Joshua Synenko
Assistant Professor Joshua Synenko
BA (York), MA (Western), PhD (York)
joshuasynenko@trentu.ca
Traill College, Scott House 212
705-748-1011 ext. 6164
Joshua Synenko is an Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Department, and Coordinator of the Media Studies Program at Trent University (Canada). He is Assistant Editor at Media Theory (MT), an international and independent peer-reviewed journal. Between 2018-2020, Synenko was President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association (CCLA).
Dr. Synenko completed a BA (Summa cum Laude) in Political Science at York University in 2005. His MA thesis, “Uncommon Singularities: Event, Politics, Representation,” was completed in 2007 at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism (ThC), Western University. Synenko completed his PhD in Humanities at York University in 2015. His dissertation, entitled “After Collective Memory: Postnational Europe and Socially Engaged Art,” situates cinematic, literary, and sculptural interventions aimed at challenging specific imaginaries of European “home” amid the global financial crisis in 2008. By bridging the history and theory of memorialization together with approaches from critical race and ethnic studies, Synenko argues that interventions into European collective memory were largely initiated at this time among second-generation migrants pursuing “translocal” (El-Tayeb, 2011) identity politics.
Since graduating, Dr. Synenko has contributed single-author publications exploring broad intersections between (new and old) media and geography, emphasizing questions of mobility, technology and infrastructure within collective memory practices, the political uses and misuses of crowdsourcing maps, the discursive practices around smart cities, and theories of space in visual culture. In 2018, he completed a major editorial project on Geospatial Memory.
Dr. Synenko’s current research focuses on situating locative arts and technologies in a broader history of experimental cultures, investigating the sociology of mobilities, mobile social media, and practices of digital archiving and preservation. Synenko has been PI in two SSHRC Explore Grants: Ecology, Infrastructure and Mobility in Communications Research (2020-21), and Building an Open Access Repository of Locative Arts (2021-22).
Dr. Synenko has taught Introduction to Media Studies, Introduction to Film I and II, War and Media, Issues in Global Media, Television Studies, Social Media and Power, Contemporary Topics in Media Studies, and Workshop: Computational Arts.
Personal website: www.joshuasynenko.com