Digital Democracies Institute

DDI Summer Speaker Series - Dr. Parmit Chilana
2024-07-03 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | 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.

Digital Democracies Institute Speaker Series - Adrian Ivakhiv
2025-02-12 12:30 - 13:30 | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
We invite you to attend the second session of the Digital Democracies Speaker Spring Series featuring Adrian Ivakhiv (Simon Fraser University).
Ecologies of the Multipolar Information Disorder: On Recent Elections, Current Wars, and Climate Disasters to Come
Bio: Born to World War Two refugee parents from Ukraine, Adrian Ivakhiv grew up in Toronto, Canada. From 2003 to 2024 he was a Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont, where he served as Steven Rubenstein Professor of Environment and Natural Resources and founding coordinator of EcoCultureLab. He previously taught at York University (Toronto) and the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, has held fellowships at Freie Universität Berlin and Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyïv, and has conducted fieldwork on eco-cultural conflicts in the U.S. Southwest, the British Isles, western and central Ukraine, maritime eastern Canada, and Vermont. His books include “Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona” (2001), “Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature” (2013), “Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times” (2018), the co-edited “Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies” (2022), and the forthcoming “Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth” and “The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds.” A Fulbright Scholar (Germany/Ukraine), Canada-USSR Scholar (1989-90), and Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment, the Cinepoetics Centre for Advanced Film Studies, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, he has presented his work in numerous countries around the world. He also plays and composes music.
The presentation will be in person at the DDI (TASC2, room 7460) and online via Zoom.
Date: February 12, 12.30 – 1.30 pm
Venue: Digital Democracies Institute, TASC2, room 7460, SFU Burnaby campus.
Contact us to access the Zoom link.

Bo Ruberg - How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games
2025-03-13 16:30 - 18:00
Abstract: Today more than ever, we need the power to build new worlds. Video games are exceptional tools for worldbuilding because every video game itself is a world. Yet, in video games and other media forms, worldbuilding is still commonly understood as an expression of storytelling. A queer reading of video games shows us that worldbuilding means something much deeper and more radical than narrative elements that sit on the surface of the world. In video games, worlds are built on the foundation of interaction design, software simulations, graphical dimensions, and other elements often overlooked as too technical to hold cultural meaning. By analyzing these elements of game development as acts of worldbuilding, we can reimagine worldbuilding itself: as a process of challenging firmly held beliefs about the fundamental structures, conventions, and irreducible truths that give shape to the world around us. Video games also powerfully model the concept of queer worldbuilding–a practice of building worlds that destabilizes the fundamental logics of our universe and builds new worlds founded on alternate expressions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, intimacy, and desire.

Bio: Bo Ruberg, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, as well as the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Their research explores gender and sexuality in digital media with a focus on LGBTQ topics in video games. They are the author of four books: Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019), The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (Duke University Press, 2020), Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies (MIT Press, 2022), and How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games (NYU Press, 2025). They have also co-edited two volumes, Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and Real Life in Real Time: Live Streaming Culture (MIT Press, 2023). In 2021, they received the Stonewall Book Award for Non-Fiction from the American Library Association. In 2022, they received the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. They are also the recipient of a 2023-2025 Dangers & Opportunities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/bo-ruberg-guest-lecture-tickets-1248647411019?aff=oddtdtcreator

Digital Democracies Institute Speaker Series - Reem Hilu
2025-03-19 12:30 - 13:30
You are invited to join the third session of the Digital Democracies Speaker Spring Speaker Series, featuring Reem Hilu (Washington University in St.Luis).
The Intimate Life of Computers: A Feminist Perspective on the History of Home Computing
The Intimate Life of Computers offers a feminist intervention in the history of personal computing by discussing the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of these technologies as they were taken up in US homes in the 1980s. As this talk will discuss, although women were often not involved in the production nor even the primary intended audience for most applications of 1980s computing and gaming, in order to adapt these media to the home, hardware and software producers had to contend with middle-class domestic culture, feminist critique, and their perceptions of how women would respond to computing. Computer applications such as playful therapeutic relationship software, adult sex-themed computer games, and talking dolls and robots powered by microprocessors were examples of the efforts made to integrate computers into the most intimate aspects of family life. The talk argues that, as a result of the encounter with domestic culture, personal computing came to be thought of as an intimate and interpersonal medium, one that could shape and intervene in companionate relationships.
Reem Hilu is assistant professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on the history of computers and games as media of relationality and considers the role of gender, sexuality, and intimacy in shaping these histories. Her work in feminist media histories of computing and gaming has appeared in journals including Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Histories, and The Velvet Light Trap.
Date: March 19, 12.30 – 1.30pm PST
Venue: Digital Democracies Institute, TASC2, room 7460, SFU Burnaby campus.
Contact us to access the Zoom link.

