[Air-L] Crystallising Wellness: Online Symposium September 21

[Aleena Chia]

Dear Colleagues,

Please consider joining an online symposium organised by Tom Brock and
Aleena Chia, featuring talks on by Bridget Conor, Johannes Bruder, Jonathan
Corpus Ong:


*Crystallising Wellness*



Wed, September 21, 2022

11:00 AM – 2:00 PM BST

Online Symposium



Speakers: Bridget Conor, Johannes Bruder, Jonathan Corpus Ong



Registration:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/crystallising-wellness-disc-online-symposium-tickets-396507122477



A satellite event of the Digital Society @ Manchester



Wellness is more than a buzzword in the digital society. Wellness is used
to market health apps and wearable tech to manage attention, optimise
productivity, and find personal meaning. Platform companies design for
digital wellbeing to counter public criticisms about the psychological
costs of the attention economy. Lifestyle brands promote popular ideas of
wellness on social media to sell aspirational supplements and services.
These developments flourish at the ideological nexus of digital technology
and neoliberal spirituality, which empowers subjects to personal
transformation through consumption. At the same time, online wellness
communities identifying with new age spirituality have increasingly
politicized around conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine activism.



This satellite event of the Digital Society @ Manchester brings together
critical researchers of wellness to discuss its couplings with
neuroscience, alternative health, and conspiracy thinking. Focusing on how
wellness configures gender, class, and race through digital technologies,
these talks trace unlikely connections between the brain science of
algorithms and the neoliberal spirituality of crystals.



Speaker extracts:



*Bridget Conor – ‘Voices for Freedom’: Wellness and anti-vaxxers in
Aotearoa*

In this talk I’ll reflect on my experience returning to live in Aotearoa in
the last two years whilst also thinking and writing about cosmic wellness.
Highly restricted borders, a managed isolation system for arrivals to the
country and more recently, vaccine mandates, have ensured relatively low
rates of Covid-19 infection. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, anti-vaccine
‘activism’ has increased, fuelled by particular groups and people. The most
prominent, Voices For Freedom (VFF), is led by three women whose
extracurriculars include paleo diets, DoTerra essential oils and crochet.
Most recently, VFF played a visible role in a large anti-government
occupation of New Zealand’s parliament grounds. Using VFF as a case, I’ll
consider how the group and its leaders alchemise wellness, whiteness and
motherhood in this particular place and time.



Bridget Conor is Associate Professor of Communication at Waipapa Taumata
Rau, the University of Auckland. Her areas of interest include cultural
work, inequalities in cultural industries and cosmic wellness. Her most
recent publication is the UNESCO report Gender and Creativity: Progress on
the Precipice.



*Johannes Bruder – Informational Alchemy, ca. 2022. A report on the status
of dreaming in digital societies.*

Counter to the 20th century fixation on acts of cognition that can be
observed in neuroscience and psychology labs, the late 1990s saw a
resurgence of research on the dark energy of the brain—what happens in the
brain when humans rest. Resting-state neuroscience has since focused on the
productive and generative aspects of mind wandering and the digital
wellness industry devised apps, techniques and substances that turn
slacking and drifting away into productive exercises. A new science of
sleep that developed in parallel has uncovered similarities between
drifting waking thought and dreaming, which researchers in the field now
consider as emotional first aid and a locus for stress-free processing of
accumulated memories. Dreaming has in this process become a new territory
for self-care and growth: whereas early interventionist paradigms focused
on the normalization of sleep patterns to support the recharging of
cognitive capacities, the management of REM sleep energies aims at
improving emotional resilience and establishing some sort of “informational
alchemy”. In my talk, I’ll position this emerging neuropsychology of
dreaming in the broader context of wellness in digital societies.



Johannes Bruder is a scholar of digital culture with a background in STS
and media studies. His current research focuses on psychological
categories, sociological models, and speculative designs encoded in digital
technologies. His first book “Cognitive Code. Post-Anthropocentric
Intelligence and the Infrastructural Brain” (MQUP, 2019) is based on
fieldwork in neuroscience laboratories and provides insights into the
bio-politics of contemporary machine learning. Johannes has a strong
interest in experimental research methods, alternative pedagogies and
critical publishing practices that unsettle disciplinary paradigms and
render research in the humanities operational in real-world contexts.



*Jonathan Corpus Ong – The Grand Conjunction: When Scam Accounts and
Shadowbans Target Astrologers on Instagram*



Social media and contemporary meme cultures are credited for the
exponential popularity of astrology, but astrologers and other spiritual
influencers feel they’re left in the dark about platforms’ content policy,
monetization opportunities, and account security protocols. Based on
interviews and digital ethnography with spiritual practitioners on
Instagram, this talk explores how a community habituated into marginality
articulates (limited) vernaculars of platform accountability while
manifesting competing versions of sustainable spiritual business.



Jonathan Corpus Ong is Associate Professor of Global Digital Media in the
University of Massachusetts - Amherst. He is the author of two books and
over 25 journal articles in the areas of media ethics, humanitarian
communication, and digital politics. He is currently Co-Principal
Investigator on a National Science Foundation Accelerator Grant (2021-2022)
entitled "FACT Champ", which investigates racially targeted misinformation
and hate against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the
wake of Covid-19. He is also Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy
School's Shorenstein Center where he studies networked conspirituality in
tarot and astrology communities.


-- 
Dr. Aleena L. Chia (she/her)
Lecturer, Media, Communications & Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London