Anna Watkins Fisher  is a cultural and media theorist, whose work focuses on the politics and aesthetics of resistance in contemporary visual and digital culture.

Her books and essays seek inventive frameworks for exploring how digital and corporate power alter the conditions for radical leftist opposition and critique. She is especially interested in how the tactics employed by artists and activists working in experimental or marginal traditions are evolving in response to challenges associated with the rise of automated technologies, namely the accelerated co-option of disruption and dissent.

She is the author The Play in the System (Duke U Press, 2020) and Safety Orange (U Minnesota Press, 2021); co-author with Precarity Lab of Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2020); and co-editor with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2nd edition, 2015).

Anna's current work investigates the critical intersection of environmental and digital studies by considering the role that digital culture plays in normalizing and intensifying the climate crisis and wearing down and dispersing energies for resistance and collective action. She is presently at work on a new book that explores how the ability to say ""no"" is being designed out of our everyday devices and infrastructures, as ceaseless engagement and energy use become the unquestioned default.

She is a founding member of two research collectives: Precarity Lab (2017-20), collaboratively researching and publishing on how digital technologies further already insecure conditions of work and life for vulnerable populations, and Critical Futures (2020-24), focused on novel theoretical approaches for urgently addressing climate change.

Before coming to King's, she was Associate Professor of American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Critical theories of power
• Digital media art and theory
• Social theory and aesthetics
• Digital visual culture and performance
• Digital x environmental studies

She invites PhD applications engaged with these areas of study.

Teaching

Anna's teaching broadly addresses subjects of digital media and culture, with an emphasis on digital theories, politics, and aesthetics. Her modules explore digital paradigms of power, subjectivity, and visuality and are attentive to how new technologies shape our conceptions of truth, freedom, and justice.

Selected Publications

• Anna Watkins Fisher, Safety Orange. University of Minnesota Press. Forerunners Series (2021). Open access version.
• Anna Watkins Fisher, The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance. Duke University Press (2020). Open access version.
• Precarity Lab (Lisa Nakamura, Kalindi Vora, McKenzie Wark, Jackie Wang, Silvia Lindtner, Iván Chaar-López, Cindy Lin, Cass Adair, and Cengiz Salman, with Meryem Kamil). Technoprecarious, Goldsmiths/The M.I.T. Press’ Future Media series. (Published November 2020).
• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Anna Watkins Fisher (eds.), New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition. Routledge. (2015).