DISCO JAMS brings together DISCO Network PIs with other invested parties–academics, policymakers, funding agencies, non-profit organizations, and community members–to collect, organize, and disseminate the most current research and perspectives on pressing societal issues.

How have Black people responded to major technoscientific events? This research aims to begin answering this question by looking at the 20th century space race. Using Black newspapers to decipher the myriad sentiments of Black people about the race to the moon, we hope to reveal new historical insights into the ways Black people experience and talk about science and technology.

Hip Hop and technology have always been intimately connected. The use of technology is widely accepted, but authenticity has shaped the choice of technology. Authenticity is incredibly elusive, but it is a term that we deploy to do all kinds of cultural work. The terms so fraught because people deploy it to distinguish, differentiate, and ultimately separate. However, with the emergence of AI and its apparent use within Hip Hop, do these new technoscientific tools reshape, reconfigure, and recontextualize our perceptions of authenticity?

This project seeks to understand how Black women historically and contemporarily participate in cultures of automobility. We are focused on addressing the question: how do we make EVs and the growing infrastructure to support their consumption a habitable place for Black women’s bodies?

We live in a world where technoscientific incursions into everyday life are ubiquitous. As a result, some people choose not to comply with these ever-present technological imperatives. Are we on the cusp of a cultural movement that makes technological refusal its central aim? This project tracks, maps, and assess contemporary moments of opting out of technological systems, pathways, and networks.

This project aims to study the impact of hyperbolic scientific and technological rhetoric on the public's trust in science and technology. Specifically, what can we learn from a historical study aimed at understanding the relationship between technoscientific trust and scientific hyperbole?

This project explores the evolution and progressive loss of radical protest and impactive statement making by black spotlight athletes, giving way to the current environment of temporary virtue signaling by athletes and the performative sportswashing of professional sports.

The research examines digital sneaker marketplaces (StockX, Flight Club, eBay, etc.) to map, track, and assess the longitudinal relationships between price, marketing, and rhetorical traffic on digital forums to understand the evolution of sneaker hype. The intent of this research is to understand how the components of hype–scarcity, design, aesthetics, pleasure, and acquisitiveness–feed social and cultural desires for popular cultural consumer objects such as sneakers.

This will world will continue the evolution of the Sōls work.