Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge: Issue 36 (2020)

Contributors

Mohammed Syed Ali is a PhD student in the Department of History at Duke University. He is a specialist in 20th-century United States history, critical theory, pornography studies, and the welfare-warfare state. Mohammed sees himself at the crossroads between the disciplines of history and comparative literature because he is fascinated by the mutual dependency between narration and knowledge. He has long seen himself as a storyteller. His tragedies concern the unintended consequences of people’s entanglements with abstractions. Mohammed completed the Bachelor of Arts program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago and the Master’s program in History at the University of California, Irvine. In recognition of his interdisciplinary potential, Duke University inducted Mohammed into the James B. Duke Fellowship and the University Scholars Fellowship, where he enjoys empowering his undergraduate mentees to become skilled navigators of US higher education.

Lee Boot is a media artist and researcher who develops and tests new tools and practices to improve how public interests are served within the digital media datasphere. His projects address challenges in public health, education, well-being, and the environment by engaging methods and traditions native to the arts, despite that they are not usually present in such domains. Lee is currently Director of the Imaging Research Center at UMBC.

Alyssa M. Brumis, a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, teaches Communication at Howard Community College and the College of Southern Maryland.

Ekin Erkan is a Turkish writer in science, technology and philosophy living in New York City, notable for researching with and developing Reza Negarestani’s research on artificial general intelligence. Erkan’s work has been published in Radical Philosophy, Theory & Event, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Cosmos & History, Alphaville, Cultural Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Chiasma, Rhizomes, Labyrinth, Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice, Media Theory, Philosophy East and West, and The Cincinnati Romance Review.

Sergio C. Figueiredo is an Associate Professor of English at Kennesaw State University. His current work focuses on electracy, comics, the avant-garde from the early-nineteenth century forward, and rhetorical invention.

Elizabeth de Freitas is a professor at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on philosophical investigations of mathematics, science and technology, pursuing the implications and applications of this work in the social sciences. She has published five books and over fifty articles. Her recent work explores weird geometries in speculative fiction, and the use of sensor technologies in shaping alternative spatial and political imaginaries. She is co-director of The Biosocial Research Lab, see https://www.biosocialresearchlab.com/

Christopher Neil Gamble earned an M.S. in social psychology from Penn State and is pursuing a Ph.D. in rhetoric at the University of Washington. His work focuses on rhetoric, new materialism, and Homer. He co-edited the 2016 “Figures of Entanglement” special issue for Review of Communication, which explores the significance of Karen Barad’s work for rhetorical studies. He co-authored the 2019 Angelaki article, “What is New Materialism?” He is currently working on a performative new materialist reading of Homer.

J Inscoe, a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy & Culture program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, published a review in Hyperrhiz.

Joshua Jackson is a lecturer in eSports at Staffordshire University. His research centers on gender and labour concerns in videogame production.

Will Luers is a digital media artist and writer living in Portland,Oregon. In the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver, he teaches multimedia authoring, creative programming, digital storytelling and digital cinema. His art has been exhibited internationally and selected for various festivals and conferences, including the Electronic Literature Organization, FILE (Brazil) and ISEA. The recombinant e-lit work novelling, his collaboration with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, won the 2018 Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature.

Thomas Nail is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015), Theory of the Border (Oxford University Press, 2016), Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Being and Motion (Oxford University Press, 2018), Theory of the Image (Oxford University Press, 2019), Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2020) and Marx in Motion (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020). His publications can be downloaded at http://du.academia.edu/thomasnail

Craig J. Saper, Professor in the Language, Literacy & Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC, has published Artificial Mythologies; Networked Art; The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown; and, with his pseudonym dj Readies Intimate Bureaucracies: a manifesto. He has co-edited scholarly collections on Electracy; Imaging Place; Drifts, Mapping Culture Multimodally, and edited and introduced six volumes, including five with Roving Eye Press: The Readies; Words; Gems; 1450-1950; and Houdini. And, Saper introduces and annotates the biographical context for each of the contributors in Readies for Bob Brown's Machine: A Critical Facsimile Edition. He has published chapters and articles on digital culture, and built readies.org. He co-curated TypeBound (on typewriter and sculptural poetry), and was the co-founder of folkvine.org. He is on the editorial boards of the Hyperrhiz Electric digital book-equivalent series, Rhizomes, Hyperrhiz, Textshop Experiments, and recently the new journal Inscription: The Journal of Material Text – History, Practice, and Theory for which he is the current digital-artist-in-residence. Saper's name is often misspelled as in the cases in this article as “Craig Sapper” or given a new first name like “Peter”….

Rob Shields is Research Chair and Professor of Human Geography and Sociology at the University of Alberta. His work spans architecture, planning and urban geography. His current research ranges from urban revitalization, to theories of social spatialization and cultural topologies of temporality and spatiality, to large scale energy infrastructure projects as drivers of Indigenous sovereignty, notably in newly autonomous territories such as Eeyou Istchee, on the Eastern shore of James Bay. He is an award-winning author and co-editor of numerous books including Spatial Questions, The Virtual, Lifestyle Shopping, and Places on the Margin, and is founding editor of Space and Culture, an international peer refereed journal.

Balbir K. Singh is Assistant Professor of Cultural Theory and Digital Media in the Department of Religion and Culture, Core Faculty in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought, and Faculty Affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies at Virginia Tech. She earned her PhD from the University of Washington, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Illinois and the University of Texas. Her writing has appeared in journals including Sikh Formations, Critical Ethnic Studies, QED: A Journal of LGBTQ World-Making, and Surveillance and Society. She is currently at work on her first book, “Militant Bodies: Violence and Visual Culture Under Islamophobia.”

Sarah E. Truman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Melbourne’s Literary Education Lab where she researches speculative fiction and literary education. She also co-directs WalkingLab, and is one half of (Oblique Curiosities. Her personal website is www.sarahetruman.com.