M Murphy is the Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit. Murphy is a feminist decolonial technoscience studies scholar. They are a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice, and Professor in History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. They are the author of The Economization of Life (Duke UP 2017), Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Feminism, Health and Technoscience (Duke UP, 2012) and Sick Building Syndrome: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Duke UP 2006). Murphy is the two-time winner of the Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. Murphy’s current research is in the area of Indigenous Science and Technology Studies and environmental justice, with a particular focus on reimagining chemicals and chemical exposures, data justice, and chemical informatics. They are working on a project called Alter Life in the Ongoing Aftermath of Industrial Chemicals. It explores the colonial infrastructures and decolonial futures of life already altered by industrially produced chemicals, especially endocrine disrupting chemicals, on the lower Great Lakes. They also co-directs the Indigenous-focused Environmental Data Justice Lab at the TRU, and has a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. They are Red River Métis from Winnipeg.
Kristen Bos is the Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit. Kristen is an Indigenous feminist researcher trained in archaeological approaches to material culture as well as an Indigenous science and technology studies (STS) researcher, who is concerned the relationship between colonial, gendered, and environmental violence. She is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Science and Technology Studies in the Historical Studies Department at the University of Toronto Mississauga, with a graduate appointment in Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto St. George campus. She is also a graduate of the University of Oxford and the University of Toronto. Kristen is urban Red River Métis and based in Toronto, but her homeland is northern Alberta in Treaty 8 territory, or where prairie transitions into boreal forest. She is the author of the upcoming novel, The Interrogation Room (Alchemy by Knopf, 2025).
Vanessa Gray is Co-Director of the Environmental Data Justice Lab. She is an Anishnaabe kwe from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, located in Canada’s Chemical Valley. As a grassroots organizer, land defender, and educator, Vanessa works to decolonize environmental justice research by linking scholarly findings to traditional teachings. She continues to take part in a diversity of tactics such as direct action, classroom lectures, co-hosting Toxic Tours, and Water Gatherings
M. Fernanda Yanchapaxi is a Kichwa-Panzaleo/Mestiza Ph.D. Candidate in the Social Justice Education Program, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), at the University of Toronto. She is TRU’s Lab Manager and Research Fellow. Fernanda’s research focuses on intellectual property, Indigenous data sovereignty, and Indigenous research methodologies. She looks at ways in which Indigenous peoples form, use, and protect Indigenous knowledge and examines and highlights how Indigenous researchers protect Indigenous knowledge and assert Indigenous knowledge sovereignty through their research practices. She was born and raised in Ecuador.
Beze Gray is a two-spirit Anishnaabe, Delaware, and Oneida from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, treaty #29 territory (They/Them). Beze is a Community Researcher of the Environmental Data Justice Lab as well as a Youth Coordinator of the Niizh Manidook Hide Camp. Beze is one of the Producers of a grassroots documentary from the Kiijig Collective. Beze is a member of the Jiibwaabiigamowag Young Peoples Council (Aamjiwnaang Youth Council) and Co-founder of Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia Against Pipelines. Beze is a youth organizer of grassroots events based on culture and environment like Toxic Tour, Niizh Manidook Hide Camp, Aamjiwnaang Water Gathering. They focus on telling their experience of living in Canada’s Chemical Valley and promoting Indigenous culture/ language resurgence. Beze practices Anishnaabemowin, sugar bushing, hide tanning, seed saving, and structure making.
Vanbasten de Araújo (he/him) is a Brazilian scholar interested in decolonial science and technology studies in Latin America, especially in Brazil and a Research Assistant at TRU Lab. He has a BA in International Relations by the University of Brasília, in Brazil, and a MA (High Honors) in Critical Gender Studies by the Central European University, in Budapest, Hungary. Currently, as a PhD Student at the Institute for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, de Araújo researches how toxic matter affects the daily lives of humans and nonhumans, creating chronic health effects, particularly regarding their sexual and reproductive health. In his dissertation, he is interested in furthering the studies on ‘non-spectacular forms of contamination’ – an intoxication that does not happen through large-scale environmental disasters.
Zarah Khan (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She holds an MA in Feminist Research from McMaster University, where she researched planting and forest-making practices in Israel and Palestine. Her current research, informed by Frantz Fanon, takes up decolonial approaches to psychoanalysis.
Rohini Patel is a PhD student at the University of Toronto Department of History. Her research looks into the history of chemical munitions production in Canada during the Cold War period, and its associated politics of knowledge and environmental fallout. She is interested in the intersections of histories of industrial/racial capitalism, science and technology studies, and environments and bodies. Rohini has an undergraduate degree in engineering and a master’s degree in modern history and she is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Toronto Climate Observatory.
