2020 updates: Transmediale, etc.

Been slacking on the blog for months, but with good reasons.

For starters, in late January I had the chance to participate in a workshop at Transmediale. I presented and discussed my research on tagging aesthetics (basically the first and last chapter of my thesis) in front of a select group of other PhD students/curators/artists and then in a public session of the festival. It was a pretty unique chance to engage with the Transmediale network, as well as get a lot of solid feedback in a pretty crucial phase of my PhD. Apart from giving me the chance to meet many super-talented people whose work I respect and admire, the event already led to a very cool publication that documents the email exchanges within the group in the months prior to the festival, and another one will follow as a special issue of APRJA (a very cool journal by the Aarhus people with a great editorial board).

Also in terms of publications, a couple book reviews of mine have been published in the past few months. The first one is Pattern Discrimination for Theory, Culture & Society, and more recently #identity for Cultural Sociology. The first book is quite short, but packed with lots of important points on algorithmically-enforced identity politics and the near future of new media theory. The second is a timely collection about the nuanced properties of hashtags when they intersect specific identity labels and social categories. The latter review is not open access, but you can let me know and I’ll send it to you personally if you’re interested.

Last but not least, I recently submitted my PhD thesis. Hopefully portions of it will be published in the next months in a couple outlets, but I’ll post more updates in due time (you never know… in Italian we have a word for it, but I’m not sure how well it translates to English).