The Alt-Right Media Literacy Series is a public facing six-part virtual speaker series with scholars invited to speak on the Alt-Right movement. Live on Zoom, the series was originally planned from Fall 2022 – Spring 2024 but will now be extended into this coming Fall after a short hiatus. Our interdisciplinary list of speakers has included Reece Peck, Dale Beran, Pete Simi, and Director Arthur Jones and Producer Giorgio Angelini with their 2020 documentary Feels Good Man.
Our in-person symposium focused on “Tracing the Contours of the Alt-Right Manosphere” with keynote speaker Catherine Liu was held at Sedgwick Reserve in Santa Ynez, California on 16-18 February.
I am one of the primary co-organizers together with graduate students from UC Santa Barbara (Film and Media Studies, Sociology), UC Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness), UCLA (Cinema and Media Studies) and funding provided by University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) at UC Santa Barbara, and the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at UC Irvine, with the generous support of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara.
I am also co-editor for an accompanying, upcoming edition of Media Fields Journal Special Issue: Media Literacy of the American Alt-Right.
Alt-Right Media Literacy Series Website
A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts was an interdisciplinary conference held 8 – 10 December 2016 at Claire Trevor School of the Arts at University of California, Irvine. The conference brought together international scholars in the sciences, humanities and arts on the subject of integrating embodied, situated, distributed, and extended theories of cognition with modes of artistic practice. Keynote speakers were Antonio Damasio (cancelled), Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Evan Thompson, Giovanna Colombetti, Erik Myin, Anthony Chemero, and David Kirsh. The Conference was supported by the Science, Technology, and Society Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences, National Science Foundation (NSF); the Beall Center for Art + Technology; UCI Illuminations; and the UCI Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning.
I assisted Director Simon Penny in all aspects of planning, graphics support and (initial) website design and management for this conference in collaboration with the Dean’s Office at UCI Claire Trevor. I also set up and ran the conference management software and acted as the primary contact for all participating speakers. I was part of the peer review process, working with Professor Penny to distribute submissions to the appropriate readers. I also chaired the panels Embodiment in Criticism and Connoisseurship and Embodiment and Biopolitics, and was the editor managing the publication of the conference proceedings.
A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts – Archived Website