Katrien Jacobs- "From Square to Square: Sex and Social Experiment in China and Hong Kong"
Katrien Jacobs is a scholar, media artist and activist who investigates the role of digital networks in people’s experiences with the body and sexuality. She has lectured and published widely about pornography, censorship and media activism in Hong Kong and global media environments. She is associate professor in Visual Culture Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is working on long-term research projects in visual anthropology that detail the impact of queer erotic Japanese animation on global porn and pop cultures. She is the author of three books about digital sexualities. Her book People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (Intellect Books, 2011) was widely reported on in the mass media. In June 2015 she will publish a feminist queer sequel called The Afterglow of Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China (Palgrave Macmillan) she is also working on short films and an art installations about wandering ghosts, or how a how a queering of modes of writing revives the university itself and its engrained power rituals. Her work can be found on www.libidot.org/blog Manuela Lavinas Picq- "Amazon modernities? Sexuality and the core-periphery divide" Manuela Lavinas Picq is Professor of International Relations at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Her research explores international politics from peripheries like gender and Indigeneity in Latin America. She has been a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study (2014), a Lowenstein Fellow at Amherst College (2011), and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2005). Her publications appeared in scholarly journals like Latin American politics and Society and media venues like Al Jazeera English. She is the co-editor of two forthcoming volumes: Sexual Politics and International Relations: how LGBTQ claims shape world politics (Routledge 2015) and Queering Narratives of Modernity (Peter Lang 2015). Michael Brown- "Queering the local state’s biopolitics: The noir of public health contact tracing in Seattle" (co-authored with Larry Knopp) Michael Brown is professor of Geography and adjunct professor of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. His interests are in sexuality, political and urban geography. In a long collaboration with Professor Larry Knopp, he has researched the hidden forms of urban politics around sexuality in mid-Century Seattle. His previous research has looked at new spaces of AIDS activism in the city, the closet as a spatial metaphor, and home hospice care. He is a former managing editor of Social and Cultural Geography. Professor Brown received his B.A. from Clark University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. Nicola Mai- "Assembling 'Samira' and 'Travel': affecting sexual humanitarianism through experimental ethnofictional filmmaking" Nicola Mai is a sociologist, an ethnographer and a filmmaker working as Professor of Sociology and Migration Studies at London Metropolitan University and at the Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology (LAMES) of Aix -Marseille University. His academic writing and films focus on the experiences of migrants selling sex and love in the globalized sex industry in order to live their lives. Through experimental ethno-fictions and original research findings Nicola Mai challenges the humanitarian politics of representation of the nexus between migration and sex work in terms of trafficking, while focusing on the ambivalent dynamics of exploitation and agency that are implicated. Shaka McGlotten- "Black Data: Against the Hegemony of the Transparent" Shaka McGlotten is an Associate Professor of Media, Society, and the Arts at Purchase College. He mixes methods from the humanities and social sciences, and most of his research and writing is grounded in ethnographic modes of attention and deals with some configuration of issues related to media, technology, gender, sexuality, and race. His work falls broadly under rubrics of affect and political feelings, or the ways our sensed experiences and emotional engagements with the world inform and are subject to politics and other forms of power. Recent publications include Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality(SUNY Press 2013) and Black Genders and Sexualities, co-edited with Dana-Ain Davis (Palgrave 2012). |