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 and Director 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. Ketchum is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University (IGSF). From July 2018- August 2023, she was the Faculty Lecturer of the IGSF. 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) and Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses. Ketchum led a 2-hour workshop on public facing scholarship and website design. She worked with participants to begin building their own websites to make their research results accessible to the public.
Presenters
isted in alphabetical order.
NB: These were their bios at the time of their presentation. Some of the speakers have since changed positions.
Founder and Director 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. Ketchum is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University (IGSF). From July 2018- August 2023, she was the Faculty Lecturer of the IGSF. 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) and Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses. Ketchum led a 2-hour workshop on public facing scholarship and website design. She worked with participants to begin building their own websites to make their research results accessible to the public.
Dr. Kath Albury is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, leading the 'Digital and data capabilities for sexual health ' project. She is also an Associate Investigator in the Swinburne University of Technology Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. She is a Chief Investigator on the Swedish/Australian collaboration 'Digital sexual health: Designing for safety, pleasure and wellbeing in LGBTQ+ communities'. Kath's past projects investigated young people’s practices of digital self-representation, and the role of user-generated media (including social networking platforms and dating apps) in young people’s formal and informal sexual learning, safety and wellbeing practices. Her recent co-authored books include: Everyday Data Cultures' (with Jean Burgess, Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken, Polity 2022) and Data for Social Good: Non-Profit Sector Data Projects (with Jane Farmer, Anthony McCosker and Amir Aryani, Palgrave Macmillan Open Access 2023).
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.
Dr. Abeba Birhane is a cognitive scientist researching human behaviour, social systems, and responsible and ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI). Her interdisciplinary research explores various broad themes in embodied cognitive science, machine learning, complexity science, and theories of decoloniality. Her work includes audits of computational models and large scale datasets. Birhane is a Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation and an Adjunct Assistant professor at the school of computer science and statistics, Trinity College Dublin.
Danielle Boyer is a 22-year-old Indigenous (Ojibwe) and Queer robotics inventor and advocate for youth who has been teaching kids since she was ten. Driven by her families own inability to afford science and technology education, she is passionate about making education accessible and representative for her community so that no child is left behind. Danielle creates equitable and innovative learning solutions for Indigenous youths with robots that she designs, manufactures, and gives away for free. In 2019 at age eighteen, she created The STEAM Connection, a minority and youth-led charity that has reached hundreds of thousands of children worldwide with technical education with an emphasis on language revitalization. The STEAM Connection focuses on the future: ushering in a new age of education via personal and wearable robotics, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality. Informed by the past and present, The STEAM Connection utilizes traditional knowledge to uplift and protect Indigenous communities with an emphasis on language. Her goal is not necessarily to get youth into STEM careers but rather to equip them with the skills to solve the problems that they see in their communities now.
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).
Becky Chambers is a science fiction author based in Northern California, best known for her Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series. Her varied works have also been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Women's Prize for Fiction, among others. Her latest book is the upcoming novella A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (July 2022), the second of her Monk and Robot series.
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. Marika Cifor is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at University of Washington and an adjunct faculty member in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. She is a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. My research investigates how individuals and communities marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and HIV-status are represented and how they document and represent themselves in archives and digital cultures. This multidisciplinary scholarship uncovers how archives and digital technologies and cultures are shaping identities, experiences, and social movements. Cifor's book, Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activisms alive. It charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it and the activation of these records on contemporary digital platforms by artists, archivists, and activists. Archives allow us to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic’s past in order to remake AIDS’ present and future. In addition, Cifo's research has been published in leading journals in information studies, communication and media studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
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.
Stacey Copeland (she/her/hers) is a media producer and Joseph-Armand Bombardier (SSHRC) Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver, Canada. Copeland's doctoral research focuses on lesbian and queer feminist audio media. She received her Master of Arts from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture graduate program with a concentration in radio production, sound studies, media culture and gender studies. It was during her Master’s work that Copeland co-founded FemRadio, a Toronto, Canada based feminist community radio collective. She is currently the project manager and supervising producer of the scholarly podcasting initiative Amplify Podcast Network. Website: staceycopeland.com/
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. Kate Crawford (she/her) is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. Her work has focused on understanding large-scale data systems, machine learning and AI in the wider contexts of history, politics, labor, and the environment. She is a Research Professor of Communication and STS at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR-NYC, and she currently holds the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, In 2021, she will be the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. Her academic research has been published in journals such as Nature, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values and Information, Communication & Society. Kate’s work also includes collaborative art projects and visual investigations. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler – which maps the full lifecycle of the Amazon Echo– won the Beazley Design of the Year Award in 2019, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She also collaborated with the artist Trevor Paglen to produce Training Humans – the first major exhibition of the images used to train AI systems. Their investigative essay, Excavating AI, won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. Crawford's latest book, Atlas of AI, is published by Yale University Press in 2021.
