Digital Democracies Institute

Moya Bailey presents to the DDI
2022-08-03 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Online
Dr. Moya Bailey is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on Black women’s use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine.

She also coined the term misogynoir which describes the unique anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience.

#HashtagActivism Book Cover

She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice and is the author of the forthcoming, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance.

Maria Ressa - How to Stand Up to a Dictator
2022-09-13 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Vancouver) | SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre
Nobel Peace Prize laureate, SFU Honorary Degree recipient and renowned journalist Maria Ressa on how democracy dies by a thousand cuts.
Renowned investigative journalist Maria Ressa received the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her fearless defense of press freedom and democracy in the Philippines as CEO and co-founder of Rappler, an online news site. For her critical reporting of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s government and policies, she faces multiple lawsuits and potentially over 100 years in prison yet remains resolved in her fight to speak truth to power.
Now, in her forthcoming book How to Stand up to a Dictator, Maria Ressa maps out a global network of disinformation from Duterte’s drug wars, to America’s Capitol Hill, to Britain’s Brexit, to Russian cyberwarfare to Silicon Valley and beyond.
“How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms.”
Join us at this SFU Vancouver Speaker Series event where Maria Ressa will discuss the threat disinformation campaigns pose to our increasingly polarized democracies. Ressa will also be formally presented with her honorary Doctor of Laws from Simon Fraser University by SFU President Joy Johnson.
Peter Klein, Professor with the UBC School of Journalism, Writing, and Media and Executive Director of the Global Reporting Centre will provide opening remarks. Santa Ono, President of the University of British Columbia will give closing remarks. Wade Grant (Musqueam First Nation) will begin this event and offer a welcome.
This SFU Vancouver Speaker Series event is presented in partnership by SFU Vancouver, SFU Public Square, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, the Digital Democracies Institute, Ouano Foundation, the University of British Columbia and the Global Reporting Centre.

SFU Vancouver Speaker Series
The SFU Vancouver Speaker Series brings global experts to a local audience. Launched in 2012, the series builds on SFU’s rich history of community engagement by exploring critical issues to contribute to better understanding among Vancouver’s citizens through an intellectually enriching experience.

Register here. Note that there are reserved tickets for DDI affiliates, so contact ddi_comms@sfu.ca to reserve your space if you are affiliated.

This event is in person at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, and there is a livestream option.
This event is organized in partnership with SFU Vancouver, SFU Public Square, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, the Digital Democracies Institute, Ouano Foundation, the University of British Columbia and the Global Reporting Centre.

Charlton McIlwain presents to the DDI
2022-09-21 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver)
Charlton McIlwain – Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development; Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
Media, Culture, and Communication
Charlton McIlwain’s recent work focuses on the intersections of race, digital media, and racial justice activism. He recently wrote Racial Formation, Inequality & the Political Economy of Web Traffic, in the journal Information, Communication & Society, and I co-authored, with Deen Freelon and Meredith Clark, the recent report Beyond the Hashtags: Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice, published by the Center for Media & Social Impact, and supported by the Spencer Foundation. He is currently working on a book Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca to join the presentation.

Thinking With | Wendy Hui Kyong Chun | Discriminating Data & the New Politics of Recognition
2022-09-26 16:30 - 17:00 (Europe/Amsterdam) | Online
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, who leads the Digital Democracies Institute, will be in conversation with respondents Alexander R. Galloway, Hannah Turner,​​​​​​​ and Evelyn Wan, moderated by Wayne Modest on MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 | 16.30-18 hours CET.
On the event of the publication of Chun’s most recent book Discriminating Data – Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press), as part of our Thinking With conversation series, we consider how “big data and predictive machine learning currently encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage.” As a museum, with extensive histories collecting ‘ethnographically,’ we are interested in how notions of “discriminating data” in the contexts of the digital, which Chun works with, can inform our own collection practices—past, present, and affect how we do so in the future. More generally, in our conversation, we also engage Chun’s overarching question, “How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data?”, in order to also ask the same question of ourselves at the museum?
This event takes place virtually, at the Research Centre for Material Culture. More information and registration here.

