The Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan invites applicants for its 5th Annual Digital IDEAS Summer Institute, to be held June 23-27, 2025, at the university’s central campus in Ann Arbor, MI. The IDEAS summer program supports scholars and thinkers at the intersection of critical digital studies, social justice and activism, and public intellectualism. The institute’s week-long community-building workshop, led by faculty director Sarah Murray, hosts graduate students, independent scholars, aca-adjacent artists and activists, and those in early career transition.
This year’s summer institute eschews a formal theme. Instead, we welcome intensive inquiry at the intersection of brokenness and survivalism.
Rounding the corner into 2025, press coverage of the U.S. tech industries included proclamations of failure, loss, slop, enshittification, and death. Aligning with crises in global politics, academia, and economics, we find ourselves in a deeply existential conjuncture defined by brokenness. In the midst of such a demoralizing historical moment, how do we approach the act of thinking, and the practice of being an intellectual?
Taking broken machines and survivalist dreams as a playful and provocative starting point, and inspired by Sarah Sharma’s Manifesto for the Broken Machine (2020), we see brokenness not as a disposition of despair or a dispirited fracturing by those in power, but instead as an opportunity to harness the “productive malfunctioning” of disassembly.
We are thrilled to host Dr. Sarah Sharma and Dr. Shannon Mattern as our invited senior scholars and broken machine facilitators for two featured workshops during the week.
In bringing together participants with a wide range of research topics and practices, IDEAS calls for applicants to participate in the groundwork necessary to reassemble futures of remediation, redress, repair, and longevity. We aim to upend the defeatist tendencies of an overwhelming political environment and harness the collective power of survival as strategic continuation.
The Institute encourages a broad interpretation of this call. We invite scholars across disciplines who are engaged in the critical study of postdigital cultures. We support a range of analytical frameworks, methodologies, and objects of study that can reasonably be considered digital studies in scope. We invite conversations guided by the following catalyzing questions:
anti/intellectual
what does it mean to be an intellectual at this historical conjuncture? What are the urgencies demanded by the role of the thinker and critical-cultural researcher? what is the potential for public intellectualism in a deeply anti-intellectual moment?
alt/aca
how can we be academic without being an academic? how can the best of academia be disarticulated from late capitalist institutions? how can/should the values of academic life be extemporaneous and activist? shouldn’t everything we do be alt by default?
re/attunement
how do we recenter feminist methods like glitch and joy? how do we participate in scholarly work that builds technologies and tech practices in non-extractive abolitionist ways? how do we design art and tech, build research, and write theory that recuperates survivalism, that sees futures as more than solutions, and that sees brokenness as default power and potential?
Overall, we encourage participants to approach the week as an effort to find “attunement in the cracks” by following Natalie Loveless and Carrie Smith’s call to slow down, recalibrate, and specifically commit to being responsive to each other in moments of extreme friction (2022).
Structured by a conference setting that takes the best of conversation and collaboration but leaves the rest behind, we’ll engage these ideas through hard conversation, intentional reflection, workshopping, panel discussion, dialogue with invited guests, blue skies thinking, and community building. We challenge participants to engage with their own research and their peers’ research with feminist and antiracist methods, and with an eye toward humane scholarship and an optimism about the place of thinking in the 21st century.
We invite research that involves an expansive notion of digital studies, including but not limited to: critical data studies (data colonialism and governance); social media; streaming platforms; disinformation and post-truth internet cultures; storage solutions and ecological crises; critical approaches to artificial intelligence; postdigital critical artistic practices, surveillance studies, architecture and urban tech studies; software studies; infrastructure studies; studies of consumer-facing tech, startup cultures, and video games and gaming studies.
Qualifications
Digital IDEAS is open to a broad cohort, including advanced graduate students from campuses in the US and abroad, postdocs and early career scholars and alt-ac practitioners, artists, and activists. Over the course of one week attendees will participate in a community-focused unconference setting of group discussion, workshopping, brainstorming, panel discussions, and workshops.
Questions about fit or eligibility can be directed to Sarah Murray at smurr@umich.edu.
Cost of Attendance
$750 - Registration Fee
$1,250 - Registration Fee including UM Dorm Housing Accommodations (lodging only)
Note: There is a reduced registration fee ($250) for Digital Studies Institute Graduate Certificate Students
Application Process & Timeline
Applications are due by March 7, 2024.
Please submit your application using this Google Form. A Word Document outlining all application questions can be found here.
Please contact Sarah Torsch at dsi-studentservices@umich.edu if you have any questions about the application or need additional assistance.
