RMeS Network Event: “How do you… Disconnect in a Digital Age?”

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Date: 25 April 2018, 13.00-16.00 (followed by drinks)
Venue: Utrecht University [room to be confirmed]
Registration: https://goo.gl/forms/jHESESnumQaMlcpJ2

Description

In line with the previous editions of the RMeS Network Event – which covered such themes as methodology, (re)writing, and academic communication – this year we will focus on “How do you… disconnect in a digital age?”

Digital detox holidays, phone stacking dinners, virtual suicide, a year without Internet.
In a culture obsessed with social networking, participation and connectivity, to disconnect has come to mean going off-line: to reclaim presence in the physical world; to revitalize face to face communication; to salvage the actual over the virtual; to (temporarily) obliterate one’s online identity. To disconnect signals a desire to re-connect: with one’s off-line identity, with friends, with the spiritual values of life, with one’s natural environment, with the world at large. Disconnectivity thus bespeaks connectivity, and vice versa.

During this years’ RMeS Network Event, Pepita Hesselberth will engage with you in a discussion on paradox of disconnectivity in the digital age, taking the “Data Detox Kit” – as well as academic life itself – as a case in point.

For the eager reader:

Bio
Pepita Hesselberth is Lecturer in Film and Literary Studies and Digital Media, at Leiden University. She is the author of Cinematic Chonotopes (Bloomsbury 2014), and co-editor of volumes on Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury 2016) and Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines (Brill 2018). She is currently finalizing her project on Disconnectivity in the Digital, for which she received a fellowship from the Danish Council for Independent Research, and was appointed as a research fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen (2015-2018). For more info see here.

The purpose of the annual RMeS Network Event is to stimulate the exchange of ideas between PhD and RMa students of different universities in light of a topical theme and/or practice relevant to (junior) media researchers.