Avery Dame-Griff is a Lecturer in Women's and Gender Studies at Gonzaga University. He founded and serves as primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project (queerdigital.com), an independent community history project cataloging and archiving pre-2010 LGBTQ spaces online. In 2022, he was selected to be a Public Humanities Fellow for Humanities Washington, developing a series of interactive online exhibits, teaching guides, and workshops about the history of LBGTQ+ communities in online spaces.
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.
Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist and professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. She creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded artificial intelligent ecosystems. Dinkins’ art practice employs lens-based practices, emerging technologies, and community engagement to confront questions of bias in AI, data sovereignty and social equity. Investigations into the contradictory histories, traditions, knowledge bases, and philosophies that form/in-form society at large underpin her thought and art production. (https://www.stephaniedinkins.com/about.html)
Dr. Stefanie Duguay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada. She is a Concordia University Research Chair and Director of the Digital Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality (DIGS) Lab where her research focuses on the intersection of digital technologies and media with representations and practices pertaining to intimate life, relationships, gender, and sexuality. This has involved studies of LGBTQ+ people’s social media participation, dating apps, platform appropriation and governance, discourses of automation and algorithmic neutrality, and the role of platforms and mobile media in queer social landscapes. @DugStef
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.
Rose Eveleth is a writer and producer who explores how humans tangle with science and technology. She’s the creator of Flash Forward Presents and host of Flash Forward and Advice For And From The Future. In her work, she’s covered everything from fake tumbleweed farms to million dollar baccarat heists. She helped launch ESPN’s 30 for 30 Podcast and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Nautilus Magazine, CBS, Racked, Scientific American, Eater, The New York Times, Fusion, VICE, Five Thirty Eight and more. She co-edited the 2018 edition of What Future: The Year's Best Writing on What's Next for People, Technology, and the Planet, her work has appeared in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, and she has a forthcoming comics/essay hybrid that tackles big ideas about the future coming out in March. (https://www.flashforwardpod.com/book/)
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. Margaret Galvan (she/her) is Assistant Professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. In her research, she examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s, recovering artists and their networks.
Nicole J. Georges is a writer, illustrator, podcaster & professor from Portland, OR. Nicole has been publishing autobiographical comics about her queer vegan life for the past 25 years, evolving from teen zinester to graphic novelist. Her Lambda Award-winning graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura, was called “engrossing, lovable, smart and ultimately poignant” by Rachel Maddow, and “disarming and haunting, hip and sweet, all at once” by Alison Bechdel. Allô, dr Laura? was an Official Selection at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. She has adapted Calling Dr. Laura into an Edward R. Murrow-award-winning podcast series, called Relative Fiction, with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Nicole’s latest book, Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home, is the recipient of 2 Oregon Book Awards, and a Lambda nomination for best Graphic Novel. It received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and the Library Journal, and was voted a 2018 “Great Graphic Novel for Teens” by The American Library Association. It is currently in development for television with Sid Gentle Productions.
Dr. Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible) is a leading critic of surveillance technology, digital privacy, and the problematic ways that tech intersects with race and social class. He will talk about the digital forms of surveillance that are coming into schools, colleges, and universities. Dr. Chris Gilliard is a writer, professor and speaker. His scholarship concentrates on digital privacy, and the intersections of race, class, and technology. He is an advocate for critical and equity-focused approaches to tech in education. His work has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, EDUCAUSE Review, Fast Company, Vice, and Real Life Magazine. He was recently a research fellow with the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center.
Dr. Brenna Clarke Gray is a critical educational technologist working as a practitioner/researcher and theorist. She is also an academic podcaster. Her focus is on the ethical, accessible, and care-informed use of digital tools in education.
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.
Dr. Mél Hogan is the host of The Data Fix podcast and the Director of the Environmental Media Lab (EML). She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University. Her research focuses on data centres and infrastructure, understood from within the contexts of settler-colonial extractivism, planetary catastrophe, and collective anxieties about the future. http://melhogan.com
Khari Johnson was a senior writer for WIRED covering artificial intelligence and the positive and negative ways AI shapes human lives. He was previously a senior writer at VentureBeat, where he wrote stories about power, policy, and novel or noteworthy uses of AI by businesses and governments. He also worked for AOL’s Patch, Business 2.0 Magazine, and San Diego News Network, with contributions to publications like Real Future (now part of Univision), the San Francisco Chronicle, and Voice of San Diego.
