Teaching Area 1: Digital Media Studies, Social Media Production, and Influencer/Creator Culture

Some topics in my syllabi: Social Media Habits; Social Media (Pre)histories; Digital Sociality, Friendship, and Networked Selves; The Rise of Online Celebrity; Broadcast Yourself: Vlogs and Livestreams; Intimacy, Affect, and Sexuality; Platform Governance and Content Moderation; Mis- and Dis-Information; Shitposting, Memes, and Vibes; Legacy Media x the Internet; Social Media and Visual Aesthetics; Social Media and Sound; Temporality, History, and Death; Social Media Space and Place; Politics of Im/materiality; The Labor of Technology; Algorithmic Bias and Racial Capitalism; Waste and Want in One Click; Everyday Joy and Resistance; Social Media Activisms; Cats on the Internet; Influencers Unite!

Teaching Area 2: Film and Media (Cultural Studies, Critical Theory)

Sample topics: Auteur Theory Revisited, and A New Cinephilia; Taking Paratexts Seriously; Rethinking Genre: Texts and Industries; Transnational Aesthetics and Globalization; Production Culture and Labor; Runaway Production and Transnational Filmmaking; Hollywood Unions and Labor Actions; Film Circulation and Exhibition; Race and Representation; Spectatorship and the Politics of Representation; Nation, History, and Identity; Indigeneity and Settler Colonialism; Borderlands and Fugitive Aesthetics; Class, Labor and Capitalism; Queer & Trans Cinema; Disability and Cinema; Eco-Cinema and Salvage Aesthetics; Film and Photography; The Digital Image; Expanded Cinema and Installation Art; Adaptation; Video Games and Film Narrative; Film, Social Networks, and Desktop Cinema; Algorithm and AI.

Collectives

"Crises of Vectorial Ecosystem" started off as a 2021-2022 University of California working group co-organized by Zizi Li and Suryansu Guha, supported in part by the University of California Office of the President MRPI funding M21PR3286.

The group seeks to address questions of labor, capital, environmental, and media crises at the intersections of digital networks, supply chain capitalism, and state-corporate extractivism. We emerge in the time of pandemic capitalism with the hope to engage with varying scholarly and activist models of inquiry to better understand and reimagine the ongoing crises as they intersect with our (im)material relationships with vectorial ecosystems.

The collective is highly interdisciplinary, with members from fields including cinema and media studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, geography, communication, culture studies, global studies, and area studies. Some common keywords of interest include: "capitalism," "extraction," "supply chain," "vector," "risk," "vulnerability," "infrastructure," "zone," "proxy," "resources," "energy," "repair," "care," "operation," "media," "community," "alternatives," "mediation," "geopolitics," and "power."

We host a variety of regular events such as reading groups and talks, and are working toward facilitating writing groups, symposiums, conference panels, and journal special issues.

Our latest endeavor, “Using Manifest to create Supply Chains Methodologies ‘in/from the South’,” was supported by Supply Studies Research Network Manifest Project Fund. Between April 2023 and April 2024, core members Veronica Uribe A., Zizi Li, and Suryansu Guha used Manifest to map three alternative supply chains in the Global South: open hardware developed in Mexico, Sustainable Fashion Influencer Movement, and customized visual effects (VFX), a global industry lead by an Indian conglomerate.

Something exciting is in the cook from Zizi Li and Slaveya Minkova. Please come back and check it out later…