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My research interests include the public understanding of science, vaccine hesitancy, and the formation of niche online communities. Currently, I’m exploring how vaccine skepticism evolves through the hero’s journey narrative in Facebook groups. I’m particularly interested in determining whether there’s a shared “inciting incident” amongst these groups that signals a shift in values is underway by analyzing their vocabulary. I currently have a BA in Humanities from York, MSc in Film from Staffordshire University, and I intend to continue my studies at York as an STS Ph.D. student upon completing the MA program.
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Twitter: @jaimywarner
I hold two BA’s, one in Liberal Arts from Seneca College and my second from York specializing in Humanities. Currently I am working towards my MA in the STS Graduate Program. My education is in the Humanities tradition being taught in the Classics with a focus area from Antiquity including Sumerian texts, Presocratics and Socratic Philosophy to Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation, and Enlightenment works as well as Analytic and Continental Philosophy and Canonical works of Western Literature. I also have interests in Philology, East-Asian philosophy such as Confucianism and Daoism, and more contemporary philosophers such as Foucault, Charles Taylor, Wittgenstein. My critical eye and interest in Philology leads me to a gamut of culturally significant texts by Goethe, Cervantes, Augustine, Chekov, James Joyce, and Aldous Huxley amongst many others which I try to incorporate into my work. My research so far has focused on subjectivity, theories of the self, and ideal archetypes throughout the ages. Spanning literature from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment amongst various other eras to contemporary literature, visual arts, critical and cultural theory my work often seeks to engage questions around textuality, embodiment, technology, society, culture, and social movements. Within these queries various questions arise such as how social, economic, and cultural institutions shape and influence notions of the self. My current studies continue in these traditions looking at the relationship between Science and Religion in Nineteenth Century Britain.
I have a BA in Communication Studies and am broadly interested in new media studies, feminist and queer theory, decoloniality, body studies, and posthumanism. More specifically, I’m interested in exploring ideas of subjectivity, difference, and the self in relation to collective metaphors for emerging technological systems.
My research interests are varied; I have a background researching the history of medicine, social history, the medical humanities more broadly, and practicing and writing in the scholarship of teaching and learning. In particular, I am interested in critical pedagogy and the practice of students as partners, especially as it relates to social change and equity. I have editorial experience as co-editor and then Editorial Manager for The International Journal for Students as Partners (IJSaP). As a graduate student in Science and Technology Studies, I am exploring equity in medicine, and the ethics and politics of medicine as it interacts with modern technology (particularly how big data and the algorithmic Internet impact the dissemination and public reception of scientific knowledge). I am also interested in how technological innovations such as the algorithmic Internet or machine learning interact with our social and political world.
I am a transgender writer and paramedic. I have a BAH in Drama, English, and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor (2015) where I focused on the history of gender-diverse characters in Canadian theatre. I obtained a diploma from St. Clair College and have been working as a Primary Care Paramedic since 2018. As an interdisciplinary student, I am interested in the crossroads between medicine, science, and the arts.
I graduated from York University in 2020 with a Specialized Honours BSc in Biology. I completed my honours thesis under the supervision of Dr. Vivian Saridakis, and my paper focused on the role of a protein known as SPOP that is commonly mutated in prostate cancer. I am interested in the emergence of antibiotic resistance as an epidemic and the threats it poses to public health. I am interested in both the pharmaceutical industry’s role in new antibiotic development and the public’s knowledge and views on antibiotic use/antibiotic resistance. I hope to work with governing health care institutions such as the World Health Organization or provincial/federal ministries.
Aadita Chaudhury is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies. Her dissertation project explores racial capitalism in the context of the multifaceted material-semiotic turns in the field of fire ecology, building on her ethnographic, historical, and media research on wildfire management in California and internationally. She was a virtual resident in the UNIDEE residency program in Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy, exploring visual modes of representation, embodied modes of relating and poetic form in relation to fire/combustion as a phenomenon along with arts practitioners from other disciplines. She uses her background in environmental studies, STS, political ecology, cultural studies and arts practice to understand how nature can be a felt, embodied experience through performance, visual and material expression, as a way by which to connect with more-than-human worlds, and one's internal world, in the global context of capitalism, colonialism and climate change.
