Department of English

• Thursday, April 9, 2015 (All day) to Saturday, April 11, 2015 (All day)

Multiple locations -- visit our website for more info.

Faculty and graduate students from the School of Arts & Sciences and the Annenberg School for Communication will host “Biocode: Performing Transgression After New Media,” an international conference featuring key scholars, designers, and artists whose work is paving the way for us to better conceptualize the potentials and ramifications of digital media. An increasing number of disciplines, across Penn and around the world, are turning to the study of media to understand major shifts in things like health care, governance, community, identity, and textuality. The conference will provide a venue for a deeply interdisciplinary conversation about the role of transgression—conceived as the rupture of social or cultural protocols—in our quickly changing digital landscape.

Biocode will explore possibilities of digital transgression across multiple fields of inquiry, including gender and sexuality studies, race studies, disability studies, and transnational and border studies. While these areas of scholarship often become isolated from one another, in the humanities and social sciences alike, we understand them to be equally concerned with what Michel Foucault called “biopolitics,” broadly defined as social and political power over life. The rise of digital media in the academy has sparked a proliferation of scholarship dedicated to exploring relations between the fields named above. 

Visit our website for more information!

co-sponsored by GSWS and the Alice Paul Center