This past week I went to a conference that was hosted by a university with ongoing student encampments, protests against the administration, as well as tensions surrounding a lack of respect for Indigenous loss of life.
By attending this conference, I felt a lot of shame and deeply unsettled. Although, I am deeply grateful for the presentations I got to observe because they related, in some part, to how we might think of the current state of our world.
One presentation engaged with the rhetoric of cell phones and their consequences. Particularly, they stated that smartphones rely on a "logic of visibility" which works to hypervisibilize personal lives in a digital sphere. This relates to concepts I've been grappling with and makes me wonder how much of this visibility is mediated through racist algorithms? An additional presenter on the panel discussed how memes serve a recontextualizing function using humour to disrupt socially engrained shame. Their focus was primarily queer and female experience. These memes allowed me to consider how community can be fostered in a digital space and how practices of resistance do not have to be critical.
Many of the other presentations also contributed to my thoughts on media, rhetoric, identity, and race. There was a presentation, on my panel, by a professor at an American university who had some questionable things to say. His project entailed creating visual supplements through posters, billboards, stickers, etc to increase awareness of vaccines in Indigenous communities. While this project had great potential to engage critically with concepts of Western and Indigenous traditional medicines, and the history of biological warfare against Indigenous communities, among many others – it simply stated the colour choices were necessary because they reflected "Indigenous values." His presentation did not address how propagandizing these posters were, nor did he consider elements of othering, power dynamics, and structural changes.
