PhD student biographies

Pénélope Chandonnet

Pénélope Chandonnet is a first-year PhD student in Communication Studies. Her main research interest centres on how girls participate and integrate popular culture in every day life. She is also concerned about ethics and methodologies in girls’ studies. For her M.A. Thesis, she wanted to have a better understanding of the meaning that teenage girls give to a serialized fiction that addresses youth suicide, especially in the context of moral panic. To do so, she focused on the series13 Reasons Why, which was followed by a polemic in the media after its arrival on Netflix. For her PhD Thesis, she is working under the supervision of Monika Gagnon. Pénélope Chandonnet wishes to understand how, from early childhood, girls from diverse ethnic and cultural background make sense of Disney Princesses’ cultural products in their everyday lives, including the movies, series, websites, toys, clothes, etc.

Arwen Fleming

My research concerns the intersections of memory, archival photography, and landscape in the aftermath of urban displacement and redevelopment. Specifically, I consider how archival photographs of Montreal’s Griffintown and Goose Village neighbourhoods signal the ways in which the exclusion and displacement of these neighbourhoods continue to haunt, retroactively, the futuristic visions of Expo 67.

Sarah Ganzon

Sarah Ganzon is a Phd student in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her research revolves mostly around the areas of game studies and digital fandom. Currently, she is writing her thesis on Japanese maiden games (otome games) in English, and their players. She holds an MA in English Literature from Cardiff University and a BA in English Studies from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. Prior to starting her doctorate, she taught courses in literature and the humanities at the University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas and Far Eastern University. Apart from spending countless hours playing visual novels and RPGs, she enjoys dressing up as a Jedi, watching an unhealthy amount of Let’s Play videos, reading out-of-print nineteenth century novels, looking for well-written fan fiction, and keeping an eye out for disappearing blue police boxes.

Nicholas Goberdhan

Nicholas Goberdhan is a first year PhD student in Communication Studies. His doctoral research draws from critical-Mad, critical-Black and fashion studies, supervised by Canada’s Research Chair for Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies, Dr. Arseli Dokumaci. Drawing from years of community research, his central area of investigation is on the ways Black creatives mobilize clothing as a site resistance, and why it is often an overlooked, but central aspect to creative protest in expressing emotions and lived racial struggle.

Nicholas is also a Teaching Assistant, and Research Assistant for the Disability and Media Lab (tentative name) being established in the Communications Department. Alongside Concordia University, he is greatly involved in the art community and designs avant-garde clothing. 

Felicity Tsering Chödron Hamer

Felicity Tsering Chödron Hamer began amassing photographs at an early age. Perplexed by her own emotional relationship to these images, she ventures to understand the complex ways in which photographic portraits function as place marker for the absent, extending our relationships beyond physical death. Within this context, Felicity examines the therapeutic potential of photography associated with death rituals and of Victorian-era Spirit Photography in particular. Other research interests include: memory and imagination through photography; emotional relationships to photographs; paranormal, supernatural, magical and miraculous imagery; and intersections of religion and photography.

Antonia Hernández

Antonia Hernández is a media artist and SSHRC-supported PhD student. Using a dollhouse as her research device, she is looking at how domesticity and labor are entangled in amateur sexcams. With a BA in Graphic Design and a MA in Media Studies, her professional work mixes media practice and theory, facilitating the communication of research projects. She is a founder member of MAT3RIAL, a collective of researchers, designers and developers.

Eileen Mary Holowka

Eileen Mary Holowka is a writer and PhD candidate currently researching the intersections of social media and endometriosis. She has published on self-imaging, Instagram, online affective labour, chronic pain, and memes. She also has experience working in both theatre and games, including research and development of an app for folks living with chronic pain (Play the Pain), and co-creation of a playable art project for Montreal’s largest ever public art event, KM3. She published a digital narrative, circuits, in 2018, which can be played for free online: https://eileen-mary.itch.io/circuits/

Michael Iantorno

Michael Iantorno is a FRQSC-funded PhD student in Concordia University’s Communication program whose doctoral research explores videogame afterlife, fandom, and intellectual property law. His ongoing academic projects involve studying socioeconomic class in games, cataloguing and archiving early home computer technologies, and investigating the production of bootleg Super NES / Super Famicom cartridges. He is currently a student representative for the Technoculture, Art and Games Lab, an active member of Dr Mia Consalvo’s mLab, and a research assistant at the Residual Media Depot.

In addition to his academic work, Michael is also a game designer, radio producer, and writer. His first videogame hack, HyperBound, was featured in Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, his radio programs have earned multiple honours at the New York Festivals, and his writing has been featured in journals and magazines. To learn more about his work, visit: www.michaeliantorno.com  

Katherine Kline

Katherine Kline's research is situated between relational psychoanalysis, and materialist ecological theory, exploring unique sites where psychic life and material worlds intersect. These sites include, for example, the work of Wilhelm Reich, dendrophilia, and practices of mediumship. Her supervisor is Peter van Wyck and she is a member of the Feminist Media Lab.

