Ségolène Guinard’s doctoral dissertation, titled “In Lieu of an Image: Sensing the Cosmos at the Large Millimeter Telescope”, grounds the study of the relationships between images and the unobservable in an ethnographical account connecting communities of astronomers in Mexico to global interferometers seeking to characterize black holes with increased resolution. In April 2019 and May 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released visual evidence of the existence of black holes. Among the observatories used to collect the data needed to reconstruct the EHT images is the Large Millimeter Telescope, located on top of the extinct Sierra Negra volcano, within the Pico de Orizaba National Park. While astronomers seek to reduce uncertainty in their approach to the unseeable, we may wonder how uncertainties of all kinds may bear witness to the social, political and environmental arrangements overlapping around the Large Millimeter Telescope. As astrophysicists evince the possibility of reconstructing images to capture truth, Ségolène seek to give an account of the processes at stake in and beyond the production of astronomy iconic visuals. This project is to tell the story of different ways of sensing and making sense of a greater cosmos, and of the hardships of doing so, from the Sierra Negra to the broader astronomer’s community, in Mexico and beyond; from the proximity of high mountain ecological and social landscapes to distant astronomical events and entities. What images and imaginaries intersect, oppose and articulate around the Large Millimeter Telescope, making entities and relationships exist, which would otherwise fade into the unobservable? How can we understand the role played by uncertainty in our approximation of truthful descriptions of things and events?
Cynthia Kreichati
Cynthia Kreichati is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. Trained as a pharmacist in Lebanon, Cynthia holds a Masters in Sociology from the American University in Beirut. Her current work explores the relationships between politics, archives and the environment. She is now completing her doctoral dissertation project — an ethnography of an infrastructural project of development targeting the Litani river in Lebanon. Cynthia’s doctoral research explores how infrastructural projects in Lebanon have become a synecdoche of the state’s divestment from responsible public service provision. Her dissertation focuses specifically on the Litani river dam project, a hydropower and irrigation infrastructure funded by Lebanon’s first loan from the World Bank and implemented between 1950 and 1970. Initially conceived as the country’s most important investment in technological modernity since its independence in 1943, the heavily polluted Litani river is now poisoning all forms of life in the rural region of the Bekaa through which it flows, delivering disease and disarray in the place of abundance and progress. Cynthia’s ethnography traces the fraught histories of these technological transformations. Investigating the institutional discourses of infrastructural development and decline on one hand, and the consumption practices of water and electricity in everyday life on the other, her dissertation attends to way the gaps and tensions between these two entwined scales have become invested with local politics. Her research ultimately foregrounds the creative ways communities address broader socioeconomic and ecological fallouts and navigate bio-political practices forged in the crucible of infrastructural collapse.
Jérémie LeClerc
Jérémie LeClerc is a PhD candidate in English at McGill University. His SSHRC CGS-funded dissertation, “Making Space Matter: Romanticism and Field Theory,” looks at the ways transatlantic Romantic literature intersected with the development of classical field theory in nineteenth-century physics and mathematics. Breaking away from the Newtonian model of physics and its conception of matter as “atoms in a void”—small hard bodies floating in the empty container of space—the field theory of matter put forward by nineteenth-century figures such as Michael Faraday, William Rowan Hamilton and James Clerk Maxwell instead conceived of space as a continuum or field of “physical lines of forces.” This paradigm shift occurred at the same period that British and American writers were exploring novel ways of thinking about nature, and the porous boundary between the disciplines of arts and sciences at the time led to many fruitful exchanges and conversations among physicists and poets, mathematicians and novelists. “Making Space Matter” takes the concept of field developed by nineteenth-century physics and mathematics as a starting point to explore new treatments of space and materiality, individuality and relationality, and atmospheres and environments in transatlantic Romantic literature, studying the writings of figures such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake and Martin R. Delany to argue that the field model of nature makes for a rich contribution to many traditional research questions in Romantic scholarship that have important ramifications for our understanding of science, technology and culture today.
Nina Morena
Nina Morena is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies. Her doctoral research investigates the social media practices of young people with metastatic breast cancer (MBC). Despite breast cancer’s prominent public profile, metastatic disease (or Stage IV) is often excluded from dominant narratives of screening, treatment, and survivorship. As a result, people with MBC are often marginalized from the philanthropic and survivor-centred focus of breast cancer discourse aimed at people with earlier stages of disease. The experience of living with MBC remains understudied and too little understood. On social media, understanding how people with MBC respond to living with and managing the disease will inform the fields of cancer medicine, treatment, and health communication from patient perspectives. Nina’s research examines the knowledge work people with MBC do on social media, and the forms of information activism and digital literacy about breast cancer they produce in the process. This research will create practical knowledge that will help medical professionals better understand the online information practices that people with MBC engage in and will support the production of critical literacy materials the public can use to interpret online information about breast cancer. Nina holds an MA in Media Studies from Concordia University and a BA in English Literature from McGill University. She has published work in JMIR Formative Research, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Feminist Media Studies.
