Digital Democracies Institute

Crisis Media, or Some Afterthoughts on Documentary’s Expanded Fields | Presented by Jihoon Kim
2023-04-11 18:00 - 19:30 (America/Vancouver) | SFU Harbour Centre Room 1800
This talk offers some afterthoughts on Jihoon Kim’s recent book Documentary’s Expanded Fields in relation to his current book project entitled Crisis Media: Expansion of Media in the Precarious 21st Century. This project develops the concept of ‘crisis media’ as an array of media practices and formations that function as both to cause and to respond to various regional and planetary crises encompassing climate change, civil wars and protests, extraction of resources and labor, and the epistemological and ontological crises imposed by the computational forms of control and governmentality. He argues that a crucial aspect of ‘crisis media,’ more than their ambivalent relationships to nature and the human, lies in the ways that they fundamentally challenge what media are and how they work, and that it is in this sense that they must be considered as ‘media-critical,’ or, marking a turning point in thinking of the concept and existence of media. In delineating the three aspects of ‘crisis media,’ I also present a set of preliminary thoughts on the broader implications that they have to the concepts of truth, evidence, and agency that underlie both traditional and emerging forms of documentary cinema.
Jihoon Kim is professor of cinema and media studies at Chung-ang University. He is the author of Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018/16. Currently he is finalizing Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1982-2022, the first English-language monograph on the subject, as well as Crisis Media: Expansion of Media in the Precarious 21st Century.
Date/Time: April 11, 2023 at 6 pm
Location: SFU Harbour Centre Room 1800
Contact ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details.

Garth Davies presents to the DDI
2023-04-12 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Dr. Garth Davies is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. His current work involves developing a database for evaluating programs for countering violent extremism; the social psychology of radicalization; and the statistical modeling and projection of violent right-wing extremism. He has also been involved in the development of the Terrorism and Extremism Network Extractor (TENE), a web-crawler designed to investigate extremist activities on the internet. The crawler is presently being adapted to examine violent extremism on the dark net. Dr. Davies earned his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University.
Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for Zoom link and details.

Data Fluencies Speaker Series - Fallon Wilson
2023-04-26 12:30 - 13:30
Fallon Wilson from the Black Tech Futures Research Institute will present on the Black Tech Ecosystem Index.
About Dr. Wilson:
Through her work with non-profits, academia, and government partnerships, Dr. Fallon S. Wilson
strives to make visible the work of historic and modern-day Black crises solvers. As the Lead
Principal Investigator for #BlackTechFutures Research Institute, which she co-founded with Melissa
Brown-Sims, M.A., Fallon engages in community action that creates change in her community and
across the US. The Institute’s work, funded in part by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s
2020 Open Knowledge grant, builds a national network of city-based researchers and practitioners
conducting research on sustainable local Black tech ecosystems, especially within underrepresented
communities. Fallon serves as the Vice President of Policy for the Multicultural Media and
Telecommunication Internet Council (MMTC) through which she launched a national campaign,
“Black Churches 4 Digital Equity,” to support digital access in Black communities. The campaign
was so successful that she launched a national faith based civic tech fellowship, “Black Churches for
Digital Equity.”
Additionally, Fallon’s research on first-generation Black college students’ alternative tech pathways
and Black tech ecosystems has garnered notable research grants from the Kapor Center, the
Kauffman Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, among others. Her TEDx–Nashville presentation of
Stop Ignoring Black Women and Hear of Our Tech Prophecies eloquently addresses the intersection
of historical reality for Black women, spirituality, and technology. Fallon holds a Bachelor of Arts in
Political Science from Spelman College and a Master of Arts in Political Science and a Doctor of
Philosophy in Social Service Administration from the University of Chicago.
This presentation is part of the Data Fluencies Speaker Series, co-sponsored by the Ahmanson Lab/Harman Academy at the University of Southern California and the Social Science Research Council Just Tech Program.
Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.

