Since my father’s diagnosis of lung cancer, my life has been haunted by something I cannot see. When the biopsy reported “airway dissemination positive,” I became consumed by questions: What is the shape and reach of this spread? Was the surgical margin sufficient? Has the cancer already advanced beyond what was removed, lurking undetected, growing with each breath, shifting with every cough? (read more...)
“The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day I got in…” Kevin Flynn, Tron Legacy In Autumn 2008, while studying in Athens, I happened to attend an event called Error Code. The event’s poster lured me in as it depicted a Nintendo Game Boy connected to another electronic device and a keyboard. During the event, the three performers played their chiptunes – compositions which they had created live on Game Boy. Although the overall umbrella term for chiptunes would be electronic music, they all had very distinct styles, ranging from noise to electropop. (read more...)
In spring of 2024, when green buds had already begun to appear even though light flurries were still falling in Rochester NY, I was slumped in the folding chair in my apartment, surrounded by dissertation books, the pigment tests, maquettes, and preliminary drawings for an upcoming exhibition in Beijing that October. Ever since I started graduate school, the gentle dilemma of being both an artist and a scholar has colored my days, as a tension that persists but always in the happiest ways. The room was quiet, the light soft, and my attention drifted between thinking, reading, and the pull of artwork I had not yet begun. Almost without intention, my finger moved across my phone, again, returning to the familiar drift of scrolling that has become an ordinary part of contemporary life. I opened Xiaohongshu (Red Note, the Chinese social media App) and typed four characters, sculpture factory (雕塑工厂, diaosugongchang), into the search bar, looking for workshops near Beijing and the adjacent city of Yanjiao in Hebei Province, hoping to locate production sites and people who might help accelerate the work for the exhibition when I returned in the summer. (read more...)
Many people in China have started buying residential apartments, not to live in, but to store the ashes of deceased family members. These are called bone ash apartments. Some people think it’s creepy and unlucky to be neighbors with them. Others say, “Honestly, I’d rather have dead neighbors than noisy ones.” So, I started asking, how did bone ash apartments become a real alternative to cemeteries in China? This isn’t just about space—it’s about how land, death, tradition, economy, and policy collide in today’s urban China (UN-Habitat 2020). (read more...)
We are in Ruzaevka, a small town near Saransk, the regional capital of Mordovia, Russia. Ham radio operator Dmitry Pashkov, photographer Sergei Karpov, and I climb the roof of the local technical college. Sergei and I are on the roof because we are interested in so-called bottom-up space exploration. Dmitry works at this college as an IT specialist. It is a cloudy day in March, and there is a cold wind on the roof, still icy from the winter. Dmitry promises to show us how to get an image of the European part of Russia using an American weather satellite. (read more...)
We are a group of scholars and researchers who work with gig and platform worker unions in India in various capacities. We form the India chapter of the Labor Tech Research Network collective, and have been meeting regularly from across the globe to share cross-sectoral organizing strategies, track the political landscape around gig & platform unions, and discuss research and reflections from our place-based engagements. Our work sits at the critical intersection of scholarship and activism. It involves amplifying workers’ voices, supporting unionisation efforts, and supporting workers in their struggles to lead more dignified and just working lives. Our discussions have inspired us to put together this blog series on the politics of writing about platform workers’ organizing. (read more...)
In the Andean cosmovision, constellations are not formed by connecting the dots of stars, but rather from the spaces of darkness in the night sky. The most important one is the Yakana, shaped like a llama —the most essential animal for life in the Andes (Zuidema & Urton, 1976). What might be seen as void, then, can reveal as much as, or even more than, the brightest star. (read more...)
In late 2022, I was enjoying my last semester in the United States, before I headed to Brazil to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. I spent the fall break in New York City and used my free time to head downtown and browse bookstores. I was specifically looking for books on psychoanalysis in perhaps the most (only?) Freudian city in the country. After all, NYC remains to this day a Freudian oasis within a USA that had largely moved past psychoanalysis and replaced it with cognitive-behavioral therapy, pharmacology, neuro-disciplines, and self-help. (read more...)
