Previous Conferences

Professor Miranda Campbell is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Industries at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she teaches courses in creative collaboration, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and care ethics. Her research focuses on creative employment, youth culture, and small-scale and emerging forms of cultural production. Her involvement with creative communities includes coordination and board of director roles with Rock Camp for Girls Montreal, a summer camp dedicated to empowerment for girls through music education, and with Whippersnapper Gallery, an artist-run centre focusing on emerging artists in Toronto. Most recently, she is the author of Reimagining the Creative Industries: Youth Creative Work, Communities of Care (Routledge, 2022).

Elisha Cooper is an emerging singer, songwriter, and producer living in Toronto, Ontario. Growing up on Vancouver Island, she cherished time alone by the ocean and under the thick canopies of West Coast rainforests as safe places to reflect and ground herself. These moments of respite inspire the textures of her music, blending lo-fi, soothing beats with rich and dream-like harmonies. Combining this light sound with honest lyrics, Cooper explores the depth and complexity of the human experience. As a developing artist she aspires to be a champion of hopefulness, empathy, and equity.

Dr. Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist, curator and writer. From 2015-2022, he served as the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. His book, Hungry Listening (University Minnesota Press, 2020), examines Indigenous and settler colonial practices of listening, and was awarded best first book by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Canadian Association for Theatre Research, and the Labriola Centre American Indian National Book Award.  He also recently co-curated with Candice Hopkins the touring exhibition, Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts features newly commissioned scores, performances, videos, sculptures and sound by Indigenous and other artists who respond to this question. Unfolding in a sequence of five parts, the scores take the form of beadwork, videos, objects, graphic notation, historical belongings, and written instructions. During the exhibition, these scores are activated at specific moments by musicians, dancers, performers and members of the public gradually filling the gallery and surrounding public spaces with sound and action.

Dr. Norah Lorway is a UK/Canada-based composer, programmer, professor and artificial intelligence researcher working with sound, computer science and digital healthcare. Her research focuses on artifical intelliegnce and live coding/music, digital health care, particularly the use of immersive and artificial intelligence technologies to support and assist with various psychiatric and neurological disorders and issues. 

Conference Proceedings

Dr. Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University in the School of Creative Industries. Her first book, Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture, was published in 2019 by Wilfrid Laurier Press. Her second, Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty was published this year by Coach House Books. The book details the history and role of Uncle Tom, a persistent figure in Black political thought and discourse. Dr. Thompson is currently researching Canada’s history of blackface performance funded through a SSHRC-Insight Development Grant, and a SSHRC-Connection Grant, in collaboration with Pink Moon Studio, and is coproducing a feature documentary film based on her research. In addition to her academic writing, Dr. Thompson is a columnist with Herizons, Canada’s leading feminist magazine and is also a frequent contributor to The Conversation, Spacing and Zoomer, with recent works appearing in the New York Times. 

Diasporic Futurisms is a collaborative curatorial team comprised of Adrienne Matheuszik and Vanessa Godden. This collaborative curatorial endeavor works to create space for Indigenous, Black and racialized peoples whose artworks are based in the genre of diasporic futurisms. Matheuszik and Godden define diasporic futurisms as the presentation of alternative perspectives of the present, predictions of the future, and creative approaches to reimagining the past. Within the movement of diasporic futurisms, the destabilization of white-supremacy, colonisation, and capitalism in relation to the lives of diasporic peoples are a primary concern. In diasporic futurisms, these concerns are materialized through the genres of Fantasy, Magical Realism, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and related subgenres.

Lauren Dwyer is a 3rd year PhD Candidate in the Communication and Culture program. Her research focuses on the intersection between loneliness, communication studies and companion robots in a time of increased isolation. She previously completed her Masters in Professional Communication with Ryerson, and her BSc Hons in Psychology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Lauren is an active member of student government and is currently serving as the Doctoral Representative on the YSGS Council. Isolated Circuits: Designing Companion Robots for the Future of Loneliness will focus on the histories of and future relationships between loneliness, user-centred design, and social robotics. It will then explore and evaluate the potential for the role of technology in loneliness as a growing public health issue.