Elisha Lim presents to the DDI
2023-05-03 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Dr. Elisha Lim, is a Provost Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, where they are working on a book that connects social media algorithms to piety and pious conduct. Lim is also an award-winning claymation filmmaker and graphic novelist, and their community-based art practice has been extensively documented by longitudinal scholarly studies and Duke University Press monographs.
The Original Platform: The East India Company
Elisha Lim will explain how The East India Company (EIC) is the predecessor to modern digital platforms (like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent). Lim will focus on the case study of the Company’s operations in their hometown of Singapore, in order to combine Platform Studies with Southeast Asian history and colonial scholarship. Lim will adopt four elements of a platform in order to outline how the East India Company is the blueprint of modern platforms: 1) Platform: EIC’s treaties and charters; 2) Complementors: European shipping companies, plantation owners etc.; 3) Application programming interfaces: roads, monetary systems, etc., and 4) Software development kits: the spread of racist views and tactics through media, literature, philosophy and culture. This talk will underscore the indispensability of colonial frameworks to Platform Studies.
Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.

Data Fluencies Speaker Series - Kim Gallon
2023-05-10 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Dr. Kim Gallon is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Her work investigates the cultural dimensions of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. Her first book, Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020) —argues that African American newspapers fostered Black sexual expression, agency, and identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Gallon is also the author of the field defining article, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.

This speaker series is co-sponsored by the Ahmanson Lab/Harman Academy at the University of Southern California, the Social Science Research Council Just Tech Program and the Digital Democracies Institute.

Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.

Liz Canner presents to the DDI
2023-05-17 15:00 - 16:00 | By zoom
Award-winning media artist Liz Canner has produced many documentaries and transmedia projects that investigate social and environmental in/justice issues. She often utilizes emerging technologies to interrogate mainstream narratives, explore new language for communication and inspire user engagement. Her critically acclaimed interactive documentary Symphony of A City, explores the housing crisis from a new perspective. Orgasm Inc., a NY Times “Critic’s Pick”, investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Lost City of Mer, an award-winning smartphone app and VR experience, uses a unique living narrative structure to immerse players in a mysterious underwater civilization devastated by climate change. Canner has received over 60 awards and honors including a Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at Harvard, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Canner’s award-winning films have been theatrically released, shown extensively on the international festival circuit, streamed on Netflix (“Most Popular”) and Kanopy (“Most Popular”) and broadcast on PBS, cable stations and internationally in many countries.
Pixel Pleasures and Human Disasters

During her interactive talk at SFU, award winning media artist Liz Canner will discuss her work, process, and the history of cyber-democracy. This includes how she chased down orgasm disease-mongers, uncovered decades of ritualized violence on college campuses, had her investigative work on police brutality censored, and built a fantastical underwater lost civilization devastated by climate change – all in the pursuit of using media as a tool for social and environmental justice. She’ll go into her use of emerging technologies to challenge dominant paradigms and deconstruct power dynamics while exploring its potential for inspiring user action and positive change. The research questions she’ll be exploring while on campus will also be discussed.
Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.

Indrek Ibrus presents to the DDI
2023-06-06 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Dr. Indrek Ibrus is a Professor of Media Innovation at Tallinn University’s (TLU) Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM), Estonia. He also curates BFM’s doctoral program. His research interests include media innovation, the evolution of the ubiquitous spatial internet, the emergence of contemporary metadata formats for audiovisual culture and industries, the broader evolution of modern creative industries, and the implications of cultural heritage digitization. He is currently principal investigator in the Estonian government-funded research project “Public Value of Open Cultural Data” and a work-package leader of CresCine, a Horizon Europe funded multi-year project improving the conditions for Europe’s small film countries. He has been a co-editor (together with Carlos A. Scolari) of Crossmedia Innovations (Peter Lang, 2012), editor of Emergence of Cross-Innovation Systems (Emerald, 2019) and co-author (with John Hartley and Maarja Ojamaa) of On the Digital Semiosphere (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is currently editing also research journal Baltic Screen Media Review.

The Public Value of Media Data: Conceptualizations and Ways of Measuring

In this presentation, Dr. Ibrus will be reporting on the work of their ongoing multi-year research project (https://publicvalueofdata.tlu.ee/) that studies the complex ways in which open data solutions in media and cultural sectors could generate ‘public value’. In conceptual terms, it builds on existing research traditions on (public) value creation, links these to work on innovation systems in media industries and investigates how new open data technologies such as the linked data and blockchains could be seen as conditioning the emergence of new kinds of “media innovation systems”. They have been studying existing data management systems to interpret how public service media institutions generate public value. But they are also developing new systems for them enabling them to do it even better. They are also collaborating with various startups experimenting with public blockchains in order to decentralize online media economies and generate public value again in different ways. That is, this project has been conceptual, empirical, and interventionist. It is also highly interdisciplinary as it combines network science and data science with media and innovation economics, media and communications studies, and cultural semiotics. The presentation will discuss their research results as well as their emergent conceptualizations of ‘public value’ in the era of media datafication.

Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.

Dr. Roopa Vasudevan presents to the DDI
2023-06-28 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
High-Level Creativity: New Media Art and the Priorities of the Tech Industry

Artists working with emerging technologies are often depicted as existing “outside” of the technology industry, both by scholars exploring technology and society as well as within their own perceptions of themselves and their output. Their works are alternately positioned as innovations, diagnostics and correctives; they are frequently depicted as carrying unique perspectives that do not exist within the technology industry otherwise. However, these artists are very much subject to the norms and limitations inherent to digital technology. The protocols and ideologies of the industry have a sizable impact on the work artists can make; how they are able to share and preserve it; and even how they envision their broader cultural roles.

This project examines the relationships between new media artists—practitioners who see themselves expanding, reinventing, or misusing technological expression—and the industry that controls the tools, resources, and protocols necessary for their work. I demonstrate that new media artists are heavily bound up in the workings of the contemporary tech industry, in both material and ideological ways. Drawing on theories of art worlds, scientific infrastructure and creative labor, I argue that the power and impact that the tech industry exerts on almost every facet of contemporary life also guides, influences and shapes the creative possibilities and conventions that new media artists are able to harness in their practices. Additionally, using the concept of the imagined affordance, I make the case that, rather than operating externally to the industry, these artists are seen as a vital resource due to their perceived ability to envision uses for emerging technologies that elude the capabilities of traditional engineers and developers. Through this revised subject position, I argue that we can gain a more nuanced understanding of where and how the tech industry exerts control over culture and creative practice, allowing for a re-conceptualization of how art can challenge the dominance of technical systems.

Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.

Dr. Judy Radul presents to the DDI
2023-07-05 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Judy Radul’s video installations often incorporate an original computer-controlled motion choreography and playback system for live and pre-recorded video. Recent exhibitions include: Dazibao, Montreal, 2023; Gwangju Biennale, 2021; Albertinum Museum, Dresden, 2021; Kunstinstitute Melly, Rotterdam, 2017. Her large-scale media installation World Rehearsal Court (2009) has been shown in Vancouver, Vienna, Seoul, Oslo and Moscow. She has published two books with Sternberg Press Berlin: A Thousand Eyes: Media Technology, Law and Aesthetics, 2011 co-edited with Marit Paasche, and This Is Television, 2018. Radul received a B.A in Fine and Performing Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 1991 and Master of Visual and Media Arts, Bard College, New York, 2000. She is Professor of Visual Art at SFU School for Contemporary Arts. She lives in Berlin and Vancouver (unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Skwxwú7mesh and Musqueam lands) and is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver. https://cargocollective.com/judyradul

Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link

Lyn Bartram presents to the DDI
2023-07-12 12:30 - 13:30 | By zoom
Dr. Lyn Bartram’s work explores the intersecting potential of interactive technologies, visual analytics and computational media from both theoretical and applied perspectives, particularly to better support data-enabled thinking beyond the traditional applications of expert data science. She works in both standard and practice-based research methods in applications related to data visualization, personal visual analytics, computational sustainability, and computational aesthetics.

A computer scientist by training, she engages extensively with data practitioners at all levels of competence and discipline through her work as Director of VIVA, the Vancouver Institute of Visual Analytics. VIVA is an interdisciplinary university institute with the mandate to educate, foster research collaboration and enhance literacy around data-driven thinking, visual analytics and exploratory data analysis. Our audiences and collaborators are both internal to the university and the external community, spanning a wide scope of disciplines, domains (e.g. health, finance, governance, research, scientists and entrepreneurs) and levels of expertise.

Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.