Kline also works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and musician. Present collaborations include multimedia performance project The Powers with Emily Pelstring and Jessica Mensch, an ongoing visual/textual collage project with Leyla Majeri, and Wire Mother/Cloth Mother, a sonic exploration of maternal space with Sasha Langford.

Kline presently lives and works on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples.

sistership.tv

Elina Lex

Elina Lex is an interdisciplinary researcher, media artist and PhD student in Communications Studies at Concordia University. Working across VR, 360° video, sensory ethnography, interactive documentary, site-specific storytelling, and digital archives, she investigates how emergent digital media forms might transform the way cultural information, knowledge, and memory is expressed and exchanged. Her current doctoral research-creation project explores applications of VR (XR) in the design of speculative archival interfaces and architectures, examining how they might produce new modalities of access and participation for diverse audiences and communities to share, preserve, and interpret cultural heritage material. 

Elina is an active member of the Post-Image research cluster located at the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology as well as a researcher in the Technology: Innovation working group of Archive/Counter-Archive. Her creative work can be found at: lexel.squarespace.com

Amy Mazowita

Amy Mazowita (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at Concordia University. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Cultural Studies with a specialization in Texts and Cultures from the University of Winnipeg (Treaty 1). Amy’s current research is situated at the intersections of Communication and Media Studies, Comics Studies, Critical Disability Studies, and Mad Studies, and is focused on representations of mental illness in auto/biographical comics. Her doctoral project considers the specific verbal-visual affordances of the comics medium, explores how graphic texts are used to visually disrupt normative perspectives of stigmatized mental health conditions, and examines how comics readers engage with and respond to mental-health focused graphic narratives. As an activist and advocate for mental health de-stigmatization, Amy is interested in examining how mental health-focused comics might contribute towards critical pedagogies, and seeks to explore how graphic texts may enrich psychiatric treatment plans and systems of both self- and collective care.

Amy is working under the supervision of Dr. Arseli Dokumaci, Canada Research Chair in Disability Studies and Media Technologies and the Coordinator of the forthcoming Access in the Making Lab. Amy is a member of the AIM Lab’s executive board and works as both a Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant in the Department of Communication Studies

Kumar S. Pathak

Kumar S. Pathak is a Doctoral Research Scholar at Concordia University. He brings with him more than a decade of experience in academic and policy research, writing and public interventions. Focusing on the issues of nuclear disarmament, nuclear safety, environmental sustainability, alternative media, online democracy, and human rights, Kumar has been writing for journals, magazines, newspapers and many prominent websites.

Kumar has been an Asia Leadership Fellow of the International House of Japan and a recipient of the prestigious Takagi Fellowship for Citizen Scientists. He has done his M.Phil. in Disarmament Studies from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

As a researcher and campaigner, Kumar has been associated with major civil society platforms such as the Nobel-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons(ICAN), Greenpeace India, Indian Pugwash Society, and Asia Progressive. DiaNuke.org, a website founded by him after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, is a major online platform for nuclear-related resources, updates, and public dialogues. DiaNuke is a key partner of the ‘Don’t Nuke The Climate’ campaign, an international coalition of grassroots environmental movements.

Sâmia Pedraça

Sâmia Pedraça is a Brazilian journalist, ex-entrepreneur, ex-reporter, ex-press officer consultant and, currently, a PhD student in the Communication Studies Program at Concordia University. She holds an MA in Humanities Computing at University of Alberta and a BA in Journalism at Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Vitória-Brasil. Her previous research affiliations include GRAV (UFES/Brasil), Edmonton Pipelines Research Group and VITAlab (UofA), and Digital Humanities Initiative (Hamilton College/NY-US). Sâmia’s current research interests involve the procedural manifestation of culture and ideology in digital games. Along with the academics duties, she divide her time with movies, music, digital sculpture and 3d modeling, and video games.

Treva Pullen-Legassie 

Treva Pullen-Legassie is an interdisciplinary researcher, curator, artist and a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Engaging in curatorial practice as research-creation, her dissertation tends to the many histories and interlocutors of the River Street Bridge in the Lower Don Valley, Tkaronto/Toronto. With attention to feminist, queer and intersectional theory her practice explores curatorial methods for public art located on dynamic and complicated sites. With the increasing sense of urgency in the face of climactic devastation, Pullen-Legassie’s work asks, how can artists and curators create artworks, exhibitions, and events that engage dynamically with notions of place to propose more just and livable post-Anthropo-/Capitalo-cenic futures.

