A Center for 21st Century Studies Conference
May 2-4, 2013
Milwaukee, WI

At least since the 1980s, the digital has been the occasion for enthusiastic, often utopian, dreams. In almost every area of human and nonhuman endeavor—finance, consumer culture, technoscience, education, medicine, communication, or the arts—digital technologies have been heralded as revolutionary if not redemptive. But there has always been a dark side to such digital enthusiasm—dark places that scholars of the digital tend to overlook as they illuminate new fields and paths; dark practices that intensify social inequalities and accelerate environmental destruction; and dark politics that often remain obscure to global media users. Devastating labor conditions at factories like FoxConn in China are exacerbated by the appetite for next generation iPhones or iPads. Securitization and data mining are fueled by the eagerness of contemporary media users to share their search patterns, location, and affective labor. And the environmental destruction from disposing the hazardous waste of still functioning but outmoded media devices, or mining for the precious metals that the continued production of these new devices require, is mostly invisible to the consumers of new tablets, mobile phones, HD monitors, and netbooks.

Dr. Alessandra Renzi will be the first Social Studies of Information Research Group (SSIRG) Postdoctoral Fellow beginning this fall. Dr. Renzi, originally from Italy, has an interdisciplinary MA degree in North American Studies from the Free University in Berlin, Germany. She went on to complete her PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in 2010 from the Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her focus was on media studies and the title of her dissertation was "From Collectives to Connectives: Italian Media Activism and the Repurposing of the Social."

While at SOIS, Dr. Renzi will be teaching as well as continuing with her research. She says she is excited to work with SOIS faculty: "Before I saw the position, I was already familiar with the work of some of the SOIS faculty. This is, for me, a great opportunity to work with scholars I respect and to be embedded within a school of information studies that welcomes interdisciplinary researchers and is interested in supporting sociological research on information."