Associate Professor
annawfis@umich.eduOffice Information:
3640 Haven Hall
Fields of Study:
digital studies, media theory, performance studies, contemporary art, visual culture, feminist and queer studies, critical theory
Education/Degree:
Ph.D. Modern Culture and Media, Brown UniversityHighlighted Work and Publications
Safety Orange
Anna Watkins Fisher
Safety Orange emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard in technical manuals and federal regulations. Here the color provides an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in twenty-first-century U.S. public life and for pondering what the color reveals about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact often hiding in plain sight in commonplace phenomena.
The Play in the System
Anna Watkins Fisher
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism—tactics of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Fisher tracks the ways in which artists on the margins—from hacker collectives like Ubermorgen to feminist writers and performers like Chris Kraus—have willfully abandoned the radical scripts of opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and feminism. Space for resistance is found ...
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Technoprecarious
Lisa Nakamura, Anna Watkins Fisher, Silvia Lindtner, Ivan Chaar-Lopez, Cengiz Salman, McKenzie Wark, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, Cass Adair, Cindy Lin, with Meryem Kamil
Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor, or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; women; indigenous people; migrants; and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital...
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New Media, Old Media
Eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Anna Watkins Fisher (with Thomas Keenan)
This much-expanded and updated second edition of New Media, Old Media brings together original and classic essays that explore the tensions of old and new in digital culture. Touching on topics including media archaeology, archives, software studies, surveillance, big data, social media, organized networks, digital art, and the Internet of Things, this newly revised critical anthology is essential reading for anyone studying the cultural impact of new and digital media.
Available here.
