Moira Weigel

Wednesday, October 24, 12 – 1 p.m. with lunch to follow

Milstein Program Students Talk with Moira Weigel

Tatkon Center, Room 3330

"How Not To Be Evil:Tech-workers Against Racism, Sexism and Surveillance" with Moira Wegiel, author, editor, and junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. 

Moira Weigel is a writer, scholar, and founding editor at Logic magazine, currently at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature and Film and Media from Yale University in 2017. Before Yale, she earned a BA (summa cum laude) from Harvard University, and an M. Phil from the University of Cambridge, where she was the Harvard Scholar in residence at Emmanuel College.

Broadly, Moira's work examines how emerging media technologies shape culture--and vice versa--in a comparative context. She also has a deep interest in the history of feminism. Her first book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (FSG, 2016), pushed back against widespread media panic about the "death of courtship" inspired by the rise of mobile phone apps, arguing that the varied practices called "dating" have constantly co-evolved with consumer capitalism and women's work. Her dissertation, Animals, Media, and Modernity: Prehistories of the Posthuman examined how the rise of cinema influenced early twentieth century fascinations with nonhuman perception and consciousness and understandings of rapidly disappearing "nature."

In her capacity as a Logic founder, and a writer for the Guardian, Moira has been closely following the rise of tech worker activism since the 2016 presidential election. In this talk she will present an overview of ongoing efforts by engineers to build a more ethical and democratic tech industry--and show that bringing humanistic frameworks to bear on contemporary code and platforms can help us all "do better."

Find out more about Moira at website: www.moiraweigel.com

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