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.
Tamara Kneese is Senior Researcher and Project Director at Data & Society Research Institute’s AIMLab (Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab). Before joining D&S, she was Lead Researcher at the Green Software Foundation, Director of Developer Engagement on the Green Software team at Intel, and Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities studies at the University of San Francisco. Tamara’s research juxtaposes histories of computing and automation with ethnographies of platform labor. Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text and Social Media + Society and in popular outlets including LARB, The Verge, The Atlantic, and Logic Magazine. In her spare time, Tamara is a volunteer with the Tech Workers Coalition. She holds a Ph.D. from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.
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.
Dr. Sasha Luccioni is a researcher in ethical and sustainable artificial intelligence at HuggingFace, as well as a Founding Member of Climate Change AI and a Board Member of Women in Machine Learning. Dr. Luccioni's work focuses on having a better understanding of the societal and environmental impacts of AI models, datasets and systems.
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. Shannon Mattern is a contributing writer for Places. Mattern’s research and teaching address how the forms and materialities of media are related to the spaces (architectural, urban, and conceptual) they create and inhabit. She writes about libraries and archives, media infrastructures, the material qualities of media objects, media companies’ headquarters and sites of media-related labor, place branding, public design projects, urban media art, and mediated sensation. She is the author of The New Downtown Library; Deep Mapping the Mxedia City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by the University of Minnesota Press. Her latest book, A City Is Not a Computer, the second volume of Places Books, is an expansion of several of her Places articles.
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/](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.
indee mitchell (they/them/theirs, he/him/his) is a New Orleans based performance artist, cultural organizer and Queer Black feminist interested in creating experimental and community centered work rooted in collective liberation and healing. Heavily influenced by Black DIY/alternative cultures and a radical politic of resistance, indee has traveled and performed original work around the US slowly planting seeds with many BIPOC Trans & Queer communities, rural and urban alike. indee has been living in New Orleans since 2013, where he is currently a co-director of Last Call (www.lastcallnola.org) and LOUD--New Orleans Black Queer Youth Theater Ensemble (www.loudnola.org). As a community taught archivist and TGNC (trans and gender non conforming) youth advocate, indee believes in the power and importance of looking back at history to create a more just future moving forward.
Nina Morena is a PhD student in Communication Studies. She holds an MA in Media Studies from Concordia University and a BA in English Literature from McGill University. Her doctoral research explores the ways in which breast cancer patients seek and share health information on social media and how this impacts their disease management. Her research interests include the gendered politics and public discourses surrounding women’s cancers. She is particularly interested in intersections of gender and illness and how medical misinformation travels through platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
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. Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. They’re also the author of the novels The Terraformers (forthcoming in January 2023), The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a journalist, they are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.
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.
Tawana Petty is a mother, social justice organizer, poet, author, and facilitator. Her work focuses on racial justice, equity, privacy, and consent. She is a 2023-2025 Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council, a 2024 National LIO Yearlong Fellow with the Rockwood Leadership Institute, and serves on the CS for Detroit Steering Committee. Petty is an alumni fellow of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford PACS, the Detroit Equity Action Lab, and Art Matters, and has been a convening member of the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition since 2016. She also serves as the founding Executive Director of Petty Propolis, a Black women-led artist incubator primarily focused on cultivating visionary resistance through poetry, literacy and literary workshops, anti-racism facilitation, and community-centered initiatives. She is a former co-lead of Our Data Bodies and has previously served as Data Justice Director for the Detroit Community Technology Project, National Organizing Director at Data for Black Lives and Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Algorithmic Justice League. Petty has been honored with several awards. She was honored with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition and with Wayne State University’s Center for Peace and Conflict Studies Peacemaker Award in 2018. In 2021, she was named one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics, and in 2023, Petty was honored with the AI Policy Leader in Civil Society Award by the Center for AI and Digital Policy.
