Spring 2021 Digital Matters Research Talks

Описание: Sarah Sinwell, DM Faculty Grantee, Asst. Prof. in Film & Media Arts, “#Representation Matters: Mapping Gender, Race, and Sexuality on Twitter”

This project focuses on how audiences and fans of blockbuster films and franchises such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Black Panther, and Frozen use Twitter hashtags to create a space for more inclusive media representation of people of color and LGBTQIA+ characters in popular media.

Ashley Cordes, DM Faculty Grantee, Asst. Prof., Dept. of Communication, “Indigenous cryptocurrency: Finance, capital, and the digital ghost of empire”

This project illuminates Indigenous subversion of capitalism in the digital age. I surface ‘hidden’ Indigenous histories and innovations that contribute to contemporary cryptocurrency, which include reciprocity and digital epistemologies. Indigenous cryptocurrency discursively addresses ‘ghosts’ of Indian/federal treaties that haunt through dispossession and pays homage to financial goals of Indigenous leaders. This research untangles strings of racism, nationalism, financialization, and empire.

Jaclyn Wright, DM Exhibition & Performance Faculty Grantee, Asst. Prof. of Photography & Digital Imaging, “Marked”

The American West’s photographic surveys sought to document, aestheticize, and colonize the lands and the bodies viewed through the camera’s lens. Photographs of the landscape and the body still carry this trace of privilege and propaganda. Marked responds critically to this history by examining the fraught relationship between the land and the body and their abstraction by both patriarchy and photography.

John Flynn, DM / American West Center Graduate Fellow, PhD Candidate in Dept. of History, “Native Places: An Indigenous Atlas of Utah and the Intermountain West”

Native Places is a spatial humanities project from the American West Center. It consists of an interactive, layered map centered on Utah that encompasses the homelands of the state’s traditionally associated tribes. The map records and restores indigenous place names to major landscape features and selected historical and cultural sites.

Daniel Uncapher, DM Graduate Fellow, PhD student in Creative Writing, “Open Wounds”

“Open Wounds” is a narrative map of the visible geological damage of wealth extraction in the state of Utah, from 1847-2021.

Danielle Waters, DM Exhibition & Performance Graduate Student Grantee, Graduate Student in MAT-FA, “Youth Activist Art Archive”

The Youth Activist Art Archive (YAAA) is a digital archive that highlights youth-created art projects created for social change, along with art activism resources and research. This website is created as an open-access tool that allows users to view numerous categories of youth-created activist art and filter through based on location, social issue, or artistic medium.