Pullen-Legassie is one of the co-founders of the Curatorial Research-Creation Collective at Milieux and Assistant Director of the Speculative Life Cluster. Her writing has been published in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, PUBLIC Journal, The Senses & Society, InterARTive, JAWS and AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. She has also curated new media based exhibitions such as Femynynytees (2018), #NATURE (2016) and Influenc(Ed.) Machines and co-ordinated Cheryl Sim’s YMX: Land and Loss after Mirabel.

Ryan Scheiding

Ryan Scheiding is a PhD student in the Communication Studies Program at Concordia. He is also affiliated with the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) research lab at Concordia. Prior to joining the program he received MAs at the University of Waterloo in History and at York University in Communication & Culture and a graduate diploma in Asian Studies from the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR). His research is primarily concerned with the collective memory of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as expressed through popular culture and video games. In his past studies he has focused on collective memory practices, legacies of propaganda in media and World War II Japanese history.

Katerina Symes

Katerina Symes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University working under the supervision of Professor Krista Geneviève Lynes. She holds a MA in Media Studies and a Graduate Certificate in University Teaching, and she is an instructor in Humanities at Vanier College. She is a member of the Feminist Media Studio in Montreal, and her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory and Feminist Media Studies, and her forthcoming article “Her Story: Educating a Mainstream Audience” can be found in the Peter Lang series Transgender Representations on Film and Television. Her current project “The Pedagogy of Queer Crossover Television” examines how online-streaming platforms have contributed to the proliferation of LGBTQ+ representation (e.g., Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, etc.).

Angus Tarnawsky

Angus Tarnawsky is an artist, researcher, audio engineer and PhD student in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. His research-creation practice focuses on understanding diverse listening orientations to offer generative possibilities for engaging with issues of cultural representation and settler colonialism. For his doctoral project, he is working on site-specific sound installations that productively ‘unsettle’ common spaces in the built environment. Angus is affiliated with the SpokenWeb network and Concordia’s Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance. In these collaborative settings, he facilitates the production of handmade lathe-cut records and online sound map projects. Angus holds a BMus from the University of Melbourne and a MFA from OCAD University. Originally from lutruwita/Tasmania, Australia, he currently lives and works on the unceded Indigenous lands and traditional territories of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.

Quinn Valencourt

Quinn Valencourt is a first year PhD student (2018) working with Professor Charles Acland in his examination of contemporary live-streaming technology/ screen culture and digital media consumption. As a graduate of the MA program in Popular Culture from Brock University, his research background has traditionally been devoted to understanding cultural theory in its variety of mediated forms. These approaches have informed his understanding of popular culture as expressed through social media, advertising, music, cinema, sport, television, and video games, as well as non-mass mediated cultural forms such as fairs and festivals, food culture, or tourism and travel. In the past two years this interdisciplinary nature has enabled him to complete award-winning work on projects including: ‘“Tastes Like Chicken”: A Food Analogy for Concern, Ambiguity and Exoticism”, “Me, Myself, and (I)dentity Construction Online: Analyzing Self Presentation on Instagram”, and ‘“Oh my God! They Made Fun of Society Again!”… “You Geniuses?”’ South Park and Pop-Cultural Criticism in Today’s Television.” Quinn’s current research project and doctoral thesis work aims to identify a T.V IV era of media content consumption, grounded in ontological depictions of liveness, as they exist on live-streaming platforms such as Twitch.TV, or Facebook and Instagram live.

Chrys Vilvang

Chrys Vilvang is a media artist and PhD student at Concordia University. He is interested in the impact of digital technologies on consciousness and is currently exploring archives, algorithms, photography, and memory through research-creation. Vilvang examines the production of meaning through images and how these processes are being compromised by tools that intervene, remediate, and alter our relationship with our photographic past. 

Chrys has a BA in Cultural Studies from McGill University (2011), an MA in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam (2015), and an MA in Media Production from Ryerson University (2017). His supervisor is Dr. Matt Soar and he currently serves as a research assistant with the Montreal Signs Project. 

Nimalan Yoganathan

Nimalan Yoganathan is a second-year PhD student whose current research interests include anti-racist sonic activism, ethical questions surrounding field recording and soundscape studies, and intersectional modes of listening to everyday environments. His doctoral thesis work will attempt to bridge critical race studies with acoustic ecology in order to highlight the ways in which marginalized communities construct aural counterpublics that center their own listening positionalities and counter-narratives. Nimalan will also engage a politics of listening that studies how sound, noise and quiet can be deployed by BIPOC groups as quotidian tactics of refusal and resistance. 

Nimalan holds an MA in Media Studies and a BFA in Electroacoustic Composition both from Concordia University. He has published articles for The Conversation, Canadian Dimension and Organised Sound. He has presented his research at the International Conference on Arts and Humanities (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), The Politics of Listening Conference (Sydney, Australia) and the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium. As a practicing sound artist, Nimalan interweaves hip-hop, dub, and soundscape composition concepts and methods. He has participated in research-creation and field recording residencies in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest and the Inuit community of Inukjuak, Nunavik.

A recent article by Nimalan for The Conversation:

https://theconversation.com/profiles/nimalan-yoganathan-1138939/articles

Patricia (Trish) Audette-Longo

Patricia (Trish) Audette-Longo is a PhD candidate and Canada Graduate Scholar supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Her research focuses on how First Peoples create and negotiate media in response to bitumen extraction and development efforts, and she works with Dr. Lorna Roth. Trish has an MSc in Media, Communication and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa. Before undertaking doctoral studies in 2012, Trish worked as a newspaper reporter for nearly a decade; she has covered crime and justice, Alberta politics, and the environment, and her work has appeared in the Edmonton Journal, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Alberta Views magazine, and the St. Catharines Standard.

Isabel Macdonald

Isabel Macdonald's research focuses on emerging forms and practices of journalism. Drawing on a range of critical approaches from fields including sociology and cultural studies, her research is particularly concerned with the cultural dimensions of journalism that have long been elided by journalists' standard language about "reporting the facts". She is also very interested in the social and political implications of recent changes in the media landscape, including the rise of digital and online platforms that privilege visual forms of communication, as well as the phenomenon that has been dubbed "big data".

As a PhD candidate in Concordia's Communication Studies program, her current research focuses on an emerging visual media form known as "comics journalism," which combines journalism's standard methods for reporting facts with a medium (drawn comics) that implicitly works to call attention to issues of representation that scholars have long faulted journalists for neglecting. She is particularly interested in the opportunities and challenges this peculiar media form might present for a more self-reflexive journalism approach. As part of her SSHRC-supported doctoral work in Communication, she has been testing out comics journalism's potential as a self-reflexive research methodology, by experimenting with the methods of this emerging visual form of reportage in a camp for people displaced by the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Based on the findings of this research, she is currently writing, illustrating and designing an original work of comics journalism on the issue of displacement in Haiti.

Ashley McAskill

Ashley McAskill is currently in her third year of her PhD in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. She has a BA in Theatre and Film Studies and English, and a MA in Communications and New Media from McMaster University. For her doctoral work Ashley is researching disability and ethical theatre practices, specifically within mixed ability groups whereby artists with and without disabilities work together. One of her biggest ventures for her doctoral project (and overall artistic hope) will be the creation of a permanent mixed-abilility theatre collaborative in Montreal. Other research interests include gender and beauty practices, the spectacle of public performativity, feminist media studies, and performance art.

Vanessa Meyer

Vanessa Tolkin Meyer is a researcher, video-maker, and part-time music-maker. Her research is practice-based and fundamentally interdisciplinary, taking shape at the intersection of experimental film, documentary, autoethnography, feminist philosophy, and critical theory. Her current thesis work is a research-creation project that explores the construction of mother-daughter relationships in self-reflexive documentary and experimental autoethnography. She has worked in documentary production and television in Montreal and New York for over ten years.

Marilou St-Pierre

My principal research interests are journalism, sports, and the place of gender in these two domains. I’m interested in gender studies, feminist studies, and the political economy of the media. I also had the chance to work on the media history in the province of Quebec, a domain I hope I will still have the opportunity to work on in the future. In my thesis, I want to look at the professional practices of female sports journalists who have worked in the field at different moments since the 1970s. This project is a continuation of my Master’s degree in communication, completed at Laval University in 2012.

Celia Vara

Celia Vara is a feminist psychologist, visual artist and PhD candidate at Communication Studies. She has been working as a psychologist in Spain in a pioneering institute about gender based violence. She has participated in numerous research programs and projects on international cooperation, feminism and art in Europe, Canada and the Caribbean. In 2013, her master’s thesis, Early Feminist Video Art in Spain (1970-1980) won the 1st Prize/Award in Gender and Research at Jaume I University in Spain. She has been a practicing visual artist since 2005 and has had international artist residencies and collective and solo shows in Spain, Canada, Cuba and Dominican Republic. She is an active member of a feminist collective in Spain that does research on patriarchal strongholds on different aspects of the self. She also is a member of Feminist Media Studio, Hexagram and La Centrale Gallery Power House (Feminist Artist Run Centre). Her research interests are feminist media and culture, and the transnational dimensions of feminist video, collectives and activism, focusing specifically in Spain and Latin America. Her current project centers on how the strategies of the self in video performance present a possibility not only for self-exploration but for feminist liberation.

Nic Watson

Nic Watson is a second-year PhD student in Communication. He is interested in digital game studies and has a background in anthropology and computer science. His current work focuses on the use of ethnographic methods to study computer game modding, fan content creation, and participatory culture.