Beth Pickens is a Los Angeles-based consultant for artists and arts organizations. She is the author of Make Your Art No Matter What (Chronicle Books, 2021.) Her previous book is Your Art Will Save Your Life (Feminist Press, 2018). Her pamphlets—Making Art During Fascism and On Artists and Hopelessness—were designed and distributed by the Feminist Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles. Her popular podcast, Mind Your Practice, is widely available as is her artist service program, Homework Club. Pickens earned her Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of Missouri. Since 2010, she’s provided career consultation, grant writing, fundraising, and financial, project, and strategic planning services for artists and arts organizations throughout the U.S. She previously taught at the California Institute of the Arts School of Theater and continues to teach at universities, companies, and art spaces throughout the U.S.
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.
Joy Lisi Rankin is the author of “A People’s History of Computing in the United States.” She earned her PhD from Yale University in 2015 and was an Exchange Scholar at MIT during 2012-2014, and a Visiting Scholar (postdoctoral fellow) at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences during 2015-16. In 2018, she fired Michigan State University in protest, choosing to leave her tenure-track position after publication of her book. She is currently a Research Scholar at New York University, where she leads the research program in Gender, Race, and Power in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the AI Now Institute.
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.
Revital Software is a small company that works with Indigenous communities to create interactive language revitalization software. Revital Software was founded by Kahentawaks and Wennekerakon Tiewishaw.
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.
Dr. Aron Lee Rosenberg graduated from DISE's PhD program in the spring of 2023, after completing a study with high school students and teachers about how their online practices connect them to issues of social and environmental justice. His research drew from institutional ethnography and arts-based methodologies to investigate and help develop students’ critical digital literacy practices. Earlier in his time at McGill, Aron spent a year offline to explore how his own student experiences were shaped by the digital world. Before grad school, Aron was a high school teacher in Vancouver, and before that, grew up in Edmonton.
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.
A Virginia Tech faculty member since 2011, Dr. Ashely Shew received a Certificate of Teaching Excellence in 2017 and a Diversity Award in 2016, both from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. Also in 2016, she received the Sally Bohland Award for Excellence in Access and Inclusion from the Virginia Tech office of Services for Students with Disabilities.
Anna Sigrithur (she/her) is a writer, artist and audio producer specializing in food from a critical feminist and decolonial perspective. She has produced a series of podcasts for Noma's Nordic Food Lab Radio about the life of Sami reindeer herders in Swedish Sápmi and currently works as the producer of Ox Tales, the podcast for the Oxford Food Symposium in the UK. https://www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/podcast/
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.
Dr. sava saheli singh is an Assistant Professor at York University. She was previously a Research Fellow, Surveillance, Society and Technology at the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology and Society and was previously the eQuality-Scotiabank Postdoctoral Fellow in AI and Surveillance. sava saheli singh received her PhD from New York University’s Educational Communication and Technology program. Her dissertation, titled “Academic Twitter: Pushing the Boundaries of Traditional Scholarship”, addresses how 21st-century academics negotiate their professional identities as a complex form of emotional, intellectual, and academic labor and the ways in which this helps and hinders their academic and personal lives. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her current research interests include educational surveillance; digital labour and surveillance capitalism; restorative justice and abolition; speculative fiction; and critically examining the effects of technology and techno-utopianism on society.
Dr. Luke Stark is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies (FIMS) at Western University in London, Ontario. He researches the ethical, historical, and social impacts of computational technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Stark is particularly animated by how these technologies mediate social and emotional expression, and are reshaping, for better and worse, our relationships to labor, collective action, and each other. Stark's current book project, Ordering Emotion: Histories of Computing and Human Feelings from Cybernetics to AI, is a history of affective computing and the digital quantification of human emotion, from 1950s cybernetics to today’s social media platforms.
Dr. Catherine Knight Steele is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland - College Park where she serves as the Director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and part of the DISCO Network. Her research focus is race, gender and media with specific focus on Black culture and discourse and digital communication. Dr. Steele's book, Digital Black Feminism builds on her decade-long research into the Black blogosphere of the early 2000s as sites which replicated features of black oral culture in order to engage in political discourse in seemingly apolitical spaces. Digital Black Feminism considers the ‘magic’ of Black women, operating in digital spaces in ways that far surpass the possibilities that were imagined for them. Black women's technological capability and intentional discourses of resistance drafted online are predicated upon their historically unique position of having to exist in multiple worlds, manipulate multiple technologies, and maximize their resources for survival in a system created to keep them from thriving. Through close readings of texts on blogs, Twitter, and Instagram and in analysis of content and form, she demonstrates how the use of online technology by Black feminist thinkers has changed the outcome of Black feminist writing and simultaneously has changed the technologies themselves. More recently she has explored the interwoven concepts of resistance, joy, and death as found in discourses of Black communities on TikTok and Instagram. Her work has appeared such journals as Social Media + Society, Television and New Media, Information, Communication and Society and Feminist Media Studies. Dr. Steele was the founding director of the first African American Digital Humanities Initiative (Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture: An integrated research and training model). Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AADHum 1 fostered research, education and training at the intersections of digital humanities and African American studies, and prepared a diverse community of scholars and students whose work has broadened the reach of the digital humanities in African American history and cultural studies, and enriched humanities research with new methods, archives and tools.
