Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 18, 2010, 07:40 AM

HASTAC's mission since 2002 has been a systems approach to understanding and creating technology in the world.   Our colleague Mandy is just back from SXSWi and was cheered by how many people appreciate our systems approach to technology.   When there has been a massive change to behavior and social organization, you need to understand how it all changes at once, how each part of the process influences the other.   That's why we believe you can't create without critiquing, you cannot create brilliant new worlds without understanding the systemic impact in the world.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Nov 11, 2008, 07:36 AM
If cultural criticism is rooted in critique, in what is critique rooted? That is far too big a topic for any one person so I'm just going to throw out some extravagant generalizations about historicity, critique, and agency and I would love to hear what others think. If the Frankfurt School's idea of critique is rooted in a horrific historical moment, one in which intellectuals were not just derided but jailed and killed, if the major theorists of the late twentieth century, virtually all of whom consider critique to be foundational to their method, came of age in the 1960s in the midst of struggles, riots, assassinations, unjust wars, and radicalism generated by a sense of political urgency and agentive hopelessness, what will the cultural criticism of the future look like for eighteen year-olds who voted for the first time for an utterly improbable and historically unlikely president who won. In other words, in the gross world of power politics and partisan politics in the U.S., what happens if what no one could have predicted was even possible a year ago could, through concerted collective effort, become possible? If you believe you have agency in democracy, what is the affective, critical imperative borne of that agency? What is the relationship between theoretical critique and collective action? What is the continuity between success in one improbably arena and the sense that you can change other arenas as well? What form of critique, evaluation, and analysis emerges when you believe that you have the collective power to change and succeed against all predictions, against the assumptions of history? These are all interesting questions that do NOT presume a utopic world but, rather, a rooted sense of power to enact certain forms of collective action and change within a deeply flawed world where constant intervention is required.