DHN-CDRS Lightning Lunch: Disasters, Communities, and Preparedness – Sept. 29, 2020

Additional Information

Speakers' bios:

Tong Lam is a Toronto-based historian and artist, whose research-based visual projects explore the intersection between technology and military violence, as well as the landscape of industrial and postindustrial ruination. His ongoing project focuses especially on the material evidence of Cold War mobilizations globally and their environmental and social consequences. His recently completed collaborative project, Moving Images, Moving People, is a SSHRC-funded study of the mobilization of mobile cinema for remaking political subjects in post-socialist China’s changing digital mediascape. Meanwhile, his other lens-based projects also systematically dissect China’s frantic growth amid the country’s forsaking of its socialist past. In addition to archives and ethnography, his visual practice involves photography, cinematography, and other multimedia methods. In so doing, he also aims to bring art and scholarship into conversation. He is an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto Mississauga, with active research projects on infrastructure, empire and nation, and the politics of information and data.

Steve G. Hoffman (PhD, 2009, Northwestern University) is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. His scholarship and teaching focus on social theory, the cultural politics of knowledge production, the sociology of expertise, and qualitative research methods. Recent publications can be found in The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge Broadsheet #5, as well as Theory & Society, Engaging Science, Technology, & Society, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Sociological Forum, Cultural Sociology, and Social Studies of Science. Hoffman is currently the Principal Investigator on a multi-year, multi-sited study, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Counsel (SSHRC) Insight Grant, that documents the production and use of simulation techniques among disaster managers in the Greater Toronto Area. Despite Hoffman’s occasional nostalgia for the avocado and tangerine trees of his Southern California childhood, he considers himself lucky to be growing old in the Great Lakes region of North America. He does not typically speak about himself in the third person, but does enjoy poking fun at such academic quirks.

Jennifer Ross currently serves as the Digital Humanities Network Postdoctoral Fellow in the Jackman Humanities Institute. Her research focuses on contemporary American literature, literary and cultural theory, critical disaster and terrorism studies, and the digital humanities. Jennifer's dissertation, "Insurgents on the Bayou: Hurricane Katrina, Counterterrorism, and Literary Dissent on America’s Gulf Coast," explores forms of political resistance put forward in literature and film produced after the flooding of New Orleans in 2005. She graduates with her Ph.D. from William & Mary this August, and holds Masters and Bachelors degrees in English literature and History from the University of Michigan-Flint. In 2019, Jennifer was awarded the Michael R. Halleran Dissertation Completion Fellowship from William & Mary, as well as earned an Honorable Mention from the Ford Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Selections of her research can be found in the forthcoming edited volumes Transnational Spaces: Intersections of Cultures, Languages, and Peoples (Vernon Press, 2020) and Liberal Disorder: Emergency Politics, Populist Uprisings, and Digital Dictatorships (Routledge, 2020).