Keynotes

 

Lecture (+ Q&A) - Tanja Bosch (title to follow)

 

Tanja Bosch will explore the concept of "refusal" as a generative and insurgent mode of scholarship within decolonial studies, moving beyond simple negation to enact epistemic disobedience and challenge capitalist structures in academia: rejecting extractive logics, resisting metrics of impact, and centring labour, sovereignty, and solidarity.

 

Bio

 

Tanja Bosch is Professor of Media Studies and Production at the University of Cape Town and is the author of Broadcasting Democracy: Radio and Identity in South Africa (HSRC Press, 2017), Social Media and Everyday Life in South Africa (Routledge 2020); co-editor of Digital Citizenship in Africa (Zed Books, 2023), and Digital Feminist Citizenship in Africa (Bloomsbury, 2025); as well co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2nd edition, forthcoming). Her research includes work on decolonising digital methods, digital citizenship, and social media culture and activism.

 

Dialogue (+Q&A): Sally Wyatt and Willem Schinkel

 

Sally Wyatt and Willem Schinkel will discuss Schinkel’s book Waarom ik geen mobiele telefoon heb. Aphonismen (Why I don’t have a mobile phone. Aphonisms) (2024, Leesmagazin). The session will start with a short summary of the book by Sally Wyatt, especially for those members of the audience who cannot read Dutch. Wyatt and Schinkel will then have a conversation about what Schinkel describes as ‘working around’ or resisting the ubiquitous mobile telephony infrastructure. Wyatt will draw on her earlier work about non-use of digital technologies to explore Schinkel’s views on how we can illuminate possibilities for challenging the digital imperative and for examining the diverse, context-dependent forms of use and non-use (such as forced, reluctant, partial, or selective use). Schinkel’s auto-ethnographic approach provides a particularly valuable point of departure for addressing the methodological challenges of studying technological non-use and resistance. There will be time for questions from the audience.

 

Bios

 

Willem Schinkel is professor of Social Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He publishes on a wide range of subjects in social and political theory, including migration, property and algorithms. In 2024, he published Why I don’t have a mobile phone. Aphonisms. He teaches in the master’s programme Power, Publics and Engagement and hosts the Compositions Book Club podcast.

Sally Wyatt is professor of Digital Cultures in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences (FASoS) at Maastricht University. She publishes on social aspects of digital technologies, including non-users of technologies, health information on the internet, (digital) citation infrastructures, and the use of metaphors in digital media studies.

 

Book talks (+ Q&A): Thomas Dekeyser and Nolen Gertz

 

Dekeyser and Gertz will explore the contested terrain of human-technology relations, examining both how we've been shaped to think about technology and the persistent refusal to accept its dominance.

In his new book The Technological Unconscious, Nolen Gertz critically investigates the ideological influence of "technology movies" by exploring the parallel histories of the technological development of robots, AI, and VR, and of their cinematic depiction. This investigation reveals how much Big Tech and the Big Screen have come to influence each other, and how much both have shaped what we think is (and especially what is not) possible concerning human-technology relations.

Drawing from his forthcoming book Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine (University of Minnesota Press), Thomas Dekeyser pushes against teleological narratives of technological history, revealing the oft-perplexing and stubborn existence of a tenacious urge to negate life's technologization. From early machine breakers in ancient Greece to ultra-leftist armed assaults on capitalist computation in 1980s France, the extension of the technical realm has been inextricably tied up with political struggles over who counts as human and whose lives are worth saving.

Each author will present their work before engaging in discussion about the ideological forces that shape our technological imaginations, the persistent resistance to technological domination, and what it means to think critically about technological refusal and resistance today.

 

Bios

 

Thomas Dekeyser is a human geographer and film maker at the University of Southampton whose works examine digital cultures, pessimism and political refusal. His forthcoming monograph is ‘Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine’ (University of Minnesota Press), and his films include 'Machines in Flames', an experimental documentary about the 1980s French computer bombers. 

 

Nolen Gertz is an Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He is the author of Nihilism (MIT Press 2019), Nihilism and Technology (Rowman Littlefield International 2018), and The Philosophy of War and Exile (Palgrave 2015).