Michaela Bunakova is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at McGill University. She holds an MSc in Epidemiology from McGill and an MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford. Her research sits at the intersection of health and policy, focusing on how family dynamics and informal knowledge transfers contribute to health inequalities across macro-level contexts. Specifically, she investigates how varying levels of literacy and education within families shape their collective capacity to navigate healthcare systems and provide informal care—an understudied mechanism that may perpetuate and deepen health disparities. In addition to the Wolfe Fellowship, Michaela’s work is supported by the FRQSC Doctoral Fellowship and the H. Anthony Hampson Award from the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Beyond her doctoral research, she serves as the Training Program Facilitator for the CAnD3 Consortium, where she helps coordinate a multidisciplinary training program in data-driven population analytics for aging societies. Her PhD project, titiled "For better or worse: Unpacking the complex relationship between social connections and knowledge in driving health disparities across intimate partnership dyads", explores how knowledge—both formal and informal—circulates within intimate partnerships and contributes to health inequalities, even in societies with universal healthcare. Drawing on interdisciplinary research from sociology, epidemiology, and policy studies, it examines how education and literacy function not only as individual assets but as shared resources within families that shape healthcare navigation and informal care practices. Using both theoretical and empirical approaches, the thesis investigates how differences in spousal education, literacy, and field of study influence self-rated and mental health outcomes. It includes a systematic literature review and three quantitative studies using international and Canadian datasets. The project engages with Bourdieu’s concept of “ways of knowing” to better understand how different forms of knowledge—academic, functional, and experiential—impact health. By focusing on dyadic dynamics, it sheds light on underexplored mechanisms through which health advantages are maintained or amplified in family contexts. Ultimately, the research aims to inform policy conversations about addressing health disparities through a broader lens that includes social networks and knowledge environments.
Alper Güngör is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at McGill University, where his doctoral research supported by Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et Culture (FRQSC) explores the intersection of philosophy of art and philosophy of technology. His work examines the ontological boundaries between natural objects, artifacts, and artworks, investigating whether principled distinctions can be drawn among these categories and what philosophical significance such distinctions carry. As a Wolfe Fellow, he will examine whether the art generated by using AI programs presents a novel challenge to a widely accepted assumption: art-making minimally involves intentional production –artworks are artifacts, after all. As AI systems currently fail to count as intentional agents because they lack relevant mental states such as beliefs and desires, the intentions governing the production must reside either in the users or the designers of the AI programs or both. The common view suggests that it is the users, and users are the artists whose use of AI programs is no different than using a word processor or a paintbrush—they are just tools. Another view suggests that we can conceive AI programs (or AI art) as a distinct medium just like painting or photography. This project’s aim is to combine these views to determine the site of appreciation in AI art and examine whether the nature of AI programs prevents the artists from exerting creative agency—a largely non-accidental form of making—which is put forward as a necessary condition for authorship by many. Alper holds a BA in Business Administration and an MA in Philosophy from Boğaziçi University. His academic work is published in Dialectica, Episteme, Erkenntnis, and Synthese. Beyond academia, he regularly contributes to Notos, a Turkish literary magazine, writing and translating short pieces on philosophy, literature, and technology.
Kirsten Hawson is a British/Canadian PhD Candidate in Communication Studies (Gender Option) at McGill University. Her research is at the intersection of misophonia, sound studies, and disability. Jonathan Sterne (whom she shared a great love of cats and cat memes with) was her advisor on her SSHRC-funded doctoral study until his passing in March 2025, and her new advisor is Alex Blue V. Her dissertation investigates misophonia culture and context within biomedicine through cultural lab ethnographies and oral history. A former singer and actor, Kirsten is a professional dialect/voice coach with extensive experience in film/TV, theatre, and voiceover worldwide. She holds a terminal MFA degree in Theatre Voice Pedagogy from the University of Alberta, and a BA Acting degree from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, England. Her project examines algorithm literacy and the pervasive issue of dis/misinformation about hearing disorders; in particular, misophonia, across social media platforms and its profound impact on misophonic individuals, healthcare providers, and public understanding. The digital landscape has fundamentally transformed how people consume and share health information, with particular consequences for conditions like misophonia that still struggle for clinical recognition. She will systematically analyse content across major social media platforms to document prevalent myths and misconceptions about misophonia, including unsubstantiated treatment claims, mischaracterisation of misophonia, confusion with other conditions, and oversimplified neurological explanations that contradict current scientific understanding.
Elijah Klein (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, where she works at the experimental intersections of taxidermy, garden studies, ornithological history, and collage. Her doctoral project focuses on the enigmatic creations of Dionisio Minaggio, a seventeenth-century gardener, artist, and bird-keeper who lived in Spanish-occupied Milan. His magnum opus, titled The Feather Book or Il bestiario barocco is comprised of 156 illustrations made nearly entirely of feathers and organic avian matter, and represents the oldest collection of preserved bird skins known to date. Conserved within the works’ incandescent pages is an avian archive that includes dozens of diverse species ranging from common hens to formidable owls, as well as sections devoted to representing a range of diverse imagery of musicians, actors, tradesmen, and townscapes. Minaggio’s work falls across many disciplinary fields, connecting art, science, technology, and tactile knowledge-making practices. Following suit, Elijah’s research contours the world of The Feather Book by tracing the materially-embedded avian histories and human-geographies that buoyed its creation. Elijah holds an MA in Art History from McGill University, and a BA in Anthropology and Early Modern Studies from the University of King’s College. In addition to the Wolfe Fellowship, her doctoral research has been supported by SSHRC CGS-D. Alongside academia, Elijah maintains an active multidisciplinary art and film-making practice, with works collected and screened across Canada.
