About Speculative Futures

Sponsors

Main Sponsor: College of Letters & Sciences

Co–Sponsors:

UCSB Arts & Lectures, The Center for Nanotechnology in Society, The Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, The Center for Information, Technology and Society, The Carsey–Wolf Center, The American Cultures and Global Contexts Center (Department of English), The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Transcriptions (Department of English), Department of English Department of Film and Media Studies, The Media Arts and Technology Program, Department of Computer Science.

Primary Investigators

Bishnupriya Ghosh, a scholar of cultural globalization, teaches in the English Department at UC Santa Barbara. In her current projects, The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization and Speculating Life: HIV/AIDS Pandemic Media, Ghosh theorizes the significance of speculative knowledge for the study of transnational media.

Rita Raley works on digital media with a particular focus on cultural critique, artistic practices, and language. Particularly relevant for the Speculative Futures project is her ongoing research in tactical media and biopolitics, simulation, and dataveillance. She is faculty in the Department of English at UC Santa Barbara and currently director of the Transcriptions Center.

Bhaskar Sarkar, faculty in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, is currently working on 1) plasticity as a framework for theorizing cultural relations in the era of globalization, 2) the question of piracy within a paradigm of emergence and control, and 3) documentary formations and video cultures in the global South.

Greg Siegel is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His recent essays have appeared in the journals Communication and Critical⁄Cultural Studies, Discourse, and Grey Room. He is currently finishing up a book on the use of media technologies to forensically reconstruct accidents.

Associated Faculty

Barbara Herr Harthorn (Feminist Studies & Center for Nanotechnology in Society)

Wolf Kittler (Comparative Literature)

Patrick McCray (History & Center for Nanotechnology in Society)

Paul Amar (Global Studies)

Victor Rios (Sociology)

Giovanni Vigna (Computer Science)