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.
Studio Ekosi uses narrative-driven games and animated films, to create moments of joy, worlds that spark wonder, and characters people see themselves in. Studio Esoki was founded by Keara and Caeleigh Lightning.
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.
Dr. Sophie Toupin is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Concordia University (Horizon program) where she examines critical perspectives in artificial intelligence. Sophie completed her PhD in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Québec, Canada. Her doctoral research examined the relationship between communication technologies and anti-colonialism in the context of the national liberation struggle in South Africa. She is one of the three co-editors of The Handbook of Peer Production (Wiley, 2021) and has published in New Media & Society, Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature, and Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, and Journal of Peer Production, among others.
Christine H. Tran (they/she) is a multimedia artist, digital consultant, and PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information Their SSHRC-funded dissertation explores the interplay of gender, race, and domestic labour in the careers of women and racialized live streamers. Christine has been appointed to Graduate Fellowships at the Centre for Culture & Technology (2022-23) and Massey College (2019--) and was a Research Assistant on the SSHRC-funded project Cultural Workers Organize. Their writing on Internet culture, digital labour, and liveness in ludic media has been published in peerreviewed journals such as Television & New Media, Communication, Culture & Critique and New Media & Society. https://thechristinet.wordpress.com/
Dr. Jaipreet Virdi is an award-winning historian whose research focuses on the ways medicine and technology impact the lived experiences of disabled people. Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (University of Chicago Press, 2020) raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. She has published articles on diagnostic technologies, audiometry, hearing aids, and the medicalization of deafness. As an educator, Dr. Virdi has taught at Ryerson University, the University of Toronto, and Brock University. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of History at the University of Delaware where she teaches courses on disability histories, the history of medicine, and health activism. She also serves as Co-Director of the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture.
Meredith Whittaker is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the AI NOW Institute of NYU. The AI Now Institute produces interdisciplinary research on the social implications of artificial intelligence and acts as a hub for the emerging field focused on these issues. Whittaker is a Distinguished Research Scientist at New York University, and the founder and lead of Google’s Open Research group. She has over a decade of experience working in industry, leading product and engineering teams. She co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement system that provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. M-Lab provides one of the primary resources for policymakers and researchers investigating issues of net neutrality and network performance. She has worked extensively on issues of privacy and security, advising on both policy direction and technical implementation. She co-founded Simply Secure, helped build and currently advises the Open Technology Fund, and led work to strengthen the security of critical internet infrastructure. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on artificial intelligence, internet policy, measurement, privacy, and security.
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).
Alisha B. Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Wormsley’s work is dedicated to the expansion and creation of time and space and the rematriation of Black/Indigenous Matriarch. Alisha is a mother, and founder of Sibyls Shrine, an arts collective and residency program for Black artists who M/other and her project There Are Black People In The Future both focus on the redistribution of resources and reimagination of Black futures. Wormsley is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, 2023 Creative Time Commission Public Artist with Suzanne Kite and 2023 Anonymous Was a Woman and New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Environmental Art Grants Recipient and Sundance Interdisciplinary Grantee. In 2024 she begins her appointment as Assistant Professor of Art in the area of Social Practice at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work centers on the history of human sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), the history of technology, feminist STS, and media theory. She is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University in the Luddy School of Informatics. Additionally, she is a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference. Zeavin’s first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy is now out from MIT Press, with a Foreword by John Durham Peters. She is at work on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2024). Other academic work has appeared in or is forthcoming from differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, Technology and Culture, American Imago, Media, Culture, and Society, and elsewhere. Essays and other public writing have appeared or are forthcoming from Bookforum, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine,The Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, The New York Review of Books, Slate, The Washington Post, and beyond. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis Magazine. She is also an Associate Editor at Psychoanalysis & History and an Editorial Associate of The Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association.
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, Andrew Folco, and Si Yu Li of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies for helping process paperwork and book rooms
Research Assistants: Esli Chan, Hyeyoon Cho, Kit Chokly, 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.