I am Associate Professor of Media and Culture and Graduate Director in the Department of Cultural Studies at Trent University. I am Co-Editor of Media Theory, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, and Corresponding Editor of the Canadian Review in Comparative Literature. I also sit on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies.

My research draws from both media and geography to examine how experimental and socially engaged art reveals critical issues for cities, technology, politics, and visual culture.

View my publications.

Out Now: Media Theory 9.1.

Out Now: Imaginations 15.3

Past research

Questions of space have figured prominently since my first days in graduate school at Western University’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism (2005-7), where I wrote a master’s thesis exploring political subjectivity and its spatial dimensions in works by Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Derrida. However, growing impatient with the demand for pure textual analysis and hermetic thinking at the Centre, I made the decision to pursue a Ph.D at York University in the Department of Humanities (2007-15), where I focused on articulations of contemporary European culture and migratory art. Highlighting archival lieux des memoire including architecture, film, literature, and sculpture, my dissertation situated new imaginaries of European “home” as a critical response to the upheavals of the 2008 financial crisis. The artistic works I chose to focus on supported a broader investigation into memorialization practices as read through the prism of critical race and ethnic studies. As I argued, second generation migrants are uniquely situated to hold European memory institutions accountable for the “translocal” specificity of diverse communities (El-Tayeb 2011).

After graduating with my Ph.D, I published articles on archiving, cultural memory, art history, counter-memorialization, libraries and architecture, and cities. During this time, I also revisited a prior interest in media theory and explored various media-geographical entanglements. My first article on this subject looked at digital media in relation to mapping representations and politics. In “The Geospatial Rhetoric of Asylum: Mapping Migration in Fortress Europe,” I sought to expose the impact of geospatial imaging technologies on relations between users, interfaces, and publics. I analyzed an online map created by neo-fascists which contained geospatial details of asylum houses throughout Germany built in response to the Syrian refugee crisis. I uncovered how the group’s information gathering tactics reflected long contested relationships between maps, power, and the construction of identity. I made further note of a suspicious alignment between anti-migrant sentiments and the map’s presumed objectivity, and I questioned the viability of cementing demands for social justice through an appeal to facts. I addressed the epistemic assumptions behind rejecting politically motivated maps as propaganda, the logistical and strategic novelties associated with crowdsourcing through social media, and the narrative power of maps.

This work inspired me to examine a broader constellation between the arts, media, cartography, and cities. In “Geospatial Detritus: Mapping Urban Abandonment,” I explored how digital mapping visualizations help to transform abandoned cities into motors of sensory experience, sociality, and public initiative. Heralding the onset of “austerity urbanism” (Tonkiss 2013), I situated artworks like Michael Heizer’s City as a watershed for resisting demands to mobilize a digital tourism industry of abandoned places. Later, in “Geolocating Popular Memory: Recorded Images of Hashima Island after Skyfall,” I described how Japan’s Hashima Island as featured in a James Bond film spurred efforts by Google to produce images of the island’s built environment with the help of an experimental “Trekker” device. I explored how this image archive was applied to support Japan’s contested bid for UNESCO industrial heritage status. This status protects the island as an historic site of technology and Meiji-era industrialization, despite loud objections from the Korean families of long-forgotten conscripted workers.

Altogether, these various projects inspired me to develop a special journal issue exploring questions of Geospatial Memory. With a focus on aesthetic, cultural, historical, and archival objects, I compiled a volume of 17 contributors with an aim to explore how geospatial media helps to shape our current spatial orientation toward the everyday and to the past. The contributors and I found diverse and often unique ways to infuse the practices of collective memory into the experiences, discourses, and technologies of geospatial media, drawing on film and archival studies, psychogeography, urban studies, media archaeology, critical methods, and communications.

Current research

My research during the pandemic has faced predictable challenges. In the first year of the pandemic, I became actively engaged with colleagues both at Trent and beyond to explore various initiatives and funding proposals. Generally, however, the pandemic delayed completion of several existing projects. My edited volume of the Canadian Review in Comparative Literature, which included papers delivered at annual meetings of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association (CCLA) during my tenure as President (2018-20), was delayed. Initially scheduled for publication in the fall of 2020, the volume was released almost two years later with my introduction entitled “Comparative Studies in a Precarious Present.”