Program

Conference Proceedings

Dr. Haru Ji is a media artist and co-creator of the research project “Artificial Nature”, exploring the subject of life in art through artificial life worldmaking: a form of computational generative art creating and evolving virtual ecosystems as immersive environments. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California Santa Barbara and is an Assistant Professor in Integrated Media & the Digital Futures programs at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been shown at art festivals worldwide including SIGGRAPH and Digital Art Festival, conferences such as ISEA and EvoWorkshops, venues including La Gaite Lyrique, ZKM, CAFA, MOXI, Seoul City Hall, and the AlloSphere, and recognized in the international 2015 VIDA Art & Artificial Life competition and the 2017 Kaleidoschope Virtual Reality Showcase.

Ryan J. Phillips is a Ph.D. candidate in Ryerson University’s Communication and Culture program, where his research is focused on rhetoric, promotional cultures, and the political economy of communication. His recently completed dissertation project interrogates the rhetorical strategies of vegan and plant-based foods promotion, with an extended case study on the A&W Beyond Meat Burger campaign. He traces the cultural history of hamburgers and critically engages with the ongoing boundary work of ‘meat’ and ‘burger’ as food categories. Ultimately, he argues that Beyond Meat and other plant-based promotional cultures serve to reinforce the dominant social, cultural, and economic logic of consumer capitalism. In addition to food, he is also engaged in research examining advertising and audiences in sports media, as well as a new project that is investigating the promotional cultures of recreational cannabis in Canada.

Program

Conference Proceedings 2020

Dr. Maya Goldenberg is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. Her research in philosophy of medicine and philosophy of science examines the intersection between science and values in both institutional and public domains in order to address the fundamental epistemic question: how do we know what to believe? She is currently writing a book on vaccine hesitancy and public understanding of science. Her keynote is titled: A War on Science? The Death of Expertise? Reframing the Problem of Vaccine Hesitancy and Refusal.

Thibault Biscahie is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics at York, where he specializes in political economy, international relations and comparative politics. He holds a Master’s degree from Sciences Po Lille and has also studied at the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Université de Provence. His doctoral research examines the election of Emmanuel Macron through a Gramscian lens and aims to understand the implications of Macron’s neoliberal policies and Caesarist governance for France. This research project also seeks to explore the recomposition of the European hegemonic order that Macron’s election could entail. His keynote is titled: Rejection of Traditional Antagonisms and Radical Centre in an Era of Backlash: Perspectives from France and the European Union.

Program

Conference Proceedings 2019

Dr. Tanner Mirrlees is the Director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). Mirrlees’s current research focuses on the global political economy of the US Empire and communications, geopolitics and popular culture, work and labour in the cultural industries, and the nexus of the alt-right and social media. Mirrlees is the author of Hearts and Mines: The U.S. Empire’s Culture Industry (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization (Routledge, 2013), and numerous articles. His keynote is titled: “Spaces of Empire: A Cognitive Map”

Treva Michelle Legassie is a Ph.D. candidate and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and the Assistant Director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster at Milieux Institute. Legassie’s work borrows from interdisciplinary methods and her background as a researcher, curator, artist, and ethnographer. Her writing has been published in PUBLIC Journal, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, Open Cultural Studies, The Senses & Society, InterARTive, and AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. She has also curated new media-based exhibitions such as #NATURE (2016) and Influenc(Ed.) Machines (2015). Legassie holds an MA from OCAD University in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories, with a focus on new media, and a BFA from OCAD University majoring in Art Criticism and Curatorial Practice. Her keynote is titled: “Mangles and Intersections: Feminist art-science laboratories and the ethics of care”

