2024

Emma Blackett

Emma Blackett
Emma Blackett (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies whose work is informed by queer/feminist studies, psychoanalytic theory, film studies, and ecocriticism. Her dissertation, “Psychoanalysis for a Blue Humanities,” offers a critique of environmental subjectivity, taking as its premise the failure of public communications about ecological collapse to provoke action adequate to halting it. Focusing on watery environs for reasons of colonial and industrial history, apocalyptic mythology, and rising tides, this project studies filmic and literary representations of “beached subjects,” whose gender/sex/race characterizations are of paramount interest as they tell particular stories about ways to relate—or fail to relate, as the case almost invariably is—to, water, land, and the idea of the end of the world. This project draws on psychoanalytic literature, refracted through Marxist thought, because psychoanalysis, especially when inflected by historical materialism, offers a persuasive account of why the subjects called human readily act against their own interests, even or perhaps especially in the face of their own deaths. Emma holds an MA in Media, Film and Television (MFT) and a BA in MFT and Political Studies, both from the University of Auckland. Her work is funded by Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et Culture (FRQSC), and she is published in Environmental Humanities, Apocalyptica, and the New Zealand Women’s Studies Journal.

Sadie Couture

Sadie Couture
Sadie Couture is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University working at the intersection of media history, sound studies, and science and technology studies. She holds an MA in Media Studies from Concordia University, and a BA in Philosophy and Gender Studies from the University of British Columbia. During her tenure as a Wolfe Fellow, she will be working on my dissertation project, entitled “Long Time, First Time: A History of Call-In Radio in the United States and Canada 1945-1975” which focuses on the origins, development, and conventionalization of call-in radio and traces how technologies, policies, economies, and cultural desires impacted the format and pummeled it—imperfectly—into the shape it is today. Calling-in—using a telephone to connect to a radio station and subsequently be broadcast live—is simultaneously a technical process, a feedback system, satisfies the ‘public good’ criterion of many regulatory regimes, offers an additional way to shape an audience, and generates cheap, usable content. This project offers a technical and cultural history of an understudied period in both radio and telephone studies, tracing a practice from its infancy in the ‘golden age’ of radio, through an awkward adolescence as the network system collapsed and independent stations reigned, into its adulthood in the re-networked era of deregulation, automation, industry consolidation, and satellite distribution.

Jay Ritchie

Jay Ritchie
Jay Ritchie is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. His SSHRC CGS-funded doctoral research examines how poets created what Fluxus artist Dick Higgins called “intermedia” art, where two or more different artistic media are combined to create an artwork both between and beyond the artwork’s component media. Situating the turn towards intermedia in the context of the emergence of digital technology, his research examines the effects of digitality on poetic production, circulation, and reception from 1970 to 2020. During this half-century of unprecedented technological acceleration and profound social change, North American and European economies were moving from industrial production to the post-industrial pre-eminence of service and finance industries. Simultaneously, artists were moving away from creating objects to making more disembodied, ephemeral things—including performances, sound art, and digital media. In this shift, poets, as artists who worked with texts, queried the status of the text as an object, and critiqued object-hood and art-making as the act of producing material things. Examining poetic experiments with performance, recorded sound, and digital media, intermedial poets are positioned as early adopters of new technology who use experimental methods to test and develop representations of subjectivity and social life that respond to changes in culture and society. In the context of deindustrialization, intermedial poetry is not only representational but performative, with poetic texts as sites of social interactivity that help to form new relationships among artists and their multiple publics. By underlining the interrelated nature of technology, labour, and culture, his research shows how intermedial poetry has responded to, and, in certain cases, anticipated, the evolving landscape of digitality.

Maryam Roosta

Maryam Roosta
Maryam Roosta is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at McGill University. Her doctoral dissertation is focused on the practice of temporary marriage among disadvantaged women in Iran. In Twelver Shi’a Islam, temporary marriage or mut’ah is a contract lasting anywhere from an hour to 99 years between a man and an unmarried woman. While mut’ah has traditionally been an urban phenomenon, the introduction of internet has reshaped the social arrangements between men and women who intend to contract mut’ah. Maryam’s research shows that to better understand the boundaries between mut’ah and transactional intimate relations is necessary to attend to the ways in which digital technologies such as the internet both enable and constrain women in contracting such relationships. By examining the role of technology in transforming transactional intimate relations through the practice of mut'ah, with a focus on labor and gendered subjectivity, this project will ultimately explore the question: how can we (re)conceptualize marriage when it is used as a means of exchanging intimate services? In addition to Wolfe fellowship, her doctoral research is supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture (FRQSC) and Wenner-Gren foundation. Maryam holds an MA in International Development Studies from the University of Grenoble Alpes, an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University, and a BA in Social Communications from the University of Tehran.

Mehak Sawhney

Mehak Sawhney
Mehak Sawhney (she/her) is a PhD candidate and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Communication Studies at McGill University. Her doctoral project titled Audible Waters: Sounding and Surveilling the Indian Ocean traces the production of oceanic territory through underwater sonic technologies in postcolonial India and the subcontinental Indian Ocean. Through a focus on hydrography, military security, conservation, and resource extraction, the project explores the politics of underwater monitoring technologies such as sonars as well as scientific disciplines such as underwater acoustics and bioacoustics. In so doing the project offers media theoretical reflections on the idea of the planetary, ongoing submarine colonialisms, and geopolitically situated ways to think about the relationship between sound, media and the environment. Mehak also works on the intersection of sound and AI with a focus on the politics of machine listening in bioacoustics, automated speech recognition and voice analysis. She has co-curated Capture All: A Sonic Investigation (2020-2022), a collaborative artistic and research project between Sarai, Delhi, and Liquid Architecture, Melbourne, that explores questions of sonicity and situatedness in the Asia-Pacific region. Previously, she was a researcher at Sarai, the media research programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, where her work investigated urban sound and listening cultures. Her work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Kalfou, Amodern, Disclaimer, and The Wire. Mehak holds an MA and MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi.

Muhe Yang

Muhe Yang
Muhe Yang is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Studies at McGill University. Her doctoral research investigates how to design technologies to better support the interrelated needs of older adults living alone for physical activity. Older adults engage in physical activity for myriad purposes, including health benefits, associated sensory pleasures, and increased opportunities of socializing. Yet, older adults, especially those living alone, often encounter various barriers to maintaining their exercise routines, contributing to inactivity and falling short of recommended physical activity levels. Those barriers, including health problems, lack of motivation and social support, lack of exercise resources, not only span across individual, social, and environmental levels but also are often interrelated, as revealed in Muhe’s research findings to date. Muhe has employed a human-centered iterative design methodology, actively involving older adults in the design and evaluation process, including co-designing prototypes and interviewing user needs and design feedback. Her research will contribute to technology design guidelines to address older adults' barriers to physical activity, while facilitating a holistic approach to supporting older adults’ complex needs by connecting healthcare services, social services, and information services, enhancing their overall wellbeing. Muhe holds a BEng in Industrial Design (Taiyuan University of Technology) and an MFA in Information Design and Visualization (Northeastern University, Boston). Her doctoral research is also supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT).