L
isted in alphabetical order.
NB: These were their bios at the time of their presentation. Some of the speakers have since changed positions.
Founder of the Series
Dr. Alex Ketchum is the founder and organizer of The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series and is the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab. Since 2018, she has been the Faculty Lecturer of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University. In addition to her research on feminist communications, technology, and consumption, she is co-founder and editor of The Historical Cooking Project (historicalcookingproject.com), a website dedicated to food history scholarship and formerly co-led Food, Feminism, and Fermentation. She presently manages 6 websites that make academic research accessible to the public for free. For a full list of her publications, go to alexketchum.ca. She is also the author of the book Engage in Public Scholarship: Feminist and Accessible Communication (2022). Ketchum will lead a 2-hour workshop on public facing scholarship and website design. She will work with participants to begin building their own websites to make their research results accessible to the public.
Founder of the Series
Dr. Alex Ketchum is the founder and organizer of The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series and is the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab. Since 2018, she has been the Faculty Lecturer of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University. In addition to her research on feminist communications, technology, and consumption, she is co-founder and editor of The Historical Cooking Project (historicalcookingproject.com), a website dedicated to food history scholarship and formerly co-led Food, Feminism, and Fermentation. She presently manages 6 websites that make academic research accessible to the public for free. For a full list of her publications, go to alexketchum.ca. She is also the author of the book Engage in Public Scholarship: Feminist and Accessible Communication (2022). Ketchum will lead a 2-hour workshop on public facing scholarship and website design. She will work with participants to begin building their own websites to make their research results accessible to the public.
Dr. Moya Bailey is Associate Professor of Communications at Northwestern University. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and an MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT. She is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance (2021, NYU Press).
Dr. Ruha Benjamin is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. She is also the founder of the JUST DATA Lab and the author of two books, "People's Science" (Stanford) and "Race After Technology" (Polity), and editor of "Captivating Technology" (Duke). She writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice.
Ana Brandusescu collaborates with McGill University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal (CRIEM) as the resident Professor of Practice for 2019-2020, and will be an OpenNorth Fellow. As a Professor of Practice and OpenNorth Fellow, she will design and implement a research agenda on artificial intelligence (AI), its transformative effects on institutions, and the engagement potentialities afforded, and not afforded, by its implementation.
André L. Brock joined the School of Literature, Media, and Communication as an associate professor. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with an M.A. in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His article "From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation" challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved "a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else" and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.
Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and a data journalist. She is the author of “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.” Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good. She is also interested in ethical AI and appeared in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias. She is an affiliate faculty member at the Moore Sloan Data Science Environment at the NYU Center for Data Science, a 2019 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Institute of Museum & Library Services as well as the Tow Center at Columbia Journalism School. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has also worked as a software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her features and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and other outlets.
Dr. Elspeth Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where she teaches queer and trans history; the history of US capitalism; oral history; and the history and theory of photography. She also currently serve as the Director of the Digital Humanities She is an active volunteer and Vice President of the Board at The ArQuives, Canada’s Lesbian and Gay Archives, the world’s largest LGBTQ+ community archive.
Dr. Elinor Carmi is a digital rights advocate, feminist, researcher and journalist who has been working, writing and teaching on deviant media, internet standards, (cyber)feminism, sound studies and internet governance. Her second monograph will be out in early 2020 titled "Digital Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media", published on Digital Formation series at Peter Lang publishing. Currently Elinor is a Postdoc Research Associate in digital culture and society, at Liverpool University, UK, working on several ESRC and AHRC projects and part of the Nuffield Foundation funded project Me and My Big Data: Developing UK Citizens Data Literacies. At the moment she is working on two special issues: for Theory, Culture & Society together with Brittany Paris about 'Redesigning Time', and for the Internet Policy Review together with Simeon Yates about 'what digital literacy mean today'. Before academia, Elinor worked in the electronic dance music industry for various labels, was a radio broadcaster and a music television editor for almost a decade. In 2013, she published a book about the Israeli Psytrance culture titled "TranceMission: The Psytrance Culture in Israel 1989-1999" (Resling Publishing).
