Program Announced for 2018 Annual Meeting, June 13-17, 2018

The program is now posted for “Humanities Informatics,” the CHCI Annual Meeting taking place this year on the campus of the University of Virginia. It can be viewed or bookmarked at this link:

https://chcinetwork.org/2018-annual-meeting/2018-meeting-program

This year’s Annual Meeting starts with two days devoted to CHCI’s core work as a consortium: bringing together scholars, artists, administrators, and other staff members crucial to the intellectual and practical missions of humanities centers and institutes. New this year, the conference will start with day-long meetings of the CHCI networks and affinity groups, including Public Humanities, Medical Humanities, Environmental Humanities, and Associate Directors. The following day will include updates on CHCI funding initiatives as well as the annual Business Meeting.

The themed portion of the program, “Humanities Informatics,” will include plenary lectures by Achille Mbembe, Lydia Liu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Michael Witmore. Panels will include subjects such as ‘Information Wars, Impossible Democracies,’ ‘Art, Desire and Techno-Entanglements,’ and ‘Epistemic Acceleration, Algorithmic Cultures.’ There will also be a workshop on ‘Experimental Humanities’ that will feature the work of various humanities labs.

A special panel entitled, ‘#Charlottesville: August 11 & 12’ will focus on the eruption of neo-fascist violence in contemporary America. Charlottesville, the location of the conference, is also the site of neo-Nazi and white supremacist violence that shook the United States in the summer of 2017 and garnered global media attention. The panel will revisit the legacies of slavery, the civil war, the history of confederate monuments, and white supremacist movements in Virginia, a historic region that exists on the fault-line of a deep racial division that was foundational to the establishment of the United States as a nation. Speakers include Kirt Von Daacke, Chair of the UVA Presidential Commission on Slavery, and Deborah McDowell, Director, The Carter Woodson Institute of African and African-American Studies.

The morning of June 17th will feature two site visits, one to Monticello and the other a tour of the Charlottesville area with an emphasis on racial history.