How Are You? Sentiment, Surveillance, and Anti-Asian Racism
2022-10-01 14:00 - 15:30 (America/Vancouver)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
University of Toronto
Critical Digital Humanities Initiative
In-Person: Saturday, October 1
Campbell Conference Facility
5:00-6:30 pm EST

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at the Simon Fraser University School of Communication. Dr. Chun is the author of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), as well as numerous articles and edited collections. She has received fellowships from various foundations and institutes, including the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She was Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades.

Currently, Dr. Chun leads SFU’s Digital Democracies Institute which was launched in 2019. The Institute aims to integrate research in the humanities and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice in order to combat the proliferation of online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation by fostering critical and creative user practices and alternative paradigms for connection. It has four distinct research streams all led by Dr. Chun: Beyond Verification which looks at authenticity and the spread of disinformation; From Hate to Agonism, focusing on fostering democratic exchange online; Desegregating Network Neighbourhoods, combatting homophily across platforms; and Discriminating Data: Neighbourhoods, Individuals and Proxies, investigating the centrality of race, gender, class and sexuality to big data and network analytics.

Nanditha Narayanamoorthy presents to the DDI
2022-10-12 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Nanditha Narayanamoorthy is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her work draws from a Humanities-based framework to understand the relationship between technology and democracy and rethink digital infrastructure and platform design, particularly for marginalized communities in the Global South.
As an interdisciplinary scholar at the intersection of Critical Digital Studies, Gender Studies, and Social Justice, she investigates the role digital infrastructures play in centering vulnerable groups online. She studies digital protest to examine how religious, gendered, and ethnic minorities employ social media platforms in the Indian context to create and perform their political identities and create safe spaces for their digital assembly. She also examines how these marginalized communities are targeted by state-sponsored digital hate campaigns that undermine democracy.

Wendy Chun keynote at NYU's Neil Postman Graduate Student Conference
2022-10-27 08:00 - 2022-10-28 17:00 (America/Vancouver) | Online
The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University is pleased to announce the Neil Postman Graduate Student Conference to be held on October 27-28, 2022 in a hybrid format (in person at NYU, with support for remote contributions).
Keynote speaker is Professor Wendy Chun and the theme this year is ‘Hinterlands of Media and Technology.’ The CFP is attached below. There will also be a virtual CFP launch event on March 24, 2022 at 12.30pm –1.30pm (EST). More details below; Register here.)
Hinterlands of Media and Technology
October 27-28, 2022
Keynote: Professor Wendy Chun, Simon Fraser University.
Format: Hybrid (in person at NYU, with support for remote contributions)
What is peripheral and yet indispensable to media and technology production? What networks and relations may be obscured or revealed if we interrogate the constitution of the center? This year, we focus on the centrality of the ‘elsewhere’ and the ‘otherwise’ in the production of media experiences and media technologies. To consider the many historical, geographic, economic, and material dynamics at play, we center our inquiry around the notion of the hinterlands, and invite contributions to the question: What and where are the hinterlands of media and technology?
The full CFP is attached below; applicants are required to send a 300-350 word abstract, bio, and any supporting media via this application form by May 1st, 2022.
Information is also available at www.postmanconference.org and questions can be directed to postman.nyu@gmail.com. We will also be posting regular updates on Twitter
In addition, we are hosting a virtual CFP launch event on March 24, 2022, at 12:30 PM EST, with a discussion of the theme’s relevance for work in different areas and sites, featuring:
Lily Chumley – Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU
Martin Scherzinger – Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU
Philipp Seuferling – Visiting Researcher at the Dept. of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU; PhD, Södertörn University, Stockholm (2021)
Ayesha Omer – Postdoctoral Fellow, UPenn Annenberg School of Communications, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication; PhD, Dept. of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU (2020)
We invite all prospective applicants and those interested in the theme in general to join this conversation. Opportunities for networking and socializing for graduate students have been limited during the past few years, and we hope this event will allow participants to build an intellectual community and engage in conversations in advance of meeting in person this fall.

Susan Benesch presents to the DDI
2022-11-02 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Susan Benesch is an Adjunct Associate Professor, School of International Service, at the American Univeristy. She founded and directs the Dangerous Speech Project (dangerousspeech.org), to study speech that can inspire violence – and to find ways to prevent this, without infringing on freedom of expression. She conducts research on methods to diminish harmful speech online, or the harm itself. Trained as a human rights lawyer at Yale, Susan has worked for NGOs including Amnesty International and Human Rights First. She is also Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
To join the presentation email ddi_comms@sfu.ca.

