A Queer History of Blackouts: history of online blackouts
Embassy of Canada together with transmediale festival hosted the Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2025
February 07th, 2025
On 29 January 2025, the Embassy of Canada in Berlin hosted a sold-out lecture with Canadian academics Cait cMKinney and Lindsey Freeman of Simon Fraser University. This event was presented in collaboration with transmediale - festival for art and digital culture in Berlin.
As part of the Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2025 edition, Cait McKinney’s talk, “A Queer History of Blackouts”, discussed the phenomenon of online blackouts through the perspective of queer media theory. The lecture was followed by a conversation between McKinney and Lindsey A. Freeman on how protests methods were transformed from analogue to digital, as well as how marginalised groups use media to communicate, share information and inspire collective action. They also discussed how relational notions emerged within the digital and computing sphere, and how intimacy and sexuality theories might help us comprehend digital infrastructures better.
Cait McKinney is an associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in BC, specialising in sexuality studies, media history, and activist media.
Lindsey A. Freeman is an associate professor of Sociology at SFU in BC, a writer, and a sociologist interested in endurance, hapticality, atomic and nuclear cultures, and poetics.
References
- https://www.facebook.com/CanadainGermany https://www.facebook.com/CanadainGermany
- https://transmediale.de/en/2025/event/marshall-mcluhan-lecture-2025 https://transmediale.de/en/2025/event/marshall-mcluhan-lecture-2025
