"What is Remembered Lives": The Spatio-Temporal Disruption of Archiving AIDS on Instagram

Marika Cifor’s talk focuses on how archiving HIV/AIDS on Instragram offers powerfully disruptive potential for addressing and redressing the injustices that characterize the contemporary American HIV/AIDS epidemic. By mobilizing Instagram’s spatio-temporal affordances, The AIDS Memorial account holds unique promise for repoliticizing HIV/AIDS. Even as representations on The AIDS Memorial sometimes extend endemic AIDS time’s normalizing registers and abet structural domination, this Instrgram archive profoundly alters the temporal rhythm of social relations in lived time. The Memorial produces immediacy in two ways to rupture normative AIDS time: affective immediacy by circulating crowdsourced images and stories, and spatio-temporal immediacy by manipulating Instagram’s geotagging functionalities. The AIDS Memorial exposes, beyond the tight bounds of AIDS communities, the continued immediacy of HIV/AIDS in the times and spaces the privileged also occupy. Reigniting urgency around AIDS can improve the lives and life chances of people living with HIV/AIDS, and bolster memory transmission and intergenerational exchange in queer communities.

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Classroom Building Room 122

A Decolonial Multiscalar and Hemispheric Analysis of Women’s Organizing Against Extractivism

Across the Americas, extractive industries' water usage often brings them into prolonged conflicts with local communities, who mobilize to resist the initiation and/or expansion of extractive activities that they view as threatening their health, ways of life, and of their families and communities' territories. This talk focuses on different forms of gendered resistance. Through two comparative case studies from West Virginia, USA and Cuenca, Ecuador, I explore how the waterscapes of communities across the Americas, impacted by extractive industries, are embodied by women and how these, in turn consitute and shape women's resistance practices.

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Classroom Building Room 122

Cartographic Attributes of the Invisible: Conjunctural Geographies of the Platform Economy

Department of Geography - Harrison and Eva Lewis Bailey Distinguished Alumni Lecture

Title: Cartographic Attributes of the Invisible: The Conjunctural Geographies of the Platform Economy

Abstract: Geographers have long been interested in the spaces brought into being by the internet. In the early days of the Web, digital technologies were seen as tools that could bring a heterotopic cyberspace into being: a place beyond space de-tethered from the material world. More recent framings instead see digital geographies as always-augmented, hybrid, and ontogenetic: integrally embedded into everyday life. Against that backdrop, the talk presents findings from three large research projects about digital platforms. First, a large-scale digital mapping project that looks at how digital inequalities can become infused into our urban landscapes. Second, a study about the livelihoods of platform workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, early results from a new action research project (the Fairwork Foundation) designed to improve the quality of platform jobs. In each case, the talk explores why understanding the ways that platforms command digital geographies is a crucial prerequisite for envisioning more equitable digital futures.

 

Date:
Location:
WT Young Library Auditorium
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