This talk invites you to consider the spaces between us. They are marked by histories of violence, mediated through technologies, complicated and redefined in the present moment. Technology choreographs the illusion of nearness while concealing distances, differences, opacities, and contradictions that define us and structure the world. All of these constitute gaps that are physical as much as they are social and historical, epistemological and technological.

If we reflect on how histories of violence and histories never told remain embedded in our everyday lives, we are faced with the task of not only remembering but acknowledging and also transforming. To confront these histories is to shape new modes of being together, to relate to one another and the world in ways that fully move through their weight.

While offering this story, mediated through history and Glissantian concepts, this talk by Nelly Y. Pinkrah will interrogate how bodies, proximities, and technologies inhabit a relational continuum. It probes the dual role of technology – as a tool of control and as an (infra)structure of Relation – and asks us to rethink how we engage with it. What we make of it. How we make it. How do technologies born of violence carry the imprint of their origins? And how might they be reimagined?

After their lecture, Nelly Y. Pinkrah will be joined by Shaka McGlotten in conversation.