Member Projects 

ATOUI 

Counter/visualizing the Syrian refugee crisis (doctoral project; ongoing) engages with a selection of images that constitute the visual field of the Syrian refugee crisis. The aim is to examine the constitutive role images play in articulating the crisis as a socio- political event, as well as to investigate the social and political effects of this articulation. This research maps the multiple and contradictory perspectives that constitute the visual culture of the Syrian refugee crisis as a highly politicized field of struggle, critically examines the ways in which visual mediations enact various modes of governance and of political praxis. 

Making Revolution: Collective Histories, Desired Futures (co-organizer, April 1-May 1. 2021, Montreal, Arts Interculturels): this exhibition explores forms of struggle and revolution in the Middle East and North Africa through video art and installation.  

Intimacy and The Politics of The Image (co-organizer, February 2021): this interdisciplinary conference engages with theories and methodologies of intimacy together with the political potential of images.  

Beyrouth plusieurs fois (Co-organizer August 27), a solidarity and fundraising outdoor screening program of short films from/on Beirut, Montreal.

The Political Imaginary of Waiting (co-organizer, Sept. 2018- March 2019): a graduate students reading group and a public screening/lecture series exploring the politics, poetics and aesthetics of waiting through the lens of media and communication studies. This project culminated with a workshop led by guest artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas on decolonial artistic practices and political activism.

Nakba Archive: Fragments from the Palestinian Expulsion (Research Assistant to Dr. Diana Allan, Dept. of Anthropology on book project, 2018-2019). This book draws on a unique collection of refugee stories of the 1948 displacement gathered in the Nakba Archive, and addresses the significance of oral histories and narratives for collective liberation and cultural resistance in the Palestinian context.  

Dissonant Integrations, (Co-organizer, March 5-April 2): this multimedia exhibition and video program investigates disruption as a tool to challenge dominant representations of race, ethnicity and other forms of fixed identities. Organized as part of the Ethnocultural Art Histories Research project, Z Art Space, Montreal.  

Abu-Dhabi’s Louvre, Guggenheim and Zayed National Museum: Mediating a “New Global Arabism” (MA Major Research Paper; Concordia University, completed 2015). This research examines Abu Dhabi’s museum boom as a point of entry for critically investigating the politics of the cultural production of the United Arab Emirates — as a young modernizing Arab nation, an emerging economy marked by a high scale of labor migration, and a society mainly composed of migrant communities — against the background of 21st century globalization, interrogating its significance as well as relevance at this specific postcolonial, post-oil discovery historic moment.  

AUERBACH 

Fragmented Abundance: Disjunction and Uncertainty in a Solar Economy (MA thesis; McGill University, completed 2019) examined the infrastructural management of uncertainty on the California electrical grid, using this case to develop questions about political economy, planning, and revolutionary form via Marx, Deleuze and Guattari, Harney and Moten, et al. The project was supervised by Darin Barney and supported by a Wolfe Graduate Fellowship (McGill University, 2018). 

BARNEY 

Energy Media: The Politics of Solid-Phase Bitumen investigates the emergence of solid-phase bitumen as a format for the transportation, storage and commercialization of bitumen extracted from the Athabasca oil sands.  The project explores: the comparative environmental and economic benefits and liabilities of this format; the political implications of the infrastructures required to produce, contain, transport and process it; the regulatory and legal implications of solid-phase bitumen; the possible effects of this format on modes of political advocacy, organization and deliberation concering the extractive economy in Canada; and how solid-phase bitumen affects relations of economic and political power in the energy sector, including relationships between the energy sector, environmentalists and in-line communities.  The project is supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant.  

Solarity is an international collaboration of the After Oil collective that explores the social, cultural and political conditions implicated in transitions to solar energy. Commencing at the 2019 After Oil School held in Montreal, the project involves multiple collaborative publications and research outputs that inquire into the history and present of diverse cultures of solarity, and what they teach us about solarity as a social condition and possibility. What infrastructures, architectures, institutions, practices and relationships are implicated, or unsettled, by solarity? What are the obstacles to solarity? Under what conditions might solarity imply solidarity? What will solarity look, feel and sound like? This project is supported by a SSHRC Connections Grant, Future Energy Systems (University of Alberta) and the Petrocultures Research Group. 

Grain Media: Infrastructure and the Subjects of Prairie Agriculture investigates the transformation of the infrastructures of grain-handling and marketing in the Canadian prairies, and its relationship to dominant, residual and emergent political subjectivities in the region. It traces large-scale changes to systems of grain elevation and storage, railroads, and grain marketing as material media of shifts in political orientation, as well as resistance to these shifts. This project was funded by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant. 

