Sophie Toupin
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.
Contact: sophie.toupin@mail.mcgill.ca
Projects
Critical perspectives on Artificial Intelligence (Postdoctoral Research Project; Concordia University, ongoing) investigates first, how intersectional feminist and decolonial digital activists and scholars from the global South and North frame their narrative around artificial intelligence (AI). New critical discourses and practices on AI including feminist AI and decolonial AI have emerged around specific communities as a response to sexist, racist, anti-poor and anti-migrant bias/power/colonial relations in AI systems. Second, I investigate the ways in which governments are experimenting with emerging technologies to control, mediate the experience of and govern migrants. The project is supported by Concordia University Horizon program.
Feminist data, datasets and infrastructures: social justice, solidarity and fugitivity (Postdoctoral Research Project; University of Amsterdam, 2020-2021) investigated a) how feminist digital activists build, maintain, and understand their technologies as feminist infrastructures (b) the role of such infrastructures in the establishment and maintenance of transnational solidarity among feminist digital activists and women’s rights organizations; and (c) the fugitive character of many of these infrastructures that—as in apartheid South Africa—facilitate resistance to unjust laws, and unequal access to technology and infrastructure. The project was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC) post-doctoral fellowship.
Technically Subversive: Encrypted Communication in the South African National Liberation Struggle (PhD dissertation; McGill University, completed in 2021) investigates an encrypted communication system developed by the African National Congress Technical Committee and used by freedom fighters during the South African national liberation struggle. The system is examined as a social and political project, through contemporary accounts of the politics of infrastructure, particularly in the Global South, and through the history of media and communication in revolutionary and liberation struggles. The project was supported by Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship award recipient (2016-2019).
Publications
Christian Pentzold, Mathieu O’Neil and Sophie Toupin (Eds.). (2021). “The Handbook on Peer Production,” Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. (Infrastructure, Media)
Stéphane Couture and Sophie Toupin. (2019). “What Does the Concept of ‘Sovereignty’ Mean in Digital, Network and Technological Sovereignty?,” New Media and Society, 21(10), 2305–2322. (Infrastructure, Media)
Sophie Toupin (2016). “Gesturing Towards Anti-Colonial Hacking and Its Infrastructure,” Journal of Peer Production, 12, 1-27. http://peerproduction.net/editsuite/issues/issue-9-alternative-internets/peer-reviewed-papers/anti-colonial-hacking/ (Infrastructure, Media)