DDI Fall Speaker Series - Dr. Susan Erikson
2023-09-06 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
DDI Fall Speaker Series, 6th September from 12:30- 1:30pm PST
Dr. Susan Erikson, SFU Faculty of Health Sciences and DDI Fluencies Faculty Fellow
Dr. Erikson studies highly complex political and economic systems that shape human health experiences. She is a medical anthropologist who has worked in Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and North America. During an earlier international affairs career, Dr. Erikson first lived in an eastern Sierra Leonean village for two years before working with government departments and foreign affairs organizations on foreign policy and trade issues. As an academic, she combines her practical experience with a critical study of global political economy of health. Her work has been published in Nature, The Lancet, BMJ, Medical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Social Science & Medicine, Global Public Health, Critical Public Health, Anthropologica and others. Media quoting/citing her work include Nature, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Wired, Al Bawaba and others.
This is a hybrid event.
Email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

From General Intellect to General Imagination by Dr. Sean Cubitt
2023-09-25 16:00 - 17:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Dr. Sean Cubitt, 25th September from 4:00- 5:30pm PST

His research links film and media studies with ecocriticism, technological, aesthetic, economic and political history, and the media arts and aesthetics. He is series editor of Leonardo Books (MIT Press) and serves on the boards of the Media Art History network, Goldsmiths Press, Media Art 21 (CAFA Beijing / SFMOMA / He Foundation), Delocating Mountains (Austrian Science Fund) and a number of journal and books series including Screen, Cultural Politics, Visual Art Practice and the Journal of Environmental Media. He is currently working on the latest of nine funded research projects, this dealing with social media and photography. He has completed 31 PhD supervisions.

This is an in- person event at Harbour Centre 1500, SFU Downtown campus.
Email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details.

Data Fall Speaker Series - Dr. Fallon Wilson & Jurnell Cockhren
2023-10-04 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Data Fluencies Speaker Series, 4th October from 12:30- 1:30pm PST
Fallon Wilson & Jurnell Cockhren (Black Tech Futures Institute)
Dr. Fallon Wilson is the vice president of policy at the Multicultural Media and Telecommunication Internet Council (MMTC) where she launched a national campaign, Black Churches 4 Broadband to support digital access in black communities. She is also the co-founder of #BlackTechFutures Research Institute which is funded by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s 2020 Open Knowledge grant. #BlackTechFutures Research Institute builds a national network of city-based researchers and practitioners conducting research on sustainable local black tech ecosystems. Prior to launching the #BlackTechFutures Research Institute, Dr. Wilson was the former research director for Black Tech Mecca where she developed the SMART Black Tech Ecosystem Assessment Framework. As a member of the Federal Communications Commission’s Communications Equity and Diversity Council, Dr. Wilson chairs the Digital Inclusion & Anchor Institution Subgroup. Dr. Wilson is a 2019 TEDx Speaker (e.g. Stop Ignoring Black Women and Hear of Our Tech Prophecies).
Jurnell Cockhren has over a decade of experience in creating and contributing to open source software, Jurnell has worked in various fields, including neuroscience, optics and astronomy. Jurnell acts as the CTO of Black Science Network, and Instructor at the Nashville Software School. In 2012, Jurnell founded Sophicware, a Tech Firm and Think Tank. It’s mission: to enable the general public with computing tools that enables them to contribute to solving problems they encounter in their communities everyday.

This is a hybrid event.
Email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Fall Speaker Series - Dr. Kate Henessey
2023-11-01 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Dr. Kate Henessey and PhD student Brett Gaylor, 1st November from 12:30- 1:30pm PST

Dr. Kate is an anthropologist of media and the director of the Making Culture Lab at School of Interactive Arts and Technology, SFU where the research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage. Her multimedia and art works and investigate documentary methodologies to address Indigenous and settler histories of place and space. She is a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective, which has curated exhibitions and projects at the intersection of anthropology and contemporary art since 2009. In 2017, she was awarded the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC’s Early in Career Award, which recognizes the contributions to the non-academic community made by faculty members who are at an early point in their careers.
Brett Gaylor is a documentary filmmaker and interactive producer. His interactive series Do Not Track is the recipient of the International Documentary Association award for best nonfiction series, the 2016 Peabody Award, and the Prix Gemaux for Best Interactive Series. His short OK Google animated a year of his son Rowan’s accidental voice searches and received the 2019 Webby Award. His 2008 feature Rip! A Remix Manifesto was the recipient of audience choice prizes at festivals from Amsterdam to South Africa, broadcast in 20 countries, and seen by millions of people worldwide on Netflix, Hulu and The Pirate Bay. His most recent project Discriminator premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2021.