Program

Dr. Michele Lacombe (Trent University): Dr. Lacombe’s research is focussed on artistic and creative expression is often described as qualitative research by social scientists and includes interdisciplinary, arts-based research methodologies informed by social science approaches.  From a humanities standpoint, a wide range of theoretical and empirical frameworks are also available for addressing the place of Indigenous creative arts. What does it mean to say that stories matter? Indigenous women’s voices include many kinds of storytelling, from oral and written versions of family and community history to autobiography, life-writing, poetry, theatre and performance, fiction, and essays.  I am interested in understanding relationships to place and nation as articulated in the arts.

Dr. Will Straw (McGill University): Will Straw is James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies.  He has been Visiting Professor at the Open University (Budapest), the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Belgrade.  He is also Adjunct Research Professor at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University.

Professor Straw has a Bachelor’s degree in Film Studies and postgraduate degrees in Communications Studies.  Much of his work has dealt with the social and institutional dimensions of popular music, and with the development of the notion of the music scene.  He has a strong interest, as well, in histories of popular music in Montreal, Quebec and Canada.

In the area of cinema, Dr. Straw’s current research focuses on so-called “background players”, and the ways in which they offer a sense of social texture within films.  He has a long-standing interest, as well, in sensational print culture – in magazines and newspapers engaged in covering crime, scandal and celebrity gossip.  Part of this interest centers on the lower levels of magazine publishing in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s.  As well, he maintains a strong interest in the print culture of Mexico, and in crime-oriented periodicals in particular.

Program

Louie Palu (Canadian photojournalist): Louie is an award-winning documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in festivals, publications, exhibitions and collections internationally. He is the recipient of numerous awards including two Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Grants, 2011-12 Bernard L Schwartz Fellowship with the New America Foundation and Milton Rogovin Fellowship at the University of Arizona. He is well known for his work which examines social-political issues such as human rights, conflict and poverty.

Program

Dr. Jasbir K. Puar (Rutgers University):  Jasbir K. Puar is Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty member since 2000. Her most recent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017) published with Duke University Press in the series ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise that she co-edits with Mel Chen.  Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), which has been translated into Spanish and French and re-issued in an expanded version for its 10^th anniversary (December 2017).

Puar’s edited volumes include a special issue of GLQ (“Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization”) and co-edited volumes of Society and Space (“Sexuality and Space”), Social Text (“Interspecies”), and Women’s Studies Quarterly (“Viral”).  She also writes for The Guardian, Huffington Post, Art India, The Feminist Review, Bully Bloggers, Jadaliyya, and Oh! Industry. Her writings have been translated into Polish, French, German, Croatian, Swedish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Danish.

Program

Dr. Sara Grimes (University of Toronto): Sara M. Grimes is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Visiting Professor in Book and Media Studies at the University of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. Her work is centred in the areas of children’s digital media culture(s) and play studies and critical theories of technology with a special focus on digital games. Her published work explores the commercialization of children’s virtual worlds and online communities, the articulation of a critical theory of digital gameplay, discussions of intellectual property and fair dealing in digital game environments, as well as the legal and ethical dimensions of marketing to children online. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Media & Society, The Information Society, Science Technology & Human Values, and Cultural Studies as well as in chapters in edited volumes and in various magazines and blogs. She has presented her research at a number of national and international conferences, workshops and festivals. Professor Grimes teaches courses on children’s cultural texts and artifacts, remix culture, research methods, and the social and cultural dimensions of social media technologies.

Program

Dr. Sarah Sharma (University of Toronto): Dr. Sharma’s research focuses on the relationship between technology and culture with a particular focus on social inequalities. One key strand of her research has focused on time as a site of social difference in a culture that is imagined to be technologically speeding up. She is currently at work on a new project that engages medium theory and feminist approaches to technology on such sites as algorithmic culture, the “sharing” economy, and the changing structures of care labour.

Dr. Brian Holmes (The European Graduate School and the University of Illinois at Chicago): Brian Holmes is a Paris-based art critic and activist who is known for his writing on the intersections of artistic and political practice. He received a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. Holmes was the English editor of publications for Documenta X in 1997, was a member of the activist group Ne Pas Plier (Do Not Bend) from 1999 to 2001, and has recently worked with the French conceptual art group Bureau d’Études. Brian Holmes is a frequent contributor to the international listserve Nettime, and to the art magazines Parachute (Montreal), Springerin (Vienna), and Brumaria (Barcelona). In addition, he is a member of the editorial committee of the political journal Multitudes (Paris) and is a founder, with Bureau d’Études, of the new journal Autonomie Artistique (Paris). His essays have been gathered into three anthologies: Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art and Politics in a Networked Era (2002); Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (2008); and Escape The Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (2009).

Program

Dr. Murray Pomerance (Ryerson University): Professor Pomerance is editor of the “Techniques of the Moving Image” series at Rutgers University Press and the “Horizons of Cinema” series at SUNY Press, and co-editor, with Lester D. Friedman and Adrienne L. McLean respectively, of the “Screen Decades” and “Star Decades” series at Rutgers University Press. He is a frequent guest and commentator on media matters.

Dr. Ken Hillis (University of North Carolina):  Dr. Hillis’ research focuses on: the politics of information technologies, with an emphasis on electronically mediated communication; the technologization of the “public sphere”; the relationships among identity, information, and the form a technology takes; and minority body politics and social change.

Dr. Tagny Duff (Concordia): My background is in media art with a focus on video, performance, biological art, net art, social sculpture and installation. My research/creation interests focus on visual culture, viral media, interdisciplinarity, art/sci production and collaboration, post-studio art practice, and the relation between art, science and technology. Topics of interest include surveillance and biopolitics; queer(ing) culture and temporality; posthumanisms and changing perceptions of bodies; waste creation and ecology; scale, duration and spacetime; performance, liveness and documentation.

Dr. Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario) is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, and co-author of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing and Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games.

Dr. Penelope Ironstone-Catterall (Wilfred Laurier) is a faculty member in the Department of Communication Studies and Coordinator of the Program in Cultural Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her central pedagogical and research interests concern the mechanisms deployed to resist difficult information – be it information regarding social difference or information concerning health and illness – and the social and political consequences of these resistances. More generally, her interests include risk, media and the politics of anxiety, queer theory and cultural production, and cultural studies of science, medicine and technology. She edited a special issue of Space & Culture: An International Journal of Social Spaces (London: Sage, 2001) on “Love and Mourning” and has published in the areas of social and cultural responses to HIV and AIDS, mourning and grief studies, cultural studies of risk, feminist research methodology, post-9/11 politicality and psychoanalysis, and queer cultural production. Her current research project is called “From Seasonal Flu to Pandemic Influenza: The Cultural Life of a Virus.” She also spends considerable time in airports.

Dr. Wade Rowland (York University): Wade Rowland is one of Canada’s leading literary non-fiction authors. Author of Greed Inc., Galileo’s Mistake; Ockham’s Razor; and Spirit of the Web; he is a long-time journalist who has worked for the Winnipeg Free Press, the Toronto Telegram and both national Canadian television networks: CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and the CTV Television Network.

Dr. Patricia Mazepa (York University): Patricia Mazepa is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies and is the interim program director in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture. She was appointed to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Faculty of Arts, Division of Social Sciences in July 2004. before joining York University, she was a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa. She teaches in the Politics and Policy stream at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and is the 2012/13 course director for AP/COMN 4214 “Media, Publics and Democracy”. Professor Mazepa’s research concentrates on social movement media in Canada, and the critical political economy of communication in general. She is currently working on analyzing corporate, government and military relationships in policy development and computer networking, including a history of Canadian Inter/Intra-net developments.

Program

Program