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She holds degrees in quantitative social science and has been a practicing data scientist and AI developer since 2013. She is currently the Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence, where she works with C-suite clients to create cutting-edge technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI. In her work as Accenture’s Responsible AI lead, she led the design of the Fairness Tool, a first-in-industry algorithmic tool to identify and mitigate bias in AI systems. The Fairness Tool has been utilized successfully at Accenture clients around the world. Dr. Chowdhury co-authored a Harvard Business Review piece on the tool. Dr. Chowdhury holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, a master's degree in Quantitative Methods of the Social Sciences from Columbia University, and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She holds degrees in quantitative social science and has been a practicing data scientist and AI developer since 2013. She is currently the Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence, where she works with C-suite clients to create cutting-edge technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI. In her work as Accenture’s Responsible AI lead, she led the design of the Fairness Tool, a first-in-industry algorithmic tool to identify and mitigate bias in AI systems. The Fairness Tool has been utilized successfully at Accenture clients around the world. Dr. Chowdhury co-authored a Harvard Business Review piece on the tool. Dr. Chowdhury holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, a master's degree in Quantitative Methods of the Social Sciences from Columbia University, and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Gabriella (Biella) Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she researches, writes, and teaches on computer hackers and digital activism. Her first book on Free Software, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking has been published with Princeton University Press. Her book, "Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous," published by Verso, was named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2014.
Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock (they/them or she/her) is a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, move towards collective liberation, and advance ecological survival. They are known for their work on networked social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a joint appointment in Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the Department of Urban Studies+Planning. They are a Senior Research Fellow at the Algorithmic Justice League (ajl.org) and a Faculty Affiliate with the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Sasha is a board member of Allied Media Projects (alliedmedia.org) and a member of the Steering Committee of the Design Justice Network (designjustice.org). Sasha is the author of two books and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other research publications. Their new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, was published by the MIT Press in 2020.
Dr. Diane Dechief is the Science Communication Specialist at the Office for Science Education McGill University. She was formerly Faculty Lecturer at McGill University’s Writing Centre where she designed, taught, and coordinated writing courses focussed on science communication and digital genres.
Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer and coauthor of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, and the founding editor of Terraform, VICE's science-fiction vertical. She is the former futures editor of Motherboard, and a contributor to VICE, Rhizome, The Guardian, WIRED, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Eye on Design, Quartz, OneZero, and Aeon.She is an advisor to graduate design students at Art Center College of Design and a member of the cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. She lives in Los Angeles.
Chancey Fleet is a 2018-19 Data & Society Fellow and current Affiliate-in-Residence whose writing, organizing and advocacy aims to catalyze critical inquiry into how cloud-connected accessibility tools benefit and harm, empower and expose communities of disability. Chancey is the Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library where she founded and maintains the Dimensions Project, a free open lab for the exploration and creation of accessible images, models and data representations through tactile graphics, 3d models and nonvisual approaches to coding, CAD and “visual” arts. Chancey was recognized as a 2017 Library Journal Mover and Shaker.
Dr. MC Forelle is a Cornell Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. They completed their PhD in communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Their scholarly work examines the intersections of technology, culture and the law.
Dr. Yuriko Furuhata is associate professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies, an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, and a core faculty member of the World Cinemas Program at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. She is the author of Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013), which won the Best First Book Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. She has published articles in journals such as Media+Environment and Grey Room and edited volumes, such as Screen Genealogies, Media Theory in Japan and Animating Film Theory. Her second book, titled Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Duke University Press, 2022) traces the geopolitical, technological and institutional connections between Japan and the United States that led to the development of artificial fog, weather control, cybernetic architecture, and networked computing in the mid-20th century.
Dr. Alex Hanna is a sociologist and senior research scientist working on the Ethical AI team at Google. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. Her research centers on origins of the training data which form the informational infrastructure of AI and algorithmic fairness frameworks, and the way these datasets exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality.
