2020-22: The Global SpillAge
The Global SpillAge takes inspiration from Marshall McLuhan's notion of the Global Village. This year our research will focus on the unfortunate effects of connection but also the new relations and possibilities for social change; in particular the technological and political dimensions related to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism and the global COVID-19 pandemic. Our working groups will engage the challenges of the contemporary moment while drawing from the spirit of McLuhan's attention to the medium.
- 12 working groups
- 5 graduate reading groups
- 1 PhD fellow
- 7 publications
Working Groups
A primary mode of research is the support of interdisciplinary working groups whose novel approaches to culture and technology are appropriate to the challenges of the moment while drawing from the spirit of McLuhan’s attention to the medium. Working groups consist of faculty and graduate students across the University of Toronto and are funded for up to one year to engage symposia, performances, installations, lecture series, workshops, writing retreats, and other public events. The working groups also work in consultation with the Director, Professor Sarah Sharma, to run a Monday Night Seminar.
Space Media
Research
While space exploration mediates how societies envision their future, space exploration would not be possible without media. Humanity’s relationship with the cosmos is one mediated by artifacts and technologies: Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) for communication, health and environmental monitoring/planning; Geo Positioning Satellite (GPS) for navigation; and various other tools and devices that transport bodies and goods, process information, and visualize new planetary frontiers. Outer space is a site of both potential inhabitation and politics in which medium design plays a crucial role.
This group explores the relationship between media and space, with a specific focus on the technological, political, anthropological and cultural dimensions of space and its media infrastructures. Members will engage with scientists, engineers, artists, astronauts and other members of the space community to produce a series of tele-dialogues that confront and contrast the field of “space media” to problematize and reveal its constructive power of intervention. The group will also work on the production of a literature review and glossary, both of which will be published on a public-facing website. Finally, members plan on using the research conducted under these 15 months to produce a peer-reviewed article and publication which sets the foundations for their proposed new field of ‘space media’ within media theory.
Members
- Marie-Pier Boucher (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, ICCIT)
- Tero Karppi (Assistant Professor, ICCIT & Faculty of Information)
- Jeremy Packer (Associate Professor, ICCIT & Faculty of Information
- Réka Patrícia Gál (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Lee Wilkins (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Yolanda Zhang (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Invisible Photographies
Research
While photography holds the promise of making the unknown known, the faraway nearby, and the unseen visible, the right not to be looked at—to remain invisible—matters as much as the right to look. Invisibility remains a potent, though overlooked, part of debates on power and media. In the digital era, invisibility is deployed as a strategy of resistance against and refusal of various forms of state and corporate surveillance.
In the wake of the pandemic and global uprisings against racial injustice, the issue of invisibility and its relationship with power and media has acquired renewed urgency. “Invisible Photographies” is an interdisciplinary working group that explores the varied forms and functions of invisibility in photography. What is the significance of invisibility? How has invisibility been mobilized to shape historical perspectives? To what extent might it serve the needs of the present, and how can it be used to imagine better futures? To answer these questions, the group draws from backgrounds in media studies, women, gender, and sexuality studies, curation, history and art history. The group aims to challenge predominantly Euro-American frameworks of seeing in photography, and to illustrate other ways of seeing—particularly as they have shaped race and sexuality in the Global South and across diasporic communities.
Activities include: (i) readings; (ii) webinar speaker series; (iii) workshopping works-in-progress; (iv) commissioning new artwork; and (v) a special issue of the open access peer-reviewed journal, Trans Asia Photography.
Members
- Thy Phu (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, Dept of Arts, Culture & Media, UTSC)
- Jordan Bear (Associate Professor, Art History)
- Jordache Ellapan (Assistant Professor, Historical Studies)
- Elspeth Brown (Professor, Historical Studies)
- Deepali Dewan (Associate Professor, Art History)
- Evie Gu (Associate Professor, ACM)
- Drew Thompson (School of Image Arts, Ryerson University)
- Kaia Jorgensen (PhD student, Art History)
- Victoria Abel (PhD student, Facultly of Information)
- Marina Dumont-Gauthier (PhD candidate, Art History, UTSG)
- Lynn Ly (PhD student, WGSI, UTSG)
- Michèle Pearson Clarke (Artist-in-Residence, Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, UofT)
Media Through China / China Through Media
Research
In today’s “Global Village”, China shares with the rest of the world the social and economic transformations precipitated by the integration of various technological infrastructures. But at the same time, what is known as “the Great Firewall”—the rules and technologies that control the flow of information in China’s digital spaces and mediascapes—leads to an easy dismissal of digital China as an Other with little applicability to the rest of the world.
