May 7, 2025
Critical Techtopia Workshop: Aesthetic and Technological Imaginings of the Future
Time and Place: May 7, 2025, 10:00-14:00
SDU, room: OD TEK Ellehammer Seminar room (Ø28-600-3)
The reading group Critical Techtopia invites all interested in the future to join us for a day of speculations. The work-shop will consist of shorter presentations on the crossing paths of literary fiction, social concerns, and tech-innovative gusto. Norbert Krüger: “Utopia and Dystopia in Technologized Elderly Care” Johan Lau Munkholm: “Technological Imaginaries in Kim Stanley Robinson” Bryan Yazell: ”More or Better Climate Stories? On the (Necessary) Limits of GenAI in the Environmental Humani-ties.” Gregers Andersen: “Pessimism and optimisme about future AI” Leonardo Nolé: ”Technological and energy imaginaries in high school students' speculative fiction” Apart from that, Dylan Cawthorne will generously showcase his sci-fi art work related to the topic.
May 12, 2025
Talk: Feminisms from the Mexico City periphery: influencing politics from the margins?
Daniela Villegas
When: May 12, 2025, from 11:00-13:00
Where: SDU, OD HUM IKV-Locke Meetingroom (Ø10-212a-2)
In 2016 the Primavera Violeta (Purple Spring) covered the streets of downtown Mexico City with hundreds of women denouncing gendered violence and feminicide. Historically, such demonstrations had middle-class and/or centralised origins; with participants residing in the central boroughs of the city. However, a particular characteristic of the 2016 marches was that the participants actively high-lighted their arrival from, and residence in the peripheral working-class neighbourhoods Mexico City and the wider metropolitan zone. A question that is immediately raised is how do feminisms and their agents from the periphery articulate proposals and activisms for social transformation? Furthermore, is this in any way distinct from the methods and discourses deployed historically? and how do the categories of race, class, gender and public space converge in these feminists’ activisms? In this presentation I will discuss these questions in light of the newly elected mayor of Mexico City, Clara Brugada who has called to vindicate the periphery in the construction of a caring and feminist city.
Bio
Daniela Villegas is a journalist, feminist and social researcher with a PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney. Daniela investigates the intersection of cultural history, femi-nist activisms, pop culture representations in the media, and gender and politics. Her latest research has focused on the construction of feminist identities from young urban working-class female activ-ists in the periphery of Mexico City. Specifically, how identities and through them, visual activism, emerges to denounce feminicide (the murder of women because of their gender), and the fight to ac-cess abortion. Latin America, its women, and feminist movements are one of her regional areas of expertise.
Organiser: Kathrin Maurer kamau@sdu.dk
Event is supported by the Culture, Gender, and Technology Research group at SDU.
September 3, 2025
Lecture at DIAS, at 11-12 in DIAS auditorium
At the Limit: Existential Media, Relational Selves and Technological Futures
“Philosophizing,” argued the existential philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1932) “starts with our situation”. This lecture introduces key concepts, frameworks and figurations in existential media studies by setting out from a moment of interrelated crises in which advanced technologies such as “AI” (artificial intelligence) are hailed as the inevitable solution to all of humanity’s problems. In the digital limit situation (Lagerkvist 2020, 2022)—as the technology is entrusted to be salvaging us or feared to outperform and render us extinct—“the self” is simultaneously encroached from all sides. In a curious way, new “subjects” are meanwhile envisioned to be born inside the models. This raises a series of pressing questions: What conceptions of the self are actually being forged within this powerful socio-technical imaginary? What norms for being human in the world do advanced technologies bring about, challenge or reactivate? And how can we envision selves and technologies relationally as well as within limits, for promoting an existentially sustainable future with machines?
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of media and communication studies, PI of the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence and guest researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society (CRS) at Uppsala University. She has been appointed Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Study, The University of Helsinki, for the academic year of 2025-2026. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the young field of existential media studies. Her work has spanned the existential dimensions of digital memories, death online and lifeworlds of biometrics. She currently explores intersections of datafication, disability and self-hood; and the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings (with funding from the Bank of Sweden and WASP-HS). In her monograph Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022) she introduces Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. She is the co-editor of Relational Technologies: In Search of the Self Across Datafied Lifeworlds with Dr. Jacek Smolicki (Bloomsbury, Thinking/Media Series) and she is currently under contract for her new monograph Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Self with The University of Michigan Press.