UAS and Sealaska Heritage partner to host Dr. Colbey Reid for Apr 18 presentation
“Indigeneity and the ‘Domestic Posthuman’: Reevaluating the Scale, Pace, Texture, and Place of Technology”
Juneau, Alaska
Date of Press Release: April 11, 2023
The University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) is partnering with Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) to bring Dr. Colbey Reid to Juneau for a presentation titled “Indigeneity and the ‘Domestic Posthuman’: Reevaluating the Scale, Pace, Texture, and Place of Technology” on Tuesday, April 18. The event will take place in the SHI Clan House, Walter Soboleff Building from 6:30 to 8:00 pm.
Dr. Reid will discuss the idea of “lo-tek,” an anti-primitivist conceptualization of Indigenous innovation, to reorient understanding of the design futures forecast by technology and human-technology relations toward humanity, conviviality, and ecological longevity.
Colbey Emmerson Reid is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Fashion Studies at Columbia College Chicago. She is also the Founder and Executive Director of the Fashion Lab, a Chicago-based organization for academic-corporate partnerships in co-creating and executing custom design research and product development projects. Colbey studies the interface of fashion and interior design with technology and disability studies. Additionally, she specializes in the theory of style and its impact on contemporary consumer culture. She is an award-winning writer and the author of Design, Mediation and the Posthuman (2016), and she contributed to Emerging Genres in New Media Environments (2017). Colbeyʼs new book, Designing the Domestic Posthuman (coauthored with Dennis M. Weiss) comes out in December, 2023 and will be published by Bloomsbury Press.
The event is part of a series of Earth Day events sponsored by the UAS Sustainability Committee on the Faculty Senate. The Sustainability Committee seeks to promote conservation practices and the wise use of resources at UAS. The committee makes recommendations to guide campus sustainability policies, advocates for these sustainability initiatives, and communicates the committee's activities to each member's respective departments.
Carin Silkaitis, Dean of Arts and Sciences states, “Dr. Reid is one of the most collaborative scholars I have ever had the pleasure of working with during my many years in academia. She always finds ways to call folks into the conversation, including those who have been historically marginalized. Dr. Reid is interested in having conversations with local designers to work collaboratively with her to flesh out this argument about ʼlo-tekʼ. She would ultimately love to publish a co-authored version of the work that fully credits our Juneau community for helping her to develop and find examples for these ideas—exploring the experimental concept of community-coauthored scholarly work.”
Dr. Reid notes, “I am very interested in this model for the ways in which it can possibly position indigenous and Native thinkers and designers deeply already-within academic systems from which they are historically and structurally excluded.”
Please join us in conversation at the SHI clan house on April 18 at 6:30pm.
Visit the UAS website to learn more about the work of the UAS Sustainability Committee.