[Air-L] "Hainting the Algorithm" - Shaka McGlotten at LiU, 18 & 19 June 2025

[Katherine Harrison]

Dear all,

(with apologies for cross-posting) please find below information about two
exciting events with Shaka McGlotten on 18 and 19 June at Linköping
University, Sweden.

**Please note that there is travel funding for early-career researchers
available for these events:

Are you (or do you know) a junior scholar who would be interested in
attending both events (18 and 19 June) in person? TEMA’s DataLab has some
travel funding available and may be able to offer full or partial coverage
of your travel! Please enquire by emailing the DataLab coordinator at
datalab at liu.se and including the following details: your name, affiliation,
where you wish to travel from/to, and a one-line summary of your interest.**

with best wishes
Katherine
-------------------------------------





*HAUNTING THE ALGORITHMShaka McGlotten (Purchase College–SUNY)18 June,
13:00–15:00 CEST*

*In-person: TemCas, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University,
Sweden.*

Zoom registration: https://bit.ly/TemaG_McGlotten



In this performance lecture, Shaka McGlotten will explore how algorithmic
systems are inhabited by “haints”—spectral presences from Black folklore
that trouble presence and absence, history and futurity, the technic and
the magic. Drawing from their ongoing research on “computational hexes,”
McGlotten will examine how their genealogical investigations intersect with
broader histories of algorithmic capture and extraction.

Through auto ethnography and critical fabulation, McGlotten will trace the
connections between their white slave-owning ancestors who helped found the
state of Georgia, their Blackness, and their present-day entanglements with
seductive AI systems. They will reimagine their ancestor Roswell King as
the creator of a computational device built from extracted African
knowledge to propose a theory of “digital hainting” that collapses time and
reveals how algorithmic systems are haunted by the histories they were
designed to erase.








*RESEARCH DIVINATION PICNICWith Shaka McGlotten 19 June,
14:00–16:00In-person: meet in TEMA’s Brage, Linköping University, Sweden.*

Registration required: https://forms.office.com/e/jyh5PeMFVk


Join us for the Research Divination Picnic, co-hosted by TEMA G and the
DataLab. Bring your research challenges, roadblocks, and successes for a
(mostly) phone-free afternoon of activities. Drawing inspiration from
decades of philosophers, feminists, computer scientists, and nerds, we’re
gathering to apply some playful analog divinatory practices to the work we
are doing, not doing, or doing somewhere else in the multiverse.

There will be food and chaos magick-related activities–tarot, runes, and
birch bark divination. Bring your own divinatory practices, too!
All are welcome.


Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies at Purchase College–SUNY,
where they also serve as Chair of the Gender Studies and Media Studies
departments. An anthropologist and artist, their work stages encounters
between black study, queer theory, media, and art. They are the author of
Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life, and Virtual Intimacies: Media,
Affect, and Queer Sociality.