Funding: Vernon Oliver Stong Scholarship in Science (2017), Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2019–2020)
My interests in STS cluster around the histories and political economies of health, environment, and development, especially within postcolonial states and societies. Building on my previous work experience with international public health organisations, my dissertation traces the political and technical determinants of the 'discovery' of the diagnosis of MDR-TB (Multi Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis) in post-liberalisation India of the 1990s and 2000s. This project is situated within the larger theoretical frameworks of sociology of diagnosis and global health histories, as I trace the conduits by which disease concepts historically 'emerge' to inform global health agendas.
Funding: Elia Scholarship (2015-2018); Susan Mann Dissertation Scholarship (2019)
My academic background includes a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice & Criminology with a double major in Liberal Arts and a minor in Computer Crime. I completed my Master of Science degree in Information Security & Digital Forensics in 2021, where my research largely focused on the human threat to technical systems, particularly social engineering threats within the context of small to medium sized enterprises. During this time, I became both concerned and fascinated with the capacity of technology to have a profound impact on shaping society at large. My academic interests broadly include issues that pertain to the convergence of carceral technoscience, surveillance, and oppressive power structures. Currently, my research focus includes examining the role that biometric technology plays in the conception of identity whilst simultaneously assessing the emergent ethical and societal implications thereof through an Actor-network theory perspective.
My research is on online fanfiction communities, more specifically on disabled fans and fanfiction producers who contribute to disability representation and accessibility. My interests in fanfiction and fans have evolved from ongoing work in cultural analysis of disability narrative in popular culture, especially TV shows, to transform into a concern for how they were being taken up by audiences through new media and participatory cultural practices, as well as from my long-time love of fanfiction, as a disabled fan myself. I started my research project during my Masters, and in my doctoral studies, I am further developing it through an examination of how technologies and the development of online community standards around accessibility contribute to the development of disability narratives and identities in fanfiction communities. I use theoretical frameworks and insights from critical disability studies, fan studies and STS to examine the significance of disabled fans and fanfiction producers to developing the presence of disability as subversive political embodiment in digital environments.
Funding: Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2016, 2017), SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (2018)
Dayna Jeffrey is a PhD candidate in Science and Technology Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her dissertation focuses on how narratives of technoscientific futures configure our presents. Her particular focus is on how future expectations within transhumanism configure the current development and imaginaries of AI technologies by examining how future expectations of AI come to configure it in particular and potentially problematic ways. Dayna holds an MA in Communication and Culture from a joint program between York University and Toronto Metropolitan University and a BA (Hons) in Social Anthropology from York University.
Funding: Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2018–2021)
Building on my training in fine arts (ESAD-Strasbourg) and interdisciplinary research in Fine Arts, Critical Disability Studies, and STS (York), my research interests revolve around bodies and visual production. Previous and ongoing projects address mobilizations of disabled bodies in contemporary art and aspects of consent in research and in art production. My doctoral work is primarily concerned with the practices, pedagogy, and professionalization of medical illustrators in Canada from the 20th century to the present. I am interested in the relevance of this under-documented predominantly female profession to the production and dissemination of canonical bodies in medicine and broader culture.
Funding: SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship (2016-2019); AMS History of Medicine Doctoral Completion Grant (2019)
My research interests include biopolitics; nuclear technologies; feminist theory; classification practices; materiality and identity formation. Working under the supervision of Professor Aryn Martin, my research explores these interests by examining the spatial arrangements and narratives enacted by Canadian nuclear medical infrastructures. As an anthropologist I employ an ethnographic mode of analysis that is attentive to the complex ways in which various groups seize upon scientific results and nuclear bio technologies to advance competing and overlapping goals within shifting political landscapes.
Funding: SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (2010-2013)
My background is in Communication Studies (BA, MFA) and Theology (BA). My research interests have navigated through the philosophy of technology, critical data studies, and technoscience over my academic career, keeping the sociopolitical implications of new information and communication technologies as the main focus. Currently, I am dialoguing with literature on research policy, AI governance, and critical studies of innovation to investigate the relationship between artificial intelligence imaginaries in policymaking and AI research at the Brazilian Institute of Data Science (BI0S).
Twitter: @guillycsilva
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ResearchGate
I am a doctoral student at York STS. My research interests broadly revolve around feminist, critical race, and postcolonial STS, feminist theory, and transnational studies. I received my MA from Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto. For my master’s research, I studied ethics and politics of neurotechnology with a focus on the construction of ‘pre-carceral’ and ‘techno-militarized’ subjects through entanglements between medical, legal, carceral, and military neurotech practices. I hold a PhD in physics from the University of Florida. My area of focus in my PhD was biophysics of the brain and neuroimaging and informs my current interests in STS. I received my BSc in physics from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran.
I love stage plays! Talk to me (at any time and place) about the cool ones that you know of, either on stage or in script.
I am a PhD student currently researching the environmental history of watermills in long-19th century Ontario, and their relationship to British colonialism and empire.
Funding: Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2022–2023)
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Twitter: @SwetrPocketRift
Katelyn Wan Fei Ma is a Ph.D. Candidate researching cybercrime in the Graduate Program of Science and Technology Studies at York University, and a contract teaching faculty member at Wilfrid Laurier University where she teaches topical courses related to cybercriminology. Katelyn also works for TD Bank’s North American Fraud Operations as a Manager of Strategic Initiatives, working primarily as a lead in corporate strategic planning and transformational initiatives.
Katelyn’s current research focuses on cyber financial crime assemblage and how users and misusers shape technologies and policies. She is interested in how data analytics and artificial intelligence improve cybercrime management practices, and how financial institutions respond to cybercriminal activities at both product design and institutional policy levels. Katelyn’s research strives to increase transparency and efficiency in managing cyber financial crime in Canada, and she hopes her work can contribute to cybercrime management strategies that will help build and rebuild consumer trust and confidence.
My research interests include the history of computer mediated communication technologies and the production of gendered textual bodies; social networking technologies and the ways in which socially networked bodies transgress the material and the virtual divide; and the material effects of the textualization of life.
Funding: Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2010); SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship (2011-2014)
My research interests include astrobiology science within our solar system, planetary protection, and the ethics concerning extraterrestrial environments and potential extraterrestrial life. For my doctoral research, I am looking at the social influences on planetary protection policies for the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. These moons that are thought to harbour subsurface oceans are of major relevance to the question of habitability within our solar system, therefore, they are important targets of future exploratory missions. I am conducting my investigations within the frameworks of environmental policy pertaining to space, definitions and recognition of extraterrestrial life, implications of commercially driven or state-sponsored human expansion into the solar system, and space governance. I am hoping that insights gained through this study will ultimately contribute to international multi-stakeholder discussions about planetary protection and space policy.
Funding: Carswell Scholarship (2019)
My research inscribes indigenous knowledge and knowledge from the European periphery into the early history of computation. It considers the priority dispute over the “discovery” of binary—a dispute that played out over the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries—as an episode in the history of technology. It examines the work of the seventeenth-century Spanish philosopher Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz, who took seriously the marginalized knowledge of indigenous peoples.
My doctoral research will examine how the earnest study of kitsch within the early and high Atomic Age (1945 - 1963) provides a means through which to see how individuals and society came to understand their mediated experiences with ‘the atom’, the implications of this new technology, and the failure of science communication. My project (1) examines how the atom, mass culture, and kitsch became so deeply intertwined during an era of totalizing top-down narratives; (2) presents how kitsch provided opportunities for popular participation in and consumption of atomic science; and (3) argues that kitsch should be approached as a generative tool, necessary for a robust understanding of popular culture, one of ongoing cultural significance in need of more charitable academic focus.
Funding: Vernon Oliver Stong Scholarship in Science (2017); Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2017, 2018)
Following up a bachelor's degree in the Biological Sciences (majoring in Biotechnology and Biochemistry) with a master’s in Neural and Cognitive Sciences got me thinking about thinking of science. It seemed natural to follow up by enrolling in the master’s program offered by the STS department at York, and then even more natural to enroll in the same PhD program. Intrigued by varied fields, I have asked questions on topics like gender discrimination to vaccine hesitancy. I am interested in using a cognitive lens and my training in the biological sciences to examine the interactions and intersections between science, society, and individuals.
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