Bonnie Sheehey is a third-year PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department. Her research interests include social and political philosophy, pragmatism, 20th century French philosophy, critical theory, and media theory. She is currently working on a dissertation that “traces a philosophical mode of critique disentangled from the habits of judgment through the work of William James, Michel Foucault, and Bruno Latour. In this project, I attend to the resources these figures provide for contemporary debates in political philosophy and new media theory that concern the relation between critique and normativity.”
Bonnie was introduced to the New Media & Culture Certificate through Dr. Colin Koopman’s and Dr. Wendy Chun’s Habitual New Media course, and Dr. Michael Allan’s Comporative Literature course on Transmedia Aesthetics.
“My interest in the NMCC stems from a curiosity in how contemporary digital culture informs our subjectivity and sociality, and from a commitment to teaching philosophy courses that reflect areas of contemporary concern. The research I’ve conducted toward the NMCC brings the critical methods of genealogy, pragmatism, and actor-network-theory to bear upon aspects of new media that include the use of algorithms in policing practices and in the curation of memories on Facebook.”
Currently enrolled in the common seminar course taught by Dr. Seth Lewis, as well Data Genealogy taught by Dr. Koopman, Bonnie is working on research that “extends the use of Foucault beyond media archaeology to outline a critical methodology called ‘media genealogy.’” She seeks to highlight “the limitations of media archaeology for inquiring into formations of power and presses a turn toward media genealogy as an analytic for historicizing what Foucault called “technologies of power.”
Through these courses, she is interested in exploring “the possibility of applying Foucauldian methods of archaeology and genealogy to critically inquire into the power of data in our present” and particularly appreciates the “fruitful resources…interdisciplinary engagement and focused inquiry around a set of themes, debates, and issues connected to new media.”
Bonnie’s New Media Resources:
Online Tools:
https://socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/critical-algorithm-studies/
Books:
Discipline and Punish – Michel Foucault (1975)
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter – Friedrich Kittler (1986)
Digital Keywords – Benjamin Peters (Ed.) (2016)
A Prehistory of the Cloud – Tung-Hui Hu (2015)
Control and Freedom – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2006)
The Politics of Possibility – Louise Amoore (2014)
Articles:
“The Relevance of Algorithms” – Tarleton Gillespie (2014)
“Toward an Ethics of Algorithms” – Mike Ananny (2016)
“Real Time/Zero Time” – Tung-Hui Hu (2012)
“Without you, I’m nothing: Performances of the self on Twitter” – Zizi Papacharissi (2012)