This is a hybrid event.
Email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Fall Speaker Series - Aaron Mendon- Plasek (Yale University)
2023-12-06 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Aaron Mendon- Plasek, 6th December from 12:30- 1:30pm PDT

Aaron is a historian of science and technology. His work examines how schemes of quantification, including their material, cultural, and institutional instantiations, have been used to imagine, enact, and justify social order. His first book project offers a revisionist history of machine learning, from WWII to the present, that demonstrates how and why it became thinkable and subsequently “reasonable” for learning machines and machine learning strategies, rooted in conceptions of creativity and human judgment, to adjudicate social questions in the 21st century. Prior to getting his PhD, he curated art exhibitions and wrote poetry, essays, & criticism. He’s the Knight Digital Public Sphere Fellow at the Information Society Project, and an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Prior to this he held competitive fellowships at Columbia as a GSAS Teaching Scholar Fellow (2021-22), a Contemporary Preceptor Fellow in the Columbia Core (2020-21), and a Richard Hofstadter Fellowship (2015-2020). This is a hybrid event.

Email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Spring Speaker Series - Dr. Victoria Thomas
2024-01-10 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Victoria E. Thomas, 10th January from 12:30- 1:30pm PDT
Dr. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Media and Public Engagement in the School of Communication. As an interdisciplinary scholar of Black Popular Cultural Studies, she primarily analyzes popular media to articulate how visual culture represents Blackness and Black identities. Her research is committed to political and civic engagement, diversity, and inclusion in public institutions to transform societal conditions. Dr. Thomas’ current research examines the communication practices of Black cisgender and transgender women in our contemporary media moment of hypervisibility of Black transgender women and intersectional feminism.
This is a hybrid event. Please email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Spring Speaker Series - Dr. Wendy Wong
2024-01-24 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
“We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age”
Presentation by Wendy H. Wong, 24th January from 12:30- 1:30pm PDT
Human rights are one of the major innovations of the 20th century. Their emergence after World War II and global uptake promised a new world of universalized humanity in which human dignity would be protected, and individuals would have agency and flourish. The proliferation of digital data (i.e. datafication) and its intertwining with our lives, coupled with the growth of AI, signals a fundamental shift in the human experience. Data are “sticky.” Human rights remain our best hope for ensuring essential human values that have come to be accepted internationally, but we have to account for how sticky data affect our conceptions of values like autonomy, dignity, equality, and community.. This talk will explore some of the ways data stickiness affects our lives, and make a case for the urgency of a human right to data literacy.
Dr. Wong is Professor of Political Science and Principal’s Research Chair at the University of British Columbia. She is an international relations scholar with expertise in global governance, human rights, civil society, and AI/Big Data. She is the author of We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age,published this fall by MIT Press. Wong is the author of two other award-winning books, dozens of academic articles and chapters, and contributes to outlets such as CBC, The Globe and Mail, and the Conversation. Previously, she was at the University of Toronto, where she was Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Civil Society. She’s the proud mom of two intrepid boys, a dog, and more houseplants than are practical.

This is a hybrid event. Please email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Spring Speaker Series - Dr. Nick Vincent
2024-02-07 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Nick Vincent, 7th February from 12:30- 1:30pm PDT
Dr. Vincent received his PhD from Northwestern University’s Technology and Social Behavior program (a joint degree in computer science and communication), where he worked in the People, Space, and Algorithms Research Group. During graduate school, he was a research intern at Snap and Microsoft. Before graduate school, he studied electrical engineering at UCLA. He was previously a postdoc working with the Computational Communication Research Lab at UC Davis and the Social Futures Lab at the University of Washington.
His research focuses on studying the relationship between human-generated data and modern computing technologies, including systems often referred to as “AI”. The overarching goal of this research agenda is to work towards an ecosystem of widely beneficial, highly capable AI technologies that mitigate inequalities in wealth and power rather than exacerbating them. I believe working to make people aware of the value of their data contributions can help achieve this goal. My work relates to concepts such as “data dignity”, “data as labor”, “data leverage”, and “data dividends”.

