Giornate dell'internazionalizzazione 2025

Aula Seminari, U6 Agorà, IV piano

- ore 10.00 - 12.00

  Seminario: Digital humanities and technology black boxes

• Braxton Soderman, Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies and co-chair of the Humanities Center’s Digital Humanities Exchange (DHX), University of California, Irvine.

• Chair
  Francesca Antonacci, Professoressa Ordinaria in Pedagogia Generale e Sociale, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

• Discussants
  Federica Pallavicini, Professoressa Associata in Psicologia Generale, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
  Maresa Bertolo, Ricercatrice, Dipartimento di Design, Politecnico di Milano

- ore 15.00 - 17.00 - Progettazione e cooperazione internazionale nella ricerca: case histories e seminario formativo a cura del Grant Office

  Seminario: From online risks to digital skills and children’s rights: two decades of research and policy on children and digital media in Europe

• Giovanna Mascheroni, Professoressa Ordinaria in Sociologia dei Processi Culturali e Comunicativi presso la Facoltà di Scienze Politiche e Sociali dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italian Team Leader e International Vice Coordinator di EU Kids Online

• Chair
  Stefano Malatesta, Professore Associato in Geografia, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

• Discussants
  Guido Veronese, Professore Associato in Psicologia Clinica, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
  Davide Cino, Ricercatore in Pedagogia Generale e Sociale, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

  Seminario formativo a cura del Grant Office

• Federica Fumagalli, Direzione Generale Centro Servizi di Scienze della Formazione, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Ore 11.00 - 13.00 || Aula Polivalente, U6 Agorà, IV piano

• Premiazione del concorso "Giornate dell'Internazionalizzazione"
• Esposizione dei poster di vincitrici/tori delle “Giornate dell’Internazionalizzazione” Edizione 2024

Segue rinfresco offerto dal Dipartimento

Digital Humanities and technology black boxes 

Professor Braxton Soderman, University of California, Irvine

This seminar will explore methodologies within the digital humanities, particularly in relation to the emergence of platform studies which seeks to understand the importance of the technological structures of new media and “black box” systems. Through a discussion of the recent co-authored book, Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie, seminar participants will examine how technology shapes the aesthetics and meaning of digital media products, such as games, and how social, historical, and cultural forces also shape technological development.

Focusing on the often-hidden technological structures of media—including hardware, code, and platform architectures—offers a rich perspective through which to understand a technology’s impact on history and culture. As illustrated through research conducted in the book Intellivision, technical perspectives can also help scholars reinterpret the “black box” of the history of videogames, understanding digital transformations in new ways such as the influence of analog games and toys on the history of digital games or how social and gendered inequalities in game culture are historically founded and perpetuated.

Braxton Soderman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies and co-chairs the Humanities Center’s Digital Humanities Exchange (DHX), a group of faculty, staff, and graduate students who share interests in developing digital avenues for humanities research at UCI.  He researches videogames, critical theory, new media aesthetics, and theories of play. He is the author of Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject (MIT Press, 2021) which critically analyzes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of psychological flow in relation to game studies and the concept of play.

He recently completed a co-authored book on the Intellivision videogame system, developed by the toy company Mattel in the late 1970s. Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie™ will be published within MIT’s Platform Studies Series in Fall 2024. In addition to his books, Professor Soderman has published articles in differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, The Journal of Visual Culture, Games and Culture, and elsewhere. He is excited to be working with the Digital Humanities team at UCI and extending its work through a new critical data studies initiative. 

From online risks to digital skills and children’s rights: two decades of research and policy on children and digital media in Europe

Professor Giovanna Mascheroni, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano

The diffusion of the internet, social media, and, more recently, AI-based technologies among children and adolescents has been accompanied by a wave of media panics in terms of its potential negative effects on children’s wellbeing. In the European context, however, these recursive waves of media panics have been counterbalanced by a policy and research framework that moved beyond the risk-based approach. In fact, while in the time frame 2000-2014 the Safer Internet Programme funded research networks, including the EU Kids Online, with the purpose of examining the opportunities and risks of the internet for children in a comparative perspective, the findings fed back into the policy and research framework, suggesting future directions for research.

Based on the finding that online risks and opportunities go hand in hand, that children are far from being ‘digital natives’, and that online vulnerabilities are grounded in offline vulnerabilities, the Better Internet for Kids Strategy focused on digital skills to foster online resilience and children’s rights to participation and provision, besides their right to protection. The presentation will review these shifts based on my experience as a researcher in the EU Kids Online network, the ySKILLS H2020 consortium, and my participation in expert consultations with the EC, the JRC, OECD, and CoE on AI and children’s rights.

Giovanna Mascheroni PhD in Sociology, is a sociologist of digital media, and Full Professor in the Department of Communication, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Her work focuses on the social consequences of digital media, datafication and AI for children and young people, and families. She has jShe joined the EU Kids Online network in 2007 as the Italian team leader, and since 2023 has been its Vice-Coordinator. She has had a leading role in the Horizon 2020 funded ySKILLS Consortium —leader of the in-depth research on the role of digital skills in the wellbeing of vulnerable or at risk children; and is a Partner Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

She has worked closely with the EC, JRC, CoE and OECD on the implications of AI for children and sits on the Consultative Group for the BIK Knowledge Hub (previously she was on the BIK Map Advisory Group). She has published extensively in international journals (over 50 articles, including New Media & Society, Journal of Children and Media, Big Data & Society, Social Media + Society, and Information, Communication & Society) and edited volumes, and is the author of three monogrpahs. Her latest book is Datafied childhoods: Data practices and imaginaries in children’s lives, co-authored with Andra Siibak.