Jacqueline Atkin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at McGill University working under the supervision of Dr. Mary Hunter. Her research interests include artistic and medical collaboration, 19th-century photography, and avant-garde portraiture. In her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Tracing the Human Face: The Art and Science of Emotional Expression (1860–1960),” Jacqueline explores how medical imagery produced within the field of neurology throughout the later 19th century informed modernist art-making practices. More specifically, she examines how neurological ideas about emotional expression in humans travelled across media, disciplines, and countries through clinical portraits of patients. While patients were largely conceived of as sites of scientific experimentation and innovation by later 19th-century clinicians, their ‘clinical portraits’ operated as vehicles through which theories of human facial expression, grounded in the study of human anatomy and physiology, could be articulated, debated, and publicized. By tracing the trajectories of such theories and their related visual culture, Jacqueline’s research uncovers how the collaborative efforts of scientists and artists working in Europe during the second half of the 19th century informed artistic pedagogy and practice. Jacqueline holds a BA in Humanities from York University and an MA in Art History from McGill University. In addition to the Wolfe Fellowship, her doctoral research is supported by the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship.
Jiamin (Carrie) Dai
Jiamin (Carrie) Dai is a PhD Candidate at the School of Information Studies, McGill University. Her doctoral research aims to better understand people with dementia in community-based social activities to inform the design of new social technologies. Dementia care has become a major healthcare issue in many countries including Canada. People with dementia and their caregivers face major challenges in reducing social isolation and maintaining quality of life. Carrie’s work helps enrich social activities inclusive of people with dementia and their caregivers in community settings. Her interdisciplinary research advances community-based knowledge of human-computer interaction and library and information science in the context of dementia care. Imbedded in community outreach, her fieldwork has successfully reached a range of stakeholders including people with dementia, caregivers, Alzheimer Society professionals, and librarians. Her volunteer work and community engagements are well received and recognized by organizational partners. In particular, she was awarded Volunteer of the Year 2019 by the Alzheimer Society of Montreal. In addition to her doctoral research, Carrie is a collaborator with the McGill Department of Family Medicine in promoting eHealth literacy. She holds a Master of Information Studies (McGill University) and a B.Sc. in Educational Technology (Shanghai International Studies University). In addition to the Wolfe Fellowship, her doctoral research is supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT).
Burç Köstem
Burç Köstem (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University. His doctoral research located in Istanbul, investigates the mutual production of reactionary sentiment and neoliberalism across the sites of urban construction, financial speculation and social media platforms from a degrowth perspective. More broadly, he is interested in the politics of the built environment, the problem of waste and excess in urban economies, critiques of political economy and post-autonomist political thought. His project is titled “Antiproductive Ecologies: Infrastructure, Finance and Culture in post-2000 Turkey”. Over the past 20 years, under the rule of the Justice and Development Party, politics in Turkey has been shaped by three power formations that converge around the fetishization of economic growth – the political economy of neoliberal developmentalism, the affective politics of authoritarianism, and the environmental politics of extraction. This project situates the construction of mega-infrastructure complexes and the politics of financial speculation as key sites where this fetish of economic growth is concretized and resisted. Studying the fields of cultural representation, artistic practice and activist intervention around construction and finance in Turkey, I investigate how the discourses of economic growth can be critiqued. Drawing on the work of artists, activists, political groups, and thinkers operating in Turkey, I speculate what it would mean to discover a politics of antiproduction, abundance and commoning that moves beyond growth.
Isadora Borges Monroy
Isadora Borges Monroy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. In the wake of the evidence provided by Snowden and other whistleblowers, her work studies democratic citizen attitudes towards their governments’ mass online surveillance policies, particularly in Canada, the United States, and the European Union. Using comparative, behavioral and political economy frameworks, she is in the process of testing whether attitudes towards state surveillance and surveillance capitalism differ. In particular, her work tests attitudes towards the “surveillance complex”, a term she has coined to describe the process by which governments deputize private companies to surveil and make accessible data on citizens’ consumer behavior. After observing that deputized surveillance programs create a democratic accountability gap, her research is focused on developing measures that adequately reflect citizen attitudes towards the scope, depth and variation in surveillance policies currently in use. Her research compares American to European attitudes and politics surrounding divergent regulatory frameworks, which she contextualizes through an analysis of their differing legal traditions and constraints. She holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, where her research focused on Google’s surveillance of digital piracy, and its effects on academic knowledge building. Isadora was an FRQSC scholar and has been awarded the 2018 NPSA/Pi Sigma Alpha Best Paper Award for The European Voter Privacy-Security Choice during 2014 EU Elections.
