Visiting Scholars
About
Every Spring, the Lincoln Center partners with an outstanding scholar engaging in questions around ethics and humane interventions to visit ASU. Each series of event is as unique as the visiting scholar, and presents students with new opportunities to make think critically, make connections, and collaborate as equals.
2024
Kishonna L. Gray
Dr. Kishonna L. Gray (@kishonnagray) is a professor of Racial Justice and Technology in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, digital media scholar whose areas of research include identity, performance and online environments, embodied deviance, cultural production, video games, and Black Cyberfeminism. Dr. Gray is an alum of ASU's School of Social Transformation.
Dr. Gray is the author of "Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming" (LSU Press, 2020). She is also the author of "Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live" (Routledge, 2014), and the co-editor of two volumes on culture and gaming: "Feminism in Play" (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018) and "Woke Gaming" (University of Washington Press, 2018). Dr. Gray has published in a variety of outlets across disciplines and has also featured in public outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The New York Times.
During her visit to ASU, she engaged students and faculty alike to rethink their framework for game interactions and how these forms of play can have very real effects on historically marginalized groups. In addition to her lecture, Gray held a workshop on intersectional design, in which participants deconstructed their framework for what constitutes gaming and play.
2023
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University and a visiting professor of healthcare ethics at UCLA. She brings disability culture, ethics, and justice to a broad range of institutions and communities. She is a Hastings Center Fellow and Senior Advisor and professor emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University.
Garland-Thomson's visit included a workshop series involving faculty and graduate students focusing on misfitting and the built environment, with a collaborative discussion on scenes of disability confession. She also gave a public lecture titled "A Call to Wonder: How the Health Humanities
Can Make Us More Humane," diving into profound imagery of disability in art, the history of disability studies, and concepts of wonder and the sacred body.
2022
Marcel O'Gorman
Marcel O’Gorman is a university research chair, professor of English and founding director of the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo, where he teaches courses, leads collaborative projects, and directs workshops in digital design and the philosophy of technology.
Over the course of his visit, O’Gorman hosted a series of professional workshops titled “Atelier Technique Populaire'' for staff, faculty and students, along with a public talk titled “Responsible Innovation and Critical Design” on teachings and practices of critical design techniques. Through these events, he empowered people to consider how technology impacts humans, examine our role in that impact, and ask who is counted as human in the process.