This is a hybrid event. Please email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Spring Speaker Series - Dr. Peter Ives
2024-03-06 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
“Social Media as a Failed Free Expression Experiment”
Presentation by Peter Ives, 6th March from 12:30- 1:30pm PDT
The talk will argue that “free speech” controversies are increasingly unresolvable not because people have differing commitments to the principle of free speech, but because they have incompatible underlying rationales for why speech should be free. The rise of social media has restructured the nature of public discussion; however, I argue that it is not so much the new technology but instead legal structures, social and economic exigencies and political ideals that are central to understanding the contemporary characteristics of social media. I examine how many legal scholars and policy makers including those with strong commitments to the US First Amendment and Canada’s Charter Rights of Free Expression are coming to understand that such constitutional tools are outmoded when trying to address the misogyny, racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, transphobia, and other forms of hatred that plague social media.
Peter Ives is professor of Political Science teaching primarily political theory. He was born and raised in Colorado, has a B.A. in Political Science from Reed College, Portland, Oregon; and an MA and PhD in Social & Political Thought from York University in Toronto. He is author of Gramsci’s Politics of Language (2004) and Language and Hegemony in Gramsci (2004), and co-editor with Rocco Lacorte of Gramsci, Language and Translation (2010). He has published in Rethinking Marxism, Political Studies, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy and Language Policy. He has researched and written extensively on the politics of “global English” and bridging the disciplines of language policy and political theory. He has contributed articles to The Conversation on free speech and academic freedom. He was on the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism for a decade and on the editorial collective of ARP (Arbeiter Ring Press) for many years. He is active in the University of Winnipeg Faculty Association. His writings have been translated into Italian, Turkish, Chinese, German and Portuguese.

This is a hybrid event. Please email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Spring Speaker Series - Dr. Jon Corbett
2024-03-13 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Jon Corbett, 13th March from 12:30- 1:30pm PDT
Dr. Corbett received his BFA at the University of Alberta, and MFA and Ph.D., at UBC Okanagan. During his studies, he developed his career as an application developer, focussing on centralized and de-centralized large-scale data repository and logistics web portals for UPS. Through his Ph.D., he continued the exploration of viewing technology skills as an artistic practice, resulting in my creation of the “acimow/Cree#” programming language for nehiyaw (Plains Cree), a specialized application for nehiyawewin learning, a nehiyaw keyboard, and the development of an Indigenous Computing Framework that proposes Storywork as a scaffold for programming computers using Indigenous languages. Before joining SFU, he was also a sessional faculty member at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, teaching topics in Digital Media, Virtual Worlds, and Visual Communication.

This is a hybrid event. Please email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Spring Speaker Series - Dr. Sheelagh Carpendale
2024-04-03 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Sheelagh Carpendale, 3rd April from 12:30- 1:30pm PST
Dr. Carpendale is a professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, where she holds an NSERC/SMART Industrial Research Chair in Interactive Technologies. She was previously a professor at University of Calgary, where she held a Canada Research Chair in Information Visualization and an NSERC/AITF/SMART Industrial Research Chair in Interactive Technologies. She directs the Innovations in Visualization (InnoVis) research group. At University of Calgary, she founded the interdisciplinary graduate group, Computational Media Design. Her research on information visualization, large interactive displays, and new media art. She completed her BSc. and Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University and studied Visual Arts at Sheridan College, School of Design and Emily Carr, College of Art.

This is a hybrid event. Please email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Summer Speaker Series - Dr. Adel Iskandar
2024-05-01 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Adel Iskandar, 1st May from 12:30- 1:30pm PST.
Dr. Iskandar presented a talk at the institute titled, “Revolution By Any Memes: Innovation and Irrevance in Digital Egypt”. He is the Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver/Burnaby, Canada. He is the author, co-author, and editor of several works including “Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution” (AUCP/OUP); “Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism” (Basic Books); “Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation” (University of California Press); “Mediating the Arab Uprisings” (Tadween Publishing); and “Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring” (Palgrave Macmillan). Iskandar’s work deals with media, identity and politics; and he has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. His forthcoming publications are two monographs, one addressing the political role of memes and digital satire and the other about contemporary forms of imperial transculturalism. Iskandar’s engaged participatory research includes supporting knowledge production through scholarly digital publishing such as “Jadaliyya” and academic podcasting such as “Status.” His community research agenda involves showcasing local grassroots participatory creative production by communities in the Middle East to confront the rise of extremism. His work also involves the autobiographical documentation and self-representation of Syrian newcomer women in the Lower Mainland illustrates their ingenuity in the face adversity. Prior to his arrival at SFU, he taught at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC.

