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This free online event will feature authors from��Ashoka U, who will share insights from their latest work on how higher education institutions can embed��social innovation, changemaking, and community impact��into their core mission. It’s a great opportunity to explore best practices, learn from leading experts, and engage in thought-provoking discussions on how we can foster meaningful change within our own institutions.

🔗��Register here:��

I’d love to see you there and continue these important conversations within our UW community and beyond! Please feel free to share this invitation with others who might be interested.

The Critical Media Lab is excited to invite you to register for��Critical Tech Talk 11:��Speculative Imaginaries and Technological Design��with guest speaker Sherryl Vint, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, on how speculative fiction��can help us cultivate a more inclusive social imagination.

This is a virtual event taking place on Zoom, Friday January 24^th��at 3:00 PM. Full details are below.��Registration is required using this link.��

We look forward to you joining us!

About the talk:��Speculative fiction (sf) is an influential mode that shapes how we imagine what technologies and futures we find desirable, feasible, and valuable. But whose values inform imagined techno-utopian futures? How can we draw on the power of sf if we understand the genre not as a storehouse of technologies we might one day create, but instead as a critical engagement with the way that technology inevitably shapes the social world in ways that extend far beyond its intended use? Using the example of the intersection of sf with disability studies, this talk will outline how sf can function as a mode of enquiry, a rhetorical tool that can help us guide technological development toward greater inclusion and equity by opening new perspectives on the problems technology seeks to solve. Focusing on the specific example of sf written from the perspective of people with disability, it will show how such fictions can help us understand how to cultivate a more capacious social imagination as a crucial element of equitable and inclusive technological design.

Sherryl Vint��is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she founded the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge (2021), and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is the Managing Editor of Science Fiction Studies and editor of book series Science in Popular Culture.

TAWAW is a design-research firm dedicated to advancing Indigenous architecture. Our current research centres on the meaning found in original structures – the tipi, hogan, longhouse or wigwam - which we have come to understand as a microcosm of a larger world. Each project we undertake, offers behavioural, social and ideological meanings, that we integrate into contemporary form. Our work is not about replicating traditional designs but about understanding the meanings they hold, to bring meanings forward, making culture visible, but also stable. Join us as we explore the work of encoding and decoding Indigenous environments.

Vinton G. Cerf, Internet pioneer and Vice President and "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google, will speak about the history of the Internet, beginning with the Arpanet, then move along the terrestrial Internet trajectory. He will then present emerging policy and technical challenges and, finally, discuss the interplanetary Internet project.

His lecture is free, open to everyone, and takes place on Tuesday, June 11 at 2:30 p.m. in the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ's Humanities Theatre.

Event info:��

Registration (free but required):��

Join us to explore the impact of the Voluntary Code of Conduct on the Responsible Development and Management of Advanced Generative AI Systems. The code, introduced by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Industry, aims to foster public trust in AI technologies, intending to accelerate adoption. This engaging panel discussion featuring education leaders, computer science researchers and industry experts will explore the broader implications of accelerating AI adoption beyond economic impacts.��Speakers will share insights hopes and concerns about the potential societal changes, ethical considerations and regulatory challenges that come with AI.

Admission free.�� Register at the Critical Media Lab website.

Join the Critical Tech Talk series to hear guest speaker Kari Zacharias discuss��how engineers can work towards responsibility, sustainability, and equity in design by practicing humility as respect of other ways of knowing, doing, being, and making.

Join us for an urgent discussion on "surveillance capitalism", its threat to our information civilization, and how its trajectory undermines democratic norms and the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.

This discussion of ethical decision making when building technologies in a ‘Good Way’ includes two examples. First, I illustrate how the protocol for building a Lakota sweat lodge can act as a framework for building a physical computing device. Next, I provide an example of how multiple streams of protocol are necessary to build an AI system as a confluence of ethics. Some ideas proposed here are not currently possible, some are possible if investment is made in the necessary research, and some are possible but only through a radical change in the way technology companies are run and the pyramid of compensation for the exploitation of resources is reversed.

Join via , passcode��756099.
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BIO:
Suzanne Kite is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence, and contemporary art and performance. She creates interfaces and arranges software systems that engage the whole body, in order to imagine new ethical AI protocols that interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta ��philosophies.

Much of the contemporary research on race in communication media studies begins with media representations. However, for this talk, Armond R. Towns will focus on the relationship between the modern research university, race, and the development of communication and media studies in the early and mid-twentieth century, with a focus specifically on US and Canadian communication and media studies. Like the modern university, the discipline of communication and media studies, Towns argues, has a difficulty with understanding non-Western life. This talk is a beginning conversation on how to push toward new forms of understanding humanity beyond Western life. The topic of who counts as human is crucial in a context where big tech aims to control the future of so-called humanity and the AI race closes the gap between human and machine communications.

This is a hybrid event and may be attended in-person or online.

The climate crisis calls for a massive and speedy transition away from fossil fuels towards energy systems based on renewable, clean sources like the sun, the wind and the tides. But to date, what we’re seeing is a move towards extractive, large-scale, corporate-owned for-profit models of green energy. These so-called solutions are replicating the social and environmental injustices perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry, including the rampant violation of Indigenous Rights and desecration of their lands and waters .

Upholding indigenous rights and fighting for a climate just future for all requires not just a change in energy sources, but a transformation in the very systems of power, governance, worldviews and values that have driven the climate crisis. In this talk Eriel Deranger and Jen Gobby will share their own visions for what this transformation can look like and open up a discussion about how these visions can inspire and ground the work of those in the tech and innovation world.