The Cultural Studies Ph.D program sponsors an annual speakers' series providing an opportunity for our students to hear and meet some of the most exciting and innovative scholars in the humanities and social sciences. There are opportunities to socialize with our visitors afterwards. As always, these presentations are open to all members of the university community.
2025-26 Academic Year
Mingwei Huang
September 25, 2025
Thinking with Palimpsests: China, South Africa, and the Postcolony
Since the turn of the millennium, the return of the People’s Republic of China to the African continent has been framed as a neocolonial scramble or revival of south-south cooperation. An ethnography of Chinese capitalist projects in Johannesburg, Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century recasts these relations of power as racial capitalism in a global moment of Chinese ascendance. Huang argues that Chinese migrants act within enduring structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and colonialism that they did not create but still perpetuate, albeit in different forms. This methods-oriented book talk illustrates palimpsestic approaches that work through overlapping colonial histories and conceptual disjunctures for writing histories of the present and theorizing colonialism, racism, and racial capitalism in “south-south” contexts.
Mingwei Huang is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, migration, colonialism, and capitalism and assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Huang’s first book Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century will be published in November 2024 with Duke University Press. An ethnography of contemporary Chinese world-making in Johannesburg, South Africa, the book explores racial formations, racial accumulation, and capitalist exploitation in the 21st “Chinese Century,” while situating these emergent forms in longer entangled histories of Euro-American empire-making and global racial hierarchies. Her new research is focused on artisanal mining and extractivism in South Africa, anti-extraction activism, and reading mine archives for relational histories of global race-making, indenture, and migrant labor. Her writing has been published in Scholar & Feminist Online, Radical History Review, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Public Culture, Verge, Safundi, Made in China Journal (forthcoming pieces in African Studies Review, Critical Asian Studies, and Theory and Event) as well as edited volumes Anxious Joburg: Space, Affect, and Experience in a Global South City (Wits University Press/NYU Press, 2020) and New World Orderings: China and the Global South (Duke University Press, 2022), and online in Anthropology News and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has been affiliated with the former Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand.
Eshan Rafi
October 16, 2025
The Empire Is Drowning in Blood: Three Propositions
Spanning visual, participatory, and choreographic forms, my artworks often use the document as a starting point to interrogate political subjectivity. Recent artworks have engaged with the song Boom Boom by 1980s Pakistani pop icon Nazia Hassan; socialist poster art from the 1970s created by groups such as National Student's Federation Pakistan and Muttahida Mazdoor Majlis (United Workers Assembly), Lahore; and a video recording of a U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on human rights abuses in Baluchistan. My artistic research draws on queer feminist methods and affects, while focusing on minoritized histories in the context of the Indian subcontinent. In this session, I will share these artworks, elaborating on how aesthetic forms construct my lines of inquiry, and towards what means.
Eshan Rafi (b. 1986, Lahore) is a Toronto/Tkaronto-based artist working across time-based, lens-based, and choreographic practices. An alum of the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Lebanon, Rafi has participated in residencies at Fondazioni Antonio Ratti in Como, the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Berlin, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, among others. Their work has been exhibited, performed, and screened internationally, including at Links Hall, Chicago; SummerWorks Lab, Toronto; Sharjah Film Platform; M:ST 9 Performance Art Biennale, Calgary; and neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin. Rafi’s artistic practice rests on a history of community-building within queer of colour communities, including working in collectives to develop decolonial and anti-capitalist pedagogies. They have participated in anti-surveillance and hacker spaces such as at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit and Chaos Computer Congress in Leipzig, which has has informed their research into the circulation of information and images. Rafi’s work has been extensively supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, and the generosity of queer and BIPoC communities. In 2025, they are a danceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz Vienna and a resident at LA SERRE in Montréal. Rafi holds an MFA in Art, Theory, and Practice from Northwestern University, and a BFA and BEd in Visual Arts from York University.
2024-25 Academic Year
Alex Levant
October 3, 2024, Lady Eaton: The Pit
I'm Blue: AI Literacy in the Age of Agentic Machines
Meet Blue, our family robot – curious, introspective, and sometimes funny. Blue engages in meaningful discussions on any topic, all without requiring internet access or data storage. As a key component of our research project on generative AI, Blue not only stimulates curiosity but also helps demystify this rapidly evolving technology.
This talk examines the public’s reception of generative AI through the lens of “AI Realism” (Lewis 2024), with the goal of enhancing AI literacy as systems evolve from basic conversational chatbots to autonomous agents capable of independent action. By sharing primary research with open-source Large Language Models using applications such as Open Interpreter and AutoGPT (and with live interventions by Blue), I aim to illuminate possible trajectories of this technology and the risks these developments may pose.
