The Experimental Methods and Media Lab
Welcome to the EMM Lab
The Experimental Methods and Media Lab (EMM Lab) provides resources and structure for interdisciplinary collaboration at Trent University. Led by Dr Anne Pasek (Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture, and the Environment), EMM Lab aims to foster capacities in emerging and experimental methods of inquiry that draw on strengths—and reach audiences—beyond traditional modes of academic writing. It is both a media lab, providing production equipment for film, video, audio, print, and critical code projects, and a methods co-laboratory, in which faculty and students explore creative methods of research and research-dissemination.
With close affiliations to the Cultural Studies department, and with a mandate to actively participate in Peterborough’s arts community, EMM Lab facilitates access to media production equipment, peer expertise, and creative collaboration.
Resources
The EMM Lab is home to media equipment and production software which can be borrowed by lab members, faculty, students, and community members for research and arts-based research projects. The lab also consists of a Risograph printing studio, which can be booked for print and zine making endeavours.
Email elidster@trentu.ca during the academic year for enquiries about borrowing media equipment and booking lab space and the Riso printing studio.
Projects
In addition to wider partnerships and resource sharing agreements, EMM Lab also supports a small team of faculty and students working collaboratively on a shared research program. Some of the lab’s current research projects are as follows.
Critical Climate Tech: The 2022-2023 stream is Critical Climate Tech, an exploration of technologies that are key to many models of a net zero future but are largely absent from public debates and everyday experience. By creatively staging and reconfiguring technologies such as off-grid solar or direct air capture carbon removal machines, we aim to create new opportunities for public engagement and further debates about social values that may be embedded—or reconfigured—in their designs.
The Low-Carbon Methods Group (LCMG): The EMM Lab plays an infrastructural role for LCMG: an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars founded by Dr. Pasek which examines the epistemological and equity impacts of energy transitions in the university and in academic research methods. EMM Lab hosts and maintains the LCMGP’s solar-powered network equipment, website, and provides the media production infrastructure for its DIY Methods conference series.
EMM Lab Skill Share: Along with the newly formed Trent Arts Research Group, the EMM Lab facilitates a regular Skill Share event during the academic year for faculty and grad students across campus to exchange knowledge and learn new hands-on skills. The lab welcomes grad students and faculty members to propose and host exchanges with their peers.
Members
Director
Anne Pasek
Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment and Assistant Professor
BA (University of Alberta), MA (McGill), PhD (New York University)
annepasek@trentu.ca
Research Interests: climate change, energy/environmental humanities, science communication, visual culture, new materialisms, infrastructure, cultural politics
Research Assistants
Kees Schuller
PhD Student – Department of Cultural Studies
BA (University of Windsor), MA (Queen’s University)
keesschuller@trentu.ca
Research Interests: genre fiction, science fiction, energy/environmental humanities, game studies, creative writing, activism, social and environmental justice, transhumanism, monster theory
Swati Mehta
PhD Student – Department of Cultural Studies
BA (Loreto College, Calcutta University), MA (University of Warwick)
swatimehta@trentu.ca
Research Interests: digital media and culture, climate movement and politics, environmental justice, activism, platform studies, social networks, sociology of data
Contact
We are based in Wallis Hall 126 and 127, Traill College, Peterborough
Email: elidster@trentu.ca for borrowing lab equipment or booking lab space
annepasek@trentu.ca for proposing a skill share; projects or collaborations; and media enquires
swatimehta@trentu.ca for joining the EMM Lab Skill Share mailing list