Li Parrent
Li Parrent is a PhD candidate and Cundill Fellow in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, in cotutelle with the Avignon Université. She completed her BA at the University of Minnesota in French & Italian Studies and Classical Civilization, and was a Fulbright Student at the University of York, where she completed an MA in Medieval Studies. Her work examines intersections of scientific thought on climate, habitat and medicine with politics and trade in thirteenth to fifteenth century Europe. In particular, she focuses on how ideas of the ‘local’ and the ‘exotic’ simultaneously devalued non- Mediterranean geographies and encouraged the discovery of medicinal and political potentialities in the landscapes, flora, and fauna of other distinct regions. In addition, she investigates how perceptions of local ingredients shifted as medical herbals became adapted to lay, courtly milieux. Her studies intersect with anthropological theories on space, conspicuous consumption, and animal studies through the examination of a wide range of sources, including pharmacopeias, herbals, chronicles, and paintings.
Marie Raulier
Marie Raulier is a PhD candidate in the Département des littératures de langue française, de traduction et de création at McGill University. She holds a B.A. in French and Romance Literatures and Languages from Université de Liège (Belgium) and a M.A. in French literature from McGill. Her dissertation aims to seize the transformations in the representation of the horseback rider in the French Ancien Régime literature by a study of the horseback riding treatises written between 1593 and 1789, using the methods of the cultural studies and history of ideas. She questions the relation between the emerging equestrian discipline and the other fields of arts and science and, above all, tries to account for the place of the written support in the learning of a corporal practice. Her doctoral research was funded by the SSHRC and she received a Schull-Yang International Experience Award and a Michael-Smith Foreign Study Supplement to perform research in the Parisian archives and libraries in 2020 and 2021. In 2021-2022, she will pursue her research in Paris as a pensionnaire étrangère at École Normale Supérieure de Paris.
Justin Raycraft
Justin Raycraft is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. His interests are oriented towards improving conservation policies in rangeland environments, with attention to the varied effects of wildlife management on rural livelihoods in East Africa. His doctoral project is based on a year of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Maasai Steppe, a vast grassland ecosystem in northern Tanzania that supports numerous species of ungulates and large carnivores. His research employs qualitative and quantitative methods to study people’s attitudes towards conservation areas and wildlife at the community-level. The backbone of his project is a study of community attitudes towards Randilen Wildlife Management Area and Manyara Ranch, two key community-based conservation areas in the ecosystem that protect a vital wildlife corridor between Tarangire National Park and Lake Manyara National Park. He is also carrying out several related studies on human-wildlife conflict through the lens of attitudes to understand the social, political, and economic factors that underlie people’s tolerance for living with wildlife. These studies utilize GIS technology to visualize perceived economic impacts of wildlife on agriculture and livestock production by geographical area, and focus in particular on human dimensions of conflict with spotted hyenas, elephants, and leopards.
Twisha Singh
Twisha Singh's doctoral research aims to study the commercial and technological evolution of entertainment spaces post 1900s in Calcutta and London. She focuses on the advent new scientific techniques employed by actors and managers such as reflexology and studio-schools to elevate their acting techniques. During the 1900s in cities like Calcutta, there was a large-scale investment of capital in the urban proscenium theatre that commodified entertainment much in similitude to the growth of modern theatre in London. Singh wants to study the economic and technological changes in London that invariably altered cultural production in the colonial landscape of the city of Calcutta. Her doctoral work focuses on how the technological innovations in urban theatre led to the professionalization of the occupation of an actor especially for women. Growth in theatre technology created an array of new occupational and economic opportunities for females like that resident managers. In London by 1920s a considerable number of theatre-managers were females. The inception of new technology in the realm of theatre intersected with the earlier conceptions of social thought that tethered actresses with the ideas of deviant female sexuality and a constant need of control in order to organize modern society. The growth of occupational mobility and economic independence of actresses is closely tied to the technological advancement of theatre as well as professionalization of work-sphere. Singh aims to employ a pluralistic approach combining theatrical technologies, economics, popular culture, and political theatre. Thus, contributing towards an analysis of a three-tier interaction between audience, theatre and stage and a cross-cultural study that will bring out both technological specificity and identity creation of theatre labor. Twisha is a doctoral student at the Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University. Her research area includes South Asian History, Modern British History, Theatre and Performance Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has completed her Master's degree in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and is an editor of a journal of South-Asian studies called HARF. She has previously worked at the National Human Rights Commission of India and Indian Institute of Dalit Studies in New Delhi.