Alexis Morin-Martel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy. His research is at the intersection of moral psychology and the ethics of technology. In his dissertation, he focuses mainly on normative questions about trust in the context of rapid technological transformation. As the gap between individual knowledge and the vast pool of available information widens, so does our reliance on external sources to navigate it. This has deepened our dependence on experts and AI systems we don’t fully grasp. While this offers significant benefits, it also increases the risk of disinformation, making questions about trust more pressing than ever. So far, much of the contemporary philosophical literature on trust focuses on its conceptual analysis. For example, scholars have debated whether trust is better understood as a belief or as an affective attitude (like optimism). Additionally, they have debated how to distinguish trust from other attitudes like mere reliance, and explored what it means to be trustworthy, among other questions. Understanding the nature of trust is very important, but his dissertation asks a slightly different question. It explores instead why trust is morally valuable and what normative implications follow from taking its value seriously. Alexis’ research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship, and he has been published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, AI & Society, and Digital Society. He also has two papers forthcoming in Synthese and Ergo. Before his academic career, he represented Canada internationally as a competitive judo athlete and earned a law degree.
Malcolm Sanger is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. His dissertation, How to plant a tree: Climate change, settler capitalism, & environmental communication in Canada, considers how reforestation functions as a contemporary response to climate change by studying its relation to histories of scientific forestry and the environment, political economic arrangements, and cultural representations and mediations. Drawing on environmental media, political economy, science and technology studies, and communications theory, this project argues that contemporary responses to climate change must also respond to the material histories, political arrangements, and cultural theories from which they emerge. If states and industry are to plant lots of trees to capture and sequester carbon and so offset the anthropogenic effects of fossil fuels, then forestry’s entanglement with the dispossessions of early capitalism and settler colonialism must be considered alongside the infrastructures, scientific and media technologies of counting, and labour practices dominant in tree planting in Canada today. Malcolm holds a MA in Anthropology from McGill University, and a BA in Anthropology and Literature and Critical Theory from the University of Toronto. His work is funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et Culture (FRQSC) and he was recently a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Environmental Humanities, Aarhus University.
Owen Stewart-Robertson is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Studies at McGill University. His dissertation research explores the practices, conditions, and relationships involved in the recording of environmental sounds, addressing the growing need for reflexivity around scientific and ecological knowledge production through audio data. Increasingly automated practices of recording and analysis have expanded possibilities for understanding environments through sound while also generating massive quantities of data, potentially shifting researcher relationships with the environments they study and creating further challenges to the open sharing, preservation, and use of important environmental information. Situated in the area of information practices, this qualitative, ethnographic study thus examines the various activities, skills, and processes around how people experience, create, seek, use, and share information from environmental sounds, including the ways interactions with information and the production of knowledge are shaped by and shape various relations, positionalities, and social/technological factors. Owen holds an MS in Information and Library Science from the University at Buffalo, a MMus in Jazz Performance from McGill, and a BMus in Jazz Studies from St. Francis Xavier University. His doctoral research is also supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Ata Senior Yeboah is a Doctoral Candidate at the School of Social Work, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Development Planning and a Master of Science in Development Policy and Planning, both from the Department of Planning at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. His doctoral research examines the intersection of environmental justice and community development, with particular emphasis on the socio-environmental impacts of large-scale commercial gold mining in Ghana. His broader research interests encompass environmental justice, sustainable community development, involuntary resettlement, water resource governance, and social policy planning. His project, titled "Gender, Vulnerability, and Strategy: Enhancing Environmental Justice in Community Development within Ghana’s Natural Resource Extraction Communities" investigates how the Environmental Justice movement, originating in the US over three decades ago, has evolved into a global discourse addressing pollution, climate change, natural disasters, energy consumption, and ecosystem degradation and how these issues have disproportionately impacted marginalized and disadvantaged populations, including women, children, ethnic and racial minorities, and low-income families, thereby highlighting a critical need for equitable environmental benefit and harm distribution and inclusive decision-making processes. Despite evidence of the disproportionate exposure of women to the detrimental impacts of extractive activities in Ghana, there is limited research attention geared toward incorporating environmental justice frameworks to mitigate gender-specific vulnerabilities. Notably, there is a lack of comprehensive empirical research focusing on gender-specific vulnerabilities and the development of appropriate strategies to enhance environmental justice considerations in Ghana’s resource extraction communities. The lack of strategies might impede women’s active participation in environment-related decision-making spaces, with profound implications for community well-being and the achievement of SDG 5. Addressing the forestated problem will not only help improve the lives of women in affected communities but also contribute to the global discourse on gender, vulnerability, and environmental justice. Additionally, understanding and proposing measures to reduce gender-specific vulnerabilities can form the basis for designing policies and programs that lead to more equitable, sustainable, and just development outcomes. Within the preceding context, the study aims to explore strategies for enhancing environmental justice with a gender-sensitive approach to community development within Ghana’s natural resource extraction communities. Primary data for the research was collected through qualitative approaches, involving 44 community members and 6 key stakeholders in Kenyasi, a gold mining community in the Ahafo Region of Ghana. Thematic analysis will be applied to examine qualitative data. By shedding light on the gendered aspects and vulnerability contexts of environmental justice in areas of Ghana affected by resource extraction, the research is poised to enrich academic discourse and contribute valuable insights into the environmental justice thematic realm. The findings are anticipated not only to justify the necessity for further investigation into environmental injustice in Ghana and similar contexts but also to serve as a cornerstone reference for future research.