BRODIE 

Clouds and Bogs: Infrastructure, Data, and Energy across the Irish Border (postdoctoral research project; upcoming) investigates historical and emergent entanglements of data and energy infrastructure across the land border separating the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, looking at how the socio-cultural and political aspects of technological infrastructure and extraction are being navigated in a post-conflict and Brexit environment. The project is supported by an FRQSC Bourse Postdoctorale. 

Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Built Space in Post-Financial Crisis Ireland (doctoral dissertation; ongoing) investigates the transnational politics of spatial development in relation to Irish media industries. Across three case studies – the financialized “creative city”; media policy during austerity; and the spatial development and environmental politics of data centers – the project unpacks the logics of infrastructural development which subsume culture, space, and labour into the circulatory values of foreign direct investment. In doing so, the dissertation identifies a series of pervasive and ongoing naturalizations which condition territories for exploitation and extraction. The project is supported by an FRQSC Bourse de doctorat en recherche pour étudiants étrangers (DS). 

The Labour of Media (Studies): Activism, Education, and Industry (conference/research collective/special issue; completed) was a collective project, designed, led, and run by Concordia PhD students, which confronted issues of precarity at the nexus of academic and media work. Through an international conference in 2018, the initiative spawned a special issue of Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies which included contributions from an array of scholars debating the present and future states of labour in media and academia. (PI: medialabour collective) 

HAYES 

An Intersectional Analysis of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Rulemaking Process (MA Thesis; McGill University, completed 2020) explored the participatory rulemaking procedures for disaster protocol in the United States. It specifically examined the public comments on FEMA’s first National Response Framework to determine if intersectional considerations were included and if FEMA’s rulemaking procedures provided marginalized victims of natural disaster with spaces for representation.  

KINDER 

Between Foreclosure and Possibility: Energy Imaginaries in the Contemporary Canadian Mediascape (Postdoctoral Research Project; McGill University, ongoing) studies extractive and post-extractive energy imaginaries across the contemporary Canadian mediascape. Isolating a series of case studies ranging from the Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline Project to Sacred Earth Solar’s community-based solar infrastructure initiatives, Between Foreclosure and Possibility theorizes two competing energy and infrastructural imaginaries on offer today: one of foreclosure that reproduces already-existing energetic and infrastructural relations tied to extraction and petroculture and one of possibility that foregrounds post-extractive relations. This project has two main objectives: 1) to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between the social and cultural dimensions of energy and infrastructure and their material dimensions by approaching energy infrastructure as media and 2) to theorize the possibilities of socially and ecologically just energy regimes. It is funded by postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture. 

Liquid Ethics, Fluid Politics (PhD Dissertation; University of Alberta, completed 2019) traces the emergence of the pro-oil social movement in Canada over the 2010s—a phenomenon and emergent archive he calls “petroturfing.” Introducing the concepts of energy consciousness and legitimation through circulation to describe and critique how these groups, organizations, and campaigns mobilize social media to promote Canadian oil from a self-identified grassroots position, Liquid Ethics, Fluid Politics offers significant contributions to contemporary debates in the energy humanities and in media studies. The project was primarily funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as through University of Alberta-based awards including the Andrew Stewart Graduate Memorial Prize. He is currently revising this project into a manuscript.  

After Oil is a collective of researchers the cultural politics of energy transition that has hosted two multi-day workshops in 2015 and 2019. The first gathered over 35 activists, artists, and researchers to intensively think and write about the politics and aesthetics of energy transition, which culminated in the volume After Oil. The second, hosted at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in partnership with McGill University, gathered 70 activists, artists, and researchers around the question of solar futures underwritten by the notion of “solarity.”   

The Petrocultures Research Group is an international cluster of humanities and social science researchers who work on the social and cultural implications of oil and energy. The group was founded by Imre Szeman and Sheena Wilson leading up to its first conference in Edmonton, Alberta in 2012 and has since hosted conferences in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador (2016) and in Glasgow, Scotland (2018). The next conference will be in Stavanger, Norway. Jordan served as the Petrocultures Research Group’s primary research assistant from 2015 to 2019 and Research Director from August 2019 to April 2020.   