DDI Speaker Series: Liz Barry, Metagov
2025-04-30 12:30 - 13:30 | Online
Joining us at the Digital Democracies Lab for the next Speaker Series session is Liz Barry from Metagov.
Liz Barry is the Executive Director of Metagov. Before joining Metagov, she served as Head of Partnerships at The Computational Democracy Project, the 501(c)3 organization she established with the creators of the Polis technology to steward its open source code and methods. Liz works with facilitators, social movements, civil society organizations, journalists, indigenous nations, democratic governments both young and old, and peacebuilders to implement “listening at scale.” The collaboration began when her presence at Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Revolution and subsequent relationship with g0v led to her writing up the first coverage of vTaiwan in the west, in the 2016 piece for Civicist titled “vTaiwan: Public Participation Methods on the Cyberpunk Frontier of Democracy,” now republished by Taiwan’s government.
Metagov is a community of research and practice gathered around the mission to cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age.
If you’d like to attend, please send us an email at ddi_comms@sfu.ca, and we’ll share the attendee details with you.

Theatre Performance: (Machine) Learning to be
2025-05-16 18:00 - 2025-05-17 20:00 | Progress Lab 1422, 1422 William St, Vancouver, British Columbia, V5L 2P7, Canada
From an international collaboration spanning 9 universities, 50+ researchers, and 15 artists, comes a multimedia performance experience that engages with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and their impacts. (Machine) Learning To Be explores the many faces of AI, its dangers, and possibilities for our communities. Engage with the performance on May 16th and 17th at Progress Lab 1422 and online, as you take part in a conversation around the possibilities and impacts of AI on the human body and society. (Machine) Learning To Be uses a hybrid performance model, which means audiences can join in both online and in-person.
The Vancouver performances (May 16-17) are co-produced by the Data Fluencies Theatre Project and Theatre Conspiracy and developed with support from the Data Fluencies Project through the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University. The performance had a developmental workshop with public sharing at Brown University (August 2024), produced in collaboration with Brown Arts Institute as part of the inaugural Brown Arts IGNITE Series.
The live online performance is powered by CultureHub Broadcaster.
For free tickets to the online performance, please register here: https://www.zeffy.com/en-CA/ticketing/machine-learning-to-be-online-experience.
Dates & Shows:
May 16, Friday | 6 PM
May 16, Friday | 8 PM
May 17, Saturday | 8 PM

Duration: 1 Hour

Tickets
Special Pricing: Pay What You Can

Venue: Progress Lab 1422 & online

Data Fluencies: Tributaries
2025-05-29 12:00 - 2025-07-19 17:00 | Or Gallery, 236 E Pender St, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6A 1T7, Canada
Featuring artists Lai Yi Ohlsen, Lani Asunción, Jazsalyn, Kristoffer Ørum, Caroline Sinders, and Roopa Vasudevan, with experimental research by the Night School for Data Fluencies, DATA/FFECT, hannah holtzclaw, and Data Fluencies Pedagogies.

The second of three thematically connected shows taking place across North America this spring and summer, this exhibition at Or Gallery investigates art’s potential for reimagining our often narrow understandings of data and machine learning and advocating for the digital futures we want. Using the river tributary as a conceptual starting point, the exhibition invites you to explore how our current understandings of data and technology can become a site for broader, community-centred discussions beyond the academy.

Data Fluencies: Tributaries features the diverse work of six contemporary artists, alongside experimental research supported by the Data Fluencies Project, based out of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University. Together, the artists and researchers featured here offer us ways to (re)consider our relationships with the data that surrounds and drives our everyday lives—and perhaps find new routes to agency once we are able to do so.

The Data Fluencies exhibitions are organized by Roopa Vasudevan, a co-PI on the Data Fluencies Project. Visual identity by PROPS SUPPLY.

Dates & Shows: May 29 – July 19
Open hours Wednesday – Saturday, 12–5 PM
Opening Reception: 29 May, 5 – 8 PM
Public Curatorial Tour: 31 May, 2 PM
Venue: Or Gallery, 236 Pender St East, Vancouver, BC

Author Meets Critics: Dr. Susan Erikson's Book Launch
2025-09-19 16:00 - 18:00 | The Teck Gallery, SFU Harbour Centre, 515 W Hastings St, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6B 1A1, Canada
Join in for an electric conversation with Dr. Susan Erikson, an SFU Distinguished Professor, who studies highly complex political economies that shape human health. Her new book, Investable! When Pandemic Risk meets Speculative Finance – A Cautionary Tale (MIT Press, 2025), which she traveled over 420,000 research kilometres to write, is about the financialization of global health and capitalist speculation repurposed as save-the-world innovation.
Dr. Erikson will be in conversation with Anke Kessler and Iveoma Udevi-Aruevoru in an open session about her work, research, and the story behind Investable! The book will be available to buy at the venue courtesy of Cross and Crows.
Refreshments and snacks will be served at this downtown venue.
This event is hosted with the support of the Digital Democracies Institute, the School of International Studies, and the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.

About Investable!
In a world increasingly defined by crisis, bankers behind the scenes turn catastrophes into financial securities that can be bought and sold. Offering new insights into how the excesses of capitalism shape emergency preparedness, Investable! is an ethnography of the World Bank bonds designed to solve health funding shortfalls by getting international investors to gamble on future crises. Erikson, who traveled over 420,000 kilometres conducting research for the book, takes readers from West African roads to Wall Street to Boston data modeling firms to tell the stories of the people, the special interests, and the logics of pandemic bonds. Written for a smart general audience concerned about capitalism’s effect on human health, Investable! will appeal to people working in global development, health care and data modeling, international affairs, and anyone who wants to better understand how the worlds of high finance shape how we care for one another.