Angelica Lim presents to the DDI
2022-11-23 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Dr. Angelica Lim is an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. She builds artificial intelligence software for robots to interact in a smart, but fun, way.
She has a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Kyoto University, Japan, specializing in AI applied to Robotics, and a B.Sc. in Computing Science (specializing in Artificial Intelligence) from Simon Fraser University in Canada. She is also a writer for the robotics online magazine IEEE Spectrum Automaton.

Kick off 2023 with CBC/Radio-Canada in Vancouver
2023-01-17 11:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Joseph & Rosalie Segal Center, Simon Fraser University, 515 West Hastings, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Join CBC/Radio-Canada President Catherine Tait and guest panelists for a conversation about building trust and protecting our democracy. This important discussion will touch on journalism and reporting, building relationships with the audience, online safety and public policy.
CBC/Radio-Canada and partners University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University invite interested members of the public to join them for a light lunch, followed by the panel discussion and a brief question and answer period.
Moderated by:
Anita Bathe, CBC Vancouver News at 6 pm
Panelists:
Catherine Tait, President and CEO, CBC/Radio-Canada
Jeanette Ageson, Publisher, The Tyee
Jeremy Kinsman, Distinguished Fellow, The Canadian International Council
Linda Solomon Wood, Publisher, National Observer
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair / Professor, Simon Fraser University
Registration and proof of identification is required. We also ask that you be prepared to check any large bags in our complimentary secure bag check. Please note that this is an in-person event and no live stream will be available.

Michelle Ferrier presents to the DDI
2023-01-18 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Dr. Michelle Ferrier is the founder of Troll-Busters.com, a just-in-time rescue service for women writers and journalists experiencing online harassment. She is a digital content architect with 30 years experience in media entrepreneurship and new media technologies. Ferrier is an associate professor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and was named one of the top 20 journalism innovation educators for 2018.

Ferrier holds a Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida in Texts and Technologies where she developed online communities, online learning and new media storytelling technologies; a master’s degree from the University of Memphis in journalism; and a Bachelor of Science degree in journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and link to join.

Yushu Zhu presents to the DDI
2023-01-25 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Yushu Zhu, Assistant Professor, SFU Urban Studies and Public Policy.
With a background in human geography and urban studies, Yushu’s research focuses on housing and community issues against the backdrop of urbanization and globalization. Her empirical research examines the spatial and temporal patterns of housing stratification, sense of home, and social relations that constitute urban neighbourhoods. She pays a special attention to communities of immigrants, low-income populations, and ethnic minorities. Her research has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Urban Studies, Urban Geography, Habitat International, and Environment and Behavior. Yushu teaches courses in housing, urban transformation, public policy, and research methods.
Previously, Yushu worked at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute of Asian Research at UBC and at Brown University. Yushu received her Ph.D. in Architecture from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. (Hons) in geography from Sun Yat-sen University, China.
Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for Zoom link and details.

Symposium: Korea University's Center for ICT and Society - SFU's Digital Democracies Institute & Transnational Culture and Digital Technology Lab
2023-02-08 12:00 - 17:00 (America/Vancouver) | DDI, 7460 - TASC 2, SFU, Burnaby, BC, Canada
The SFU – Korea University Symposium is taking place on February 8 from 12:00-5:00 PST. This event is in partnership with The Center for ICT and Society, Korea University, the Transnational Culture and Digital Technology Lab, SFU & The Digital Democracies Institute, SFU.

This event takes place in person at the DDI, with keynote speaker Prof. Seongcheol Kim of the Center for ICT & Society / Smart Media Service Research Center presenting “The burgeoning Korean media industry: Its light and shade.”

In addition to our guests and visitors from Korea University, this event is open to faculty and graduate students at SFU’s School of Communication. Space is limited, so email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for registration. Lunch will be provided.