KOSTEM 

The Reactionary Complex: Construction, Finance and Platforms in Post-2008 Turkey (doctoral dissertation; ongoing) studies the meeting of construction, financial speculation and popular mobilization over social media platforms as material sites through which to understand the co-production of reactionary sentiment and contemporary capitalism in Turkey. Specifically, the thesis studies the construction of a new canal in İstanbul that, when completed, will dredge open a second pathway between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea (Kanal İstanbul) significantly expanding the boundaries of urban space. Additionally, the thesis also investigates a nation-wide campaign to get citizens to invest in the Turkish lira, as a reaction to the uncertainty and speculatory pressure of currency markets. Entering public discourse in the aftermath of the post 2008 crisis, both Kanal İstanbul and the national currency campiagn increasingly become the focal point of political attention and affective investment in Turkey. Thus, the project considers how the construction of the canal and the national currency campaign were prefigured, contested, anticipated, and resisted through mobilizing social media platforms. Last bringing these sites into a conversation with the work of Gilles Deleuze, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Gilbert Simondon, as well as the work of Turkish intellectual historian Tanıl Bora and artist Serkan Taycan, the thesis also attempts to think through the themes of uncertainty, abundance and limits, to explore what an antireactionary and anticapitalist politics could mean today (supervisor: Jonathan Sterne).  

We Are Muffled Voices: Politics of Infrastructural Disruption and the Ontology of Threat explores the cultural and intellectual anxieties around the transmission, disruption, and audibility of the Islamic call to prayer (ezan) in Turkey over the past two decades. While the ezan’s audibility has long been a prevalent concern among conservative circles in Turkey at least since the early 20th century (often crystallizing their accounts of modernity and technological change), this project examines how this historically grounded concern was more recently mobilized as a technique of reactionary sentiment both by the ruling Justice and Development Party. Studying how the concern around the ezan was mobilized through party events, television series and social media platforms between 2002-2019, I am interested in why this concern became indexed to the affective production of an existential threat. Mobilizing the Turkish concept of beka (meaning continuation, survival, but also remainder and perpetuity) the project examines how this conception of threat invites the listener not only to hear the ezan but simultaneously overhear the possibility of its imminent disruption. In short, my aim is to show why the disruption of the ezan came to slowly signify an existential threat in Turkey and how the spread of this concern manifested itself through the circulatory economies of networked media. In doing so, I hope to contribute to an emerging literature around the spread of social media platforms in authoritarian contexts.  

‘The World is Sinking:’ Sand, Scarcity and Urban Infrastructure in Dubai explored the affordances of construction sand to think through the transformations of Dubai’s urban space throughout the 20th century. Putting sentiment alongside sediment the project focused on the dredging of Dubai Creek, the construction of Jebel Ali Port and the ongoing construction activity around the World Islands, as well as studying how these infrastructural projects shaped urban life through patterns of production, circulation and consumption. Additionally, the study also sought to locate Dubai’s urbanism within a much broader play of forces involving the planetary ecologies of sand and silt.  To develop an understanding of this sandy urbanism, I work with the concepts of ‘antiproduction’ and ‘general economy,’ placing these concepts alongside the ‘world-making’ power of cities as articulated in theories of urban space and infrastructure. Last, situating itself within emerging discussions of sand scarcity,  the project also searches for a different sort of ecological politics, one that doesn’t treat scarcity as an economic axiom, but rather investigates the making-scarce of our sandy ecologies through which capital distributes urban space. 

LALONDE 

The Ecological Ethics of Listening in 21st Century Art (doctoral dissertation; ongoing) investigates how contemporary artists are increasingly developing practices of listening in their engagements with nonhumans. By critically re-examining the idea of sound as a privileged mode of access to the world, and as an inherently relational force in human-nonhuman relations, it identifies the potentials of attending to the act of listening itself, rather than to sound, for nurturing ecological ethics in art. It considers how aesthetics of listening, as they are developed in selected artworks, work to assert nonhuman subjectivities that settler-colonial and capitalist infrastructures and modes of perception strategically work to suppress. The project is supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship.    

Oceanic Literacy in Contemporary Art (MA thesis; Concordia University, completed 2018) focused on two creative projects: Basia Irland’s Ice Receding/Books Reseeding (2007-ongoing) and Pamela Longobardi’s Drifters Project (2006-ongoing). It argued that though such practices are largely guided by acts of ecological remediation (from restoring watershed ecosystems to removing thousands of pounds of plastic from the ocean), the aesthetic and display strategies used by the artists more transformatively call for a widespread receptivity to nonhuman “voices.”  

On the Potential of Didacticism in Architecture (led by Dr. Carmela Cucuzzella and Dr. Cynthia Hammond, 2018) consisted of a seminar and a publication sponsored by the LEAP (Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle), an interuniversity research team based in Montreal and funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture. The project investigated the value of didacticism in architecture, public art, and urban infrastructures, as well as its power to influence social, cultural, ecological, educational, and economic issues. Information at: https://bit.ly/38e8BYL. 

