Ramón Resendiz
1:30pm, Franklin Hall, Room 310
Dr. Ramón Resendiz is a Xicanx documentary media producer and visual anthropologist from the south Texas borderlands. His research interrogates the material and imaginary intersections of systemic violence, national borders, memory, visual culture, and settler colonialism. He investigates the erasure of Indigenous peoples and how modern nation states are visualized by archival institutions across the Texas/U.S. and northplacementern Mexico border landscapes, and the ways memory workers and cultural producers render these erasures visible.
He has produced multiple collaborative documentaries including, Voces del Norte: Mariachi Quinto Sol de UW (2016), El Muro | The Wall (2017), and Migrant: A Reflection from Thundercloud (2019). He holds a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Research on Race & Society at Indiana University.
Exhuming Archival Resistance: Memory, Media, and Cultural Production on the Margins of the U.S.
The U.S.-Mexico borderlands are among the most heavily militarized and politicized landscapes of the 21st century, mediated through digital, print, social, and mass media. Mainstream narratives often frame this region as a lawless frontier under perpetual threat from Latin American asylum seekers, constructing it as an ahistorical site of encounter that legitimizes the carceral realities faced by migrants in the U.S. Drawing on over a decade of visual documentary fieldwork, Dr. Ramón Resendiz presents insights from his multimodal ethnographic research on the U.S.’s southern margins. As both theorist and media producer, he employs video and film to document the present while exhuming erased histories of violence, revealing the enduring coloniality of power embedded in the aestheticizing regimes of Texas, Mexico, and the American Southwest. His work highlights overlooked acts of resistance by subaltern communities, illuminating their role in shaping the modern borderlands. This keynote examines the visual culture of settler colonial archival institutions in the Texas borderlands, alongside resistance histories enacted by Mexican, Indigenous, and Black communities. It explores how these histories are in/visibilized, under/documented, and reimagined across media, shaping everyday visual experiences in “The Lone Star State”—the unceded lands of Indigenous peoples systematically erased from Texas’s historical record. Ultimately, this talk envisions more just representations of past violence to establish frameworks for justice, reconciliation, and a more equitable future.
Cory Doctorow
4pm, Franklin Hall, Room 310 or Link to zoom here
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, digital rights activist, and journalist. His most recent nonfiction book is The Internet Con: How to Seize The Means of Internet Computation (2023) a Big Tech disassembly manual. He is also the author of Chokepoint Capitalism (with Rebecca Giblin) (2023), about creative labor markets and monopoly; How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (2020)
Cory Doctorow will keynote the Media School Graduate Association’s Common Ground conference, presenting on his concept of enshittification. Coined the “2023 Digital Word of the Year,” enshittification describes the process by which internet media platforms become simultaneously unusable and un-quittable.
Enshittification swept through the digital world over the past decade, and it has only accelerated since, as everything - grocery stores, nursing agencies, even public schools - became digital services. The more digital something is, the more vulnerable it is to enshittification.Enshittification isn’t a force of nature. It’s not a historic inevitability. It’s the eminently foreseeable result of specific policy choices made by named individuals in living memory, after these individuals were warned that enshittification would ensue. Enshittification was a choice, not an accident.
The choices that led to enshittification are not graven in stone. They are just that - choices. We can choose otherwise. Indeed, we must, if we are to have an internet that is fit for purpose and can serve as the digital nervous system that we can use to coordinate our survival in a 21st century beset by genocide, ecological collapse, and economic chaos.
What policy choices can we make? What path can get us to those choices? How do we end the enshittocene and build a new, good internet?