This Wall, however, is porous and full of contradictions. Importantly, the daily life and cultural expressions within/through the Wall defy our common understanding of US- and Euro-centric media experiences. They are demonstrative of both the pitfalls and possibilities of our global Spillage, which calls for nuanced and intersectional approaches toward studying China through media, and media through China.
Taking the Wall as a point of departure, the group aims to advance interdisciplinary conversations on the studies of China and its mediascapes. Members will confront the questions surrounding China, capitalism, nationalism, and media technology through theme-based workshops and a symposium.
Members
- Julie Yujie Chen (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, ICCIT)
- Yi Gu (Lead Convener; Associate Professor, Arts, Culture & Media)
- Ruoyun Bai (Arts, Culture & Media)
- Sibo Chen (School of Professional Communication, Ryerson University)
- Lianrui Jia (Arts, Culture & Media)
- Tong Lam (Historical Studies)
- Yifan Li (Sociology)
- Cary Wu (Sociology, York University)
- Yolanda Zhang (Faculty of Information)
- Miaoran Dong (Journalism & Communication, Carleton University)
- Anup Grewal (Historical Studies)
- Xiaofei Han (Communication & Media Studies, Carleton University)
- Lianrui Jia
- Tony Lam
- Tracy Ying Zhang (Mel Hoppenheim School Cinema, Carleton University)
Envisioning Equiveillance
Research
The word “surveillance” means “watching” (“veillance”) from “above” (“sur”). Surveillance typically involves an entity of higher authority monitoring an entity of lower authority, for example the powerful watching the vulnerable. This working group considers the contrasting dynamics of surveillance and sousveillance (from the French prefix “sous”, meaning “under”), to imagine a fair and just “equi-veillance” that can be applied to the design of smart cities, healthcare, and other sensory infrastructures that are worn, carried, or embedded in the architecture and cities around us.
With the “covidization” of surveillance, i.e. “health-surveillance” as the “new normal”, we need a language, practice, culture, and technology for sousveillance as a form of health and well-being. Accordingly, this working group will focus on the development of ideas, policy, technology, artistic works, and cultural discourse to promote veillance equity that meets the growing needs of fair universal health and well-being for humans of all abilities.
Members will explore these themes through published papers, the production of a sousveillant mesh network, workshops, and the production of an educational video entitled “Culture and Technology of equi-veillance”.
Members
- Steve Mann (Lead Convener; Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering)
- Rhonda McEwen (Associate Professor, ICCIT & Faculty of Information)
- David Naylor (Professor, Faculty of Medicine)
- John Griffiths (Psychiatry, CAMH)
- Beth Coleman (Associate Professor, ICCIT & Faculty of Information)
- Kristen Bos (Assistant Professor, Indigenous Science and Technology Studies)
- Amir Adnan Ali (Engineering)
Black Technoscience "Here": A special issue
Research
The Black Technoscience “HERE” Working Group expands on the research and salon series of the same name produced during the 2018-19 year to produce a special issue publication. In monthly meetings over the academic year, group members brought together scholars, artists, and activists to share their research and praxis in the interdisciplinary creation of Black Technoscience. This year the Black Technoscience working group is working on a special issue to connect the fields of Black studies, transnational feminist studies, digital humanities, critical race and disability studies and science and technology studies, to offer new approaches to both Blackness and Technoscience. The special issue will reflect on the uniqueness of Black technoscience within Canada. What is Black technoscience? What does it mean, we question, to activate Black technoscience thought “here”?