Dr. Kristen Hogan, author of "The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability," is the Barnard Library and Academic Information Systems Director for Collections Strategy and Library Operations. At the University of Texas, she served as the English Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies Librarian, the Associate Director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, and most recently as the Education Coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Center. She has also worked in feminist bookstores, including as book buyer and co-manager of the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, a racial justice-based and trans affirming feminist bookstore. Kristen loves to learn about, discuss, and work toward racial justice-based queer feminism in everyday life. Her book, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (Duke University Press, 2016), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award this past summer. She has a PhD in English Literature and an MS in Information Studies, both from UT. Kristen Hogan will be speaking about her work at McGill University and at Montreal’s feminist bookstore L’Euguélionne.
Peter-Lucas Jones of Te Aupouri, Ngai Takoto, Te Rarawa, and Ngāti Kahu descent, is the General Manager of Te Hiku Media.
Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD student at Concordia University and Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Kite argues that the inseparability of body and voice with mind and heart is central to a Lakota epistemology. This guides her development of wearables which interface body and computer. She will speak about this concept through her performance practice which utilizes the body to navigate digital landscapes (visual and sonic) through wearable electronics. Following her discussion of indigenous protocols for AI, she will speak about how to integrate digital artistic practice with decolonial and social justice work.
Dr. Laura Klein is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. She received her PhD in English and American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center, and my AB in Literature (English and French) from Harvard University. She is currently at work on two major projects: the first, Data by Design, is an interactive book on the history of data visualization; and the second, Data Feminism, co-authored with Catherine D'Ignazio, is a trade book that explores the intersection of feminist thinking and data science. She also maintains ongoing research into the application of quantitative methods to the "data" of early American culture. Her first book, Matters of Taste: Eating, Aesthetics, and the Early American Archive, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. It shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people, from the nation's first presidents to their enslaved chefs, who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States. With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge.
Dr. Max Liboiron is an Associate Professor in Geography and is formerly the Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Research) at Memorial University. Liboiron is Métis/Michif (Woodman via Red River) who grew up in Lac la Biche, Treaty 6 territory. Dr. Liboiron is leader in both developing and promoting anticolonial research methods into a wide array of disciplines and spaces. As founder of CLEAR, an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory whose methods foreground humility and good land relations, they have influenced national policy on both plastics and Indigenous research, invented technologies and protocols for community monitoring of plastics, and led the development of the interdisciplinary field of discard studies. Liboiron’s book, Pollution is Colonialism, bridges Science and Technology Studies (STS), Indigenous studies, and discard studies while providing a framework for understanding all research methods as practices that align with or against colonialism. Focusing on plastic pollution, the text models an anticolonial scientific practice associated with Métis concepts of land, ethics, and relations, and demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible, but it is currently being practiced.
Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD student at Concordia University and Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Kite argues that the inseparability of body and voice with mind and heart is central to a Lakota epistemology. This guides her development of wearables which interface body and computer. She will speak about this concept through her performance practice which utilizes the body to navigate digital landscapes (visual and sonic) through wearable electronics. Following her discussion of indigenous protocols for AI, she will speak about how to integrate digital artistic practice with decolonial and social justice work.
Dr. Laura Klein is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. She received her PhD in English and American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center, and my AB in Literature (English and French) from Harvard University. She is currently at work on two major projects: the first, Data by Design, is an interactive book on the history of data visualization; and the second, Data Feminism, co-authored with Catherine D'Ignazio, is a trade book that explores the intersection of feminist thinking and data science. She also maintains ongoing research into the application of quantitative methods to the "data" of early American culture. Her first book, Matters of Taste: Eating, Aesthetics, and the Early American Archive, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. It shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people, from the nation's first presidents to their enslaved chefs, who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States. With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge.
Dr. Jennifer Lundquist is a professor and Senior Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development at UMass Amherst. She examines the pathways through which racial, ethnic and gender inequalities are perpetuated and sometimes undone in various institutional settings, such as the workplace, the dating/marriage market and in families.
Keoni Mahelona is currently building Te Reo Māori speech recognition tools including text to speech, speech to text, and measuring pronunciation. Mahelona’s main roles are project management and web development, primarily for koreromaori.com and koreromaori.io. They also built the indigenous media platform tehiku.nz which serves as a digital Marae for Te Hiku Media and the five Iwi of Muriwhenua. Their key contribution is the Kaitiakitanga License which serves to guard Indigenous data and IP from misuse while aiming to create opportunities for the advancement of Indigenous peoples.
Corina MacDonald is a SSHRC-funded PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her doctoral research focuses on self-archiving infrastructures and platforms as a site of inquiry for understanding the impact of datafication on humanities scholarly communication. She is a founding member of the archive+design collective MAT3RIAL (mat3rial.com), which works with cultural organizations, researchers and artists to develop web-based tools and publications.
Dr. Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor in Publishing @ SFU, where her research and teaching focuses on the links between publishing and social change, from the role podcasts might play in expanding public engagement with research, to systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry (https://hannahmcgregor.com/). She is the creator of the peer-reviewed, podcast Secret Feminist Agenda (https://secretfeministagenda.com).
Dr. Cait McKinney is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She was previously an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge. Formerly SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and Media@McGill Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, Montréal. She researches how queer and feminist social movements use new digital technologies to create and circulate information. She holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University, and has taught in communication studies, media and information studies, and sexuality studies. Her research is interested in how queer and feminist social movements use digital technologies to build alternative information infrastructures. She focuses on how these movements struggle to provide vital access to information using new digital tools, within conditions where that access is often precarious. For example, she has published on digitization strategies at queer community archives , lesbian-feminist newsletter networks, and community internet infrastructures built by AIDS activists.
Corina MacDonald is a SSHRC-funded PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her doctoral research focuses on self-archiving infrastructures and platforms as a site of inquiry for understanding the impact of datafication on humanities scholarly communication. She is a founding member of the archive+design collective MAT3RIAL (mat3rial.com), which works with cultural organizations, researchers and artists to develop web-based tools and publications.
Dr. Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor in Publishing @ SFU, where her research and teaching focuses on the links between publishing and social change, from the role podcasts might play in expanding public engagement with research, to systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry (https://hannahmcgregor.com/). She is the creator of the peer-reviewed, podcast Secret Feminist Agenda (https://secretfeministagenda.com).
Dr. Cait McKinney is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She was previously an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge. Formerly SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and Media@McGill Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, Montréal. She researches how queer and feminist social movements use new digital technologies to create and circulate information. She holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University, and has taught in communication studies, media and information studies, and sexuality studies. Her research is interested in how queer and feminist social movements use digital technologies to build alternative information infrastructures. She focuses on how these movements struggle to provide vital access to information using new digital tools, within conditions where that access is often precarious. For example, she has published on digitization strategies at queer community archives , lesbian-feminist newsletter networks, and community internet infrastructures built by AIDS activists.
Dr. Jess McLean does research on how humans, more-than-humans, environments and technologies interact to produce geographies of change. Her research focuses on digital technologies, feminist geographies, water politics, climate action and activism. She is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University where she currently teaches Anthropocene politics, planning placements, and Indigenous geographies. Her book Changing Digital Geographies: Technologies, Environments and People was published in 2020 and she is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Digital Geography and Society journal.
Metonymy Press of Montreal publishes literary fiction and nonfiction by emerging writers. The press tries to reduce barriers to publishing for authors whose perspectives are underrepresented in order to produce quality materials relevant to queer, feminist, and social justice communities. The founders of the press, Ashley Fortier and Oliver Fugler, will lead a workshop on small press publishing. The workshop will include information that is useful to people interested in setting up presses, working with small presses, and how to make publishing accessible to marginalized communities.Yeshimabeit Milner is the Founder & Executive Director of Data for Black Lives. She has worked since she was 17 behind the scenes as a movement builder, technologist and data scientist on a number of campaigns. She started Data for Black Lives because for too long she straddled the worlds of data and organizing and was determined to break down the silos to harness the power of data to make change in the lives of Black people. In two years, Data for Black Lives has raised over $3 million, hosted two sold out conferences at the MIT Media Lab and has changed the conversation around big data & technology across the US and globally. As the founder of Data for Black Lives, her work has received much acclaim. Yeshimabeit is an Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow and joins the founders of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street in the distinguished inaugural class of Roddenberry Foundation Fellows. In 2020, Yeshimabeit was honored as a Forbes 30 under 30 social entrepreneur.
