Members

Jesse Arseneault

Jesse Arseneault is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. With a background in African Cultural Studies, his teaching and research focuses primarily on the relationship between other-than-human life and contemporary Southern African literatures and cultures. He also works in the fields of queer theory, post- and de-colonial studies, cultural studies, and critical race theory.

Carolina Cambre

As a founding member of the Ethnography Lab, Cambre’s work academically and artistically explores vernacular visualities asking: How do people produce and direct the visual space. How is the image a doing? What are the social and cultural work/ings of images? Her current SSHRC project, “visual processes of legitimation” feeds into the new Visual Methods Studio.

David Howes

David Howes is Professor of Anthropology and the Co-Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is a pioneer of the anthropology of the senses and a leading theorist in the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. Publications include The Sensory Studies Manifesto (2022) and Sensorial Investigations (2023).

Chris Hurl

Chris Hurl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His research is situated at the intersection of financialization and emergent forms of data activism. As a coordinator of the Data Justice Hub, he is interested in how activists develope new ways of making sense of and confronting these infrastructures.

Alice Jarry

Alice Jarry is an Assistant Professor in the department of Design and Computation Arts. She is the strategic hire in Materials and Materiality, a member of the Canada Excellence Research Chair Cluster in Next Generation Cities (Concordia University), and the director of Milieux’s Speculative Life Biolab. As an artist-researcher, she specialize in site-specific responsive works, sci-art practices, socio-environmental design, and tangible media.

Fenwick McKelvey

Alice Jarry is an Assistant Professor in the department of Design and Computation Arts. She is the strategic hire in Materials and Materiality, a member of the Canada Excellence Research Chair Cluster in Next Generation Cities (Concordia University), and the director of Milieux’s Speculative Life Biolab. As an artist-researcher, she specialize in site-specific responsive works, sci-art practices, socio-environmental design, and tangible media.

Mitchell McLarnon

Mitchell McLarnon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education. His research interests include institutional ethnography, community-based and participatory research, visual methodologies, land-based/environmental education, adult education, community gardening, gentrification, food insecurity and urban political ecology.

Elizabeth Miller

Elizabeth (Liz) Miller is a Full Professor in Communications Studies. She is also a documentary maker who uses collaboration and interactivity as a way to connect personal stories to larger timely social issues. She has published several articles and book chapters on the use of interactive non-linear documentaries as social change interventions.

Nalini Mohabir

Nalini Mohabir is an Associate Professor in Geography, Planning, and Environment. She writes, researches, and teaches in the fields of feminist and postcolonial migration geographies, and is interested in gender and racial justice. She has published articles in Small Axe, Wasafiri, and Topia, and has co-edited The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation.

Bart Simon

Bart Simon is the current director of the Milieux Institute and Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology with expertise in science and technology studies, ethnographic methods, and game studies. His research revolves around explorations in design ethnography, playing with AI, and solar-powered experience design.

Carly Ziter

Carly Ziter is an urban ecologist and assistant professor in the Biology Department. She is a core faculty member of Concordia’s interdisciplinary cluster for Smart, Sustainable, and Resilient Cities and Communities. Her research asks how landscape structure, land-use history, and biodiversity impact multiple ecosystem services (the benefits we receive from nature) and their relationships in urban and urbanizing landscapes.

Marcelina Piotrowski

Marcelina Piotrowski is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Milieux Institute. Her research focuses on environmental media, bio/political subjectivity, sensor technology, and posthumanism in knowledge projects aimed at education in ecological change. Her current SSHRC-funded project examines sensing in environmental media.

Kasia Van Schaik

Kasia Van Schaik holds a PhD in Literature from McGill University and is an FRQSC Postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute. She is the author of the linked story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth, which was nominated for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2022 Concordia University First Book Prize.

Brice Ammar-Khodja

Brice Ammar-Khodja is an artist, graphic designer, and PhD student based in Montreal and Paris. His work examines active materials, residual matter, and low-technologies to explore the socio-environmental and political interconnections pertaining to materiality and visual information. He is currently pursuing a thesis jointly supervised at Concordia University, Montreal and EnsAD, EnsadLab, Paris.

Amrita Gunrung

Amrita Gurung is a PhD student in the Social and Cultural Analysis program and currently part of the Montreal Waterways research project at the Ethnography Lab. Her research interests include mobilities, labour and migration, disaster, environment and infrastructures, and Nepal and Himalayan studies. Her PhD research looks at the nexus between student mobility and transnational diaspora formation in Canada. .

Robert Hunt

Robert Hunt is a PhD student in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. Hunt’s doctoral research investigates the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence technologies and office work, examining the use of automation and data analytic software by human resources departments in practices ranging from hiring to employee evaluation to monitoring well-being to termination.

Saskia Kowalchuk

Saskia Kowalchuk is a Master’s student of Media Studies in the Communication Studies Department. Her thesis research focuses on TikTok memes and platformization of cultural production. Outside her thesis, she has worked on research related to algorithmic content recommendation, the aesthetic practice of deep-frying memes, and the impact of memes on partisan spaces online.

Maya Lamothe-Katrapani

Maya Lamothe-Katrapani is a Master’s student in Anthropology at Concordia University and a member of the Montreal Waterways research group. Funded by SSHRC and FRQSC, her thesis examines the waterfront redevelopment of Montreal’s Lachine Canal and the role of greening initiatives in gentrifying neighbourhoods. Previously, she studied urban design at the University of Copenhagen and sociology at Concordia, where she received her BA.

Valérie L'Heureux

Valérie L’Heureux is a PhD Candidate in social and cultural analysis at Concordia University interested in transnational social movements' strategies and influence, the politics of radical internationalism, and relational ethics. Her thesis focuses on the decolonial praxis of the Global Left and militant ethnography.

Patrizio McLelland

Patrizio emerged from a background in musical composition and performance, and is currently a Masters student in Concordia's Design program. At once a designer/musician/artist/learner, his practice speculates on sustainable urban futures and accessibility to our shared civic spaces. He has worked as a Research Assistant with Dr. Alice Jarry, and Dr. Carmela Cucuzzella.

John Neufeld

John is a PhD student in Social and Cultural Analysis and active member of the Concordia Ethnography Lab serving as Project Coordinator for Montreal Waterways. With a dedication to Environmental Anthropology and creative ethnographic practice, John’s research interests focus on social, material, and political relationships with water, landscape, and infrastructure.

Leona Nikolić

Leona Nikolić is a PhD student in Communication Studies at Concordia University specialising in the intersections between spirituality, magic, and algorithmic technologies. More specifically, she is examining the connections between divination and artificial intelligences as methods of speculation, prediction, and forecasting, as well as the ways in which we assign legitimacy and authority to knowledge-making practices.

Derek Pasborg

Derek is a Concordia University Master’s student studying Sociology. Their research interests are at the intersection between sociology, anthropology, and game studies, with particular interest in how individuals’ personal narratives shape the affective discourse of video games, and the implications of this for individual’s social lives in gaming communities.

Camila Patiño Sanchez

Camila is a PhD student in Social and Cultural Analysis at Concordia University and MSc in Geography. She is interested in the politics of water, energy, and green infrastructures in Québec and Colombia from an STS and Political Ecology approach. She is also a member of the Concordia Ethnography Lab in the Montreal Waterways project and Infrastructures of Ethnography.

Tracy Qiu

Tracy is a student in Concordia’s individualized program. Tracy’s research interests include the botanical gardens, how to reckon with their colonial histories, and how decolonizing practices for botanical gardens can create space for alternate botanical epistemologies and ways of relating to nature.

Cristo Riffo

Chilean artist Cristo Riffo explores memory, light, politics, and biology through kinetic installations and Live A/V performances, often modifying technology with electronics, robotics, and biology. With degrees from the University of Playa Ancha and the University Tres de Febrero, he's exhibited globally and received support from Chile's FONDART. In 2023, he showcased his work in Ars Electronica's theme exhibition.

Alexandre Saunier

Alexandre is an interdisciplinary artist and PhD student who specializes in the physical computing technologies. His doctoral project focuses on live light performance. In developing and experimenting with light instruments, he explores the bidirectional relation between humans and machines.

Manoj Suji

Manoj Suji is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. His research examines the complexities in entanglements between infrastructure developments and environmental politics with a case of riverbed extraction in Nepal’s new (geo) political terrain.

Don Undeen

Don Undeen (UF Computer Science 2003) was the Founding Manager of the Maker Hub at Georgetown University, and Adjunct Professor of creative technology courses in Georgetown's Communications, Culture, and Technology graduate program. Prior to his work at Georgetown, Don was the founder and Senior Manager of the Media Lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an incubator for experiments at the intersection of art, technology, and the museum experience.

Meaghan Wester

Meaghan holds a Media Studies MA from Concordia University where she received a SSHRC Scholarship and won the CRTC Prize for Excellence in Policy Research 2022. Her research investigates the ethical guidelines governing the public procurement of Artificial Intelligence by the Canadian government. She is interested in collective knowledge building and the political theory of AI governance.

Philippe Vandal

Philippe is an artist driven by technological, ecological, and aesthetic preoccupations. His work bridges bio-inspired critical design, environmental science, and site-specific tangible media interventions. He is currently doing a MA INDI focused on visualizing the process of detecting urban soil contamination by petroleum hydrocarbons.

Anna Noel

Anna Noel is an Undergraduate student in Design, with a minor in Urban Studies. Her studies and creative practice focus on object making, immersive and experiential design, research, and participatory design. She is interested in using material and form explorations to examine the interaction between joy, love and care with physical objects and spaces we interact with.

Chloe Marchal

Chloe Marchal is an undergraduate fellow of the Ethnography lab. Chloe is primarily interested in design anthropology and digital cultures, and uses her Intermedia studies to inform her anthropological work (and vice versa). Her undergraduate thesis focuses on AI sustainability and design. Chloe is the Editor-in-Chief of Stories from Montreal.

Desiree Foerster

Desiree Foerster was previously a postdoc at the Cinema and Media Department at the University of Chicago. Taking on the perspective of process philosophy and media-aesthetics, her research interests include aesthetics, media ecologies, affective media, embodiment, phenomenology, process philosophy, and immersive environments.

Orit Halpern

Orit Halpern is the Chair of Digital Cultures at TU Dresden and an affiliated professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Concordia University. Her research addresses histories of cybernetics, design, and artificial intelligence. Her most recent book, authored with Robert Mitchell, is titled The Smartness Mandate. She is also the director of Against Catastrophe, and she directed Speculative Life from 2016-2021.

Hanine El Mir

Hanine is an activist and aspiring anthropologist, with an MA in Anthropology from Concordia and a BA in English Literature, BA in Media/Communications, and two minors in Film Studies and Arabic from the American University of Beirut. Hanine also tends to a community garden, cooks at a vegan solidarity kitchen, and makes games.

David Shaw

David Shaw has a PhD in English from Concordia University. His research focuses on posthumanism, postcolonial theory, and the intersection of realism and climate change. He was the coordinator of the Representing the Anthropocene reading group from 2017-2020, and a member of the Critical Anthropocene Research Group (CARG).