Cultural Studies

Supervised by: David Murakami Wood (Department of Sociology, Queen's University) and Angus McBlane (Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India)

Rohit is a third year PhD Candidate in the Cultural Studies Graduate Program at Queen’s. He is writing on the acculturation of paranoia in late stage capitalism - treating it as an emergent crisis of interpretation that relates in particular ways to the contemporary material conditions of economic/ecological crisis and technological hyper-connectivity. This work hopes to simultaneously combine literatures on the risk and network societies, and examine paranoia as a psychosocial ramification of this combination - departing from the traditionally pathologising lens used by clinical disciplines as well as disciplines such as cultural/social epidemiology.

His research interests are largely centred around philosophy of technology and cultural theory. He is also interested in projections of apocalypse in the history of Science Fiction.

2019- Stéphanie McKnight (Stéfy) is white-settler artist-scholar based in Katarokwi/Kingston Ontario. Her creative practice and research focus in on policy, activism, governance, and surveillance trends in Canada and North America. Within her research, she explores creative research as methodology, and the ways that events and objects produce knowledge and activate their audience. Stéfy’s creative work takes several forms, such as installation, performance, site-specific, online and technological curatorial projects, new media and experimental photography. Recent exhibitions include “…does it make a sound” at Gallery Stratford; “Park Life” at MalloryTown Landing and Thousand Islands for LandMarks 2017/Repères 2017, “Traces” at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, “ORGANIC SURVEILLANCE: Security & Myth in the Rural” at the Centre for Indigenous Research-Creation and “Hawk Eye View” at the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning. She has exhibited solo or group work at Modern Fuel Artist Run-Centre, the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts, the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning, OCAD University, the WKP Kennedy Gallery and White Water Gallery. In 2015, her work Coded, I Am was shortlisted for the Queen’s University Research Photo Contest andQueen’s University 175 Photo Contest. In 2018, her work Hunting for Prey received an honorable mention for the inaugural Surveillance and Society Art FundPrize.

Post SSC- Stéfy McKnight, Assistant Professor (Media Production and Design), School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Canada

2019- Spencer Revoy is a cultural and media theorist who is currently a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. He received a BA with Honours in Cultural Studies and an MA in Theory, Culture and Politics, both from Trent University. His MA thesis examined the structure of Facebook’s surveillance program through a re-evaluation of Foucault’s Panopticon, Deleuzian schizoanalysis, and Zygmunt Bauman’s philosophy of liquid modernity. He continues this line of research by examining sites and spaces of surveillance through a highly interdisciplinary lens, with an emphasis on understanding the cultural effects of ubiquitous online surveillance.

Currently, his research interests include: critically evaluating the design of mobile interfaces, especially the paradigm of “user-friendliness”; the application of Deleuzian philosophy to questions of surveillance on the Internet, especially the question of the Internet’s ontology; and the politics of friendship as influenced by social media. He is particularly interested in how processes of “becoming friends” and “being friends” are affected by social media’s pervasive conditions of surveillance and commodification.