In the graduate masterclass we will discuss “Reproduction at the Interface,” Dr. Franklin’s 2024 article published in reproductions. Dr. Franklin’s article analyzes Mati Diop’s film Atlantics (France/Senegal/Belgium, 2019), in which images of people holding, using, and disposing of cell phones knit together scenes of attenuated social reproduction. Dr. Franklin’s argument takes those images as the basis for a theory of interfaces. In so doing, he connects some of the principal concerns of media theory to the social operations—of labor, of social reproduction, and of racialized, gendered, and sexuated valuation—that collectively enact the expanded reproduction of capital. From the perspective of those operations, media technologies such as cell phones become intelligible as elements in a determinate form of society: not only interfaces in themselves but also elements in an expansive, emergent, and (apparently) self-regulating network of interfaces. Interested graduate students and scholars from all fields are invited to take part.

The masterclass will be followed by a public lecture, titled “Mechanical Slavery: Freedom, Subjection, Automation.” The talk is about the strikingly constant presence of slavery in theories of automation. From the late 1940s to the present, automation, labour, and slavery have been invoked together in congressional hearings and parliamentary debates, newspaper and magazine articles, documentaries and news segments, trade union reports, industry conferences, technical writings, works of philosophy, and histories of science and technology. The talk asks two questions, each of which attends to a different scale: what animates this compulsion, to keep saying “slave” in order to say something about automation? And what becomes legible when instances of mechanical slavery rhetoric are read closely? Both questions require thinking between the history of technology and the logic of value in capitalism, and between Marxist theory and black studies.

Dr. Seb Franklin is Reader in Literature, Media, and Theory at King’s College London. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (2015) and The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (2021).

Practical information

Date and time: 16 March 2026, 13:00-15:00 (Masterclass); 17:00-18:30 (Lecture): 
Room: Masterclass room PCH 508; Lecture in PC. Hoofthuis PCH 105
Organisers: Michael F. Miller & Claudio Celis Bueno

For further information, to register for the masterclass, and to receive the reading material, please contact Michael Miller (m.f.miller@uva.nl).