Shaowen Bardzell, professor of information sciences and technology, presented a keynote address on March 23 at the virtual New Materialist Informatics 2021 conference. The talk, titled “Muddled Theories and Vibrant Mud: Notes on a Career of Reading and Walking” engaged feminist new materialist, ecofeminist, posthumanist, and feminist utopian thinking on climate crises. In this keynote, Bardzell leveraged her National Science Foundation-supported ethnographic work with Jeffrey Bardzell, professor and associate dean for undergraduate and graduate studies at the College of IST, on sustainable and computational agriculture in Taiwan as materials to think with.

The New Materialist Informatics conference connects informatics and the humanities and social sciences through the innovative field of new materialist research. The 2021 virtual event was dedicated to exploring a sociotechnical approach to informatics and the relation between informatics and social, cultural, environmental, and political domains.