Roundtable: The New Ethereality

Marisa Duarte researches problems of information, knowledge, and technology in Native American and Indigenous contexts. For example, her most recent work examines tensions between wearable technologies, privacy, and well-being among marginalized peoples, specifically among Indigenous and Mexican American women. She also investigates Native and Indigenous peoples uses of social media, construction of large-scale digital infrastructures, and interfaces that allow for the circulation of Indigenous ways of knowing. Her work requires understanding of Western and Indigenous philosophies of science and technology, as well as Indigenous concepts of justice.

Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt; and The City Is Not a Computer, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. She contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal, and she collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

Rahul Mukherjee is the Dick Wolf Associate Professor of Television and New Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. His work examines the politics of wireless technologies and mobile phone cultures in India and beyond. Rahul’s research has been published in many journals including New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, and Asiascape: Digital Asia. Rahul has been an Atkinson Center Sustainable Futures Fellow at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. He is part of the editorial collective at Journal of Visual Culture.

Tyler Morgenstern is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a former Doctoral Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. His research focuses primarily on the design, deployment, and use of information and communication technologies—particularly wireless ICTs—in colonial contexts. He is co-editor of Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis (Transcript Verlag 2020), and his writing has appeared in Synoptique, The International Journal of Communication, and The Conversation.