Join us for a conversation about Melody Jue’s (English) recent co-edited volume, Informatics of Domination. Jue will be joined by co-editors Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee and contributor Rita Raley (English). Lisa Parks (Film and Media Studies) will moderate. Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives. Their writings take on a variety of forms, such as essays on artificial intelligence, disability and protest, and transpacific imaginaries; conversations with an AI trained on Black oral history; a three-dimensional response to Mexico-US border tensions; hand-drawn images on queer autotheory; ecological fictions about gut microbiomes and wet markets; and more. Together, the writings take up the unfinished structure of the chart in order to proliferate critiques of white capitalist patriarchal power with the study of information systems, networks, and computation today.

Melody Jue is a Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, working across the fields of ocean humanities, science fiction, science studies, and media theory. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science book award. She is the co-editor with Rafico Ruiz of Saturation(Duke University Press, 2021) and co-editor with Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee of Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2025).

Refreshments will be served.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment