June 22 - 24, 2023
University of CalgaryKeynotes
We are pleased to announce our keynote speakers for 2023! We are excited to have them join us for this year's conference.
Dr. Sarah Sharma
Sarah Sharma is Associate Professor of Media Theory and Director of the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (ICCIT) at the University of Toronto. She is the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 2014). This book challenges the popular sentiment that the world is “speeding up” and locates instead how temporality operates as a key relation of power structured at the intersection of a range of social differences and technologies. Her edited volume (with Rianka Singh) Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Duke UP 2022) highlights her time as director of the McLuhan Centre between 2017-2022 and retrieves a feminist version of “the medium is the message.” Sarah is currently working on a new book (tentatively titled To Be Determined) which advances a techno-feminist media theory to account for Big Tech and the gendered politics of utility, exit and repair.
To Be Determined: On the possibility of feminist techno-logics
Thursday, June 2210:30 am - 12:00 pm
The Forum, Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning
Dr. Simidele Dosekun
Simidele Dosekun is Assistant Professor in Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research centres black African women, and their participation in popular, media and consumer cultures, to explore questions of subjectivity, inequality and power in the context of globalisation. She is the author of Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2020), and co-editor of African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics (Intellect Books, 2019). She is currently researching a burgeoning, women-led and -centered Nigerian Pentecostal self-help scene. She has a PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies from King's College London.
Beyond ‘Reifying Whiteness’ in Feminist Media Studies
In this talk, I turn a black and transnational feminist reflexive eye on the field of feminist media studies, to surface for critical consideration a certain ‘story that we tell’ (Hemmings, 2005) about race, more specifically about the visibly dominant whiteness, in the global North, of the kinds of media texts and cultures that commonly comprise our objects of analysis. I show that there is a repeated critical claim to the effect that the texts and cultures ‘reify whiteness.’ Interrogating and faulting some of the variously methodological, epistemological and ontological premises and effects of the claim, I argue that it is itself performative: it contributes to the very reification that it decries, not least by seemingly serving to explain and justify why, in a given piece of scholarship, further questions about race cannot really be attended to. I suggest some of the ways in which we might go beyond ‘reifying whiteness’ in feminist media studies, so that we can attempt to offer more complete and rigorous consideration of the racial politics of what we study and how, and indeed who we are, our various positionalities, as not only scholars of media but also at the same time, necessarily, consumers and users too.
Friday, June 2311:00 am - 12:30 pm
The Forum, Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning
Vivek Shraya
Vivek Shraya's Feminist Lens
Vivek Shraya journeys through her 20+ multi disciplinary practice to highlight her approach to creating art that reclaims and centers femininity, and the challenges and joys of making work from and for the female gaze.
Saturday, June 242:15 pm - 3:45 pm
The Forum, Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning