In the Chat: How SCRAM Navigates Post-Productivity

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

Situated Critical Race And Media (SCRAM) proposes a roundtable on our 10-year history of negotiating institutional ‘impact’ while growing a sustainable kinship praxis that could be called ‘post-productive.’ Born from feminist networking, SCRAM improvises across tech platforms to evade, reinvent, camouflage, survive, and grow. SCRAM holds strategy sessions and check-ins; improvises research, professional, and creative solutions to emergent problems in higher education; and tests media for resiliency, timeliness, and community uplift. In this session, SCRAM will reflect on its development, explore the value of togetherness in contexts ranging from digital distance to hyperlocal resistance to intermediate states of fundraising and fundlowering, and emphasize the necessity of love not as an antidote to the university in/as crisis, but as the method we craft and share. We ask:
How does the tenure track influence what SCRAM makes (or doesn’t make)?
What is the academic/intellectual value of breaking things?
How do institutionally-supported situationships (e.g. identity-based caucuses, BIPOC funding opportunities, area studies collaborations, etc.) affect deeper notions of kinship?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• George Hoagland, Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Panelists

• Anne Cong-Huyen, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Hong-An Wu, The University of Texas at Dallas

• Veronica A Paredes, University of California-Los Angeles

Biographical Information

Alexandrina Agloro is a futurist, a game designer, and a bit of a troublemaker. She is an assistant professor at Arizona State University with affiliations at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Lab, and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

Anne Cong-Huyen is a librarian, novelist, and critic of digital humanities. She is a subject librarian for Asian American Studies, Black Studies, Global Studies, Communication, and Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. Her writings can be found in The Journal of Asian Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, American Quarterly, and the Journal of e-media Studies. She’s currently co-editing a handbook on Kitchen Table Digital Scholarship.

Veronica Paredes is a media and cultural studies scholar, and Assistant Professor in Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. Her individually written work has been published in Feminist Media Histories and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; collaboratively written work has been published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Surviving Cinema: Race, Nostalgia and Hollywood Heritage in Downtown Los Angeles.

Hong-An Wu is an interdisciplinary media scholar, educator, and practitioner. Her work bridges arts education with critical game studies and feminist science and technology studies to perform a cultural inquiry of emerging media technologies in contemporary media arts education. Currently, she serves as an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Design at the University of Texas at Dallas and directs the Studio for Mediating Play.

George Hoagland is a Professor in the Liberal Arts department at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Hoagland’s academic and creative work uses principles of participatory, new, and emergent media studies to explore concepts of vulnerability, inclusivity, and adaptation. With a Ph.D. in comparative literature, they focus on representations and methodologies of queer critique in screen-based media texts.