Disappearance
Workshop with two days of scheduled talks by our invited speakers, including a tour of the Web Archive at the Royal Danish Library - Netarkivet.
Confirmed speakers
Tonia Sutherland (UCLA), Rebecca Schneider (Brown University), Tahani Nadim (Ruhr University Bochum), Althea Greenan (Goldsmiths University of London), Arely Cruz-Santiago (University of Exeter), Rocco Bellanova (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).
- with Mette Kia and Anders Klindt Myrvoll from the Royal Danish Library
- and the DALOSS team (UCPH): Nanna Bonde Thylstrup (PI), Katie Mackinnon, Frederik Schade, Esmée Colbourne
See speaker bios below.
Description
The materiality of digital data and infrastructures presents profound conceptual and practical questions and challenges for memory and knowledge politics. These challenges relate to classification (what constitutes a memory artefact), materiality (what infrastructures are necessary to collect and preserve digital material), access (how institutions and patrons can gather material from algorithmic and privatized platforms) and interfaces (how professionals and users can visually access, understand and navigate collections meaningfully). As the scope of what can be preserved expands, so does our understanding of what can be lost, raising questions about the cultures, politics and ethics of data disappearance.
This richly transdisciplinary workshop brings together scholars and practitioners working across diverse theoretical traditions and methodological approaches. From performance theory to forensic citizenship, from the sociology of preservation to security technologies, and from feminist curation to critical and liberatory approaches to the entanglements of memory, community and technology – DISAPPEARANCE creates a unique space for examining how data loss shapes our social and political worlds, and how we experience, enact and resist losses in return.
Guiding questions
- How do digital infrastructures shape experiences of data disappearance, and what are the political and ethical implications of such loss?
- How are different understandings of disappearance generated—through sensory, statistical, mechanical, or political means?
- What does disappearance produce, provoke, or necessitate?
- When does disappearance call for reconstruction, emulation, or performance, and when does it demand concealment, covering up, or forgetting?
Wednesday 11 December
|
Time |
Activity |
|---|---|
|
9:00-9:15 |
Arrival & welcome |
|
9:15-9:30 |
DALOSS team introduction |
|
9:30-10:30 |
A tour of the Web Archive at the Royal Danish Library - Netarkivet |
|
10:30-10:45 |
Coffee break |
|
10:45-12:15 |
Althea Greenan, Digital Drop Out |
|
12:15-1:30 |
Lunch |
|
1:30-3:00 |
Tahani Nadim, Hauntings: from visitation to invitation in three moves (more or less) |
|
3:00-3:15 |
Coffee break |
|
3:15-4:45 |
Rocco Bellanova, The security politics of editing: European data practices |
|
4:45-5:00 |
Wrap up |
Thursday 12 December
|
Time |
Activity |
|---|---|
|
9:00-9:30 |
Arrival & welcome |
|
9:30-10:30 |
Mette Kia from the Royal Danish Library |
|
10:30-10:45 |
Coffee break |
|
10:45-12:15 |
Rebecca Schneider, Flesh, Quarry, and the "Exorbitant Materiality" of Data Among Themselves |
|
12:15-1:15 |
Lunch |
|
1:15-2:45 |
Arely Cruz-Santiago, Disappearing Matters: Data, Disobedience, and Citizen Forensics |
|
2:45-3:00 |
Coffee break |
|
3:00-4:30 |
Tonia Sutherland, After the Archives: On Data, Loss, and Remembrance |
|
4:30-5:00 |
Concluding remarks |
Tahani Nadim
Tahani Nadim is a research professor at the Ruhr University Bochum and the College for Social Sciences and Humanities. Her work has focused on the culture and politics of museum and data collections, the histories of natural history and its infrastructures, and institutional inheritances. More recently, she is engaging with memory cultures and their relationship to statecraft and the political economy of nature conservation.
Althea Greenan
Dr Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths University of London curating the Women’s Art Library collection. She has >written on the work of women artists since the 1980s and her doctoral research focused on the WAL slide collection and aspects of digitization. Her most recent article is "We’re in the Library!: welcoming creative practices, sharing responsibilities of access", Art Libraries Journal. 2024; 49(2):46-57. She is currently Senior Fellow at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities of the University Alliance Ruhr.
Rocco Bellanova
Rocco Bellanova is a Research Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (interdisciplinary research group Law, Science, Technology & Society-LSTS). His work sits at the intersection of politics, law, and science and technology studies. He studies how digital data become pivotal elements in the governing of societies. His research focuses on European security practices and the role of data protection therein. Rocco is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant project DATAUNION - The European Data Union: European Security Integration through Database Interoperability
Rebecca Schneider
Rebecca Schneider is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in Providence, USA. She writes on performance, recursivity, gesture, and intermediality attentive to decolonial methodologies and Black study. Among her books and essays are "Solo Solo Solo" in After Criticism (2005), Performance Remains (2011), "Slough Media" in Remain (2018), "Glitch" in Uncertain Archives (2021), and "Wit(h)ness" in Ulrike Rosenbach: Witnesses (2023). She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and supported by the Mellon Foundation among other awards.
Tonia Sutherland
Dr. Tonia Sutherland is assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sutherland holds a PhD and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Computing and Information (formerly the School of Information Studies), and a BA in history, performance studies, and cultural studies from Hampshire College. Global in scope, Sutherland’s research focuses on entanglements of technology and culture, with particular emphases on critical and liberatory work within the fields of archival studies, digital studies, and science and technology studies. Sutherland is the author of Resurrecting the Black Body: Digital Afterlives in the 21st Century (University of California Press, October 2023).
Arely Cruz-Santiago
Arely Cruz-Santiago is a human geographer and scholar of science and technology studies. In November 2024, she completed a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship entitled Forensic Citizenship: Science and Expertise in Latin America. Her research has opened a new agenda on citizen forensics (2016, 2017, 2020) that analyses emerging forms of citizenship built around Forensic Science and DNA in Mexico, Colombia and Argentina. Dr Cruz-Santiago has been an advisor to the Missing Migrants Project at the International Organization for Migration (2019-20). She is a member of the Panel of Experts at the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP) and the leading author of ICMP’s first Global Report on Missing Persons in the Americas (2021).
See programme poster.
