Speaker Series

Join us for Media Archaeology

Featuring Arun Jacob

Talk Title: BiblioTech Sbagliato: Pursuing Paywalls, Publishers, and Platforms in Research Information Management Systems

Date: January 25, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: THINC Lab, 2nd Floor, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph

Speaker Bio: Arun Jacob (he/him) is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. He completed his Master of Arts in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory and Master of Arts in Work and Society at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, and his Master of Professional Communication from Toronto Metropolitan University. Arun's doctoral work unites media genealogy, intersectional feminist media studies, and critical university studies to explore how contemporary university data management techniques and information management systems shape our socio-cultural relations, experiences, and knowledge.

Featuring Paula Nuñez de Villavicencio

Talk Title: Human-Wearable relationships: A Digital Humanities approach through Patents

Date: February 15th, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: THINC Lab, 2nd Floor, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph

Speaker Bio: Paula Nunez de Villavicencio is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and a Jackman Humanities Graduate Fellow. Her research focuses on the historical and political dimensions of media technology used for the governance and surveillance of select populations. Specifically, her work looks at wearable technology and their role in shaping human conduct in different information systems, as well as their ethical implications. In broader terms, she is interested in information behaviours and practices, wearable technology, systems of AR, digital humanities and ethics. This research is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Featuring Kanika Lawton

Talk Title: Genealogies of Pain: Wounded Attachments and the Queer/Trans Archive.

Date: March 7th, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: THINC Lab, 2nd Floor, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph

Speaker Bio: Kanika Lawton is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, as well as a 2023-2024 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellow with the Evasion Lab at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Their SSHRC-funded research foregrounds an aesthetic and political critique of surveillance, arguing that it both preludes and produces scenes of violence via appeals to neutrality. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Spectator and Media Fields.

Featuring Aaron Tucker

Talk Title: Media Archeology and Critical Digital Humanities: The Symbiotic Technical, Representational and Political Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies

Date: April 4th, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: THINC Lab, 2nd Floor, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph

Speaker Bio: Aaron Tucker’s dissertation “The Flexible Face: Unifying the Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies” was defended March 2023 and studied the cinema of facial recognition technologies and their impacts on citizenship, mobility, and crisis, receiving the Governor General’s Gold Medal. During his graduate studies he was an Elia Scholar, a VISTA doctoral Scholar, and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral fellow; in addition, his graduate writing has won the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada Graduate Student Essay Prize as well as the The Ian Lancashire Promise Award at The Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. In September 2023, he began a SSHRC post-doctoral position at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Information recreating the Canadian history of artificial intelligence as a techno-national project.