Members
- Nicole Charles (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, Women & Gender Studies)
- OmiSoore Dryden (Associate Professor & JRJ Chair in Black Canadian Studies, Community Health & Epidemiology, Dalhousie University)
The Only Space is Here
Research
As social life slammed to a standstill during the COVID-19 lockdown, staring anxiously at our screens, many of us found ourselves wondering, where is everything? Art institutions pivoted by putting exhibitions online, concerts were streamed via video conference, family gatherings and personal milestones were all relegated to monitors of various sizes—for those of us fortunate to have stable Internet access and devices capable of streaming our likenesses out onto others' screens.
The group's goal is to explore what the migration of social space online entails for the politics of information privacy, as well as for one’s sense of embodied presence in the world. The urgent question members ask is: what technologies, what forms of social organizing, what forms of aesthetics are capable of meeting this moment? How do we move from hastily accepting digital facsimiles of in-person social practices and build or amend digital spaces that might foster community in the shadows of corporate platforms?
Members
- Mitchell Akiyama (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design)
- Ishtiaque Ahmed (Assistant Professor, Computer Science)
- Maria Yablonina (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design)
- Cait McKinney (Assistant Professor, School of Communication, SFU)
- Adam Tindale (Associate Professor, Digital Futures, OCAD
- Matthew Nish-Lapidus (Masters student, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design)
- Sophia Oppel (Masters student, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design)
- Talia Golland (Masters student, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design)
- Eli Kerr (Masters student, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design)
- Eli Kerr (Masters student, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design)
Co-Saloning: Experimenting With and Against Digital Gathering
Research
This year’s working group takes the practice of saloning as its conceptual starting point to interrogate decolonial, feminist and anti-capitalist forms, methods and practices of relation, collaboration and co-creation in the time of social distancing.
Emerging out of 18th century France, salon culture was a critical catalyst for the cultural, intellectual and cultural developments that characterized the Enlightenment Era. Various communities have taken up, reconstituted and reimagined the salon in the name of other political projects: feminism, anti-racism, decolonization. Both the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU) and the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC) have experimented with the form of the salon, protocols of invitation and hosting, and modes of stirring-up conversation. For example, the Technoscience Salon activates two “stirrers,” often graduate students to contribute to, guide and animate our salons.
Members will engage with this through regular salon events, held in collaboration with the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU).
Members
- Kristen Bos (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, Indigenous Science & Technology Studies)
- Michelle Murphy (Professor, History/WGSI/Technoscience Research Unit)
- T.L. Cowan (Assistant Professor, Arts, Culture & Media)
- Jasmine Rault (Assistant Professor, Arts, Culture & Media)
- Sajdeep Somal (PhD student, History)
- Lindsay LeBlanc (PhD student, WGSI)
- Vanbasten de Araújo (PhD student, WGSI)
- Subhanya Sivajothy (MI student, Technoscience Research Unit & Faculty of Information)
- Nasma Ahmed (Digital Justice Lab)
- Fernanda Yanchapaxi (PhD student, OISE)
- Aljumaine Gayle (Intersect TO)
Digital Afterlives: Feminist Emergent and Emergency Methods and Action on Data (FEEMAD)
Research
This group will bring the Feminist Data Manifest-No Workshop (FDMW) to the McLuhan Centre. The Feminist Data Manifest-No (manifestno.com) is a set of refusals and commitments written collectively by feminist data scholars across disciplines in the US and Canada. This reimagining of our understanding of and relationship with data considers, in particular, the afterlives of data and the traces of networked existence.
The group will co-host a symposium at UofT on Coalitional Trans-Feminist and Queer Black and Indigenous Digital Afterlives, thinking particularly about the Digital Afterlives of COVID-19 in terms of impact on minoritized groups and pandemic-influenced increases in compulsory data collection & circulation practices. Planned initiatives include regular online writing retreat sessions, an online Long Table conversation each semester, and the possibility of a symposium (pending new COVID-19 developments).
