Monday Night Seminar: The Centre on the Margins

Session Description

Monday Night Seminars return to the Coach House with a conversation between McLuhan Centre directors past and present.

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The previous and current directors of the Centre, Sarah Sharma and Scott Richmond, discuss the Centre’s recent past and near future.

Please note this is an in-person event. To protect more vulnerable members of our community we strongly encourage you to wear a mask.

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What are Monday Night Seminars?
The “Monday Night Seminar” carries on the tradition of public seminars at the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. All seminars take place within the same intimate Coach House on the St George Campus; in this up-close and personal environment, a range of thinkers – academics, activists, scientists, artists, designers and planners – will challenge prevailing cultural notions about technology and provoke new insight on the possibilities for a more equitable technological future. Join us!

Our annual theme, Our Selfies Our Selves, investigates contemporary technologies of the self. A number of such technologies have seemed salient in recent years: the selfie and its revolutions in our practices of imaging and self-imaging; our constant presentations of self in everyday life online; the endless online avatars we create, from dating profiles to VR avatars to the advertising profiles platforms collect; the intimate biometric technologies of the “quantified self”; or, simply, the endlessly irritating rectangle in the Brady Bunch grid of a video call that shows us back to ourselves—that we hopefully have now mostly grown numb over the last two pandemic years.

About the Speakers
Sarah Sharma Associate Professor of Media Theory at the ICCIT/Faculty of Information and Director of the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. She was the Director of the McLuhan Centre between 2017-2022. Her research and teaching focuses on the relationship between technology, time and labour with a specific focus on issues related to gender, race, and class. She is the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 2014). Her edited volume (with Rianka Singh) Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Duke UP 2022) highlights her time as director of the McLuhan Centre. Sarah is currently working on a new book on the topic of gender, technology and escape tentatively titled Broken Machine Feminism.

Scott C. Richmond is Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media in the Cinema Studies Institute and an affiliate in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His teaching and research lie at the intersection of film studies and media theory, focusing on the history, theory, and aesthetics of screen-based media. He is currently working on two books in the history of computing, Thinking with Computers: Seymour Papert and the Invention of Computational Personhood and Four Histories of Computing: Quantity, Magic, Prediction, Personhood.