In 2021, I wrote an article examining questions of media philosophy and media specificity in Harun Farocki’s Parallel, the German documentary filmmaker’s last completed work before his death in 2014. My paper, entitled “‘Where Does This World End?’ Space, Time and Image in Harun Farocki’s Parallel,” offers a meditation on the ontological status of digital images, exploring the latter’s impact both on documentary filmmaking and on adjacent narrative-based approaches. Much of my analysis of Parallel focuses on “non-vococentric” methods of essay film storytelling, and on the challenges of applying critical approaches in Media Studies, such as media archeology, to popular visual culture (Harvey 2012). I presented on this research following an invitation from CCLA’s Materialities Research Group in March 2021. However, because of pandemic delays, the completed article was not published until December 2023.

Also in 2021, I was approached by the editors of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture to write an article-length entry on “Digital Geographies” for Volume 3, entitled Digitisations, Transformations, and Futures. This entry, long completed, and included in my dossier, is scheduled for publication in 2026.

In 2020 and again in 2021, I was awarded two SSHRC Explore Grants from Trent University valued at $7,000 and $5,000, respectively. The first, building on years of prior research, was devoted to probing the myriad connections between ecology, infrastructure, and mobility in communication theory. This research was mainly conducted through a review of the diverse literature on these subjects. The second grant, more narrowly focused than the first, was geared to examining the methodological and practical challenges involved in creating an open-access repository of “locative art,” which I define as artwork that directly engages locative media (i.e., smartphones, sensor devices, and Geographical Information Systems or GIS). This research was conducted through a critical evaluation of existing open-access repositories and their rapidly changing platforms and infrastructures, and through interviews with academics, librarians, and technicians.

With the aid of this generous funding, I found myself in a position to apply for a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (IDG) in 2022, in which I proposed to build a prototype repository of digital locative art – the first of its kind. The design of the repository was to be mindful not only of the ephemeral quality of locative art, given the medium’s dependency on user experiences, but also the geographical specificity of the artform. Both aspects reveal specific challenges for archiving and digital preservation. I partnered with Dr. Jill Didur, my colleague at the Milieux Institute at Concordia University, who agreed to serve as Co-Applicant. I also partnered with a half dozen artists and technicians around the world, including from the U.K., Spain, Turkey, Canada, and the United States, who agreed in principle to serve as Collaborators. Unfortunately, the application was unsuccessful.

While these various projects have created a roadmap for my manuscript proposal as I describe in the final section of this statement, my current research has been anchored by several, recently completed projects:

The first project of note was inspired by the thoughtful questions of students taking my workshop in Computational Arts over the years, and by a personal impetus to reanimate the art-historical themes that I explored during my Ph.D. Initially, these questions concretized in an investigation about how practice-based humanities research commits to participate in the evolving forms of knowledge that are recognized at universities. In 2023, together with Dr. Agata Mergler, a colleague of mine at York University, I sought to develop a community of researchers who are equally invested in these issues by organizing a conference at Trent under the theme of A Research-creation Episteme: Practices, lnterventions, Dissensus.

Bringing together practitioners, artists, faculty, and students, the conference hosted more than 30 speakers tasked with building a collection of “manifestos” on the subject, which were delivered in short (5-minute) presentations. Beyond finding resolute solutions, the format of the manifesto wasgeared to opening the field of inquiry and debate, and to searching for a community whose durability extends beyond fragile notions of identity or creed.

Because of its tremendous success, Dr. Mergler and I got to work on an editorial project inspired by contributions at the symposium, which we launched in partnership with Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. This special journal issue includes 14 articles, including one by myself entitled “Let’s Abolish Research-creation.” The issue is now published.

I have also recently completed a second editorial project thanks to the initiative of my departmental colleague, Dr. Michael Epp, who in spring 2024 expressed an interest in collaborating with me on a special issue of Media Theory, entitled “Violent Labour and Media.” This project builds on a recognition of the fact that media, whether old or new, have been impactful when it comes to making workers comply with an agenda of perpetuating violence. Such a tendency can be found not only in labour practices that are directly equivalent to violence, such as work in the military, but also in sectors where perpetuating violence would not be considered a norm, such as education or service work or emotional labour in the context of families. The issue is geared to exploring perspectives on how media are implicated in the expansion of such “violent labour,” and to probing the specific role played by new technologies, whether they are borne from violence or from enhancing communications (or both). The issue is now published.

