Part of the Climate Council’s Conversation Kitchen series, this event is for UC Irvine undergraduates who want to understand the landscape of the use of digital media to spread disinformation and how to spot malicious content. It will also focus on how to reimagine digital civics for a more inclusive society.

European Americans think of potatoes being the traditional food of the Irish, perhaps because of the potato famines of the 19th Century, precipitating great migrations to America.  They think of tomato sauces with peppers with polenta as foods of Southern Italy.  However, potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and peppers are all foods from the New World, taken back to Europe after the European invasion of America by Columbus, Cortez, and Pizzaro.  The Alt-Right movement denigrates those peoples who gave us this food, as if these foods were always part of a superior European culture.  Moreover, when you dismiss the contributions of a people, it’s easy to discount any value that they may bring to the culture. To appreciate the cultures that gave us these foods, we will create a stew of potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and beans, with cornbread.

Event attendance requires an RSVP and ticket. Please visit https://chancellor.uci.edu/campus-climate/conversation-kitchen/ for more information.

 

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Part of the Digital Extremism: Understanding and Confronting the Alt-right’s Digital Toolkit series:

Recent elections in western industrialized democracies have been marred by accusations of interference by concerted social media campaigns that targeted specific demographic categories of voters with disinformation and propaganda. Almost overnight, political advisors, scholars, data analysis professionals, and the social media platforms themselves realized they needed a crash course in the use and abuse of the marriage between predictive analytics and digital content. Through a series of activities and programs on campus featuring a noted expert in digital media manipulation; a graduate student workshop to create curricular modules; a grant-writing workshop; and the development of a new undergraduate course on digital media manipulation, we will give students the tools they need to understand how digital disinformation is created and spreads online, to inoculate themselves against its effects, and ultimately to encourage a responsible digital civics for the social, mobile, always-online connected world in which everything—including our political discourse—now lives.

A Series of Events featuring Joan Donovan, Digital Media Manipulation Lead, Data and Society

April 4-6, 2018

Sponsors:
School of Social Sciences | Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science
Office of Inclusive Excellence Confronting Extremism Initiative

For a full agenda, please visit https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/events/2018/2018-04-04-digital-extremism.