Conferences

About HASTAC Conferences

Our annual HASTAC conferences are hosted by affiliate organizations at locations around the globe. Previous conferences have taken place at Duke University in Durham, NC; University of California Humanities Research Institute (on the UCI campus) and UCLA: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; a fourteen-site international virtual conference; University of Michigan; York University in Toronto, Canada; at the Ministry of Culture in Lima, Peru; Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona; University of Central Florida in Orlando; the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada; and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

The conference usually attracts between 250-600 attendees from around the world. Attendees include professors, independent scholars, HASTAC Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and professionals dedicated to using the open web to change the way we teach and learn.

Past HASTAC Conferences

HASTAC 2023: Critical Making and Social Justice

Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York

The 2023 HASTAC conference invited our community to engage with creative and design-based approaches to technology and education, particularly around issues of social justice and allied movements of design justice, data justice and data feminism, algorithmic accountability, (digital) literacies, open knowledge, and accessibility in all its forms.

The conference was hosted at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, from June 8–10, 2023. Registration closed early, at full capacity, at 500 participants, convened in-person. Many events also had a hybrid component. 

CANCELED-HASTAC 2020: “Hindsight, Foresight, Insight”​

University of Texas, Dallas, Texas

The conference organizing committee had hoped to postpone the conference to Fall 2021, but as we consider the continued uncertainties around vaccines, travel, and budgets, we have decided that the most responsible course of action is to cancel.

We would like to thank those 16 artists and scholars who agreed to be part of our plenary structure, as well as those of you who submitted artworks, papers, panels, and workshops for consideration for the program.

While we at the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication are disappointed by this turn of events, we know that the next HASTAC gathering will be all the more evocative and meaningful once we are able to gather safely again.

HASTAC 2019: Decolonizing Technologies, Reprogramming Education

Unceded Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Territory
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

On 16-18 May 2019, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), in partnership with the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the Department of English at the University of Victoria (UVic), will be guests on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people, facilitating a conference about decolonizing technologies and reprogramming education.

The conference held up and supported Indigenous scholars and knowledges, centering work by Indigenous women and women of colour. It engaged how technologies are, can be, and have been decolonized. How, for instance, are extraction technologies repurposed for resurgence? Or, echoing Ellen Cushman, how do we decolonize digital archives? Equally important, how do decolonial and anti-colonial practices shape technologies and education? How, following Kimberlé Crenshaw, are such practices intersectional? How do they correspond with what Grace Dillon calls Indigenous Futurisms? And how do they foster what Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang describe as an ethic of incommensurability, unsettling not only assumptions of innocence but also discourses of reconciliation?

Conference logo for #hastac2019 by Diamond Point.

HASTAC 2017: The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities

University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida

The HASTAC 2017: The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities, was held in Orlando, Florida on November 3-4, 2017. The lead sponsor and organizing group for the conference was the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium (FLDH.org), which included a dozen different organizations working collaboratively on this project.

The title suggests the simulation theme, and also the hard problems that are on the horizon for DH, and how addressing them might open new areas of research and creative work. It is also a nod to science fiction, and hence has a popular angle also.

HASTAC 2016: Impact, Variation, Innovation, Action

Nexus Lab, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

The HASTAC 2016 conference was held May 11-15, 2016 at the Arizona State University’s Nexus Lab in Tempe, AZ. The conference aimed to emphasize and encourage broader conversations about the past, current, and potential impact of interdisciplinary work in research and education. If the digital humanities are one successful configuration of humanistic and technological research domains, what other configurations are available, or urgently necessary? 

HASTAC 2016 investigated the potential for new work, and also encourages participants to engage ways that collaborative teams might use channels beyond academic publication to impact local communities, national conversations, and worldwide systems.

HASTAC 2015: Exploring the Art & Science of Digital Humanities

Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan

HASTAC 2015 conference was held May 27-30, 2015 at the Kellogg Center on the campus of Michigan State University. Connecting with HASTAC’s interdisciplinary mission, the conference’s theme was the “Art and Science of Digital Humanities” and challenged participants to consider how the interplay of science, technology, social sciences, humanities, and arts are producing new forms of knowledge, disrupting older forms, challenging or reifying power relationships, among other possibilities. The conference featured a mini-conference for HASTAC Scholars followed by two full days of conference activities and opportunities for collaboration.

The keynotes were presented by:

For more information about the conference, please see www.hastac2015.org. 

HASTAC 2014: Hemispheric Pathways – Critical Makers in International Networks

Ministry of Culture, Lima, Peru

The HASTAC 2014 conference was held in Lima, Peru (April 24-27, 2014).

This international conference was graciously hosted by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with HASTAC, the Organization of American States (OAS), and several other key partnering institutions from North, Central, and South America.

More information can also be found as follows: