The Doctoral Research Colloquium features talks by PhD students who have recently advanced to candidacy along with a keynote lecture by a speaker who has influenced their practice. The colloquium is a public forum where the excitement and energy of newly launched dissertation projects are shared with the broader local community through sustained dialog with a senior scholar in the field.

3:45 p.m. - Welcome and Coffee

4:00 p.m. - Keynote Lecture: "Is the Cloud Dead?" Dr. Tamara Kneese
Program Director, Climate, Technology and Justice, Data & Society

5:00 p.m. - PhD Panel: Johnnie Chatman, Coral Pereda Serras
Respondents: Professors Benjamin Bratton, Lisa Cartwright, Malik Gaines

6:00 p.m. - Reception
Coinciding with the opening of the Art Practice group exhibition "Uncertain Terms" on view in the SME Gallery

Tamara Kneese is the director of Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program. Previously, she led Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impacts Lab (AIMLab). Building on the participatory impact assessment frameworks developed at AIMLab, she is the principal investigator of a NSF ReDDDoT planning grant that will engage the communities most impacted by AI’s infrastructures, including data centers, to go beyond technical measurements of carbon emissions. Before joining D&S, she was lead researcher at Green Software Foundation, director of developer engagement on the green software team at Intel, and assistant professor of media studies and director of gender and sexualities studies at the University of San Francisco. 
Tamara’s research juxtaposes histories of computing and automation with ethnographies of platform labor. Her first book, Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, was published by Yale University Press in 2023. Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text, the International Journal of Communication, and Social Media + Society and in popular outlets including LARB, The Verge, Wired, and The Baffler. In her spare time, Tamara is an organizer with the Tech Workers Coalition. She holds a PhD from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.