Whit Pow (they/them)

Cover of The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life by Marisa Solomon. The cover features a sculpture by Curtis Cuffie. The sculpture is tall and eclectic. It is made of colorful, found materials—fabrics, ropes, tinsel, and various discarded objects—stacked and draped over a pole in an outdoor urban setting under a cloudy sky. A parking meter tagged with graffiti is visible on the right.

In "The Elsewhere Is Black," Marisa Solomon traces the flow of trash and waste from Brooklyn to Virginia to examine how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of racial capitalism. Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/nmdNHyj

This looks fantastic! ✨

a pixel art of mario standing on top of a gold block with a question mark on it Alt: A pixel art of Mario standing on top of a gold block with a question mark on it.

I'm co-editing a Special Issue for Critical Studies in Media Communication on "Games & Storage" 📦

Guided by Zoe Sofia’s articulation of “container technologies” and how systems of storage are never neutral! Let's unlid Game Studies!

Full CFP in 🧵👇Abstracts due April 22! Full drafts by June!

Picture of book by Oliver Haimson, titled Trans Technologies.

Also look at this fantastic book cover!

Huge congratulations to @haimson.bsky.social and his new book Trans Technologies!! So glad we could make it to his book launch event with Briar Baron at Bluestockings this past weekend — Oliver, I’m so looking forward to reading and teaching from your book now and for many years to come. 🥳 🎉 💜

ceramic tile mimicking a sheet of paper scanned from a book. artist has created the impression of type as well as someone's handwritten notes that read "from Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media The Extensions of Man Cambridge MA The MIT PRess, 1994. 7-21

a sheet of paper lies on grey carpet on the left. the first page of a pdf of a text appears on the paper. title reads "The Question Concerning Technology / Martin Heidegger". next to the sheet of paper is a ceramic tile that looks nearly identical to the sheet of paper. the tile has a small horizontal crack in the left margin. the crack is mirrored by a tear in the sheet of paper on the left.

this is what happens when artists take classes in media theory: they make incredibly ceramic tiles of the first page of McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" and Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology" as part of their presentation! I mean really, people. Look at these things 😍

Awww it’s so great to see how your class is going and what your students are making!

Amazing, I love this! I used to do linocut printmaking in college, this looks fantastic ✨

Congratulations, Jacob! This collection looks fantastic — can’t wait to read 🎉

Very excited to have a piece in this new collection. Incredible work by Zach, Melody, and Jennifer!

A book standing upright on multiple copies, which are laying next to a 1920s Underwood typewriter. The book cover is a faded and blurry background, with a photo of a person’s ear horizontal on the bottom, and text emitting from it to represent sound. The text in large font says “Echoes of Care” followed by “Deafness in Modern Britain” and the author’s name, Jaipreet Virdi.

From an idea in 2008 to a book in 2025, ECHOES OF CARE: DEAFNESS IN MODERN BRITAIN has been published by @mcgillqueensup.bsky.social ! It explores how changing perceptions of deafness intersected with healthcare, disability, and eugenics in 19th-century Britain.

www.mqup.ca/echoes-of-ca...

I wish there was a way to quantify the collective amount of work lost due to stress and despair over the last few weeks, independent of barriers to funding.

New from the Queer and Trans SCMS Caucus: a starter pack to stay in touch!

We’ve read your responses to our survey asking to transition from Meta to Bsky & we’re starting by offering this pack. A QTC account will follow.

We’re excited to connect, lmk if you’d like to be added!

go.bsky.app/G4eA51z

AI doesn’t just require tons of electric power. It also guzzles enormous sums of water. It also guzzles enormous sums of water.

“In order to shoot off one email per week for a year, ChatGPT would use up 27 liters of water, or about one-and-a-half jugs… that means if one in 10 U.S. residents—16 million people—asked ChatGPT to write an email a week, it’d cost more than 435 million liters of water.”

You know, I’ve always struggled with this as long as I can remember and I’ve been wondering if I should get an ADHD assessment at some point!

Scent Makes a Place How the desert taught me to smell

“…it’s a wildly worthwhile thing, to immerse oneself in a landscape, and savoring the scents of place is a crucial element of this process… Sniffing, searching, naming: These actions enable us to more thoughtfully engage with our environment.”

BIPOC game studies conference at the Rochester Museum of Play is looking for submissions. Deadline is soon!

I am very much a min-maxing person when it comes to my own labor and I find that it’s hard for me to stop & rest after I get into the writing process — as if I need to be working to complete exhaustion each day. Working on being kind to myself and setting a firm stopping point after so many hours 🪴

One thing I have learned while writing this book is that the act of writing is transformative and the book ends up being often more ambitious than the book proposal (a good thing!). I learned a similar thing in my PhD and how my dissertation opened up so much from the dissertation proposal

T-minus less than 2 months (give or take!) to completing and submitting my book manuscript. Aiming to submit things in February — just working on putting in the hours each day. Today I’m working on finishing up my chapter on the connected histories of computational and biological determinism

I was invited to serve as a Critic in Residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program this winter — it’s been lovely speaking with the artists in residence about their art practice and the ideas they’re thinking through in their work. Many thanks to Melinda Lang and ISCP for inviting me.

Aww, I'm so glad that you're teaching my article! I hope that your class goes well next semester -- and would love to hear how it all goes (Media Archaeology Reconfigured sounds fantastic)

Thanks so much for reading, @loriemerson.net ! It really means a lot ☺️

by @poww.bsky.social! "By positioning medical history, medical documentation & medical legislation as types of media that retain & contain trans history...[we] better see how computational media...has always contained the shape of trans lives & our pasts & presents." drive.google.com/file/d/11EQd...

Thank you for reading, @drgholmes.bsky.social !

Thanks so much for reading, @erindurban.bsky.social ! It really means a lot!

Articles — Whit Pow

"How the Computer Taught Us to See" is available to read and download for free on my website for people without access to scholarly articles! I've also made a bunch of my articles available for free on my website here (I'll post more about them in the upcoming days): www.whitneypow.com/articles

How the Computer Taught Us to See — Whit Pow My article, “How the Computer Taught Us to See,” is now out with Camera Obscura (Duke University Press)! I’m especially proud of this one: here I use the method of the “horizontal cut” in order to ...

Hi new followers! I work in transgender media studies & computer history. My article, "How the Computer Taught Us to See," is now out - I look at how computers teach us to see like the state, & how these modes of seeing are inherently linked to race and trans life. www.whitneypow.com/articles/how...

🚨Job Listing 🚨 My dept., Media, Culture, and Communication @ NYU, is hiring an Asst. Prof of Indigenous Media and Culture w/ a focus on "Indigenous theories and practices of knowledge production ... methodologies and critique." Closing date is Dec 31. Please share widely! apply.interfolio.com/158482

Hi ✨ Together with Anna Schjøtt Hansen and Tobias Blanke, I organize the #CriticalAI Seminar Series @uvahumanities.bsky.social. This is the 24-25 program🙌

⚡The sessions are online and open to everyone, find more info and sign up here: t.co/ScqpC7ZDrT