Cornell Media Studies presents a lecture by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University. Prof. Chun will present her lecture, "Critical Data Studies: The Case of Proxy Politics," co-sponsored by The Society for the Humanities.

Abstract:
The "network" is a powerful concept that resonates across all disciplines, from the humanities to the physical sciences. Networks allegedly encapsulate everything that is new about our current era: from high-speed financial networks to social media; from viruses to terrorism. Not surprisingly, network theory has created strong interdisciplinary projects across the quantitative social sciences and physical, biological and computational sciences. The connections between the qualitative and quantitative theories have been less robust. This talk argues that we need to build these bridges in order to take on the hard problems that face us now: from the proliferation of echo chambers to the global climate change. By thinking together, we can question default assumptions in all our disciplines and work towards building a more sustainable future.

Bio:
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006),  Programmed Visions: Software and Memory(MIT 2011), and Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016)..  She is co-editor (with Tara McPherson and Patrick Jagoda) of a special issue of American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature, co-editor (with Lynne Joyrich) of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology and co-editor (with Anna Fisher and Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition (forthcoming Routledge, 2015).  She was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, ACLS and American Academy of Berlin Fellow, and she has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. She has been the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is currently an Associate.