Event Date: April 30, 2025 - 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Location: FSS 4006, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS

Dismantling the primacy of traditional human-based forms of witnessing is crucial if we are to reckon with an era of technoscientific war, ecological catastrophe, and technological capture. Media and mediation are central to these intersecting crises—and to the human capacity to build new ways of knowing and being after the end of the world. In this talk, Michael Richardson shows how ecological, machinic, and algorithmic forms of witnessing can help us better understand and respond. By shaking loose the human grip on witnessing, alternative and pluriversal communicative politics become possible. To illustrate this potential, this talk examines the mediations, affects, and communicative relations of nonhuman witnessing across an array of sites, from nuclear testing on First Nations land to autonomous drone warfare to algorithmic investigative tools.

Learn more about Michael Richardson’s book titled Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data & Ecology after the End of the World:

Speaker:

Michael Richardson is a writer, researcher, and teacher living and working on Gadigal and Bidjigal country in Sydney, Australia. He is an Associate Professor in Media and Culture at UNSW, where he co-directs the Media Futures Hub, and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making + Society. His research examines technology, power, witnessing, trauma, and affect in contexts of war and ecological crisis. His latest books are Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2024) and Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology (Open Humanities Press, 2024), co-edited with Beryl Pong.

Moderator:

Nisha Shah is an Associate Professor of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa and the Associate Director of CIPS.