Graduate Student Talk: Jonathan Zong

March 5, 2025
Talk / Lecture
Loose braids of dark hair dangle from the hand and head of a performer‬ ‭ wearing a shiny silver mask. A loop of wire curls around her other arm and behind her‬ ‭ back. The boundary between the hair, the electronics, and her body is blurry and‬ ‭ shrouded in shadow. In the background is a bright projection of a pixelated blue circle.‬ ‭

Kite, Listener, 2018. Performance in Linz, Austria. Photo: vog.photo

Location
MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge, MA 02139
Day & Time
-
Admission
Free, but registration required.
Register

Join Jonathan Zong, a postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL for a conversation around List Projects 31: Kite.

How do people say "no" when they are not given permission to say no? Feminist and Indigenous scholars and activists have developed the concept of refusal as something that people with the least power in society can take up to challenge authority and open up new possibilities. In this talk, Zong will discuss his research on data refusal as design: how people work to re-shape systems of large-scale data collection. Zong will draw connections between this work and Kite's artistic and scholarly engagement with Lakota ontologies and Indigenous AI.

This will be a hybrid event with a live video that can be streamed here at 5:30 PM.

About the Speaker

Jonathan Zong is a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT CSAIL and Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and will be Assistant Professor in Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder in 2025. In his research, Jonathan partners with blind collaborators and study participants to co-design interfaces for non-visual data exploration. He also develops software and conceptual frameworks for managing the ethics of consent in large-scale social media data collection. Jonathan's work has been recognized by the MIT Morningside Academy for Design Fellowship, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, and Forbes 30 Under 30 Scientists.

Graduate Student Talks

MIT graduate students explore current exhibitions at the List Center through the lens of their own research, background, and interests. Join us for this interdisciplinary lecture series where we dive into how art and research are overlapping on MIT’s campus.

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