Grounded in “Activity Theory” (Levant et al. 2024, Vygotsky 1978), which posits that human subjectivity is in its essence a product of social interaction rather than purely neurological processes, my approach highlights how AI agency emerges from the social practices embedded within these systems, not merely the physical hardware (Pasquinelli 2023). By situating the deployed autonomous AI agents in my case studies within activity systems (Engeström 2015), I identify their relationship to human agents and the limited, often unpredictable nature of their agency. In contrast to prevailing trends in posthuman theory (Braidotti 2013; Barad 2007; Latour 2005), AI agents display an asymmetrical form agency – an agency without intention (Nardi 2005). Within this framework, I investigate differences between machine learning and human learning, exploring new directions in machine learning research (Reigeluth and Castelle 2021) and their implications for the future. As AI technology rapidly advances, the absence of a regulatory framework in Canada – and much of the world – makes this conversation both timely and crucial.
Dr. Alex Levant is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. He specializes in critical media theory and emerging/future technologies. He is co-editor of Activity Theory: An Introduction (Columbia University Press 2024) and Dialectics of the Ideal (Brill Academic Publisher 2014). His articles have been published by, among other outlets, Historical Materialism, Stasis, Critique, Educational Review, and Mind, Culture and Activity.
Danielle Taschereau Mamers
November 28, 2024
Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing
How are documents good for thinking about settler colonial policies? And how can art help us look at documents and the policies they bring into being? For many decades, Canadian state agents have used paperwork to materialize the category of Indian status. From the text of the Indian Act to registration forms, status cards, and reports, administrative documents have been tools that the state has used to make visible—and invisible—Indigenous peoples. In practices of looking back at law, Indigenous artists and activists have been guides to thinking disobediently with administrative archives. This talk will present decolonial and feminist artistic strategies as guides for analyzing settler bureaucratic practice while creating decolonial futures.
Danielle Taschereau Mamers is a media theorist turned tiny bureaucrat turned idea artist and facilitator. She’s held a handful of postdocs and has a PhD in Media Studies. Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing is her first book and she’s published a dozen articles and some non-academic essays. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two snails (both named Sylvia).
Martin Arnold
January 23, 2025
This Essay Has a Soundtrack: Martin Arnold Plays Some of His Music
Martin Arnold will play recordings of some of his music and, in between, talk about it. In doing so, he will touch on an array of theoretical provocations that have fueled his creative endeavours since the 1990s. This selection will (probably) include: music and cultural-historical mediations (beside Georgina Born); non-exemplary difference (beside Barbara Kruger) and the aesthetic politics of importance (beside Norman Bryson); formlessness (beside Georges Bataille); the experimental and its fragility (beside Trinh T. Minh-ha and Lydia Goehr); the medieval wonderful (beside Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park) and the estetiku divnosti (that is, the aesthetic of curious things, beside Rudolf Komorous). Martin will suggest a politics of music and a musical politics that does not embrace metaphor or require translation.
Martin Arnold is a musician and teacher based in Peterborough, ON. As a composer of notated music, his pieces have been performed nationally and internationally by many acclaimed artists. As a performer, he is a member of a number of marginal free improvisation, experimental pop, psychedelic ultralounge, and weird folk communities, playing (very idiosyncratically) melodica, electric guitar, tenor banjo and garage electronics. Martin is an Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Department of Trent University.
Mark Allwood Portillo & Kathryn Last
March 6, 2025
Ephemeral Ecosystems: Examining Temporality and Sustainability in the Land Art of Andy Goldsworthy and Ana Mendieta
This talk explores the relationship between temporality, sustainability, and ecological art through the work of land artists Andy Goldsworthy and Ana Mendieta. In contrast to more permanent and extractive works like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, which have been critiqued for their destructive engagement with the land, Goldsworthy and Mendieta present alternative approaches to environmental art. By prioritizing ephemerality and ecological sensitivity, these artists challenge traditional notions of permanence and monumentality in art. Goldsworthy's site-specific sculptures, constructed from materials sourced directly from nature, embody an acceptance of impermanence, with each piece returning to the landscape as part of a natural cycle. Similarly, Mendieta's Silueta Works explore the intersection of land and body, offering a deeply personal and transitory reflection on her hybrid identity as a Cuban American woman. This paper investigates how both artists use temporality and an eco-centric ethos to reflect on the broader issues of environmental sustainability, colonial legacies, and the human-nature relationship. Through their work, Goldsworthy and Mendieta redefine the potential for land art to transcend extraction, offering a sustainable vision of art that honors both the land and its histories.
Liam Mitchell
March 20, 2025
The Parasocialists
The online left is a networked social body. This means it has a shape. This talk will trace the contours of the online left by examining the shapes that it takes as it responds to contemporary forms of fascism, particularly Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. A chronology of responses to the genocide ranging from the rapid (the shitposters of Twitter and the react streamers of Twitch) to the measured (debate bros and podcasters) to the considered (video essayists) situates a populist politics inside popular media.
Liam Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University. His work theorizes the relationship between media, culture, and politics. He is the author of Ludopolitics: Videogames Against Control (Zero Books, 2018) and The Parasocialists: React Streamers, Video Essayists, Debate Bros, Podcasters, and the Cultural Politics of the Online Left (punctum books, forthcoming).
