Christina Dunbar-Hester
Biographic Data
| ID | 86918 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christina Dunbar-Hester |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christina |
| FAMILY NAME | Dunbar-Hester |
| SIGNATURE | DUNBAR-HESTER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3898-7245 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Oil, life, and everyday fossil fascism: Appropriative signification in U.S. petroleum supremacy
Fossil fuels face an uncertain future, but they have strong adherents as well as detractors. Even as California debates halting oil extraction, the Biden administration approved large new drilling projects on federal land, in keeping with the United States’ policy of “energy independence” (also called “energy dominance” under Trump). This article examines the Janus face of fossil fuels’ future, reading recent cultural moments in the western US. I…
Showing your ass on Mastodon: Lossy distribution, hashtag activism, and public scrutiny on federated, feral social media
This paper presents an account of technopolitics in Mastodon, noncommercial, decentralized social media. Mastodon’s significance has further risen in light of Twitter/X’s recent decimation of its public sphere functions; a noncommercial and ideally public alternative to commercial social media is (even more) urgently needed. The autoethnographic narrative presented here, hinging on a dispute initiated and sustained by an intemperate donkeykeeper …
Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond
"In this engaging interdisciplinary investigation, Christina Dunbar-Hester, a leading scholar in the area of democratic control of technologies, focuses on the relationships between commerce, environment, and nonhuman life forms in San Pedro Bay, which houses the contiguous ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. The harbor is a heavily industrialized area built atop a land- and waterscape that is important for wildlife, containing estuarial wetland…
Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond
Collectivities and Technological Activism: Feminist Hacking: Activism
Save the (White) Whales
In this commentary, I tune into the soundwork of cetacean communicability and whalesong in US environmental activism beginning around 1970. In the same period that whalesong attained popular audibility, the cetacean sensorium attained an exceptional status, akin to (or even superseding) human exceptionalism. This episode suggests that whales were assigned value due to possessing racially coded “hyperbrains,” and that listening for racialization c…
“Chinese Elm 1030595 . . . (or can I call you Dale??)”: Communication and representation in mediated encounters with nonhuman others
The last couple of years have seen an uptick of different technological forms presented as mediators of human/nonhuman interaction, and these developments have been accompanied by an increase in scholarly interest. Here, we engage with the human urge to enter into communicative exchanges that implicate “other” entities, but we also wonder what is at stake, analytically and ethically, in these mediated communicative acts. Following an approach inf…
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
” Hacking Diversity : The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures ” is a study of the efforts of open technology communities to “hack” the issues around the lack of diversity that pervades not only their volunteer communities, but also their related disciplines at large. Open technology communities are loosely organized, volunteer, online groups, focused on development and distribution of open or free software and hardware. Examples inc…
Not entirely analog(ous): Low-power FM radio as community, relations and knowledge in context
At the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits reflected on how communication systems could shape events and societies, often while basking in the perceived glow of the then-novel Internet. Others pled for reasoned engagement with the interplay between communication infrastructures and the social life of knowledge, a much-needed corrective in a moment of rampant breathless digital utopianism. This article explores the interplay between commu…
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
We regularly read and hear exhortations for women to take up positions in STEM. The call comes from both government and private corporate circles, and it also emanates from enthusiasts for free and open source software (FOSS), i.e. software that anyone is free to use, copy, study, and change in any way. Ironically, rate of participation in FOSS-related work is far lower than in other areas of computing. A 2002 European Union study showed that few…
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. This book investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to a…
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
Low power to the people: Pirates, protest, and politics in FM radio activism
Pirates, Hams, and Protest
This chapter provides an overview of the history of broadcasting and regulation relevant to the birth of the Low-Power FM service in 2000. It discusses technical and political formations that preceded LPFM activism, including “microradio” and pirate broadcasting, Indymedia and the anticorporate globalization movement, ham radio, citizens band (CB) radio, and the Appropriate Technology movement. It introduces the research site, the Prometheus Radi…
Radical Inclusion? Locating Accountability in Technical DIY
This chapter examines DIY (do-it-yourself) politics in the realm of practice. To do this, it follows the work of a group of media activists whose work foregrounded engagement with communication technologies. Working in a self-consciously collaborative mode, the activists promoted hands-on work with radio and Internet hardware as a means to enact DIY politics. This practice was understood to be in service of a broader goal of facilitating technica…
Being a Consistent Pain in the Ass”: Politics and Epistemics in Media Democracy Work
Are the “media reform,” ”media democracy,” and “media justice” movements complementary or in conflict? A bit of both, asserts the author, building on her earlier ethnographic study in the field. While each is a form of social activism with progressive political goals, they have different theoretical foundations and different frames for their respective agendas as “scholars,” “activists,” and “advocates.” The article offers a critical consideratio…
Producing "Participation"? The Pleasures and Perils of Technical Engagement in Radio Activism
Twenty people spent a weekend gathered around two refrigerator-sized FM radio transmitters inside a large truck parked on a busy street. These large machines were unwieldy: over thirty years old, they were heavy to move, frustratingly dark to work in, and required high electric current to operate. They were not in working order; they were filthy inside and out and miss- ing various components. After two full days of labor directed toward diagnosi…
What's Local? Localism as a Discursive Boundary Object in Low-Power Radio Policymaking: What's Local?
