Aaron McKain
Director of the School of English and Communication Arts; Associate Professor of Digital Media
North Central University / Institute for Aesthetic Advocacy
Description of Work:
As a Director — of the arts-collective the Institute for Aesthetic Advocacy and of the School of English and Communication Arts at North Central University — I see my role as assembling cross-disciplinary (and cross-cultural) teams of artists and scholars to use aesthetics as a mode of community education and civic engagement.
As a scholar (and patient) my own research lives in three — increasingly interconnected — fields: Digital ethics, public health, and law.
My public health research — on contagion, post-COVID humanity, and scientific debates over environmental illness — lives on (in exhibition form) at the Minneapolis-based arts collective the instituteforaetheticadvocacy.com, and was recently featured in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, The Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, and the IAA’s globally-curated exhibition Contaminated.
My digital ethics research focuses primarily on politically viable (and programmable) solutions to digital ethics legislation and reform. It resides with – and is co-produced by — the student-run think tank the institutefordigitalhumanity.com. The IDH’s current research and advocacy focuses on algorithmic discrimination and the future of digital policing in Minneapolis, where they are working with the Anti-Defamation League and Indiana University on policy papers and civic education materials for the Twin Cities’ diverse post-George Floyd communities.
Socials:
www.instagram.com/institute.aesthetic.advocacy/