Digital Culture and Media Initiative, Department of English, Penn State

04/04/2026

At Penn State this Thursday, at 3:30, in the Grucci Room of the Burrowes Building. It's going to be great!

“Militarized Circuits: Expat Engineers, Rural Women Factory Workers, and Global High Tech” with Patrick Chung.

Powering the electronic devices that make everyday life possible, semiconductors have become a central factor in global politics, security, and trade. Focusing on South Korea, this talk traces the rise of modern semiconductor supply chains back to the US military’s occupation and continued presence in the Cold War Pacific. It shows how the US military’s unequal investment in education and management of labor created two distinct pools of labor that fueled the rise of South Korea’s semiconductor industry. On one hand, US military investment in basic science engineering education in South Korea and overseas graduate education created a pool of highly educated, elite male researchers. On the other hand, the US military’s input into South Korean labor laws and oversight of labor unions and contractors contributed to the influx of young women from rural South Korea into the factories in industrial centers. By telling these twin histories, this talk highlights the multifaceted ways that the South Korean semiconductor industry, and the global high technology industry more broadly, were tied to the formation of a global US military empire during the Cold War.

03/30/2026

This Thursday! DCMI presents:

Julia Ticona, “Automating Servitude: How Platforms Exploit Women’s Work.”

As apocalyptic job forecasts abound about the future of work in the face of AI, carework, including the work of caring for young children, is seen as immune to the pressures of automation. However, for the past twenty years, online platforms offering to match parents and careworkers have been quietly growing in scale and global reach, promising a push-button solution to a deeply inadequate and unequal care system in the United States. Boasting millions of users and operating in countries around the globe, platforms like Care.com, SitterCity and UrbanSitter haven’t received the public attention or scrutiny of other tech companies. Drawing on nearly a decade of participant ethnography, both online and offline, with nannies, parents, and the platforms they use to find care, alongside my own experiences starting a family and finding care, I argue that, in their efforts to make parenthood easier, platforms end up automating relations of servitude between parents and careworkers. In doing so, they exploit the precarity and desires of both mothers and careworkers for different kinds of care systems, jobs, and a better way to care for our society’s kids.

Professor Ticona is Assistant Professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of author of Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (Oxford 2022) — Grucci Room 3:30pm.

11/16/2025

DCMI's first talk of the year is this Wednesday at 3pm in the Grucci Room: Melissa Charenko presents "Proxy Data: A History of the Scientific Stand-in."

Join us — all are welcome!

Our first lecture of the year is Melissa Charenko, “Proxy Data: A History of the Scientific Stand-in.”

Professor Charenko teaches in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at U Penn, and will speak to us in person at 3pm on 11/19 in the Grucci Room of the Burrowes Building, University Park.

Come one, come all. We couldn't be more excited!

10/09/2025

Our first lecture of the year is Melissa Charenko, “Proxy Data: A History of the Scientific Stand-in.”

Professor Charenko teaches in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at U Penn, and will speak to us in person at 3pm on 11/19 in the Grucci Room of the Burrowes Building, University Park.

Come one, come all. We couldn't be more excited!

04/09/2025

Our third and final talk of this year's series is next week! In “Finance by Other Means? The Ambiguous Moral Economies of the Subscription Business Model," Aaron Shapiro of UNC-Chapel Hill asks how we might "reclaim subscriptionization for post-capitalist transformation." Join us!

04/04/2025

"Data Work as Care Work" — we couldn't be more excited for our upcoming visit from Kalindi Vora.

On April 10 at 3:30 in the Grucci Room, Kalindi urges us to "challenge ongoing coloniality in tech design in the face of growing datafication."

02/28/2025

Cannot wait: on 4.3, the year's first DCMI talk is Omedi Ochieng, brilliant author of INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION and GROUNDWORK FOR THE PRACTICE OF THE GOOD LIFE!

(Up next: Kalindi Vora on 4.10 + Aaron Shapiro on 4.17!)

01/01/2025

Special session next Friday at 3:30:

"Sentimental Politics after Doomerism," with Zachary Loeb, Matt Tierney, Melanie Abeygunawardana, and Sheila Liming.

If you're at , aka , come say hi.

12/02/2024

Delighted to share the flyer for our spring speaker series!

April 3: Omedi Ochieng, Colorado
April 10: Kalindi Vora, Yale
April 17: Aaron Shapiro, UNC

See us Thursdays in April, in-person in the Grucci Room (Burrowes 102), at 3:30pm.

Our lectures are intimate and wide-ranging, engaged with their audience and with the present. All, in all disciplines, are welcome—join us!

10/24/2024

Announcing this year's slate of speakers at the Digital Culture and Media Initiative.Mark your calendars!

⚫April 3, 2025: Omedi Ochieng, University of Colorado, Boulder; author of Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy (Notre Dame 2018) and Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life (Routledge 2017); co-editor of A Companion to African Rhetoric (Lexington 2022)

⚫April 10, 2025: Kalindi Vora, Yale University; author of Reimagining Reproduction (Routledge 2022) and Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Minnesota 2015); co-author of Surrogate Humanity Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke 2019); co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the End of Revolution (Routledge 2023); winner of the Rachel Carson Prize

⚫April 17, 2025: Aaron Shapiro, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; author of Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (Minnesota 2020), “Platform Urbanism in a Pandemic: Dark Stores, Ghost Kitchens, and the Logistical-Urban Frontier” (Journal of Consumer Culture 2022), and “Optimizing the Immeasurable On the Techno-Ethical Limits of Predictive Policing” (Artificial Intelligence and the City 2023)

Learn more about us, our lecture series, and our course incubation, at:

About DCMI The Digital Culture and Media Initiative encourages thoughtful analysis of today’s device-littered planet; retrospective study through the lens of cyberculture of prior moments in the histories of computation; and speculative scholarly visions of the mediated future. In its original coi...

04/03/2024

The third and final DCMI lecture of the year is on April 11 at 3:30: Elizabeth Ellcessor of the University of Virginia presents "Call if You Can: Emergency, Equity, and Disability"!!