Dr. Sarah Myers West is a postdoctoral researcher at the AI Now Institute of New York University and an affiliate researcher at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. Her research centers on the critical study of technology and culture, with an emphasis on historical and ethnographic methods. She is currently working on a project that addresses the politics of diversity and inclusion in technological communities by exploring the nexus of artificial intelligence, gender, and intersectionality. She received her doctoral degree from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in 2018, where her dissertation examined the cultural history and politics of encryption technologies from the 1960s to the present day. Her work is published in academic journals such as New Media & Society, Policy & Internet, Business and Society and the Internet Policy Review.
Dr. Sarah Myers West is a postdoctoral researcher at the AI Now Institute of New York University and an affiliate researcher at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. Her research centers on the critical study of technology and culture, with an emphasis on historical and ethnographic methods. She is currently working on a project that addresses the politics of diversity and inclusion in technological communities by exploring the nexus of artificial intelligence, gender, and intersectionality. She received her doctoral degree from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in 2018, where her dissertation examined the cultural history and politics of encryption technologies from the 1960s to the present day. Her work is published in academic journals such as New Media & Society, Policy & Internet, Business and Society and the Internet Policy Review.
Dr. Shawn Newman received his PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen's University. His research projects have included: reconciliation project in ballet; racialized and racializing spectatorship in both artistic and activist spaces; shifting arts funding models that continue to reinforce dominant Eurocentric aesthetic practices and values; disability and performance; and Canadian multicultural nationalism. He has taught in the Department of Gender Studies and the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University, and the Department of Dance at York University. He is currently the Managing Editor of Public, Director of Public Access, and a Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellow in Cinema and Media Arts at York. He will give a lecture about his role as both Managing Editor of Public and a Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellow. The basis of this talk will be his current research project, "Publishing Dis/ability and Public Access," in which he is investigating the ways that academic journals can re-design digital publications to centralize accessibility technologies, and why this is imperative for organizations that focus on visual cultures. The talk will also discuss the need to anticipate our readerships' needs instead of merely react to them.
Mimi Onuoha is a Nigerian-American, Brooklyn-based new media artist and researcher whose work deals with the missing and obscured remnants forged from a society based on automation. Through layerings of code, text, interventions, and objects, she seeks to explore the ways in which people are abstracted, represented, and classified. Onuoha has been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology, Studio XX, Data & Society Research Institute, Columbia University's Tow Center, and the Royal College of Art. Her exhibition and speaking credits include venues like La Gaitê Lyrique (France), FIBER Festival (Netherlands), Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (China), Le Centre Pompidou (France) and B4BEL4B Gallery (San Francisco). Her writing has appeared in Quartz, Nichons-nous Dans L'Internet, FiveThirtyEight, and K. Verlag. In 2014 she was selected to be in the inaugural class of Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows, and in 2017 she was nominated as a Technical.ly Brooklyn Artist of the Year. Onuoha earned her MPS from NYU Tisch's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she is currently a Researcher. Most recently she has been named the 2018-19 Creative-in-Residence at Olin College for Engineering. She will discuss how metrified societies require the fluid, organic, messiness of people to be secured, tagged, categorized, and abstracted. This event will be co-hosted with Montreal's Artificial Intelligence firm, Element AI.
Dr. Julie Podmore joined Concordia University's Geography Department as a part-time faculty member in 2000 and became an Affiliate Assistant Professor in 2010. From 2011-2015, she was a co-researcher with Diversité sexuelle, vulnérabilité et résilience, an interdisciplinary research team focusing on sexual minority youth and LGBTQ generations at UQAM. Her sustained research focus has been on the intersections between gender and sexuality in urban space, a perspective reflected in her publications on Montréal’s lesbian spaces and new research on "Queering Canadian suburbs". In addition to lecturing at Concordia, Julie is a tenured professor at John Abbott College and a research associate of the Chaire de recherche sur l’homophobie.