Members
- T.L. Cowan (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, Arts, Culture & Media)
- Tonia Sutherland (Information & Comuter Science, Unversity of Hawai'i at Mānoa)
- Jasmine Rault (Assistant Professor, Arts, Culture & Media)
- Jennifer Wemigwans (Assistant Professor, OISE)
Critical Studies in Race, Technology and Global Migration
Research
Currently, the attention of the public in media, government, humanitarian aid and corporate philanthropy is largely centered on using technology to support learning and community engagement in the Global South. As researchers, educators, activists, and technologists work to understand the challenges and possibilities of using technology and digital media to support the worlds most marginalized communities over there, the role of digital tools and practices for migratory and minoritizied communities here is sometimes overlooked. In this working group, members intentionally frame the division of “us” in the West and “them” in the developing world. This framing calls attention to the subtle and harmful forces of power related to participation in technology and digital media among people in Canada who have experienced migration. The group's goals are to connect with and convene scholars, activists and educators working in Southern Ontario and across Canada in this area and to set an agenda for key research areas related to race, technology, and global migration in Canada.
Members will collaborate with community members at the centre of this topic through research and media-making workshops to produce collaborative mixed media projects hosted online.
Members
- Negin Dahya (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, ICCIT)
- Cosmin Munteanu (Assistant Professor, ICCIT)
- Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (Assistant Professor, Computer Science)
- Nehal El-Hadi (Visiting Scholar, The City Institute, York University)
- Dina Sabie (PhD student, Computer Science)
- Amna Liaquat (PhD student, Computer Science)
- Cansu Ekmekcioglu (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Reprising the Real World of Technology
Research
It has been thirty years ago since Ursula Franklin (first woman University Professor at the University of Toronto) delivered the 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, The Real World of Technology, and twenty years since its expanded version was published. Describing technology as practice and as a system, Franklin encouraged us to examine the social class of experts, the changing nature of community and issues of power and control. She argued for attentiveness about how digital technologies affect relations of time and space, individual and collective responsibilities, and provided a bridge between the humanist traditions of early 20th century Europe and the technological explosion that began after WWII and the defeat of Fascism that continues to echo today.
This working group will examine the intellectual legacy of Franklin and her pioneering feminist/person-centred perspectives on technology and how the themes and concerns she addressed throughout her career map onto contemporary scholarly endeavours at the University of Toronto surrounding technology and society. The group will apply a ‘Franklin-esque’ reading to issues and ethics redolent in contemporary ‘innovative’ and ‘disruptive’ technologies of datafication, algorithms and AI. What is their impact on data discrimination, privacy, social justice, resilient communities, and equity, inclusion, and diversity?
Intended outputs include a short essay series with works composed by working group members and collaborators, a website, and an end of year seminar (pending COVID-19 developments).
Members
- Leslie Shade (Lead Convener; Professor, Faculty of information; Senior Fellow Massey College; Faculty Affiliate, Schwartz Reisman Institute)
- Leslie Chan (Associate Professor, Centre for Critical Development Studies)
- Peter Pennefather (Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Pharmacy)
- Sara Grimes (Associate Professor, Faculty of Information; Director, KDMI)
- Monica Jean Henderson (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Katie Mackinnon (PhD candidate, Faculty of Information)
- Yasmin Macdowell (MI student, Faculty of Information)
- Stephanie Fielding (Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada)
- Kanishka Sikri (PhD student, York University)
You're Deactivated
Research
Extended from 2017, You’re Deactivated focuses on the message of the Platform and how workers resist the casualized and precarious work conditions of the digital economy by repurposing, hacking, or refusing platform labour. While technology intensifies work, it is constantly met with resistance from workers. Yet, while the platform may be today’s assembly line, only recently has research in media studies started to focus on workers in the digital economy as active subjects that challenge the patterns shaped by the platform as they unionize, or organize to fight for improved conditions, higher wages, predictable scheduling, and better benefits.
Instead of going online with LogOut 2, the group is working on a special issue publication based on the papers accepted from their planned March 2020 conference (cancelled due to COVID-19).
