This year the event will be offered in a hybrid model. If you are attending in person, all sessions take place in the Catalyst Centre, EV151-52, Environmental Sciences and Chemistry Building. If you will be watching the live stream, the link you will need to access the session will be sent to you the day before the event.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024 (10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon ET)

Old Tunes, New Stories

Laura Risk, Assistant Professor, Department of Arts, Culture and Media, UTSC

How do we listen to archives with new ears? In this talk, I’ll share an ongoing community-engaged music archiving project at UTSC that is working to digitize, catalogue, and ultimately bring to life audio and video field recordings of traditional dancing, fiddling, and singing from Quebec. These recordings were made in the 1960s and 70s and are part of a larger collection housed at the Canadian Museum of History. I’ll discuss the work of our Toronto-based student team and ongoing collaborations with the museum, with other universities, and with a Quebec-based traditional arts NGO. We’ll also look at examples of how other communities in Quebec have used sound archives in recent years to revitalize music and dance traditions.

Tuesday, April 23, 2024 (10:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon ET)

The Power of Storytelling

Christine Berkowitz, retired Associate Professor, Teaching Stream of History, Department of Historical Cultural Studies, UTSC

Joshua Arthurs, Associate Professor of History, Department of Historical and Cultural Studies

Connie Guberman, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream of Women's and Gender Studies, Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, UTSC

Erin Webster, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream of Art History, Department of Arts, Culture and Media, UTSC

Nicole Klenk, Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences, UTSC

Kirsta Stapelfeldt, Associate Librarian, Research and Digital Initiatives, UTSC Library

Storytelling is very much a part of our public and scholarly discourse these days, from storytelling in oral cultures and traditions, public interest in oral history collections and family history, to the use of storytelling techniques in marketing and communications. The first hour of this presentation will focus on the use storytelling approaches in academic research and experiential learning.  Our panel will examine storytelling through public history and oral history collections and preservation; an examination of power relations through life story and oral history interviews; the stories revealed by material objects; and the study of narratives from the perspective of politics and public memory. In the second hour we invite our audience to participate in an exercise of listening and telling stories.

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 (10:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon ET)

Decent Work in the Digital Economy: Platforms and AI

Rafael Grohmann, Assistant Professor of Media Studies (critical platform studies), Department of Arts, Culture & Media. 

The talk will address the possibilities and limits of decent work in the digital economy, especially in the context of digital labour platforms and artificial intelligence. In the first part, the talk will present the Fairwork project, and what has been done to pressure different stakeholders - such as companies, policy makers, governments and unions - to guarantee decent work on gig work platforms (e.g. Uber) and in relation to workers behind artificial intelligence, whether on “global” platforms (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk) or local business processing outsourcing (BPOs) (e.g. Sama, Kenya, whose workers train data for ChatGPT). In the second part, the talk will present how workers have learned to govern platforms and AI in order to guarantee decent work, through, for example, worker-owned platforms and platform cooperatives. The talk will present two cases, that of the Homeless Worker Movement, in Brazil, which created a Technology Division and is organizing tech workers, and workers in the construction and cleaning sectors through technologies, and the case of the Hollywood Writers’ strike, which is an example of worker-led AI governance, in an unprecedented case of agreement in relation to generative AI. The talk will end with the lessons learned in relation to academia and worker relationships towards ensuring decent work in the digital economy.

Tuesday, May 7, 2024 (10:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon ET)

Digital Social Justice in the era of AI and Post Privacy

Joseanne Cudjoe, Assistant Professor of Critical Digital Media Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture, Media, UTSC

Advancements in AI and other digital technologies have significantly altered not only how we perform daily interactions but also, they have shifted our conception of reality and the hyperreal. In this heightened attention economy and post privacy era, social justice activists continue to attempt to navigate the chaotic digital political landscape. Much of this work requires them to misstep the increased potential for doxing, unending streams of disinformation, and rising threats of misrepresentations via AI generated content. Throughout the talk I explore how marginalized communities have continued their ideological resistance work through the forging of discursive and rhetorical virtual spaces, while navigating through the aforementioned technological driven destabilizing obstacles and hindrances.

Tuesday, May 14, 2024 (10:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon ET)

Community-engaged Policy and Practice and the Arts

Mary Elizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka, Assistant Professor, Arts & Media Management, UTSC

In this talk, I will share some recent community-engaged and arts-based methods used in two quite different projects that are grounded in digital environments but also face challenges because of digital demands, all while playing out in real life communities. One involves the development of manifestos (towards an National Action Plan) to address urgent needs in community and marginalized media archives across Canada. This is grounded in a six-year SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant called Archive Counterarchive (https://counterarchive.ca/welcome) that involves more than 100 partners and academics. The other was a pilot project in the summer of 2023 with fledgling tiny community organization, Scarbrite, using intergenerational community-engaged, arts-based methods to facilitate a series of intergenerational mobile workshops across the Scarborough Greenway Network (https://www.scarbrite.ca/makers-in-motion/). It is one of several Listening Projects from the UTSC Urban Just Transitions Cluster of Scholarly Prominence (https://urbanjusttransitions.ca/), now in its final year.

For additional details about the Great Exploration series visit https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/vpdean/great-explorations