Media Futures in Times of Crisis

We live in times of compounding and intensifying crisis: climate catastrophe, a genocide in Gaza, a rising fascist tide across the globe, the long crisis of settler colonial invasion and occupation here in Australia, the exhaustion of growth economies. Media technologies are often posited as a way to out of crisis: artificial intelligence promises productivity gains, automated weapons are presented as more efficient and humane ways to wage war, new imaging tools shed light on the impacts of global warming, increased data collection is positioned as step toward closing the gap and addressing systemic state neglect. At the same time, media platforms and organisations are also often seen as amplifying crises in the midst of an information disorder, the limited and harmful diversity paradigms of legacy media, and the intensification of racial capitalism in newsrooms and production studios. How are we to make sense of the poly-crisis we find ourselves in? And how are we to cut through the hype of the techno-fix?

Media Futures in Times of Crisis confronts these questions across two days of presentations, screenings, and discussions. Presented by the UNSW Media Futures Hub, the symposium seeks to cultivate theory and analysis adequate to the task of understanding the futures we move toward. If crisis implies the rupture of existing order, then the other side of this equation is that the outcome of crisis is yet to be determined. The future remains contested and contestable, its shape will arise through struggle. Media Futures in Times of Crisis seeks to develop media theory and praxis capable of identifying points of political intervention in an unjust world. Such a task requires that we look at the ways media technologies emerge from histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, as well as how they intersect with questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability.

Keynotes:

Olivia Khoo (Monash)
Amy Gaeta & Beryl Pong (Centre for Drones & Culture, Cambridge)

Screening:

WINHANGANHA, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Jazz Money

Resilience and Resistance in Journalism: An Industry Roundtable
Speakers: Alex McKinnon (Deepcut News), Farid Farid (AAP), Nour Haydar (Guardian Australia), Alan Sunderland (ex-ABC), Florencia Melgar (SBS News), and Chantelle Al-Khouri (ABC)

Moderator: Ayesha Jehangir (UNSW)

Panels featuring

Tanja Dreher, Thao Phan, Pearl Tan, Ruby Hamad, Sarah Malik, Scarlet Wilcock, Georgia van Toorn, Rachel Rowe, Justine Humphry, Seamus Byrne, Ayesha Akbar, Olga Boichak, Sonia Qadir, Jodi Brooks, Sukhmani Khorana, Michael Richardson, Andrew Brooks, Charu Maithani,

Day 1, Thursday 4 December

Day 2, Friday 5 December