Sajdeep Soomal is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He is currently writing about the history and philosophy of geochemistry for his dissertation project The Chemicalization of Substance, which looks at the critical role that colonial chemical knowledge infrastructures played in the making of Canada as a large-scale industrial petrol, mining and agricultural state in the 19th century. Sajdeep works on related curatorial projects about the politics of chemical visualization with artists who are re-imagining, playing with and altering our synthetic surround. Sajdeep is the recipient of the 2023-24 Graduate Student Scholarship for Studies in the History of Ideas from the Robert and Moira Sansom Ideas Foundation.
Reena Shadaan (she/her) is a Mustard post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Work and Health and a researcher at the Environmental Data Justice Lab. Shadaan holds a PhD in Environmental Studies from York University (Toronto, Ontario) and an MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Research from McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario). Shadaan’s research commitments intersect environmental, reproductive, and occupational justice and has spanned various sites, including (but not limited to) Bhopal, India – the site of the Bhopal gas disaster – and in nail salons, where racialized newcomer and immigrant/settler women-workers contend with musculoskeletal aches and pains, routine exposure to harmfulb toxicants, verbal abuses, and labour exploitation. Shadaan is Co-lead on the Pollution Reporter App.
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Lindsay LeBlanc is currently a PhD student in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She holds an MA in Art History from Concordia University where she was researching cybernetics and art, science, technology historiography. Her current research aims to unpack machine metaphors and their material implications. In addition to her work as an emerging writer and member of the TRU, she runs editorial for the independent experimental press KAPSULA.
Aadita Chaudhury is a PhD candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at York University. Previously, she completed a Masters in Environmental Studies at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies, and a Bachelor of Applied Science at University of Toronto’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. Her research interests are broadly surrounding the anthropology and philosophy of biology and the ecological sciences, cartography, postcolonial and feminist STS, and environmental and medical humanities.
Alessandro Delfanti is a media and science studies scholar working on the political economy of digital technologies. He is the author of Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science (Pluto Press 2013). His current research focuses on cultures and practices of resistance within the digital economy. Alessandro is Assistant Professor of Culture and New Media at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (ICCIT) at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and has a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information.
Nehal El-Hadi is a writer, researcher, and Visiting Scholar at the City Institute at York University in Toronto. Her work explores the intersections between technology, the body, and the city. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Planning at the University of Toronto, where she is researching how women of colour engage online social media in pursuit of social justice.
Aljumaine Gayle is a queer Jamaican-Canadian Interdisciplinary Design Technologist. Currently enrolled in Digital Futures at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and actively co-organizes programming on behalf of IntersectTO and Pleasure Dome TO. Aljumaine’s research and art practise explores othering of blackness in contemporary life and aims to subvert this othering through Afrofuturism and technology. While challenging tokenism and trauma narratives that characterize the majority of mainstream black art, film and music.
Sophia Jaworski is a PhD candidate in the faculty of Anthropology and the Women and Gender Studies collaborative program at the University of Toronto. Her research interests problematize ‘medically unexplained chronic illness’ through reimagining how volatile organic compounds and petrochemical exposures are embodied and figured as toxicants by technoscience. Her dissertation examines symptoms treated as environment-linked under the umbrella of environmental sensitivities, as well as social and disability justice using ethnographic fieldwork and experimental methods, interrogating the ways atmospheres shape, and are shaped by, a politics of life and capitalism in Canada.
Patrick Keilty (he/him) is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. His primary research interest is the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries. He has published on embodiment and technology, data science, the history of information retrieval, design and experience, graphic design, and temporality. His work spans issues in visual culture, sexual politics, technological change, and theories of gender, sexuality, and race. He holds a PhD in Information Studies with a concentration in Women’s Studies (now Gender Studies) from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Kira Lussier is a historian of science, technology, and capitalism. Currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto Mississauga and a researcher at the TRU, she earned her PhD in history of science at the University of Toronto in 2018. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation and current book project, “Personality, Incorporated,” traces the history of corporate personality tests, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Implicit Association Test. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Conversation, History of Psychology, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, and Business History Review. She was a co-organizer of the TRU-sponsored conference, Techniques of the Corporation, which brought together STS scholars and historians of capitalism to think through the knowledge-making practices of corporations.
Shaquilla Singh is an undergrad at the University of Toronto double majoring in Computer Science and the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. She is on Civic Tech Toronto’s steering committee and last summer worked for Code for Canada. She previously served as Design Editor and Managing Online Editor at UofT’s campus newspaper The Varsity.
Subhanya Sivajothy is currently an Masters of Information student at UofT. Her research interests include queer ecologies, militarized landscapes, and racial capitalism. Outside of the university, you can find her reading science fiction novels, or trying to bake the perfect macaron.