Members
- Alessandro Delfanti (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, ICCIT)
- Julie Yujie Chen (Lead Convener; Assistant Professor, ICCIT)
We Can Rebuild You: The Automation and Erasure of Essential Workers
Research
The aim of this working group is to analyze the automation of essential labourers. From the introduction of the robotic arm on the factory floor to modern data-driven agricultural startups, corporations have long sought to excise the human element from manual labour. Even vocations predicated on empathetic domains of knowledge, such as nursing and caregiving, have been rendered vulnerable to replacement by ever more nimble automata and artificial intelligence. Yet as narratives of innovation and convenience are pushed by Silicon Valley, they clash with practical questions of long-term and large-scale scalability and Asimovian anxieties of technology gone too far. Against this backdrop, it is imperative to examine whose livelihoods are being erased by machines and why the human element of labour is often deemed superfluous.
Applying a sociohistorical perspective, we will examine how the devaluation of labourers has persisted for centuries, focusing on four major spheres of labour: agriculture, caregiving, sex work, and transportation. By exploring broader histories of labour movements, antebellum slavery, and women’s rights, attendance will be paid to how roles deemed “prone to automation” have been disproportionately filled by minority groups, women, and temporary foreign workers (largely hailing from the Global South). Through these case studies, we will explore how algorithms and automata are simply new tools in ongoing, parallel campaigns to render these paraprofessional labourers invisible despite their essentiality.
Intended outpouts include a monthly reading group, speaker series, CHI workshop proposal, a special open-access journal issue, and a roundtable workshop for the 2022 Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting.
Members
- Olivia Dogget (Lead Convener; PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Mathew Iantorno (Lead Convener; PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Julie Yujie Chen (Assistant Professor, ICCIT)
- Priyank Chandra (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information)
- Kamilah Ebrahim (MI student, Faculty of Information)
- Daniel Guadagnolo (Assistant Professor, ICCIT)
- Patrick Keilty (Associate Professor, Faculty of Information)
- Laura Lam (PhD student, Centre for Industrial Relations & Human Resources)
- Matt Ratto (Associate Professor, Faculty of Information)
- Lai-Tze Fan (Assistant Professor, English Language & Literature, University of Waterloo)
Graduate Reading Groups
In 2020-21 we introduced our inaugural cohort of graduate reading groups who engaged with the works of contemporary media scholars to explore questions surrounding race, power, inequity, and the impacts of emerging virtual spaces in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Ends of the World
The Ends of the Worlds reading group critically engages with the narratives of apocalyptic conflict and technoscientific salvation that prevail in white masculine futurologies of existential risk, survivalism, and transhumanism. The reading group contrasts these perspectives with historicities that resist framing “the end of the world” as an unprecedented apocalyptic condition separate from histories of dispossession, by focusing on scenarios which have already produced apocalyptic conditions for groups whose perspectives have been systematically ignored within the “end of mankind” framework: regional wars, genocides, ecological collapses, algorithmic oppression of BIPOC communities, as well as the disproportionate impacts of pandemics on queer and BIPOC communities.
Members
- Réka Gál (Lead Convener; PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Blair Frost (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Arun Jacob (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Brendan Smith (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Yolanda Zhang (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Racism Gone Viral: Racist Design, Social Media and COVID-19
Drawing from the double meaning of "virality" in both digital and medical contexts, this group focuses on the intersections of race, social media, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first semester, members will look at how visually-centered social media platforms, (i.e. Instagram, TikTok) reflect societal biases related to race and marginalized groups. The second semester will look at medical racism and its impacts on marginalized communities during pandemics, both historically and in contemporary digital contexts.
Members
- Alex Desplanque (Lead Convener; MI student (UXD), Faculty of Information)
- Lily Shaddick (MI student (UXD), Faculty of Information)
- Adrian Petterson (MI student (UXD), Faculty of Information)
- Veronica Rutherford (MI student (UXD), Faculty of Information)
Emergent-cy: Critical Digital Humanities in the Time of COVID-19
This group will place Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) attention to the medium’s message, and the analytical framework of scale, pace, and pattern, into conversation with the Digital Humanities and the anti-racist and decolonial work being undertaken in the field. The group will ask: “What does a robust and useful technological response to a crisis, one that is aware and attentive to the biases and messages of digital media, look like?