Valérie Lynn Therrien
Valérie Lynn Therrien is a PhD candidate in Philosophy, specializing in Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. Her dissertation — titled Models of Mathematics : A Tale of Two Logics — centers on the question of how to ad[1]judicate an appropriate background logic for axiomatizations of mathematics. Currently, first-order logics are the default background logic. They have the advantage of being simple yet expressive, deductively complete, but has two main disadvantages. The first is that it is not categorical, which means that there are infinitely many non-isomorphic models for e.g., the natural number sequence 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . — most including strange entities like “non-standard” numbers capable of being greater than all natural numbers, and in which ad[1]dition and multiplication aren’t computable! The second disadvantage is that making first-order logics expressive enough to axiomatize the natural numbers renders it incomplete! In many ways, first-order logics simply are not up to the task. Second-order logics are deductively incomplete, but have the advantage of being categorical, which makes them far more suitable to talk with precision about a mathematical structure. Val´erie’s hypothesis for the curious side-lining of second-order logics has precisely to do with the fascinating panoply of non[1]standard models, which required the development of a new field of mathematics to investigate : model theory. She intends to generate a history of model the[1]ory and use this history as a case study for the burgeoning field of Philosophy of Mathematical Practice in order to improve our understanding of scientific progress and decision-making with respect to our background theories when the advantages and disadvantages aren’t themselves decisive.
Tristan Tondino
Tristan Tondino is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. He has two areas of specialization: (1) interdisciplinary research in the philosophy of language and linguistics, specializing in semantics. Questions he asks include: what kind of communication systems do various animals have, what is different about human neurology that allows for a radically different kind of language skill, in what way is language innate, how is truth related to meaning, how do the arts and sciences contribute to understanding the world, why is promoting linguistic diversity important? (2) Tristan works on the interconnectedness of other human ‘languages’. For example, he has been doing conferences that promote STEAM over STEM by tracing the relationship between mathematics, primarily geometry, and the visual arts. Tristan is also a working painter and art director. His thesis focuses on polysemy which is ubiquitous in natural language. Metaphors are rarely true. He offers arguments to support the thesis that meanings come before truth and that we should avoid conflating regimented meanings of the sciences with the rich meanings of natural language. Importantly, both the arts and sciences contribute to how we understand the world, and both employ “felicitous falsehoods” or, as he has termed them in other work, facetted fictions. In 2010, Tristan exhibited 13 artworks based on Catherine Z. Elgin’s article “True Enough.” His work on multilingual children’s books has been studied at the University of Ottawa because it allows children to map parts of speech from more than one language effectively. He has been touring his presentation “Meaning in Artistic Practice – On the Interconnectedness of Mathematics and Visual Art: A Presentation on Linear Perspective” most recently at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels and he will be giving the talk at Dawson College and Harvard University in the fall of 2023.
Richard Yanaky
Richard Yanaky is a PhD Candidate in McGill’s School of Information Studies. His dissertation work revolves around the research and development of new urban sound planning tools for non-sound professionals. The World Health Organization identifies noise pollution as the second worst environmental risk factor and its reduction has been added to the list of long-term United Nations sustainability goals due to the detrimental effects it has on the health and quality of life of city users. Yet noise is typically addressed as an afterthought, long after decisions have literally been built into the concrete. Professionals of the Built Environment who shape our cities (including urban planners, designers, and policy makers) often have to rely on a policy and broader practice framework which narrowly focuses on setting sound level limits, providing little guidance to design with sound in mind which supports well-being. Furthermore, this work is outsourced to small groups of people (e.g. acousticians), who make decisions that affect large and diverse groups of city users. This often means underrepresented and marginalized groups will be excluded from decisions that greatly – and disproportionately – impact their daily lives. To help address these issues, Richard has developed a new virtual reality tool, City Ditty, to help a wider range of people contribute to urban sound planning. Currently, sound planning revolves around controlling and limiting sound levels, using specialized tools made for acousticians, which have a high knowledge barrier for entry. City Ditty, in contrast, helps novice users instead connect to the auditory experience of city users. By considering the auditory experience, we can, for example, encourage public space utilization and facilitate social interactions. This can help promote the attraction and lingering of people in commercial areas to promote local businesses and create restorative environments to promote stress recovery. When used in conjunction with existing techniques, this can help bridge a knowledge and communication gap to include a wider range of stakeholders in city planning.
