How are financial apps transforming our understanding of space? How are forms of mediated intimacy on YouTube shaping internet cultures? Please join us for an exciting research chat about recent developments in digital culture! UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow DeWitt King will discuss the financialization of space through the lens of medical humanities and digital apps, and Professor Emma Leigh Waldron will explore ASMR as a key form of digital mediation for 21st century internet cultures. Light refreshments will be served.
Dr. DeWitt King (Film and Media Studies)
Presentation: "Grappling with Financialization: Space, Place, and the Power Geometries of Buy Now, Pay Later"
This presentation thinks through the role that financialization has in the production of space. Moreover, this presentation centers digital space predicated by the proliferation of Buy Now, Pay Later apps during the onset of the Covid-19 global health crisis as a central node in the reconstitution of social space, physical space, and the built environment.
Dr. Emma Leigh Waldron (Informatics)
Presentation: "Mediated Intimacy: YouTube, Affect, and Why ASMR (Still) Matters"
ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) refers to the tingling sensation some people experience in response to certain auditory triggers, as well as to the genre of audiovisual online content created to elicit this sensation. This talk traces ASMR’s trajectory over the last 15 years as a locus of affective intensity and a distinct digital genre that characterizes internet culture in the early 21st century.
Dr. DeWitt King is a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. His research puts Black geographies and Black cultural studies in conversation to think through power relations in popular culture, precarity in sport industries, informal economies, the relationship between race and technology, and the spatiality of sport. His work has appeared in American Quarterly, Environment and Planning D, and ACME. In Card Subject to Change, his forthcoming book project, he utilizes the professional wrestling industry to illustrate how the ideologies that govern meritocracy as an iterative practice are intimately connected to labor precarity, deregulation, and anti-Blackness in U.S. culture.
Dr. Emma Leigh Waldron is an Assistant Researcher in Internet Culture and a Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. She received her PhD in Performance Studies with additional certification in Feminist Research & Theory and Critical Theory from UC Davis. She also holds a master's degree in Performance Research from the University of Bristol. Her doctoral dissertation on mediated intimacy is currently under development as a monograph project about ASMR. Dr. Waldron is also a co-founder and editor-at-large for the online journal Analog Game Studies.