ANNA WATKINS FISHER
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​I am a cultural and media theorist, whose research spans the fields of digital studies, performance studies, visual culture, environmental humanities, and critical theory. I am an associate professor in the Department of American Culture and the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

My first book, The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance (Duke University Press, 2020), explores what artistic resistance looks like in the 21st century, when disruption and dissent can be easily co-opted and commodified. A second experimental book, Safety Orange (U Minnesota Press, Forerunners series, 2021), uses the bureaucratic color standard “Safety Orange” as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and attention in a 21st-century American landscape of mass privatization, securitization, and incarceration. 

My essays have appeared in such venues as Journal of Visual Culture, Social Text, Discourse, WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly), MIRAJ, and TDR/The Drama Review. I am the co-editor with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of the 2nd edition of New Media, Old Media: ​A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2015). I am also a founding member of the digital research collective Precarity Lab; the collective's manifesto, Technoprecarious, was published by Goldsmiths/MIT Press in 2020.

Currently, I co-lead the Critical Futures Project, a research collective based at the University of Michigan that explores theoretical approaches for addressing the new urgency of climate change under digital and racial capitalism.
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Previously, I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. I hold a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU, and a BA from Duke University. I am based in Ann Arbor, MI and Asheville, NC.
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