911勛圖

Abstract: In this presentation, I explore lessons learned from platforms disrupting the journalism sector. Scholars have emphasized platform power (Nielsen & Ganter, 2022) and the ways in which platforms have enforced a particular logic within the sector. Here, I analyze ���spaces of negotiation��� (Poell et.al., 2023) available to journalism, rather than to platforms. What are moments of agency in which news organizations decide to disentangle from big platform companies? First, I discuss the dependency trap and agency through spaces of negotiations, before introducing the notion of tipping points. In short, tipping points are what I refer to as moments of ���enough is enough��� for news organizations in a way that enables them to act upon their agency potential to escape the dependency trap dynamic. Tipping points might be of technological, economic, ideological or political nature. Conceptualizing disentanglements as a consequence of tipping points adds nuance to the analysis of agency and power asymmetry and helps explain why and how journalism may choose to disentangle from platforms, despite existing power asymmetries.

This presentation is based on the editorial for the special issue forthcoming in Digital Journalism: ���Unfolding Disentanglements from Platform Power in Journalism: Strategies, Perceptions, Practices and Alliances.��� That I edited together with Karoline Andrea Ihlb疆k (Oslo Metropolitan University) and Annika Sehl (Katholische Universit瓣t Eichst瓣tt).

Bio: Sarah Anne Ganter, is an Associate Professor at the 911勛圖 School of Communication where she leads the Digital Content & Platform Governance Lab. Her publications include "The Power of Platforms, Shaping Media and Society" (OUP) and "Media Governance: A Cosmopolitan Critique" (Palgrave).

Abstract: As part of the requirement for the ���Introduction to Communication Studies��� course, we asked our students to go on a digital detox for a day and journal how they feel. Digital detox is a period during which one steps away from digital devices including smartphones, tablets, computers and social media platforms to practice mindfulness. The purpose of the digital detox assignment was to make the students aware of their use of communication technologies and the extent to which these devices are integrated into their daily routine and habits. Specifically, the assignment was intended to (a) enhance awareness of the uses, functions, and gratifications of communication technologies, and (b) serve as a vehicle for self-discovery whereby students closely examine taken-for-granted aspects of their personal media technology dependency. Upon reading students��� auto-ethnographies, we came across fascinating accounts. Drawing upon Attride-Stirling���s thematic network (2001), we identified six salient themes that are experienced during a digital detox journey: alienated participation, digital alleviation, gamified self, recall, disorientation, and relapse. In the absence of digital media, particularly media that can be individually consumed, detoxers find themselves disoriented and unstructured. Almost all participants experienced FOMO, fear of missing out, when they were not able to engage in the online sphere. Their accounts show how tempting technologically mediated participation is. Detoxers equate their lack of media consumption to addiction and describe how the socio-technical affordances of many applications create an urge through gamification. Gamification and playfulness help de-routinize the routine. They are a prevalent feature of social media and many digital technologies these days. Digital alleviation seems to be a major purpose for media use. Students interpreted their digital consumption as a means of tranquility and cooling down and in some cases procrastination and killing time. As the assignment was a digital detox and not media detox altogether, many students turned to old traditional media, such as (printed) books. However, they found it quite demanding for a mere alleviation. As we had asked our students for genuine answers even if it meant discontinuing the detox journey, we found many accounts in which the impulse of these technologies could not be resisted. Our findings show that students experience a difficult time for an ���unmediated solitude��� off the grid.

Bio: Daniel Ahadi is senior lecturer in the School of Communication at 911勛圖. His research focuses on self and identity in relation to media, migration, globalization, and transnational diasporas. His most recent publications include Migration and the Politics of Methodology (Routledge, 2025), co-edited with Kirsten Emiko McAllister and Ayaka Yoshimizu, and The Handbook of Ethnic Media in Canada (McGill-Queen���s University Press, 2023), co-edited with Sherry S. Yu and Ahmed Al Rawi.

Abstract: This three-year (2025-2028) program of creative and qualitative research considers how mixed-ability ensemble creation and performance might generate alternative forms of authorship, relationality, and aesthetics.

While disability-focused theatre has grown significantly since the 1990s, existing models of inclusive creation typically involve limited pairings���neurodivergent/neurotypical or disabled/non-disabled collaborators���and continue to centre non-disabled frameworks even as they gesture toward equity. This project moves beyond these traditional inclusion models by situating a wider spectrum of ability within a sustained, decentred creative space.

Drawing on Petra Kuppers' theorization of the disability-spectacle paradox, which highlights the tension between cultural impulses to render disability invisible and to make it spectacular on stage, the project asks how a broader inter-ability ensemble disrupts this binary, producing viewing experiences that resist reductive categorization and foreground relational meaning-making. The research will connect in-studio creative research with participant conversations and audience survey data, developed in partnership with Vancouver's Neworld Theatre and collaborating artist Niall McNeil, whose interest in Shakespeare's Macbeth anchors the creative inquiry. The qualitative research piece will be led by Urban Studies/Gerontology assistant professor Dr Mei Fang.

This research will develop preliminary frameworks and techniques for sustained mixed-ability collaboration, with particular attention to how aesthetic decision-making shifts when disability is centred not as adaptation or accommodation, but as creative generativity. Implications for inclusive devising practice, disability representation, and contemporary performance scholarship will be discussed.

Bio: James Long is an emerging scholar and internationally recognized performance maker who joined 911勛圖 as an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance in 2022. His work spans a wide variety of collaborative contexts, including his role as co-Artistic Director of Canada���s Theatre Replacement (2003-2022). His creative practice focuses on live performance and methods of inter-cultural, inter-ability and community collaboration. His work has been presented throughout North America, Europe and Asia. In 2019 he was co-awarded (with Maiko Yamamoto) Canada's largest theatre award, the Siminovitch Prize, for his work as a director with TR and as a freelance artist. Long���s community-based work focuses on working with unique individuals and communities to develop bespoke performance structures and events that celebrate lived experiences.

Recent work includes developing and directing the stage version of King Arthur's Night (2016), producing a feature-length documentary of the same project (2023-2025), co-writing/directing Through My Lens (2023) with blind artist and disability advocate Amy Amantea, and the current development of With Blood Comes Blood, an adaptation of Macbeth with theatre maker Niall McNeil, whose practice is informed by his lived experience of Down Syndrome. Since joining 911勛圖, his practice has expanded to include qualitative research methods and scholarly publications on inter-ability collaboration and accommodations in teaching. In 2025, he was awarded the Community Engaged Research Award from 911勛圖's Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology for his work in disability arts collaboration and community-building research.

Abstract: Over the past few years I -- with my Doctoral student Alessandra Bordini -- have been working on the digital remediation of the entire Wosk-McDonald Aldine Collection: over 130 books published at the dawn of the age of print in Renaissance Venice. This is the wellspring from which an enormous quantity of modern design of books, layout, typography, and information architecture springs, and it was developed at this once press over two or three decades. 911勛圖 has had this world-class collection since the 1990s. In 2015 the library began scanning it in its entirety; we have been building a public-facing web resource (using "minimal computing" strategies for long-term preservation) that contextualizes the Collection and allows thematic browsing through the origins of print culture. It's almost complete enough to show off...

Bio: John Maxwell is Associate Prof in Publishing, with research on history of technology, history of publishing, and history of publishing technology :-)

