PhD Seminar — Cyborgs for 21st Century

Seminar

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Date

02 Apr 2025
Organiser

PolyU Design
Time

10:00 - 12:00
Venue

Zoom

Speaker

Prof. Laura Forlano

Enquiry

PolyU Design 2766 6305 sd.phd@polyu.edu.hk

Summary

In this talk, Laura Forlano will draw on her new book, Cyborg (MIT Press), co-authored with Danya Glabau in order to examine the question of whether 21st century technologies—from smartphones to medical devices to the commonplace use of artificial intelligence—have made cyborgs of us all? The book takes feminist cyborg theory as their starting point to explore the myriad ways that technology traverses our daily lives and practices and to ask: how do social and cultural factors—from gender to race, class to ability—affect how technologies are imagined, developed, put to use, and, crucially, resisted? Forlano and Glabau present an approach called "critical cyborg literacy" that brings together insights from critical feminist, race, and disability thinkers in an effort to reframe popular and scholarly conversations around the affordances of cyborg theory and to reimagine the cyborg in light of emerging technologies like automation and AI.

All PolyU PhD students and SD staff are welcome.
This Zoom meeting accommodates 100 participants at most.
Event registration is required and on a first-come, first-served basis.
Successful registrants will receive a confirmation email with the Zoom meeting details before the event.

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Laura Forlano

Professor, Art & Design and Communication Studies, Northeastern University

Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a disabled writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is Professor in the departments of Art + Design and Communication Studies in the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Senior Fellow at The Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. Forlano's research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between design and emerging technologies. She has used participatory workshops, collaborative games, exhibitions, speculative videos, prototypes and performances to imagine alternative futures for living with data and computation. She is the author of Cyborg (with Danya Glabau, MIT Press 2024) and an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). Forlano is also an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

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