Discrete Monuments: Urban Ecology in the Point (2016) was a collaborative project that studied the history of community engagement with green spaces in Montreal’s neighborhood Point-St-Charles, and sought to make visible the histories of plants that persists in the seemingly lifeless lots along the CN railway. The project, which emerged out of Dr. Cynthia Hammond’s graduate seminar (ARTH611 Industrialization and the Built Environment: The Right to the City) at Concordia University, resulted in an on-site display of research and creative responses to urban and postindustrial ecology. 

PANNEKOEK 

Geosocial Futures: Infrastructure at the Geosphere (doctoral dissertation; ongoing)  

This dissertation project asks how the technoscientific mediation of the geosphere unfolds institutionally, economically, and ecologically. By investigating geoscientific infrastructure at sites of extraction and exploration in the Arctic and Chile, this study tracks how these knowledge economies inform a changing geological index to social life. This project follows the dispersion of this geological index both within these local geographies and on a planetary scale as the overlapping crises of climate and capital unfold.  

Geologic Media: Signs, Sediments, and the Imagination of a Volatile Planet (MA thesis; University of Amsterdam, completed 2019)  

This project identified and traced an emerging geological index in cultural production and energy policy. Geology, both as a material category and epistemic mode appears as a stabilizer for planetary volatility. This geologically inflected environmental discourse emerges across polarised theoretical and political spaces such as pro-nuclear vs. anti-nuclear energy, the urban and the rural, and discursive patterns and material processes. 

PRINGLE 

‘A Better Country to Die In’ Drawing on critical health communication, feminist science and technology studies, and emerging theories in crip/disability studies, I investigated how the recasting of health as an individual right and responsibility has crept into the changing conversation about death and dying. Specifically, this dissertation project focused on how the mediated debates surrounding the legalization process, the cultural history of euthanasia drugs, and the ethical dimensions of disability have shaped assisted dying outcomes in the country.  

Unpacking Vaccine Hesitancy Among Perinatal Healthcare Providers This multi-site CIHR-funded project led by PI Dr. Julie Bettinger and co-PI Dr. Devon Greyson examines how vaccine hesitancy transpires in mediated and clinical discourse. I am conducting an institutional ethnography of care providers to better understand how decision support media might be implemented to better address the concerns of those hesitant to vaccinate. 

TOUPIN 

Revolutionary Communications:  Encryption, Fugitive Infrastructure and the South African Liberation Struggle (doctoral dissertation; ongoing) investigates an encrypted communication system developed by the African National Congress Technical Committee and used freedom fighters during the South African national liberation struggle. The system is understood as a social and political project, contemporary accounts of the politics of infrastructure, particularly in the Global South, and 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).  

Feminist data, datasets and infrastructures: social justice, solidarity and fugitivity (post-doctoral fellowship) investigates 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 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 (such as technologies and infrastructures of sexual and reproductive freedom). The project is supported by a FQRSC post-doctoral fellowship.  

VEMURI 

Mediating Resistance to Climate Change: Infrastructures of Flood Management in Assam (doctoral dissertation; ongoing) the role state-led technological interventions play in the social and material production of disasters and hazardous landscapes in the Brahmaputra river valley in Assam, India. Following feminist science and technology studies (STS) scholars and the critical study of technological infrastructures, this study will analyze how infrastructures and abatement plans mediate relationships between the state, its citizens, and their environment. It will investigate how these infrastructures help shape the very disasters that they hope to address, and how they affect the ecological, social, political and cultural life in the region. Research questions include: What are the underlying social, political and economic factors that shape state-driven technocratic efforts to respond to climate related disasters? How do infrastructural interventions affect local populations, specifically women? Focusing primarily on women, how do local populations develop modes of resistance and mechanisms to cope with the dual effects of ecological disaster and infrastructural upheaval? 

After Nirbhaya: Anti-sexual Violence Activism and the politics of transnational social media campaigns (MA Thesis; McGill University) explored three media campaigns that went viral on social media following the 2012 Delhi gangrape of a young woman on a moving bus. The study examines the discourse surrounding these three campaigns through the conceptual lens of transnational feminist solidarity, as articulated in the work of postcolonial feminists such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Jacqui Alexander, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. It argues that international media reports which uncritically celebrate the use of Hindu mythology in campaigns about sexual violence contribute to the persistence of orientalist and neocolonial perceptions of India. In addition, they help render invisible the ongoing and increasing violence of Hindu fundamentalism in India. A conscious move away from such narrow discursive portrayals of sexual violence in India towards a more reflective and nuanced narrative is necessary to build coalitions and solidarity amongst transnational feminists across borders of class, race, caste, nationality, religion, sexuality and gender.