Current projects

1) Frozen Discourse: How Policymaking has Shaped Canada’s Internet. A book manuscript that takes a Science & Technology Studies perspective on policy discourses as promoting and legitimizing certain visions of digital technology. Tracing the genealogy of these discourses through a series of case studies, the book frames internet policy consultations in Canada as a cyclical process of posing recurring questions in the areas of internet access, online privacy, and digital copyright since the early 1990s. The book’s overarching argument draws from a feminist political economy critique of the structural barriers in the policymaking process itself.

2) The Fourchettes critical methods in technoculture research network. The network consists of digital culture scholars from Canada, the UK, and Europe, who held an inaugural meeting in June 2016 in Banff, AB. We have support from a SSHRC Connections Grant to hold a series of seminars during the year. Our first set of seminars – in Calgary, Berlin (during the Association for Internet Researchers conference), London, and Leicester – have been organized around topics such as intervening in mainstream versions of digital methods that reify analytics tools, confronting the challenges of intersectional positionality, and incorporating a feminist ethics of care into digital research.

3) The policy implications of artificial intelligence (AI). This is a new project which seeks to explore policy implications around privacy and intellectual property in a context of increasing penetration of digital infrastructure by AI. Machine learning that relies on neural networks presents unique challenges for policymakers concerned with the encroachment of commercial surveillance into everyday life and the competing claims around intellectual property between users and technology firms. The first outcome of this project will be a book chapter that provides an overview of the digital policy issues in AI; the second will be a journal article that examines the assumed rational actor behind both policymaking processes and AI systems that are built on the logic of predictability.

 

Research activities and affiliations

Founding member, Fourchettes research network for critical methods in technoculture, funded by a SSHRC Connections Grant, Spring 2016-present.

Founding member and regular contributor, Culture Digitally: Examining Contemporary Cultural Production Working Group, hosted by Cornell University and Temple University, funded by the National Science Foundation, Spring 2011-present.

Founding member, Collaboratory for International Research on Games (CIRG), Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2012-2014.

Invited member, The Fembot Collective: Gender, Media, Technology. Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon, 2011-2014.

Affiliated researcher, Mobile Media Lab, Concordia University, Fall 2009-present.

Research Team Member, “Co-Designing Open Badges for Privacy Education” (PI: Karen Louise Smith), funded by the Office of Privacy Commissioner of Canada, May 2014-April 2015.

Invited participant, Making an Entrance? A Critical Workshop on Talent, Merit, Opportunity and Selection in the Cultural and Creative Industries. University of Leicester, UK, March 2015.

Invited participant, Whose Information is it Anyway? In Search of a New Balance, The New America Foundation, Washington DC, September 2014.

Postdoctoral Scholar, Graphics, Animation and New Media National Centres of Excellence (GRAND NCE), October 2012-August 2014.

Invited participant, The Role of Advocacy in Media and Telecom Policy, The New America Foundation, Washington DC, September 2013.

Embedded researcher, Pixelles women-in-games incubator, Montreal, November 2012-May 2013.

Summer Fellow, Digital Media and Learning Summer Institute, hosted by Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, MA, June 2012

Participant, Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme, July 2010.

Professional memberships

Canadian Communication Association; Canadian Game Studies Association; International Association for Media and Communication Research; Association of Internet Researchers; International Communication Association