Organizers
More information on the conference organizers will be available soon.
Evan Buswell
Evan Buswell is a Ph.D. student in cultural studies whose work centers around the task of uncovering the influence of social organization on epistemic practices. Currently, he is investigating the relationship between the development of the form of the modern financial promise and the creation of algebraic notation and, ultimately, code. Before entering graduate school, he spent several years as a software architect and engineer.
Xan Chacko
Xan Chacko is a doctoral student in the Cultural Studies Graduate Group at UC Davis. Originally from Kerala in Southern India, Chacko earned a BA in Physics and Women’s Studies from Wellesley College and an MSc in the History and Philosophy of Science from Imperial and University Colleges, London. In an attempt to trouble the stability in scientific knowledge, Chacko explores the history of evolutionary theory through the stories of plants. Inspired by recent scholarship in Feminist Science Technology Studies, Chacko complicates the narratives of species and type specimens, historical and contemporary scientific research, using archival and ethnographic methods.
Ksenia Fedorova
Ksenia Fedorova is a media art researcher and curator. She is a PhD student at the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, UC Davis, as well as completing her PhD in Philosophy at the Ural Federal University (Russia). The focus of her current dissertation project is the potential of sensing technologies in transmedial affective interfaces and mixed reality settings. She has been an initiator and curator of the “Art. Science. Technology” program at the Ural branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Ekaterinburg, RU) and was a member of the Jury of Prix Ars Electronica 2012.
Gretchen Jude
Gretchen Jude is a Ph.D. Candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis, where her research interests include presence & embodiment in computer music, language & cultural difference in digital performance, and electroacoustic improvisation. She holds an MFA in Electronic Music & Recording Media and an MA in Applied Linguistics/TESOL, as well as koto certification from the Sawai Koto Institute in Tokyo. Gretchen regularly performs both digital and analog music, in the Bay Area and beyond.
Tanner Jupin
Tanner Jupin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department at UC Davis specializing in 20th Century American Literature, science fiction, and science and technology studies. His dissertation, “Gamic Fiction: Narrative Architecture and Media Ecologies in Video Games and Novels,” analyses the gamic fictions of Neal Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross and Ernest Kline.
Emelie Mahdavian
Emelie Mahdavian is a documentary filmmaker, Assistant Director of Ballet Afsaneh, and a principal vocalist with Zaryab ensemble. She holds a C.Phil. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis, a postgraduate diploma in filmmaking from The London Film School, and a B.A. in music and philosophy from Mills College. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Performance Studies, and is completing a feature-length documentary on female dancers in Tajikistan, a predominantly Muslim Central Asian nation.
Josef Nguyen
Josef Nguyen is an English Ph.D. candidate focusing on the intersection of media studies and science and technology studies (STS). His dissertation, “The Futures of Expertise in Popular Science Media,” explores representations of experts and their expertise through popular media forms aimed to educate the lay public in technoscience. Case studies in his dissertation include MAKE magazine and maker culture, Bruce Sterling’s critical design fiction programme, and video games developed by the Institute for the Future.
Martin Weis
Martin Weis is a Ph.D. candidate in the English literature department at UC Davis. His dissertation, “Bio-Gaming,” focuses on the biopolitics of the video game as they intersect with the life sciences (particularly molecular biology). His interests include surveillance, metagames, exergaming, and digital historiography.
May Ee Wong
May Ee Wong is a PhD student from the Cultural Studies Graduate Group in UC Davis, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Currently examining contemporary ecology-related and complex system-related discourses of the city and urban design, her research interests include history of technology, cultural politics, visual culture and aesthetics, and militarised logics and culture. She is also a member of the Singapore chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).