Abstract: In the May 2014 issue of TIME magazine, writer Katy Steinmetz declared a ���transgender tipping point,��� naming a period in the early- to mid-2010s when transgender people were gaining increased visibility in popular media. The promise of the trans tipping point was that this rise in mainstream recognition would lead to social change and greater equality for the trans community���a promise that, over a decade later, has not yet come to fruition. Instead, we have seen what communication scholar Mia Fischer calls a ���conservative backlash��� against trans communities as anti-trans movements have swept the Anglophone world, particularly in the UK, US, and Canada, leading to the introduction and passing of legislation designed to erase trans people from public life. << This sociopolitical context forms the backdrop for my book project, tentatively titled Beauty in the Age of Trans Visibility. Taking beauty media and beauty culture as sites of contestation, I argue that the mainstreaming of trans visibility has worked to reify, rather than dismantle, gendered difference. This sociopolitical context forms the backdrop for my book project, tentatively titled Beauty in the Age of Trans Visibility. Taking beauty media and beauty culture as sites of contestation, I argue that the mainstreaming of trans visibility has worked to reify, rather than dismantle, gendered difference. I do so through a combination of textual analysis of fashion media, YouTube vlogs, and trans women���s cultural production alongside semi-structured interview data with trans women and femmes. I pay particular attention to the intersections of race and trans identity to propose a trans femme of colour theory that foregrounds processes of racialization in the construction of the trans femme subject in the popular imagination.

Bio: Erique Zhang (they/she) is an Assistant Professor of Digital Publics and Promotional Cultures in the School of Communication at 911勛圖. Their research examines how images of trans women and femmes of color circulate in the fashion, beauty, and entertainment industries and what these images communicate about race, gender, and trans identity. Their first monograph, in progress, proposes a trans femme of color critique of media that understands trans womanhood as imbricated with social processes of racialization and colonization.

Abstract: Climate grief and dystopian imaginaries have been saturating the popular media landscape in the past decade; most of them focus on the inevitability of an undesirable "future world" and objectionable forms of organization and sociality leading to paralysis and lack of meaningful action towards addressing the climate crisis. There is a resignation in our media zeitgeist that post-climate society is coming, which reflects a kind of ���poverty of imagination��� (Miller, 2018). This book project seeks new ways of constructing generative and sustainable conversations about the future. By drawing on creative approaches that provoke resistance to the current trajectory of hyper-individualized consumption, we envision a multiplicity of affirmative, tangible and realistic futures across disciplines that help process the grief we feel not only for our planet, but for our ways of life that must inevitably change. In providing our own answers to this question, we offer this collaborative and carefully curated book. Working closely together the three authors create a focused, rather than comprehensive, response to the issues we identify as the root causes of collective dissatisfaction and paralysis about climate change. We work against the notion of pre-emptive surrender and resignation at the supposed unsolvability of environmental collapse. We travel through virtual tourism and escapism into gaming worlds, arts engagement and informal public education on futures literacies, as well as imaginative design methods towards speculative futures. Across these explorations, we return to several key threads: affect, grief, speculation, and future imaginaries.

Bio: Milena Droumeva brings together longstanding knowledge in the fields of acoustic ecology and game studies to examine media forms, approaches, and experiences that go beyond awareness-raising. One of the themes Milena explores is the emergent genre of ���climate change��� games where the mechanics, narrative and aesthetic design offer a sandbox for phenomenological encounters with crisis, as well as speculative quests towards possible futures. Gillian Russell���s considerable experience in speculative design offers a breadth of creative ways by which people can productively explore difficult scenarios. Working at the intersection of design, anthropological futures, and narrative environments, Gillian upholds design as the right of many (rather than of ���experts���), showcasing the power of experimental co-creation and futures-making as creative practices for eco-social change.

Dr. Gillian Russell���s research investigates how design can be used as a method for actively engaging publics in unveiling present realities and future possibilities while working at the intersection of design, anthropological futures, and narrative environments. Drawing on tactics of speculative intervention and value-sensitive design her practice explores the potential for the imaginary as a design tool for social change. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon, in the Porto Design Biennale, Helsinki Design Museum, Design Museum London, London Design Festival, Milan Furniture Fair and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She holds a PhD in Design History (2017) from the Royal College of Art, London, and was a SSHRC post-doctoral fellow at the Digital Democracies Institute, 911勛圖. Gillian is co-director of the Imaginative Methods Lab, an international working group developing practices and tools to re-imagine design research.