This article addresses the discourse of “localism” used in the formulation of low-power FM radio service in the United States. It builds on S. L. Star and J. Griesemer's (1989) concept of “boundary object” to theorize localism as a “discursive boundary object.” Drawing on interviews with advocates and regulators, participant observation with low-power radio activists, and documentary research in relevant policy discussions, the article argues tha…
Soldering Toward Media Democracy: Technical Practice as Symbolic Value in Radio Activism
This article follows radio activists engaged in a combination of policy advocacy and broadening access to technology and skills through hands-on work. In practice, this largely played out as a systematic elevation of “technical” work and downplaying of policy/advocacy expertise, even though both were salient features of their work. The article argues that radio activists cultivated a technical identity that served to mark boundaries between their…
OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture
Book Review| March 01 2010 OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Christine Harold. Christina Dunbar-Hester Christina Dunbar-Hester Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (1): 168–171. https://doi.org/10.2307/41955602 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Christin…
Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950-1980
Scholars have explored the influence of the field of cybernetics on scientific thought and disciplines. However, from the inception of the field, ''cyberneticians'' had explicitly envisioned applications reaching beyond the purview of scientific disciplines; cybernetics was remarkable for its portability and potential application in a wide variety of contexts. This article explores connections between cybernetics and experimental music from 1950-…
Free the spectrum!' Activist encounters with old and new media technology
This article contextualizes discourses surrounding new media technologies by examining activism around community media, using as a case study an activist group which has advocated for greater citizen access to low-power FM (LPFM) radio since the mid-1990s. It argues that the significance of new and emerging communication technologies can be grasped most effectively when emerging technologies are considered in a dynamic field that includes older t…
Geeks, Meta-Geeks, and Gender Trouble: Activism, Identity, and Low-power FM Radio
In this paper, I consider the activities of a group of individuals who tinker with and build radio hardware in an informal setting called 'Geek Group'. They conceive of Geek Group as a radical pedagogical activity, which constitutes an aspect of activism surrounding citizen access to low-power FM radio. They are also concerned with combating the gendered nature of hardware skills, yet in spite of their efforts men tend to have more skill and fami…
Geeks, Meta-Geeks, and Gender Trouble: Activism, Identity, and Low-power FM Radio
In this paper, I consider the activities of a group of individuals who tinker with and build radio hardware in an informal setting called 'Geek Group'. They conceive of Geek Group as a radical pedagogical activity, which constitutes an aspect of activism surrounding citizen access to low-power FM radio. They are also concerned with combating the gendered nature of hardware skills, yet in spite of their efforts men tend to have more skill and fami…
What's Local? Localism as a Discursive Boundary Object in Low-Power Radio Policymaking: What's Local?
