Teaching
Art, Cultural Production, and Critical Digital Media
A Special Topics course in Media Studies at the Department of Art, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
This course examines the role of art and cultural production in media critique, with a focus on creative interventions into the storied space of ‘big data.’ In today’s digital landscape, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are often framed as technical processes, with attention paid to “how AI works” and “how it’s used” and how it can “be improved”. This course challenges the simplicity of these AI narratives using interdisciplinary forms of cultural production that focus on AI’s social, political, and material processes and impacts. This class will focus on feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial interventions into these digital environments. Each class brings together contemporary media theory with critical artistic and cultural practices, to engage questions of data ethics, social justice, and climate change. Students will examine the cultural, technological, social, political, and ethical dynamics of today’s digital environments, and reflect on their own experiences with AI in their daily life. Students will have the opportunity to apply the critical and analytical skills developed in this class to produce their own creative interventions.
Culture and Technology
Master’s Level Information Studies Course at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto.
An examination of how society, culture, and understanding of the human condition influence and are influenced by technological development. This course encourages students to think critically about the intersections of technology and culture in order to consider the contexts and contingencies of technological “innovations” and the politics of techno-benevolence. With this foundation, students will be able to detangle the discourses and applications of technology driven “solutions” as well as imagine possible alternative approaches. To this end, students will produce knowledge mobilization outputs to communicate complex C&T concepts and research beyond the classroom.