Dr. Aron Lee Rosenberg on Jacking Out: A Year Spent Offline (Hybrid Event)

Hyrbid event. Please register on Eventbrite.

The in-person event is in the IGSF seminar room (3487 Peel Street, 2nd floor) of McGill University. Everyone who signs up via eventbrite will also be emailed the zoom link 3 days before the event, again 1 day before the event, and 15 minutes before the event.

Feel free to bring your lunch!

Dr. Aron Lee Rosenberg will talk about his book Jacking Out: A Journal of a Year Spent Offline.

In his talk, Aron will focus on how individual actions might contribute to collective and structural changes and movement building. Drawing from research about privilege and refusal, Aron will explore how his year offline connected to the social and environmental justice issues central to our digital experiences. Finally, Aron will discuss some of the other critical concerns that were relevant to his offline project, like his experience that year as a sperm donor for two of his queer friends.

At the end of 2019, Aron Lee decided to live 2020 without access to the Internet. He would interact with the world in what we have already come to think of as the "old-fashioned" taking calls and texting on a flip phone, paying bills by cheque (and receiving them by snail mail), and writing actual pen-on-paper letters to friends and family, all the while continuing his doctoral work at McGill University. Along the way he discovered a good deal about the internet, about our modern wired (and wireless) world, and about himself.

This event is also part of the 6th Season of Disrupting Disruptions: the Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series, organized by Dr. Alex Ketchum. Our series was made possible thanks to our sponsors: SSHRC, Digital Citizen Research, the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF), the DIGS Lab, Milieux, Initiative for Indigenous Futures, ReQEF, and more.

There is no fee required to attend this event. It will be professionally live captioned.

You can watch other past events here.