See details and program:

Keynote

Prof. Seongcheol Kim of the Center for ICT & Society / Smart Media Service Research Center.
“The burgeoning Korean media industry: Its light and shade”

Panel I

Prof. Yoonhyuk Jung, School of Media and Communication, Korea University. “Understanding conflicts between incumbent players and entrant platforms from the perspective of social representations: The case of LawTalk”

Chulmin Lim, School of Media and Communication, Korea University. “Examining factors Influencing the user’s loyalty on algorithmic news recommendation service”

Chaeyun Jang, School of Media and Communication, Korea University. “Kids content as IPTV platform’s new differentiator: The Korean Case”

Panel II

Dal Yong Jin/ Hyejin Jo, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. “Platformization in media governance: A critical case study of the gigantic platform power”

Ben Scholl, Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University. “Border crisis: Exploring algorithmic power along digital platforms’ shared boundaries”

Alberto Lusoli, Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University. “From hate to agonism”

Fenwick McKelvey presents to DDI
2023-02-22 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver)
Fenwick McKelvey (Concordia University) will be joining the DDI in person for a presentation, as part of the Spring Speaker Series.
“You Played Yourself: The Origins of World Politics as Computer Game”
In 1959, political scientist Oliver Benson created the first computer simulation of world politics. Written to run in the drum of an IBM 650 machine, Benson’s Simple Diplomatic Game simulated international crises between nine nations. “Players” could read the print-outs if the United States declared all-out-war against the USSR (codename HBOMB). The simple game was a “modest beginning” that Benson thought had no utility for prediction. In spite of its humble origins, Benson was not the first nor the last to imagine the world as a game. Benson’s slippage to describe international relations as a computer game has stabilized into a power socio-technical imaginary about politics and world order central to American defense intelligence. In 2020, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — what Sharon Weinberger calls the “imagineers of war” — announced a new program to support its work on military artificial intelligence, GAMEBREAKER (https://www.darpa.mil/program/gamebreaker). It trains a new generation of strategic AIs to master commercial computer games, presuming that masters these virtual competitions will port to predicting and defeating American opponents in the game of realpolitik. My presentation explores how it became sensible to imagine global politics as a computer game. The chapter focuses on the early prototypes that gradually legitimated computer simulations of world politics to understand how a simple game became GAMEBREAKER.

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

Data Fluencies Speaker Series - Joan Donovan
2023-03-01 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver)
Joan Donovan from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy will present on their new book Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.
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.

Global Media Education Summit 2023 Keynote by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Amy Harris
2023-03-02 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Vancouver)
KEYNOTE: How to Sense the Future: Global Climate Change and Media Edu-cologies – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Amy Harris
Global climate change has been predicted for at least a century, and yet little has been changed in response. This inaction has revealed the importance and inadequacy of knowledge: at first, many scientists and activists believed that simply educating the public would be enough, but the continuing lack of action and the debates over the existence and cause of global climate change – even after many predictions have materialised – has proven otherwise. Although there are many reasons for this failure to act – such as concerted political efforts to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt – our talk explores the difficulty of scale and attempts to overcome it. A fundamental difficulty is the fact that we experience weather, not climate: climate is an abstraction based on global inputs and dynamics that seem impervious to individual actions. To register the intricate and interwoven impact of climate change, we turn to arts-based interventions that deploy affectively intense hyper-local experiences. Ranging from individual VR experiences, to large scale art installations, they reveal how the senses can be deployed to create affective and effective relationships with our future world.
The Global Media Education Summit (MES) brings together an international network of researchers, educators, and practitioners across all aspects of media education, media and digital literacies, youth media production and media and technology in education. As the leading global showcase for research, pedagogy, and innovation, MES explores the changing currents across media education and media literacy communities around the world.
Held at Harbour Centre, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada on March 2nd – 4th 2023 – in person, with virtual panels.
More information, including registration here.

Chelsea Rosenthal presents to the DDI
2023-03-15 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Dr. Chelsea Rosenthal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. Before joining the faculty at Simon Fraser, she was an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Center for Bioethics at New York University and did her doctoral work in NYU’s Philosophy Department. She also holds a J.D. from the Law School there. Her research focuses on ethics, philosophy of law, and political philosophy, with current projects on moral uncertainty, privacy and content moderation on social media, and the ethical responsibilities of lawyers.
Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.