Dawn Walker is a PhD student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on citizen participation in technology design practices, in particular for environmental advocacy. Sitting at the intersection of the technology design, information practices, and civic engagement, her research bridges socio-technocal design approaches with critical social science inquiry.
Nicole Charles is an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media in the Women and Gender Studies Program in the Department of Historical Studies. Her research engages cultural studies, science and technology studies, and transnational and women of colour feminisms to deconstruct the entwined politics of biomedicine, care, gender, race and colonialism in the Anglophone Caribbean. Her forthcoming book manuscript, Suspicion: Vaccines, Biotechnologies and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados examines the (post)colonial, transnational and affective politics behind the promotion and refusal of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in Barbados.
Bretton Fosbrook is a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Gender and the Economy of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. His post-doctoral research builds on his doctoral research that examined how corporate strategies, like scenario planning, formed in response to social and political changes and uncertainties, like the increasing awareness of systemic racial and gender discrimination and catastrophic climate change. Bretton is a member of the Techniques of the Corporation Project.
Justin Douglas is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Toronto. His research aims to contribute to the existing debates on the history of finance and debt by undertaking a historical analysis of the emergence of the credit card and to try to provide an account of the role that this new technology played in the ‘credit revolution’ in the United States – situating this ‘revolution’ roughly around 1970. Contributing to the history of technology and the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on financial practices, this research treats the credit card as a material device existing within a larger developing financial infrastructure that offers an important entry point into the contemporary history of debt and capitalism. Justin has been awarded a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship.
Natasha Myers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, the convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, and a member of Sensorium. She is co-organizer of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, and co-organizer of the Write2Know Project with Max Liboiron. She is the author of Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, August 2015). Her current research experiments with ways to document the affective ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and among plants and their remarkably multi-species relations.
Ladan Siad is a Creative Technologist working at the intersections of art, design and technology to tell narratives about the world that is possible when radical visionary change flourishes. Ladan is a natural born collaborator and has used their skills to teach and help in many community-based projects. Drawing from the imagery of 70s Somali Funk Album Covers, little known black subversive DC history and the sounds of 90s R&B, Siad, who is a self-taught and community supported multidisciplinary creative quilting together global black genres into a visual and audio tapestry of home everywhere. Ladan will be starting at OCAD in the Digital Futures Program (MDes) in September 2018. Ladan holds a BA in Criminology and Psychology from York University.
Shiho Satsuka is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Unviersity of Toronto. Her research concerns the politics of knowledge, discourses of nature and science, and cultural practices of capitalism. She is interested in how divergent understandings of nature are produced, circulated, contested and transformed in translocal interactions shaped by the global expansion of capitalism. Her first book, Nature in Translation: Freedom, Subjectivity and Japanese Tourism Encounters in Canada (Duke UP 2015), analyzes the way Japanese tour guides translate ecological knowledge in national parks in the Canadian Rockies. The book examines how the guides’ translation of nature is related to the construction of their subjectivity, both as transnational flexible workers and as embodiments of Japanese cosmopolitan desire. She is currently working on her second book project examining the social role of scientists in the emerging global scientific and commercial networks associated with matsutake, a highly valued wild mushroom. In particular, she focuses on satoyama movements that aim to revitalize the traditional agrarian forests that produce matsutake, the politics of translation between expert science and other forms of knowledge, and the emerging discourses of “new commons” that envision alternative social and human-nonhuman relations. This research is also part of a collaborative, multi-sited ethnographic project, “Matsutake Worlds”. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Germany in 2012.
Martina Schlünder is a EU Marie Postdoctoral Fellow. She received her doctorate in the History of Medicine from the Charité, Universitätsmedizin-Berlin having earlier become an MD practising psychiatry and neurology. She has been a research fellow at Justus Liebig University at Gießen funded by the German Research Council and at Ludwik Fleck Center/Collegium Helveticum ETH Zurich. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and as a visiting fellow at the Department for Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University in Montréal.
Sarah Sharma is Director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology and Associate Professor of Media Theory at the University of Toronto cross-anointed at the ICCIT (UTM) and the Faculty of Information (St.George). Her research focuses on feminist approaches to technology with a particular focus on temporality and labour. Her first monograph In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 2014) was named the National Communication Association’s Critical Cultural Division Book of the Year. In the Meantime is an intervention in the popular sentiment that the world is ‘speeding up’. Working against this myopic focus on speedup, the book introduces a new approach to time called ‘power-chronography,’ locating the ways in which temporality operates as a key relation of power structured at the intersection of a range of social differences. Professor Sharma is currently working on a new book length project that explores the gendered politics of exit and refusal, or what she terms the ‘(s)Exit’ within contemporary techno-culture.
Alumni
Emily Astra-Jean Simmonds
Carla Hustak
Alex Jung
Technoscience Research Unit 