As we gear up for Fall term, be on the lookout for exciting goings-on with NMCC.  In the meantime, ride out the rest of your summer, but also take note of an exciting new class that is being offered in the Art History Dept which will be of great interest to some of you.

ARH 457/557: Art and/as Finance

Wednesdays, 2:00-4:20 pm
Prof. Murphy

What is art’s role within our increasingly complex
global economy? Is it just another luxury commodity,
to be bought, sold, and insured? Or can art critique,
and perhaps even disrupt, the concept of commodity
exchange itself? This seminar explores these
questions by surveying modern and contemporary
artists who explicitly use money and other financial
instruments as their medium. From Dada iconoclasts
who doctored government-issued bonds in the 1920s,
to South American conceptualists who manipulated
paper bills during the period of the region’s
dictatorships, to contemporary creators who make
digital works based on the structure of
cryptocurrency, artists have often sought to blur the
boundaries between art’s aesthetic value, its financial
value, and its material form. Tracking these artistic
blurrings, we will dive into some of the major
theorizations of modern capitalism and its alternatives
across a range of fields such as contemporary critical
theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies,
with the goal of developing conceptual tools for
analyzing the ways in which art embraces, or resists,
monetization.

Join Us for a Public Book Talk on:

How We Became Our Data

by NMCC Director & Assoc. Prof. Colin Koopman

Thursday, Feb. 27, 6:30 p.m.
110 Knight Law Center on the UO Campus
1515 Agate St.

In his book How We Became Our Data, UO philosophy professor Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the “informational power” we are all now subject to.

Colin Koopman is associate professor of philosophy and director of the New Media & Culture Program at the University of Oregon. His previous books include Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (2009); Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (2013). His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times and Aeon as well as in academic journals such as Critical Inquiry, Contemporary Political Theory, Diacritics, and New Media & Society.

This event is presented by the Wayne Morse Center’s Program for Democratic Governance. Cosponsored by the UO Department of Philosophy and UO Data Science Initiative.

A quick update on a new course being taught by NMCC Director Colin Koopman. I’m now in my second year as Director of NMCC and I’m very happy to announce a new graduate course on media archaeology and media genealogy I’ll be teaching in Spring of 2020 (note the year, not this coming term, but in a year from now).

From Archaeology to Media Genealogy will be a graduate offering focusing on the canonical work of media archaeologists such as Friedrich Kittler, Cornelia Vismann, and Wolfgang Ernst (as well as other figures of the ‘German School of Media Archaeology’). We will then explore recent work moving toward media genealogy, some of which was announced in a recent special section on Media Genealogy at the International Journal of Communications. All of this will take place against the trajectory of the work of Michel Foucault, and his own movement from philosophical archaeology to philosophical genealogy, though no prior knowledge of Foucault will be expected.

The course will be offered through the Philosophy Department and will be open to graduate students of any major. The course will be focused primarily on theory and history, but I have expansive conceptions of both of these. I’d love (!) to have NMCC students from any discipline in this course and in fact you all are the reason I am teaching this.

[Note that the course will be offered as a 400/500 but will be taught at the graduate level throughout and will also include separate grad-student-only meetings once per week (the times for these will be built into the class schedule announced on DuckWeb once the course is up for registration).]

If you have any questions, please email me at koopman@uoregon.edu.

Check out a new GE position providing support to the Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives on the Tykeson Hall programming project:

https://gradschool.uoregon.edu/node/3143

The position include basic research as requested, creating, filing, archiving, organizing and otherwise managing electronic content, including documents, photographs, files and folders; use and management of Excel files and databases, communications support (i.e. emails to faculty); meeting and event staffing and support; proofreading and fact-checking, and other duties as assigned.

Applicants should send their materials (standard GE application and one page cover letter) to the casdean@uoregon.edu inbox by March 1.

Taking a brief break from summer here in anticipation of gearing up for Fall term classes… we wanted to post an updated listing of fall term courses now available on the NMCC 2017-18 courses page.

A newly-arrived course offering that will be of interest to many of you is a brand-new class in WGS titled ‘Digital Cultures and Sexualities‘.  This course will interrogate digital cultures as multi-faceted sites composed of material technologies, social practices, and cultural meanings that convey ideas about sexuality and gender. Drawing on the work of gender studies and new media scholars such as Anne Balsamo, Tom Boellstorff, A.R. Stone, Amy Adele Hasinoff, and others, the course will explore how sexuality and gender is articulated through narratives of technological innovation, the role of sexuality and the digital in processes of identity formation, and the possibilities and limits of digital worlds for disrupting, reinforcing, and/or challenging sexualized and gendered dynamics of power.

The course will be taught by Jeremiah Favara, a graduate of our very own New Media and Culture certificate program here at UO and this year an instructor in WGS. Jeremiah’s research focuses on the roles of gender, sexuality, race, technology, and history in media production and representations.