University of Melbourne Events Calendar
Featured events
2024 Ableist Cities Symposium
Dec
4
9:30am - 4:30pm
Conference or Symposium
Join us for the 2024 Ableist Cities Symposium
This free one-day symposium will focus on the theme of Transformative Solutions for Inclusive Development: the role of Innovation in Fuelling an Accessible and Equitable World.
Drawing inspiration from last year’s exploration of spatial justice and the physical and attitudinal barriers faced by individuals with disabilities, this year’s Ableist Cities Symposium intends to hear narratives of individual lived experience or co-designed research.
Emphasizing an integrated approach, the symposium seeks to marry the realms of politics, policy, and practical applications to address the pressing challenges faced in the built environment. In giving voice to these narratives, we aim to ignite conversations that will shape our cities to make them more inclusive, equitable, and accessible for all.
The symposium will be available both in person, and online.
Full program coming soon.
From stacktivism to platform alternatives
Dec
10
4:30pm - 5:30pm
Public Lecture
In contemporary activism there is a growing realisation that there is an urgent need to distinguish between tools for (decentralised) organisation and (broad) mobilisation that scale up. Social media platforms have mixed the two up (news & personal messages), to the point of becoming unworkable, exhausting, unleashing mental health crises, on top of creating dangerous situations in terms surveillance.
The social media hegemony is not yet broken but there are many cracks in its architecture—and appeal. While the Internet Question seems stagnant and unresolved, the hype caravan has moved on. From VR, crypto and Web3 we are now all in the grip of ‘AI’ as the latest marketing term for machine learning and large language models that feeds its generic ’summary’ content back into the Web. While the ‘infuencer’ persona is in decline, the mass obsession with likes, views, comments, swiping from one TikTok video to the next, retweets funny memes continues. What will disrupt the ‘bored billions’ is the automation of activism (already visible in the current waves of fake news and deep fakes).
While officials raise the ethics issue of AI for Good, asking the impossible question how to build ‘responsible’ extraction software, hackers, designers and other artists are coding subversive tools that disrupt and undermine the totalitarian system of control, ‘polluting’ data bases, turning fake news and monstrous images upside down.
The message is clear: the world prepares for planetary cyberwarfare. Are you ready?