Deborah Raji is a Mozilla fellow, interested in topics of algorithmic auditing and evaluation. She has worked closely with the Algorithmic Justice League initiative on several award-winning projects to highlight cases of bias in computer vision. She has also worked with Google’s Ethical AI team and been a research fellow at the Partnership on AI and AI Now Institute at New York University working on various projects to operationalize ethical considerations in ML engineering practice.
Dr. Alessandra Renzi is Associate Professor, Communication Studies at Concordia University. Dr. Renzi’s interdisciplinary work explores the linkages and relays between media, art and civic engagement through community-led research, ethnographic studies and media projects. She has studied pirate television networks in Italy, the surveillance of social movements in Canada after 9-11 and housing and data justice in Indonesia. Her current research investigates how society’s increasing reliance on platforms, algorithms and AI is changing urban landscapes and community organizing alike. She is the PI of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant titled "On the Margins of the Platform Economy: Community-led Responses to Technical Gentrification," with focus on Montreal's Parc Extension neighbourhood.
Jenn Riley is Associate Dean, Digital Initiatives in the McGill University Library, in Montréal, Québec. She is a digital librarian, collaborator, inquirer, learner, and analyst. Her former positions include being Head of Carolina Digital Library and Archives, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Metadata Librarian for the Digital Library Program of Indiana University Libraries; and Digital Media Specialist for the Digital Library Program of Indiana University Libraries. The Digital Initiatives workshop will focus on open access scholarship and open data.
Caroline Running Wolf (Crow Nation), nee Old Coyote, is an enrolled member of the Apsáalooke Nation (Crow) in Montana, with a Swabian (German) mother and also Pikuni, Oglala, and Ho-Chunk heritage. As the daughter of nomadic parents, she grew up between USA, Canada, and Germany. Thanks to her genuine interest in people and their stories, she is a multilingual Cultural Acclimation Artist dedicated to supporting Indigenous language and culture vitality. After working for over 15 years as a professional nerd herder and business consultant in various fields, Running Wolf co-founded a nonprofit, Buffalo Tongue, with her husband, Michael Running Wolf. Together they create virtual and augmented reality experiences to advocate for Native American voices, languages, and cultures. Running Wolf has a Master’s degree in Native American Studies from Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Caroline's PhD research explores potential applications of immersive technologies (AR/VR/XR) and artificial intelligence to effectively enhance Indigenous language and culture reclamation. She is also passionate about Indigenous Data Sovereignty and AI ethics.
Michael Running Wolf (Northern Cheyenne/Lakota/Blackfeet) was raised in a rural prairie village in Montana with intermittent water and electricity; naturally he has a Master’s of Science in Computer Science, is a former engineer for Amazon’s Alexa, and is an instructor at Northeastern University. He was raised with a grandmother who only spoke his tribal language, Cheyenne, which like many indigenous languages is near extinction. By leveraging his advanced degree and professional engineering experience Michael hopes to strengthen the ecology of thought represented by the indigenous. Michael is pursuing Indigenous language and culture reclamation using immersive technologies (AR/VR/) and artificial intelligence. He is an AI ethicist and is currently building an automatic speech recognition system for Indigenous languages in the Pacific Northwest.
Morgan Klaus Scheuerman is a PhD Student of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on the intersection of technical infrastructure and marginalized identities. In particular, he examines how gender and race characteristics are embedded into algorithmic infrastructures and how those permeations influence the entire system. His recent work explores how gender and race classification in computer vision technologies excludes and endangers at-risk individuals.
Mindy Seu is a designer and researcher. She holds an M.Des from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from University of California, Los Angeles. As a fellow at the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, she began the digital Cyberfeminism Index, which was later commissioned by Rhizome and presented at the New Museum. The book Cyberfeminism Index is a 2021 recipient of the Graham Foundation Grant and will be published in Fall 2022. Seu has been a fellow at the Internet Archive, as well as a designer for 2×4’s Interactive Media team and the Museum of Modern Art’s in-house design studio. She has given lectures and workshops at Barbican Center, CalArts, Parsons, Pratt, RISD, Berkeley Art Museum, among others. Seu is currently an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.