Digital Policy Rounds: Mis/disinformation and the question of authenticity
2023-03-16 09:00 - 10:00 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Digital Policy Rounds: Mis/disinformation and the question of authenticity
Thursday, March 16 from 9 am – 10 am PST
Register here
ABOUT THE EVENT
While mis- and dis-information is primarily understood in terms of its facticity, or lack thereof, the very circulation of information such as news stories is tied to the cultural contexts in which people come to trust and rely on certain channels of information. Tackling misinformation, then, requires not just repudiation of its claims but an understanding of how and why its claims become significant — through what cultural channels — for certain groups of people. How do these channels influence what people will believe in their news and information consumption habits? How do recommender algorithms shape cultural channels that mark certain information as compelling? How does understanding the cultural sites of meaning-making help us address mis- and dis-information?
This panel seeks to surface the cultural dimensions of mis- and dis-information through the lens of authenticity: how claims to truthfulness and facticity are recognized as believable by communities, and so how those claims are authenticated as truth or facts. Our panelists will discuss the historical, technological, and political aspects of claiming access to an authentic reality, and how addressing mis- and dis-information through policy requires engaging culturally with those claims.
Register to receive the event Zoom link on the day of the event.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Dr. Elisha Lim is a Provosts’ Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice. Lim is currently working on a book called “Pious” that studies the rise in distorted identity politics through theology and Afropessimism, tackling issues from ethnic fraud to hyperbolic corporate solidarity statements. Lim is part of Canada’s Initiative for Digital Citizen Research, which advises on digital government policy, and is a Joint Initiative organized by SSHRC and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Christina de Castell is chief librarian & CEO at Vancouver Public Library, and has held roles bridging technology, collections, research and public service in her more than twenty years as a librarian. She is passionate about the role of libraries in building communities and exploring ideas, and fascinated by the way that technology is changing how we learn and communicate. Christina has represented the world’s and Canada’s libraries at UN forums including the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Internet Governance Forum, and is a member of copyright and ebook leadership groups for libraries in Canada and internationally. She is the co-author, with Paul Whitney, of Trade eBooks in Libraries: The Changing Landscape (DeGruyter, 2017), and is a frequent speaker on issues related to libraries, information and the digital world.

Sarah Nguyễn is a PhD student at the University of Washington’s Information School. Sarah investigates information infrastructures & information disorder among immigrant diaspora and non-English communities. They apply theory into practice at the intersections of information & media infrastructures, information disorder, embodied memories, archival studies, Asian American studies, & immigrant studies. Grounded in Black and Asian technocultures with feminist practices of care, Sarah centers contextual, archival, qualitative, and community participatory methodologies alongside social media analysis. Currently, Sarah contributes to the NSF Rapid Response Research with UW Center for an Informed Public about problematic information discourses within the Vietnamese and Latine diaspora; and to the AfterLab about community archives in response to COVID-19. Her research has been featured in Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, VICE, BuzzFeed News, KUOW Public Radio, NPR, Saigon Broadcasting Television Network, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, and InDance magazine.

Divyani Motla is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of Toronto; also affiliated with the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Her research explores connected transnational histories and articulations of religion and power, with a focus on Sikh ethno-nationalism, in India and Canada. Divyani is a Lead Editor with the Jamhoor collective, a Left media organisation based in Toronto focusing on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora in North America; and Editor of the Past Tense Graduate Review of History, a journal housed in the Department of History at University of Toronto.

This event intends to bring together experts in the field to discuss culturally- and community-specific ways to understand and address the spread of mis- and dis-information. It is organized in partnership with the Digital Democracies Institute at SFU; the University of British Columbia’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions; the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University; Toronto Metropolitan University’s Leadership Lab; and the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa.

Data Fluencies Speaker Series - Chris Gilliard
2023-03-29 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | By zoom
Dr. Chris Gilliard is a writer, professor, and speaker. His scholarship concentrates on digital privacy, surveillance, and the intersections of race, class, and technology. He is an advocate for critical and equity-focused approaches to tech in education. His writings have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and Vice Magazine. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center, a member of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Scholars Council, and a member of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project community advisory board. Gilliard is a member of the inaugural (2022 – 2024) cohort of the Just Tech Fellowship.
The 2023 Data Fluencies 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.
Contact ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.

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 (America/Vancouver) | 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 (America/Vancouver)
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 (America/Vancouver) | 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 (America/Vancouver) | 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 (America/Vancouver) | 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 (America/Vancouver) | 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 (America/Vancouver) | 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 (America/Vancouver) | 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 (America/Vancouver) | 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 (America/Vancouver) | 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.
