Anna Watkins Fisher

Anna Watkins Fisher’s research and teaching span the fields of digital studies, performance studies, feminist visual culture, and critical theory. Her first book, The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance (Duke University Press, 2020), theorizes parasitism as a compromised tactic of resistance in 21st-century art and politics. She is also co-editor with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (with Thomas Keenan) of the 2nd edition of New Media, Old Media: ​A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2015).

​She is also a founding member of Precarity Lab (precaritylab.org), a research collective based at the University of Michigan that focuses on the various forms of insecurity, vulnerability, and social and cultural exclusion that digital ​platforms produce and mediate. The collective’s book, Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/M.I.T. Press, 2020), models critical digital study that centers transnational, feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonial modes of inquiry.

She is currently working on two book-length projects. The first, Resistance in an Age of Inevitability, examines how the rise of self-regulating, automated, and predictive technologies has undermined conventional cultural studies conceptions of resistance and critique—and how these concepts are being reimagined by users. The second, Safety Orange, is an experimental book that uses the color standard “Safety Orange” as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and attention in a 21st-century American landscape of mass privatization, securitization, and incarceration.

 Affiliation (s)

• Faculty: Department of American Culture (AC), Digital Studies (DS)
• Faculty by Courtesy: Digital Studies Institute (DSI)
• Faculty Affiliate: Center for Ethics, Computing, and Society (ESC)