Data Fluencies Speaker Series - Dr. Marisa Parham
2024-06-05 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Marisa Parham, 5th June from 12:30- 1:30pm PST
Dr. Parham is Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, where as P.I. she directs the African American Digital and Experimental Humanities initiative (AADHUM) and NarraSpace, an immersive storytelling lab focused on BIPoc experiences. She is also associate director for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and holds affiliate faculty appointments in African-American and Africana Studies, in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the program in Immersive Media and Design, and in the program in Comparative Literature. She will be joining as part of the annual team meeting for the Data Fluencies project, generously funded and supported by the Mellon Foundation.

DDI Summer Speaker Series - Dr. Parmit Chilana
2024-07-03 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Parmit Chilana, 3rd July from 12:30- 1:30pm PST
Dr. Chilana is Associate Professor and Ebco-Eppich Research Chair at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. She co-directs the Interactive Experiences Lab at SFU. Her main area of research is in human-computer interaction (HCI), particularly, focusing on inventing and deploying user-centered software help and learning techniques for feature-rich applications in a variety of domains, such as 3D modeling, education, health, and software development. She is passionate about using interdisciplinary approaches to understand and design for user diversity and empower users from all backgrounds and skills levels to use, learn, and program emerging technologies. Her work has been recognized with several awards and honors, including the 2022 CS-CAN Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Award, an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Award, and Best Paper Awards at venues such as ACM CHI. Before coming to SFU, She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. I received my PhD from the University of Washington where I co-founded AnswerDash , a venture-funded startup that commercialized my award-winning dissertation work on crowdsourced contextual help retrieval.

This is a in-person event. Please email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca to rsvp.

DDI Summer Speaker Series - Dr. Esther Weltevrede
2024-08-07 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Esther Weltevrede, 7th August from 12:30- 1:30pm PST

Esther Weltevrede is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture in the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores the various research affordances of digital media, with a specific interest in conceptual and methodological innovations in the study of mobile apps and the market for social media engagements. She co-authored Algorithmic Authenticity (Meson Press, 2023). Her work has been published in highly-ranked peer-reviewed journals, including Theory, Culture & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, Social Media + Society, New Media & Society, Computational Culture, and Big Data & Society. She is a founding member of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) and the App Studies Initiative (ASI), and a member of the Beyond Verification (BV) research group and Public Data Lab (PDL). She received a research grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for her project on Apps and Data Infrastructures.

This is a hybrid event. Please email: ddi_comms@sfu.ca for the zoom link.

DDI Summer Speaker Series - Dr. Eric Borra
2024-08-08 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Eric Borra, 8th August from 12:30- 1:30pm PST
Dr. Erik Borra is Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he specializes in the intersecting fields of Artificial Intelligence, Platform Studies, and Journalism. He previously served as the Technical Director at the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), one of Europe’s leading schools for internet studies, where he was also a founding member. At the institute, he helped design and implement tools to gather, analyze and visualize web data, such as the Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset (DMI-TCAT), Contropedia, Political Search Trends, and the Lippmannian Device.

The lecture explores the potential uses, ramifications, and ethical concerns surrounding the use of large language models (LLMs) in digital research via the lens of media studies. It periodizes the understanding of LLMs into foundation models, instruction-tuned models, and agents, and discusses the research outlooks for each. The lecture emphasizes the importance of understanding LLMs as media and discusses how their capabilities and affordances have a direct impact on research methodologies and outcomes, as well as the gradual shift in agency from human researchers to models. To mitigate the challenges associated with using LLMs in research, such as accessibility, platform volatility, replicability, and explainability, the lecture proposes strategies for leveraging LLMs while preserving research integrity and agency. These tactics include making LLMs locally accessible, leveraging research interfaces like Prompt Compass, integrating LLMs into current methodologies and toolsets, and recognizing the materiality of LLMs when employing them in digital research. The lecture thus provides insights into the evolving landscape of LLMs and their impact on digital research, offering a critical perspective on the opportunities and challenges associated with using these powerful tools.