This article addresses the discourse of “localism” used in the formulation of low-power FM radio service in the United States. It builds on S. L. Star and J. Griesemer's (1989) concept of “boundary object” to theorize localism as a “discursive boundary object.” Drawing on interviews with advocates and regulators, participant observation with low-power radio activists, and documentary research in relevant policy discussions, the article argues tha…
Free the spectrum!' Activist encounters with old and new media technology
This article contextualizes discourses surrounding new media technologies by examining activism around community media, using as a case study an activist group which has advocated for greater citizen access to low-power FM (LPFM) radio since the mid-1990s. It argues that the significance of new and emerging communication technologies can be grasped most effectively when emerging technologies are considered in a dynamic field that includes older t…
Not entirely analog(ous): Low-power FM radio as community, relations and knowledge in context
At the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits reflected on how communication systems could shape events and societies, often while basking in the perceived glow of the then-novel Internet. Others pled for reasoned engagement with the interplay between communication infrastructures and the social life of knowledge, a much-needed corrective in a moment of rampant breathless digital utopianism. This article explores the interplay between commu…
Producing "Participation"? The Pleasures and Perils of Technical Engagement in Radio Activism
Twenty people spent a weekend gathered around two refrigerator-sized FM radio transmitters inside a large truck parked on a busy street. These large machines were unwieldy: over thirty years old, they were heavy to move, frustratingly dark to work in, and required high electric current to operate. They were not in working order; they were filthy inside and out and miss- ing various components. After two full days of labor directed toward diagnosi…
Soldering Toward Media Democracy: Technical Practice as Symbolic Value in Radio Activism
This article follows radio activists engaged in a combination of policy advocacy and broadening access to technology and skills through hands-on work. In practice, this largely played out as a systematic elevation of “technical” work and downplaying of policy/advocacy expertise, even though both were salient features of their work. The article argues that radio activists cultivated a technical identity that served to mark boundaries between their…
Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950-1980
Scholars have explored the influence of the field of cybernetics on scientific thought and disciplines. However, from the inception of the field, ''cyberneticians'' had explicitly envisioned applications reaching beyond the purview of scientific disciplines; cybernetics was remarkable for its portability and potential application in a wide variety of contexts. This article explores connections between cybernetics and experimental music from 1950-…
Oil, life, and everyday fossil fascism: Appropriative signification in U.S. petroleum supremacy
Fossil fuels face an uncertain future, but they have strong adherents as well as detractors. Even as California debates halting oil extraction, the Biden administration approved large new drilling projects on federal land, in keeping with the United States’ policy of “energy independence” (also called “energy dominance” under Trump). This article examines the Janus face of fossil fuels’ future, reading recent cultural moments in the western US. I…
Geeks, Meta-Geeks, and Gender Trouble: Activism, Identity, and Low-power FM Radio
In this paper, I consider the activities of a group of individuals who tinker with and build radio hardware in an informal setting called 'Geek Group'. They conceive of Geek Group as a radical pedagogical activity, which constitutes an aspect of activism surrounding citizen access to low-power FM radio. They are also concerned with combating the gendered nature of hardware skills, yet in spite of their efforts men tend to have more skill and fami…
Free the spectrum!' Activist encounters with old and new media technology
This article contextualizes discourses surrounding new media technologies by examining activism around community media, using as a case study an activist group which has advocated for greater citizen access to low-power FM (LPFM) radio since the mid-1990s. It argues that the significance of new and emerging communication technologies can be grasped most effectively when emerging technologies are considered in a dynamic field that includes older t…
OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture
Book Review| March 01 2010 OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Christine Harold. Christina Dunbar-Hester Christina Dunbar-Hester Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (1): 168–171. https://doi.org/10.2307/41955602 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Christin…
Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950-1980
Scholars have explored the influence of the field of cybernetics on scientific thought and disciplines. However, from the inception of the field, ''cyberneticians'' had explicitly envisioned applications reaching beyond the purview of scientific disciplines; cybernetics was remarkable for its portability and potential application in a wide variety of contexts. This article explores connections between cybernetics and experimental music from 1950-…
Soldering Toward Media Democracy: Technical Practice as Symbolic Value in Radio Activism
This article follows radio activists engaged in a combination of policy advocacy and broadening access to technology and skills through hands-on work. In practice, this largely played out as a systematic elevation of “technical” work and downplaying of policy/advocacy expertise, even though both were salient features of their work. The article argues that radio activists cultivated a technical identity that served to mark boundaries between their…
What's Local? Localism as a Discursive Boundary Object in Low-Power Radio Policymaking: What's Local?
