Fwd: [CRITSEX] "Hainting the Algorithm" - Shaka McGlotten at LiU, 18 June 2025

[Katherine Harrison]

Dear all,

(with apologies for cross-posting) please find below information about two exciting events with Shaka McGlotten on 18 and 19 June at Linköping University, Sweden.

**Please note that there is travel funding for early-career researchers available for these events:

Are you (or do you know) a junior scholar who would be interested in attending both events (18 and 19 June) in person? TEMA’s DataLab has some travel funding available and may be able to offer full or partial coverage of your travel! Please enquire by emailing the DataLab coordinator at dat...@liu.se and including the following details: your name, affiliation, where you wish to travel from/to, and a one-line summary of your interest.**

with best wishes

Katherine

 

HAUNTING THE ALGORITHM

 

Shaka McGlotten (Purchase College–SUNY)

 

18 June, 13:00–15:00 CEST

In-person: TemCas, Department of Thematic Studies

Zoom registration: https://bit.ly/TemaG_McGlotten

 

In this performance lecture, Shaka McGlotten will explore how algorithmic systems are inhabited by “haints”—spectral presences from Black folklore that trouble presence and absence, history and futurity, the technic and the magic. Drawing from their ongoing research on “computational hexes,” McGlotten will examine how their genealogical investigations intersect with broader histories of algorithmic capture and extraction.

Through auto ethnography and critical fabulation, McGlotten will trace the connections between their white slave-owning ancestors who helped found the state of Georgia, their Blackness, and their present-day entanglements with seductive AI systems. They will reimagine their ancestor Roswell King as the creator of a computational device built from extracted African knowledge to propose a theory of “digital hainting” that collapses time and reveals how algorithmic systems are haunted by the histories they were designed to erase.

 

Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies at Purchase College–SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of the Gender Studies and Media Studies departments. An anthropologist and artist, their work stages encounters between black study, queer theory, media, and art. They are the author of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life, and Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality.

 

 

 

RESEARCH DIVINATION PICNIC

With Shaka McGlotten

 

19 June, 14:00–16:00

In-person: meet in TEMA’s Brage

Registration required: https://forms.office.com/e/jyh5PeMFVk

 

Join us for the Research Divination Picnic, co-hosted by TEMA G and the DataLab. Bring your research challenges, roadblocks, and successes for a (mostly) phone-free afternoon of activities. Drawing inspiration from decades of philosophers, feminists, computer scientists, and nerds, we’re gathering to apply some playful analog divinatory practices to the
work we are doing, not doing, or doing somewhere else in the multiverse.

There will be food and chaos magick-related activities–tarot, runes, and birch bark divination. Bring your own divinatory practices, too!
All are welcome.