Maria Paz Almenara
Maria Paz Almenara Unten is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her interdisciplinary work engages frameworks from political theory, media studies, visual culture studies, anti-colonial and feminist STS, and critical indigenous theory. Maria Paz’s dissertation develops a cultural and intellectual history of analog and digital landscape, as a genre for the visual mediation of land, in the context of settler colonialism and extractivism in Latin America. In particular, the project examines the hemispheric transits of environmental and land management policy (and its associated quantified methodologies of enforcement) to illuminate the contradictions and failures of technological transfer across distinct settler colonial contexts and along imperial formations.
Maria Paz holds a BA in Modern Culture and Media (Honors) and Political Science from Brown University. Her previous work engages the photographic archives of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation commission to consider the role of media spectacle in the criminalization and legitimation of violence.
Nabil Hassein
Nabil Hassein is a PhD candidate in New York University’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication who is writing a dissertation on Arabic-based computing and its associated communities, intending to consider their linked historical, social, technical, and theoretical aspects. Born and raised in Northern Virginia, Nabil has lived in New York City for the large majority of the years since 2008, and holds a B.A. in mathematics and computer science from NYU’s Courant Institute. Before re-entering NYU in the humanities, Nabil worked as a high school teacher, a software developer, and a freelance writer, public speaker, event organizer, and educator at many places including the School for Poetic Computation.
Noah Ọládélé
Noah Oladele is a PhD student in the Media, Culture, and Communication program at New York University. His research interests include but are not limited to postcolonial studies, power dynamics and politics, African digital rhetoric, cyber and youth identity, social media, and rhetoric of social movement. His research is situated in Nigeria where he is interested in digital ethnographic study of social media and the imbrication of local practices, knowledge production, and explanatory principles. He is currently working on the spectacle of violence, mapping out the iterations of violence on both physical and online spaces.