The New Media & Culture Annual Lecture is an opportunity for graduate students and faculty from across campus to gather and engage with cutting-edge scholarship from scholars working at the intersections of technology and culture.
2025-2026 New Media & Culture Speaker: Megan Hyska
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University
“Recording the State in a Time of Synthetic Media”
Friday May 1st, 2:00pm in the Knight Library Browsing Room
We are living through a strange moment for the political use of recording technologies. On the one hand, recording associated with US migra-watch projects (public counter-surveillance of immigration enforcement activity) has been a particularly popular and urgent part of community defense in the second Trump administration. On the other hand, the increasing ubiquity of synthetic media (like deepfakes) that are difficult to distinguish from photos, videos, and audio recordings suggests that the role of even truthful recordings is in flux. This talk addresses what synthetic media mean for projects of surveillance-from-below and what the political relevance of these projects reveals about the capacity of synthetic media to revise the reception of recordings in political life.
Past Annual Lectures
AY 2024-2025: Lindsay Poirier, Smith College (postponed to AY 26-27 due to unforeseen circumstances)
AY 2023-2024: Aimée Morrison, University of Waterloo
AY 2022-2023: Autumn Womack, Princeton University
AY 2021-2022: André L. Brock, Jr., Georgia Institute of Technology
AY 2019-2020: Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, The University of British Columbia (cancelled due to covid)
AY 2018-2019: Mike Ananny, University of Southern California
AY 2017-2018: Melissa Gregg, Intel Inc., Principle Engineer & Director of Smart Home Research