FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

Considering the social implications of Western news media on East-Asian cultural identity formation, I aim to explore how American news media deployed techno-Orientalist strategies and depictions of East-Asia(ns) during the COVID-19 pandemic. I will conduct a critical discourse analysis of American-published news articles during the coronavirus pandemic, positing East Asian nations as inherently adversarial and homogeneously threatening to the West. Adopting a postcolonial lens and utilizing Derrick Bell’s critical race theory, Edward Said’s critical concept of Orientalism, and Kevin Morley and David Robins’ discursive phenomena of techno-Orientalism, I will analyze the underlying assumptions and biases present in these published articles.

Alexis-Carlota Cochrane is a queer Latinx PhD student in Communication, New Media and Cultural Studies. She currently resides on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe (including the Mississaugas of the Credit) and the Huron-Wendat. Her doctoral research analyzes how Meta (previously Facebook)’s platform infrastructure upholds algorithmic oppression through censorship of racial and cultural activism. Thinking with Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and biopower (1990) and Higginbotham’s respectability politics (1994), Alexis aims to better understand how identity, power and censorship intersect on platforms. She is currently a graduate student affiliate at Northwestern University’s Centre for Latinx Digital Media.

Amanda Jarvis is a PhD student in Communications, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research focuses on the impact of popular music fandom on queer and trans youth, considering the ways music and music fandom operate as tools of identity formation, resistance, and community building tools amidst the rapid rise of anti-LGBTQ political rhetoric and legislation in Canada and beyond. Amanda is committed to mobilising her research and sharing her findings beyond academia.

My research-creation project focuses on designing pedagogical encounters with members of a feminist collective from the Peruvian Amazon. The aim of these encounters is to challenge the dominant narratives of extractivism in the region and activate and re-story alternative ways of thinking and being with the body-territory.

My research focus is on the creation of music and its impact on climate change and climate anxiety. Through creating music independently I have found it helps to alleviate stressors surrounding global climate issues and aim to spark discourse and further research on the impact of independent musicians on environmentalism.

I am an artist-researcher and educator invested in engaging with narrative media, anti-oppressive praxis, and critical theory. As a student researcher at Pulse Lab McMaster, I am working on my Master’s thesis project “Transing the Narrative: Positing/Digesting Grief for Equitable+Dialogic Frameworks” which is grounded by research on transgender mental health data, gender policy, grief + joy narratives, critical play, interactivity, and queer theory. This project is developing as a short comic book and game piece, where I am furthering my skills in storyboarding, character design and animation, documentary narrative, interactivity, comic book illustration, and 2D + 3D modeling and animation. Artists and/or scholars I am inspired by include Martha Newbigging, Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman, and Marjane Satrapi.