2023-24 Academic Year
Gavin McLachlan
January 16, 2024
Architecture is Aggression
This seminar will use philosophy and examples from architectural practice to identify problems that arise from built solutions to social demands.
A new civic building, like a hospital, is an act of aggression. It obliterates the site that was there before, occupying and replacing it with a vision shaped by the dreams and anxieties of the governing system. Lately, these visions are preoccupations with security, risk mitigation and essentialization. The architecture that results defines a territory (physical, cultural and relational) and, within those confines, reinforces a set of operations that insist on conformance while reducing agency and accountability.
The process that generates the design of this type of building, the manner in which complexity and vernacular community networks are rejected, redefined and often replaced, can be critiqued through a reading of Bernard Stiegler (The Age of Disruption) and Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern). Problems identified relate to the delirium of authority that drives the new design (Stiegler’s “optimism and “pessimism”) as well as the continued impact of the purification and isolation of information and identity (Latour’s process of purification) in arriving at the building program and form’s definition.
However, the same texts also support an alternate approach to the process that locates civic architecture in a community, determines what needs are being responded to and how that response is structured through a design. It rejects the authority and bias of data for something emergent, one where the evolving and unanticipated narrative of the community’s needs can be heard and told. The success of the narrative, in how it informs the design, is found in its capacity to accommodate a changing individual, cultural and historical complexity. And, whether the community is permitted to define and progressively modify the territory of the building.
Gavin studied at Trent University and the University of Toronto before spending the next 20 years working in architecture designing healthcare and justice buildings and writing/presenting about the relationship between space, recovery and violence.
David Holdsworth
November 21, 2023
Styles of Practice in the Natural and Human Sciences: Text and Image from Thoreau to Foucault
The talk will have as its implicit thesis that, from a methodological point of view, both the natural and human sciences have more in common than divides them. It will proceed in five stages towards an explicit thesis about the nature of interdisciplinary inquiry: (1) an overview of my work on styles of practice, in contrast with A. C. Crombie’s styles of thought and Ian Hacking’s styles of reasoning; (2) an analysis of text and image in the work of the 19th century naturalist Henry David Thoreau; (3) a review of Michel Foucault’s conception of saying and seeing (the articulable and the visible) as a general understanding of text and image and their engagement; (4) an appeal that we avoid monolithic questions (with apologies to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose work I deeply respect) such as “What is Philosophy?”; and, (5) a conclusion to the effect that all theoretical practices, such as cultural theory (and, yes, theoretical physics), can be simultaneously philosophical, scientific, and creative.
David Holdsworth is emeritus Professor from the Trent School of the Environment and the former director of the MA Program in Theory, Culture and Politics (now the MA Program in Cultural Studies) at Trent University. His career has divagated wildly from Physics (Waterloo / McMaster) to Philosophy of Science (Western), Theoretical Physics (Cologne), Mathematics (Queens), Philosophy (Toronto), Radiation Risk Assessment (Ontario Hydro), Environmental Studies (York), to Environmental Theory and Continental Philosophy (Trent). The current talk is based on a 2018 Publication (“Styles of Practice in Philosophy and Mathematical Science”) and themes from a course taught in the English Seminar in the University of Cologne (2018) whimsically called “Where’s Walden?”. He labours to this day under the spell of Gilles Deleuze.
The Cultural Studies Ph.D program sponsors an annual speakers' series providing an opportunity for our students to hear and meet some of the most exciting and innovative scholars in the humanities and social sciences. There are opportunities to socialize with our visitors afterwards. As always, these presentations are open to all members of the university community.
S. Trimble
November 7, 2023
Stories of Arrival: A Feminist Cultural Studies Mixtape
This talk reflects on the entanglements among autobiography, research, and pedagogy. By combining stories about my family, an account of my academic journey, and reflections on my experiences as a teacher, I inquire into what Stuart Hall (2017) describes in his memoir as “the connections between ‘a life’ and ‘ideas.’” How do we begin to account for what Sara Ahmed (2006) calls the “histories of arrival” that bring us to scholarly work, and what value might there be in the undertaking? How do these histories inform the ways we inhabit the fields and (inter)disciplines that shape our research questions? How do they animate our pedagogical strategies, sometimes consciously and sometimes not? By riffing on the figure of the haunted house – as my growing-up place, a cultural object I study, and a trope I pass on to my students – I open up questions about a field(?) it took me a long time to recognize as my academic “home”: feminist cultural studies.
S. Trimble (she/they) is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream and Undergraduate Chair at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her book, Undead Ends: Stories of Apocalypse (Rutgers, 2019), draws on Black feminist thought and queer theory to explore the cultural politics of mainstream apocalypse films. They also write cultural criticism for non-academic audiences, some of which can be found in the Bitch Media archives, and the most recent of which is a personal essay on The Exorcist included in the queer and trans horror anthology, It Came from the Closet (Feminist Press, 2022). Trimble loves dogs, basketball, and spooky season.