Talks & Events Information
Once you have made a booking, you will receive a notification by email with information about your event. If you have general queries about attending Talks at IMMA please see our Frequently Asked Questions page below.
Registration: To attend using zoom platform, register here
American culture is steeped in the social imaginary of Black death. Dr Tonia Sutherland’s research and presentation, Digital Remains: Reflections On Race and the Digital Afterlife, investigates the social and cultural tensions created by the proliferation of publicly available digital records and data relating to deaths of Black Americans. Sutherland’s research uses these and other records to illustrate the ways Black people’s bodies have been commodified from the analogue era through the digital era. At its heart, Sutherland’s project challenges the narrative that Black people’s lives are disposable. Engaging critical race theory, performance studies, archival studies, and digital culture studies, asking how existing technologies (analogue and digital) reflect the wider social world offline.
This talk by Sutherland calls attention to the complex relationships between the increasingly commercialised digital public display of visual memory objects and the emotional agency of images; the impulses, ethics, and consequences that accompany digitally raising the dead; the human fight against the silence and erasure of oblivion; and the conflicting rights and desires of humans to be forgotten in a time when the Internet is understood to be an expression of forever.
A closing discussion will be moderated and chaired by Sharon Webb, Lecturer in Digital Humanities at University of Sussex and team member of the network (IFTe) Intersections, Feminism, Technology & Digital Humanities.
You can attend by registering in advance to receive a zoom link directly to your inbox.