DDI Fall Speaker Series - Jason Lewis
2024-09-04 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Jason Lewis, 4th September from 12:30- 1:30pm PST
Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media theorist, poet, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he conducts research/creation projects exploring computation as a creative and cultural material. Lewis is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, critical, creative and technical levels simultaneously. He is the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. Lewis co-directs Abundant Intelligences, the Indigenous Futures Research Centre, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network, and the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design. He directed the Initiative for Indigenous Futures and co-directed the Indigenous Protocol and AI Workshops.
Please email ddi_comms@sfu.ca to rsvp.

Fall Speaker Series – Dr. Zenia Kish
2024-11-15 17:00 - 18:30 | SFU Harbour Centre room HC2200, 555 W Hastings St, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6B 4N6, Canada
Remediating the Soil: Grounding Elemental Media in the Russo-Ukrainian War
Within a year of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine’s Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry Research assessed that at least 10.5 million hectares, or a quarter, of the country’s agricultural land had been degraded by the war. Subjected to damage from bombs and artillery, compaction from heavy military vehicles, and chemical contamination from explosives and fuel spills, Ukraine’s soils will require what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2019) refers to as long-term “ecological cultures of care” to heal. Approaching soil through the lens of both visual and elemental media, this talk considers how the liveliness and wounding of soil ecosystems is represented amidst the ongoing war from the tank-stopping agency of the “rasputitsa” (mud season) to the cascading impacts of the invasion on the food system in Ukraine and abroad. Arguing that Russia’s war on Ukraine is, in part, an agricultural war, the talk will explore how the battlescape’s highly mediated soil grounds the entangled visual and temporal politics of the war—soil hosts its destructive capacity and also distinctive timescales of repair and regrowth.

Zenia Kish is Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University. Her work on global digital media, food politics, digital agriculture, and philanthropy has been published journals including American Quarterly, Cultural Studies, New Media & Society, and Antipode (forthcoming). Her co-edited anthology Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation recently won the 2023 Best Edited Volume Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society.

DDI Fall Speaker Series - Dr. Kathleen Creel
2024-11-27 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI/ zoom
Presentation by Kathleen Creel, 27th November from 12:30- 1:30pm PDT

Dr Creel is Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, cross appointed between the Department of Philosophy and Religion and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. She was the inaugral Embedded EthiCS Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. Her current research explores the moral, political, and epistemic implications of machine learning as it is used in non-state automated decision making and in science. I have other ongoing projects on early modern philosophy and general philosophy of science.

Please email ddi_comms@sfu.ca to rsvp.

Digital Democracies Institute Speaker Series - Brooke Erin Duffy
2025-01-15 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
You are invited to join the inaugural session of the Digital Democracies Speaker Spring Speaker Series, featuring Brooke Erin Duffy (Cornell University).
The Visibility Bind: Platform Labor, Precarity, and Resistance in the Creator Economy
In the aftermath of the global pandemic, Big Tech companies have touted the Creator Economy as an Entrepreneurial Promised Land for self-enterprising artists, entertainers, and information intermediaries. But this image is belied by the precarious–even perilous–realities of platform-dependent labor. Drawing upon more than 100 interviews, I illuminate the source of their plight: a platformed visibility bind. In a labor market where algorithms are key arbiters of success (and failure), creators struggle to defy the imminent threat of invisibility. But they must also navigate the risks of hypervisibility—ranging from burnout and cultural appropriation to trolling and targeted harassment. The consequences of this bind are, I argue, amplified for marginalized creators—including women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Crucially, though, some creators are strategically harnessing their platform in/visibility to call attention to platform injustices and wider labor issues. The talk closes by considering creator-led pursuits of labor solidarity, activism, and resistance.
Brooke Erin Duffy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she is also a member of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty. Her research interests include digital and social media industries; gender, identity, and inequality; and the impact of new technologies on creative work and labor. She’s the author of two monographs on gender and cultural production, including (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017), which draws upon research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor. In addition, she is co-author of the newly released book Platforms & Cultural Production (Polity, 2021).
Date: January 15, 12.30 – 1.30pm PST
Venue: Digital Democracies Institute, TASC2, room 7460, SFU Burnaby campus and on Zoom.
Contact us to access the Zoom link.
