Welcoming our new Director: Scott Richmond

 

We are very happy to officially announce that Scott Richmond (UofT Cinema Studies) will be taking over the role of McLuhan Centre director in January 2022. Scott’s areas of interest include avant-garde and experimental cinema and digital media art, critical theory and phenomenology, and contemporary film and media theory.
⁠
Scott takes over from Sarah Sharma as she prepares to step into the role of director of the Institute for Culture, Communication, Information and Technology at UTM. We wish her all the best in her new role and look forward to sharing more of our new plans in the new year.⁠
⁠

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

​

Call for Participants: McLuhan Manuscript Workshops

​

The McLuhan Centre invites UofT researchers with book manuscripts in-progress to participate in a manuscript workshop session.  

Workshops are open to researchers working on books related to technology and culture and broadly connected to our annual theme of The Global SpillAge. Selected participants will have the opportunity to invite up to three external scholars and three University of Toronto scholars of their choosing for a half-day workshop to discuss their research and obtain feedback on their draft.

 

Workshops will take place Fall 2021.

Workshops are open to UofT faculty only and will be organized by the Centre. Manuscripts must be in progress and ready to be read by the application deadline. Manuscripts under contract with a press will be given priority.

UofT scholars can apply here. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.

​

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

​

NEWS + UPCOMING EVENTS

WORKING GROUP FEATURES

RECENT EVENT PHOTOS

 

PAST EVENTS

Click on images for event details

Culture/Work/Resistance

May 30, 2017

 

A book launch and author discussion for three new titles on
Culture/Work/Resistance in a Digital Age.

Mark Banks Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality (Rowman and Littlefield).

Launched by Sarah Sharma.

​Enda Brophy Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce (Palgrave MacMillan). Launched by Ursula Huws.

​Nicole Cohen Writer's Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (McGill-Queen's University Press).

Launched by Tanner Mirrlees.

Care, Automated

October 21, 2017

​

A workshop with Amelia Abreu, Marc Böhlen, Hermenio Lima, Ian Roderick, Sarah Sharma,

David Harris Smith + Frauke Zeller. Hosted by Letters & Handshakes.

 

Presented in partnership with Blackwood Gallery as part of their year long series:

Take, Care.

​

The habit of attaching “care” to innately positive attributes obscures its entanglement with dominant systems of power and control. The ambivalence of care is crisply reflected in technological configurations of care/work. In this workshop, seven researchers share their inquiries into intersections of care and technology, in particular, automation. Questioning technological fixes to care crisis, Care, Automated examines how care work’s ongoing machinization coexists with and deepens, rather than disrupts, entrenched social hierarchies and prevailing economic imperatives. Beyond providing critical diagnostics, however, the workshop also sets out to consider how technologies of care/work might be ethically and collaboratively reimagined.