Book Talk | Danya Glabau & Laura Forlano | Cyborg

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Thursday, February 13 (5:30-7:00 PM) for a book talk with Danya Glabau and Laura Forlano. They will discuss their book Cyborg with Margaret Jack and David Parisi.

Danya Glabau is a medical anthropologist and STS scholar researching health activism, the medical economy, and how human bodies become valuable data. She directs the Technology Ethics undergraduate curriculum at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and teaches in the NYU Tandon Integrated Design and Media graduate program. She has authored two books, Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care (2022, University of Minnesota Press), and Cyborg (2024, MIT Press; co-authored with Laura Forlano, Northeastern University). Her latest research investigates how new parents use parenting advice, with a focus on how digital resources, apps, and devices shape modern ideas about what makes a “good” parent.

Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a disabled writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is Professor in the departments of Art + Design and Communication Studies in the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Senior Fellow at The Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. Forlano’s research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between design and emerging technologies. She has used participatory workshops, collaborative games, exhibitions, speculative videos, prototypes and performances to imagine alternative futures for living with data and computation. She is the author of Cyborg (with Danya Glabau, MIT Press 2024) and an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). Forlano is also an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

Margaret “Maggie” Jack researches technology and work in a global context. Maggie primarily uses qualitative methods including ethnography, interviews, design research, participant observation, and archival review. Her scholarly work is in conversation with the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and design. She also contributes to popular conversations about the changing nature of work and the ethical dimensions of emerging technologies. In her teaching, Maggie encourages design and engineering students to use humanistic methods and perspectives to critically analyze and imagine futures for the impacts of technology on society. Maggie’s first book Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology was published in the Labor and Technology series at the MIT Press in May 2023. The book describes how Cambodian media workers after the Khmer Rouge repaired film and radio infrastructures, and how contemporary new media workers find and repair media artifacts from before the war period and disseminate them (often) using social media. In previous lives, she worked in the international development sector and as a financial analyst in the technology-media-telecom sector in Silicon Valley.

David Parisi is the Dibner Family Chair in the History and Philosophy of Technology and Science and Associate Professor in the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society. His research investigates the past, present, and future of touching with digital technologies. Parisi’s book Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) explores the technological transformations of touch necessary for the invention of touch-based computer interfaces. Opening with an examination of touch’s role in apprehending the mysteries of eighteenth century electrical machines, and closing with an analysis of new computing technologies that digitally synthesize haptic sensations, Archaeologies of Touch traces the iterative development of a technoscientific haptics across four centuries. Along the way, he shows how electric shock, experimental psychology, cybernetics, aesthetics, telemanipulation robotics, and virtual reality each participated in a reconceptualization of touch necessary for its integration into contemporary computing technologies. Parisi’s work has been published in venues such as Real Life, Logic, Open!, ROMchip, New Media & Society, Journal of Games Criticism, Convergence, and Game Studies. His perspectives on the intersection of touch and digital media have been featured on Flash Forward, The Haptics Club, Internet of the Senses, and INIT. He currently serves as an editor for ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories.