I teach three yearly new media classes as a volunteer with Humanities 101 (Hum) at the University of British Columbia. Hum is a free, university-level program attended by low-income residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside/South. I take an STS-inflected approach to teaching media theory and new media technologies, asking how technoscientific and everyday practices shape and are shaped by subjectivities, institutions, and metaphysics (Law and Lin 2009). Half lecture and half workshop, the 3-hour class puts pressure on the coloniality of new media, traces out the material agencies and incapacitations enacted in planet-spanning media technology infrastructures and algorithmic life, and invites dreaming into what generativities of new media (crucially, Indigenous new media) might allow for other worldings. We think our way along “scary new networks” that hold together earthly relationships in what Donna Haraway (1985) calls an “informatics of domination.” We also reckon with medianatures: Jussi Parikka’s (2011) reworking of Haraway’s naturecultures to describe the ways in which the materialities of life and nonlife are mobilized in the production of media artifacts. Finally, we consider alongside Marisa Duarte (2018) the implications of medianatures for Indigenous futures.

humanities101.arts.ubc.ca