This article addresses the discourse of “localism” used in the formulation of low-power FM radio service in the United States. It builds on S. L. Star and J. Griesemer's (1989) concept of “boundary object” to theorize localism as a “discursive boundary object.” Drawing on interviews with advocates and regulators, participant observation with low-power radio activists, and documentary research in relevant policy discussions, the article argues tha…
Low power to the people: Pirates, protest, and politics in FM radio activism
Pirates, Hams, and Protest
This chapter provides an overview of the history of broadcasting and regulation relevant to the birth of the Low-Power FM service in 2000. It discusses technical and political formations that preceded LPFM activism, including “microradio” and pirate broadcasting, Indymedia and the anticorporate globalization movement, ham radio, citizens band (CB) radio, and the Appropriate Technology movement. It introduces the research site, the Prometheus Radi…
Radical Inclusion? Locating Accountability in Technical DIY
This chapter examines DIY (do-it-yourself) politics in the realm of practice. To do this, it follows the work of a group of media activists whose work foregrounded engagement with communication technologies. Working in a self-consciously collaborative mode, the activists promoted hands-on work with radio and Internet hardware as a means to enact DIY politics. This practice was understood to be in service of a broader goal of facilitating technica…
Being a Consistent Pain in the Ass”: Politics and Epistemics in Media Democracy Work
Are the “media reform,” ”media democracy,” and “media justice” movements complementary or in conflict? A bit of both, asserts the author, building on her earlier ethnographic study in the field. While each is a form of social activism with progressive political goals, they have different theoretical foundations and different frames for their respective agendas as “scholars,” “activists,” and “advocates.” The article offers a critical consideratio…
Producing "Participation"? The Pleasures and Perils of Technical Engagement in Radio Activism
Twenty people spent a weekend gathered around two refrigerator-sized FM radio transmitters inside a large truck parked on a busy street. These large machines were unwieldy: over thirty years old, they were heavy to move, frustratingly dark to work in, and required high electric current to operate. They were not in working order; they were filthy inside and out and miss- ing various components. After two full days of labor directed toward diagnosi…
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. This book investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to a…
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
Not entirely analog(ous): Low-power FM radio as community, relations and knowledge in context
At the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits reflected on how communication systems could shape events and societies, often while basking in the perceived glow of the then-novel Internet. Others pled for reasoned engagement with the interplay between communication infrastructures and the social life of knowledge, a much-needed corrective in a moment of rampant breathless digital utopianism. This article explores the interplay between commu…
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
We regularly read and hear exhortations for women to take up positions in STEM. The call comes from both government and private corporate circles, and it also emanates from enthusiasts for free and open source software (FOSS), i.e. software that anyone is free to use, copy, study, and change in any way. Ironically, rate of participation in FOSS-related work is far lower than in other areas of computing. A 2002 European Union study showed that few…
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
” Hacking Diversity : The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures ” is a study of the efforts of open technology communities to “hack” the issues around the lack of diversity that pervades not only their volunteer communities, but also their related disciplines at large. Open technology communities are loosely organized, volunteer, online groups, focused on development and distribution of open or free software and hardware. Examples inc…
Collectivities and Technological Activism: Feminist Hacking: Activism
Save the (White) Whales
In this commentary, I tune into the soundwork of cetacean communicability and whalesong in US environmental activism beginning around 1970. In the same period that whalesong attained popular audibility, the cetacean sensorium attained an exceptional status, akin to (or even superseding) human exceptionalism. This episode suggests that whales were assigned value due to possessing racially coded “hyperbrains,” and that listening for racialization c…
“Chinese Elm 1030595 . . . (or can I call you Dale??)”: Communication and representation in mediated encounters with nonhuman others
The last couple of years have seen an uptick of different technological forms presented as mediators of human/nonhuman interaction, and these developments have been accompanied by an increase in scholarly interest. Here, we engage with the human urge to enter into communicative exchanges that implicate “other” entities, but we also wonder what is at stake, analytically and ethically, in these mediated communicative acts. Following an approach inf…
Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond
"In this engaging interdisciplinary investigation, Christina Dunbar-Hester, a leading scholar in the area of democratic control of technologies, focuses on the relationships between commerce, environment, and nonhuman life forms in San Pedro Bay, which houses the contiguous ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. The harbor is a heavily industrialized area built atop a land- and waterscape that is important for wildlife, containing estuarial wetland…
Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond
Showing your ass on Mastodon: Lossy distribution, hashtag activism, and public scrutiny on federated, feral social media
This paper presents an account of technopolitics in Mastodon, noncommercial, decentralized social media. Mastodon’s significance has further risen in light of Twitter/X’s recent decimation of its public sphere functions; a noncommercial and ideally public alternative to commercial social media is (even more) urgently needed. The autoethnographic narrative presented here, hinging on a dispute initiated and sustained by an intemperate donkeykeeper …
Oil, life, and everyday fossil fascism: Appropriative signification in U.S. petroleum supremacy
Fossil fuels face an uncertain future, but they have strong adherents as well as detractors. Even as California debates halting oil extraction, the Biden administration approved large new drilling projects on federal land, in keeping with the United States’ policy of “energy independence” (also called “energy dominance” under Trump). This article examines the Janus face of fossil fuels’ future, reading recent cultural moments in the western US. I…
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Media studies (6 works) · Social Media and Politics (6 works) · Social science (6 works) · Media Studies and Communication (5 works)