Informatics of Domination, Duke University Press, 2025Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives. Their writings take on a variety of forms, such as essays on artificial intelligence, disability and protest, and transpacific imaginaries; conversations with an AI trained on Black oral history; a three-dimensional response to Mexico-US border tensions; hand-drawn images on queer autotheory; ecological fictions about gut microbiomes and wet markets; and more. Together, the writings take up the unfinished structure of the chart in order to proliferate critiques of white capitalist patriarchal power with the study of information systems, networks, and computation today. This volume includes an afterword by Haraway.Contributors. Dalida María Benfield, Zach Blas, Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, micha cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Shu Lea Cheang, Jian Neo Chen, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Stephanie Dinkins, Ricardo Dominguez, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Matthew Fuller, Jacob Gaboury, Jennifer Gabrys, Alexander R. Galloway, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Donna J. Haraway, Eva Hayward, Stefan Helmreich, Kathy High, Leon J. Hilton, Ho Rui An, Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Tung-Hui Hu, Caroline A. Jones, Melody Jue, Homay King, Larissa Lai, Lawrence Lek, Esther Leslie, Alexis Lothian, Isadora Neves Marques, Radha May (Elisa Giardina-Papa, Nupur Mathur, and Bathsheba Okwenje), Shaka McGlotten, Mahan Moalemi, madison moore, Astrida Neimanis, Bahar Noorizadeh, Luciana Parisi, Thao Phan, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Rita Raley, Patricia Reed, Jennifer Rhee, Bassem Saad, Ashkan Sepahvand, Justin Talplacido Shoulder, Lucy Suchman, Ollie Zhang
Camera Obscura, Duke University Press, 2016In honor of the journal's fortieth anniversary, this special issue of Camera Obscura considers theories and practices of collectivity. Camera Obscura has operated through a feminist editorial collective since its beginnings in the 1970s, a time when many forms of cooperative action proliferated. In the last ten to fifteen years, a growing constellation of collectives, many international, has emerged in response to new social, economic, and technological conditions. This issue explores the potentials and challenges of collectivity through pieces—both full-length analyses and short-form reflections—that address such topics as collaboration in photography, cinema, and video; utopias and dystopias; history and memory; modes of singleness and of togetherness; technology, embodiment, and intimacy; and feminist and queer collective practices in media and activism in various times and places.This article features an interview with the artist Radha May, a global, artist collective working under a single female identity. Radha May, whose members come from India, Italy, and Uganda, talks about merging three different perspectives and experiences in her art practice and building on the tradition of artists who play with the construction of identity. Radha May's work explores forgotten and hidden histories, peripheral sites, and feminine myths. The interview explores her latest project, When the Towel Drops, Volume 1, Italy (2015), which focuses on the censorship of femininity and sexuality in Italian cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. For the project, Radha May retrieved censored scenes that had never been seen in public and created a film installation, a performance, and a digital publication. She distributed the recovered material further by organizing a public event in which excerpts from the censorship documents were uploaded to Wikipedia.