Caroline Sinders is a machine-learning-design researcher and artist. For the past few years, she has been examining the intersections of technology’s impact in society, interface design, artificial intelligence, abuse, and politics in digital, conversational spaces. Sinders is the founder of Convocation Design + Research, an agency focusing on the intersections of machine learning, user research, designing for public good, and solving difficult communication problems. As a designer and researcher, she has worked with Amnesty International, Intel, IBM Watson, the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. Sinders has held fellowships with the Harvard Kennedy School, the Mozilla Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and the International Center of Photography. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Open Technology Fund and the Knight Foundation. Her work has been featured in the Tate Exchange in Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA PS1, LABoral, Ars Electronica, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Slate, Quartz, Wired, as well as others. Sinders holds a Masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Yuan (you-anne) Stevens is a research consultant specializing in public interest law, emerging technology, and computer security. She currently works as a Research Officer at the Cyberjustice Laboratory, housed at the Faculty of Law of Université de Montréal where she examines the impact of artificial intelligence on access to justice for vulnerable populations. She is a research affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute (NYC). She received her B.C.L./LL.B (JD) from McGill University in 2017, working as a research assistant for hacker expert Gabriella Coleman. One of her current academic projects is an ethnographic study focused on the labour experiences of hackers who participate in crowd-sourced vulnerability disclosure. She serves on the board of directors for Open Privacy Research Institute, Head & Hands in Montreal, and previously worked at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Yuan (you-anne) Stevens is a research consultant specializing in public interest law, emerging technology, and computer security. She currently works as a Research Officer at the Cyberjustice Laboratory, housed at the Faculty of Law of Université de Montréal where she examines the impact of artificial intelligence on access to justice for vulnerable populations. She is a research affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute (NYC). She received her B.C.L./LL.B (JD) from McGill University in 2017, working as a research assistant for hacker expert Gabriella Coleman. One of her current academic projects is an ethnographic study focused on the labour experiences of hackers who participate in crowd-sourced vulnerability disclosure. She serves on the board of directors for Open Privacy Research Institute, Head & Hands in Montreal, and previously worked at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the directory of the philosophical documentaries “What Is Democracy?” (TIFF 2018), “Examined Life” (TIFF 2008) and Zizek! (TIFF 2005); the author of the American Book Award Winner, “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Cultures in the Digital Age; and a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She has written for The New York times, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Walrus, The Baffler, n+1, and many other outlets. Her new book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, will be out from Metropolitan Books in early 2019. Astra Taylor will be talking about how new technologies frequently presented as offering solutions to the problems of traditional publishing more often than not reinforce pre-existing power dynamics.
Rackeb Tesfaye is a PhD student in the Program of Integrated Neuroscience at McGill University. Her research investigates biological and behavioural factors that contribute to elevated sleep disturbances in youth with autism. Tesfaye’s scientific projects involve analyzing large scale genomic and longitudinal sleep data. She also collaborates with researchers and families to develop novel approaches to include the diversity of perspectives and voices of youth with autism in scientific research. Outside of the lab, Tesfaye is a science communicator who creates audio stories and is an advocate for diversity and inclusion in STEM. She is the founder and executive producer of Broad Science. Rackeb is also a vocal supporter for accessible science communication training for graduate students. She currently sits on the organizing committee for ComSciCon Canada, the first Canada-wide science communication conference for graduate students.
Alice Wong (she/her) is a disabled activist, media maker, and consultant. She is the Founder and Director of the Disability Visibility Project® (DVP), an online community dedicated to creating, sharing and amplifying disability media and culture created in 2014. Currently, Alice is the Editor of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, an anthology of essays by disabled people, available now by Vintage Books (2020).
RéQEF Masterclass Speakers
Hilary Bergen is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University, where she studies screendance, posthumanism and feminist media history. She is also a trained dancer who holds a BA honours degree in Contemporary Dance from the University of Winnipeg and an MA in English Literature from Concordia. Her work has been published with Screening the Past, Culture Machine, Briarpatch, The Dance Current, PUBLIC(forthcoming) and Word and Text. Her paper is entitled, "Animating the Digital Trace: Embodiment and Relation in MikuMikuDance."