Members
- Nelanthi Hewa (Lead Convener; PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Haley Bryant (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Camille Intson (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Arun Jacob (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Sub-Alternative Media Technologies
As social inequalities have been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, this reading group centers race, power and global politics in a study of media and technology. In their readings, members re-centralize how these notions are left unresolved in the technologically-assisted push for normality. This move also aims to redress the paucity of representation for/of racialized scholars and race-focus scholars among our disciplines.
Members
- Julian Posada (Lead Convener; PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Hassan Assif (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Monica Henderson (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Cansu Ekmekcioglu (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Ellen Michelle (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Christine Tran (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Lee Wilkins (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
The Global South Feminist School of Media and Archives
The Global South Feminist Media & Archives School began in the 2019-2020 academic cycle as a Marshall McLuhan Centre Working Group, under the theme "Hot MessAge." In the 2020-2021 academic cycle its members have constituted a Graduate Student Reading Group positioned to explore the Centre's call to research the "Global SpillAge." The Group explores information, archives and media scholarship that is based on feminist epistemology and theoretical frameworks developed outside of and/or against Global North frameworks.
Members
- Carina Guzman (Lead Convener; PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Jamila Ghaddar (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Mariam Karim (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Henria Aton (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
- Chido Muchemwa (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
phd Fellow
The PhD Fellowships are part of theProgram and are awarded to incoming doctoral students who's research overlaps with McLuhan Studies research and scholarship taking place at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. They are an opportunity for students to take part in, conduct, and collaborate with the Director, and affiliated faculty on McLuhan Studies.
Réka Gál (PhD student, Faculty of Information)
Publications
A collection of publications resulting from research, events, and initiatives held at the Centre for Culture and Technology.
Journal articles and special issues
What would Ursula Franklin Say?
Edited by Kanishka Sirki, Kate Mackinnon and Leslie Regan Shade
Humanities Commons (June 2022)
This essay series is based on our 2019/22 Reprising the Real World of Technology Working Group. The WG examined the intellectual legacy of Dr. Ursula Franklin, first woman University Professor at the University of Toronto, and her pioneering feminist/person-centred perspectives on technology, notably derived from her CBC Massey Lecture series, The Real World of Technology (1989). The WG was particularly keen to examine how the themes and concerns Franklin addressed throughout her career map onto contemporary scholarly endeavours at the University of Toronto surrounding technology and society.
Research in Brief: Space Media
Article by Réka Gál, L M Wilkins, Yuxing Zhang, Marie-Pier Boucher, Tero Karppi and Jeremy Packer
in Canadian Journal of Communication Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sept 9, 2021)
Transnational Feminisms and Digital Islamophobia
Edited by Zeinab Farokhi and Yasmin Jiwani
Special issue of Islamophobia Studies Journal (Spring 2021)
This special issue is based on the Transnational Feminism in a Time of Digital Islamophobia Symposium organized at the Centre in March 2019 by our 2018/19 Digital Islamphobia working group.
Sensing of the Self, Society and the Environment
Article by Steve Mann
in IEEE Sensors (Fall 2020)
A Manifesto for the Broken Machine
Research article by Sarah Sharma
in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies (Fall 2020)
Books
Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan
Edited by Sarah Sharma and Rianka Singh
Duke University Press (April 2022)
Interviews
The CBC Spark Guide to Civilization, Part Four: Attention
Featuring Sarah Sharma
CBC Radio (December 2020)
We have been lamenting our loss of focus and blaming our short attention spans on technology for ages. But are our attention spans actually dwindling—or is it just that there are so many things clamouring for our attention all the time?
CBC Ideas: Everything at Once
Featuring Sarah Sharma
CBC Radio (January 2021)
Out of synch? No wonder: the pandemic clock is messing with us. Taking measure of a strange moment, with writers, sociologists, a therapist, and a mathematician.
Other writing
Climate Change, COVID-19 and the Space Cabin: A Politics of Care in the Shadow of Space Colonization
by Réka Gál
in #9 Climate Imaginary Reader (October 2020)