Future research

At this juncture, my research aims have reached an inflection point, branching out into several different but connected paths:

1. Research in the arts

In 2023, I contacted Concordia University Press to propose a monograph on the history of locative art, focusing on its intellectual roots, artistic traditions, and early institutional challenges. In my proposal for Experimental Technologies: Reframing Locative Media’s Artistic Past, I observe that while locative media like smartphones is pervasive in contemporary culture, the purview of locative art, which explicitly uses such media, remains shrouded in obscurity and is often relegated to specialist or niche audiences. However, despite its lack of mainstream popularity, locative art holds significant potential as a communications tool given its ability to reach audiences directly through experiences. In fact, many locative artworks have galvanized user experiences to address important and consequential issues such as climate change, migration, identity politics, and war.

While the academic study of locative media is well established, the connections between locative art and the experimental traditions from which it came have yet to be concretized. In the book proposal, I express my intention to explore the experimental practices of locative art with a focus on its lineage from historical artistic collectives, including Fluxus, the Situationist International, the World Soundscape Project, and the earthworks sculptural movement, examining their diverging and often fraught political leanings. I further propose to develop connections between locative art and the emergence of collectives from the recent past, including Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theatre, the Blast Theory collective, and media labs like The Senseable City Lab at MIT. These investigations will show that locative art did not simply result from the commercialization of locative media in the late 1990s. Rather, it originated from a history of makers who adapted and reworked different experimental approaches, and from sustained efforts to push the speculative horizons of art toward its inherent capacity for opening up new possibilities, worlds, and ways of thinking and doing.

Conducting the unconventional art-historical research proposed in this monograph is important for examining current issues related to artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, technological disruption, and the apparent increase in global disorder. Examining and reframing how we interact with technologies, how the limits of human intervention have been imaged and continue to be imagined, and the degree to which experimentation can be moulded to achieve progressive aims are all crucial aspects of addressing urgent matters of the present through the past.

2. New perspectives on cinema and geography

In another developing path of my research, I examine relations between cinema and geography as an indicator of power relations. In “Apparatus Time: Screen, Mobility, and Regimes of Perception,” an article I am currently writing, I focus on the policing of affects through the growing push for safety awareness. By observing the proliferation of amber alerts, crime reporting tools, climate early warning systems, and breaking news, I illustrate how alert systems that are currently being marketed as phone apps can be viewed as fundamentally good: They bring attention to under-reported events and empower users to make lifesaving decisions. From another perspective, however, they hold the potential to alter our conception of safety and risk. By identifying existential threats in our surroundings through repeated prompts on our phones, I argue that such alerts edify us to adopt a mode of vigilance that ultimately serves to disempower users, and to legitimize traditional authorities such as the police.

Forecasting research I aim to complete in the next five years, my article develops an approach to situate this phenomenon in the context of cinema studies. Drawing from the established field of cinematic urban geographies (Penz and Koeck 2017), I frame the social impact of heightened vigilance through questions of storytelling and genre, space and place, and the technical apparatus, and introduce specific examples from the history of film, including police crime drama and film noir, which serve as a template. Methodologically, I focus on the insights provided in Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, which uses a form of documentary placemaking to neutralize fictional and supposedly impervious outcomes. Though a departure from the art-historical themes of the monograph project, my desire to work in this subject area has developed over many years, beginning with some of my earliest work on media and geography. I plan to conduct research in these areas for some time to come.

3. Future of scholar-led publishing

Since 2023 I joined as Co-Editor of Media Theory (mediatheoryjournal.org), an international, peer-reviewed and scholar-led open access journal. Since then, I have devoted considerable time to improving Media Theory’s financial situation by applying to SSHRC’s Aid to Scholarly Journals, and to professionalizing the journal, including applying for membership to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), building partnerships through the Radical Open Access Collective, and taking action to improve discoverability of the journal through indexing, web design, and diversifying content. Recently, I have also agreed to sit on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Review in Comparative Literature to help oversee a period of considerable revitalization as the publication enters its second half century.

Through these experiences, I have developed a strong interest in exploring broader questions raised by trends in academic publishing, and in experimenting with the limits of what a journal can be given the media ecology of the 21^st century; to critically examine the communities served by journals, the techniques and technologies a journal may rely upon to disseminate information, as well as to examine specific journal content in relation to its readers. Over the next five years, I intend to build on this experience through research on publishing with a focus on open access, the future of academic writing and multimedia content, the challenges of artificial intelligence, and the relative health of the educational sector overall.