CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now with Jason Loviglio (MCS)

The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

Advanced registration for lunch is required. Sign up by October 21

Jason Loviglio, Professor, Media and Communication Studies
Fall 2026 Residential Faculty Fellow

Smart speaker as Cassandra: Feminized voices and technologies of domestic containment

Listening In is a slickly produced podcast (QCode, 2022) that remediates John Cheever's classic 1947 short story “The Enormous Radio” and Lucille Fletcher’s Sorry, Wrong Number, the 1943 classic radio thriller. Across three distinct media forms, these stories each feature a white woman trapped in an uptown New York apartment, negotiating the social isolation specific to their gender, class, and historical moment. In each case, social isolation is exacerbated by the technologies of sound communication ostensibly designed to inform, entertain, and empower them: smart speaker, radio set, and telephone, respectively. Instead, these technologies of vocal transmission become sources of danger---sonic portals to the malign forces around them. Disembodied voices reinforce the embodied nature of women’s vulnerability to social violence. At the same time, these technologies of sound provide, in their glitches and contradictions, opportunities for these women to understand their position and, in the direst of ways, speak back. AI vocal technologies represent the latest, and strangest, chapter in the long history of gendered technology and technological gender. 

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Join via WebEx: https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=m8014d3038f117e4fda8ba401720018c8