Priscilla Guy is a curator, dance artist, filmmaker and researcher sharing her life between Montreal and Marsoui (Gaspésie, Canada). She is a PhD candidate in film studies at Université de Lille - SHS (France). Her artistic work is presented internationally, and she contributes to different publication projects (Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, La creation en videodanza, Dance Current Magazine). She is founder of Mandoline Hybride (multidisciplinary creation company), Regards Hybrides (initiative dedicated to screendance), and Salon58 (tiny cultural space in Gaspésie). See more at mandolinehybride.com and regardshybrides.com. Her paper is entitled, “Anachronismes cinéchorégraphiés : l’impensé à travers corps, regards et paroles enchevêtrés.”
Yasmeen Hitti, Andrea Eunbee Jang, Carolyne Pelletier, and Ines Moreno are presenting their work entitled, “The Importance of Defining Gender Bias in Text in the Digital Era.” We are a group based out of MILA working on implicit gender bias in text using machine learning.
Magdalena Olszanowski is presenting, “Pleasurable is Political: Joyful Affinities & Intimate Friends (on the WWW).” She is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University. She is faculty in Cinema and Communication Studies at Dawson College and in Media Arts at John Abbott College. She has published and created work on gender, sound and image technologies, with a particular focus on the self-image and censorship in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, nomorepotlucks, n+1, and Visual Communication Quarterly. Her dissertation is focused on feminist internet histories of the 1990s.
Special thanks to:
Kim Reany and Andrew Folco of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies for helping process paperwork and book rooms
Research Assistants: Hyeyoon Cho, Hana Darling Wolf, Amy Brant Edward, Dominique Grégoire, Sophie Ogilvie-Hanson, Thai Hwang J, Kari Kuo, Charlene Lewis Sutherland, Astrid Mohr, Mohammed Odusanya, Meera Raman, and Adi Sneg at the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab.
RéQEF Masterclass Speakers
Hilary Bergen is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University, where she studies screendance, posthumanism and feminist media history. She is also a trained dancer who holds a BA honours degree in Contemporary Dance from the University of Winnipeg and an MA in English Literature from Concordia. Her work has been published with Screening the Past, Culture Machine, Briarpatch, The Dance Current, PUBLIC(forthcoming) and Word and Text. Her paper is entitled, "Animating the Digital Trace: Embodiment and Relation in MikuMikuDance."
Priscilla Guy is a curator, dance artist, filmmaker and researcher sharing her life between Montreal and Marsoui (Gaspésie, Canada). She is a PhD candidate in film studies at Université de Lille - SHS (France). Her artistic work is presented internationally, and she contributes to different publication projects (Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, La creation en videodanza, Dance Current Magazine). She is founder of Mandoline Hybride (multidisciplinary creation company), Regards Hybrides (initiative dedicated to screendance), and Salon58 (tiny cultural space in Gaspésie). See more at mandolinehybride.com and regardshybrides.com. Her paper is entitled, “Anachronismes cinéchorégraphiés : l’impensé à travers corps, regards et paroles enchevêtrés.”
Yasmeen Hitti, Andrea Eunbee Jang, Carolyne Pelletier, and Ines Moreno are presenting their work entitled, “The Importance of Defining Gender Bias in Text in the Digital Era.” We are a group based out of MILA working on implicit gender bias in text using machine learning.
Magdalena Olszanowski is presenting, “Pleasurable is Political: Joyful Affinities & Intimate Friends (on the WWW).” She is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University. She is faculty in Cinema and Communication Studies at Dawson College and in Media Arts at John Abbott College. She has published and created work on gender, sound and image technologies, with a particular focus on the self-image and censorship in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, nomorepotlucks, n+1, and Visual Communication Quarterly. Her dissertation is focused on feminist internet histories of the 1990s.
Special thanks to:
Kim Reany and Andrew Folco of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies for helping process paperwork and book rooms
Research Assistants: Hyeyoon Cho, Hana Darling Wolf, Amy Brant Edward, Dominique Grégoire, Sophie Ogilvie-Hanson, Thai Hwang J, Kari Kuo, Charlene Lewis Sutherland, Astrid Mohr, Mohammed Odusanya, Meera Raman, and Adi Sneg at the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab.