Our TRU members have been getting busy this semester.
The successful launch of our Environmental Data Justice Lab’s ’s Pollution Reporter app, and the associated Land and the Refinery website, has been just one of several significant events at the TRU this fall:
On October 24, with the Latin American Racial Technologies Working Group, the Technoscience Salon welcomed Dr. Melissa Creary to University of Toronto to discuss her work on biocultural citizenship, health equity, and “bounded justice”—a project that emerged out of the politics of sickle cell disease in Brazil and its articulations across state, social, and racial lines.
Jennifer Wemigwans, Max Liboiron, Zac Marshall, and Simona Ramkisson came together on November 8 as part of this year’s Technoscience Salon and Consent and its Discontents McLuhan Working Group series. Hosted at the McLuhan Centre, the discussion, “Capture and Consent: Images and Stories in Digital Research Culture” sought to think between the “dodgy consent” often present in scholarship about minoritized communities and the new terrain of online and technologized consent these same communities are now being disproportionately affected by. Stay tuned for future Salon events in the new year.
TRU member Aljumaine Gayle curated an exhibition in collaboration with Black Artist’s Network in Dialogue that considered the forms of social injustice surveillance systems produce. The exhibition, titled TWENTY_FOUR_SEVEN/365 was held in Toronto throughout October and November.
TWENTY_FOUR_SEVEN/365 is an interactive installation that illustrates the rising dangers of surveillance technology for communities of colour, and intends to start and accessible and inclusive conversation about surveillance and its technologies. Images courtesy of Aljumaine Gayle. Gayle also ran a critical data workshop that grappled with privacy and surveillance systems on December 5, co-hosting with TRU alum Ladan Siad. “Mapping Data Bodies” was presented with MOCA and Digital Justice Lab.
A newly established TRU group, Toxicity Working Group, has started meeting this year to offer mutual collaboration and support in undertaking critical research with and against various figures of the toxic/toxicity/toxicants in relation to broader structures of violence. The group is collaboratively run by Reena Shadaan, Sophia Jaworski, and Rohini Patel.
At the beginning of this school year, we also welcomed new members Mia McKie (from the History department at U of T), Rohini Patel (History, U of T), and Aadita Chaudhury (Science and Technology Studies, York), and Lindsay LeBlanc (from the Women and Gender Studies, U of T).
We’re grateful to work with such brilliant folks and look forward to more powerful engagements with STS practices, methods, and objects to come in the spring term. If you’re interested in joining the TRU, you can find the online application form here.
Technoscience Research Unit 