2026 PANELS

CONDUITS ꩜ Modulations: Affect, Resistance, and Control  [pdf]

Morning Panels (10:30 AM - 12:00 PM)

Politics of News and Discourse, Chair: Dr. Sarah Ganter 

Media and Representation, Chair: Dr. Victoria Thomas

Labour and Alienation, Chair: Laya Behbahani

Afternoon Panels (2:30 PM - 4:30 PM)

Environmental Communication, Chair: Dr. Amy Harris 

Sociopolitical Formations and Technology, Chair:Dr. Frédérik Lesage 

Critical Perspectives on AI, Chair: Prem Sylvester

Morning Panels – 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

1. Politics of News and Discourse

Chair: Dr. Sarah Ganter

Contesting 'Post-Pandemic': The Biopolitics of "Vulnerability" and Long COVID 

Kayli Jamieson, SFU

This presentation builds on my thesis research findings to challenge the modulations within the regulatory biopolitical processes of ‘post-pandemic’ discourses within Canadian news media, proposing discursive forms of resistance to constructions of “vulnerability”. My research took a temporal approach to understand how such constructions surrounding COVID-19 risk emerged over various newspaper sampling timelines, reflecting the modulations and fluidity of discourses. Grounded in the Foucauldian tradition, this work interrogated socio-political relations and notions of “immunity” present in Canadian newspaper articles (n=352) from March 2022 to July 2024 in their discursive construction of a ‘post-pandemic’ that ‘Othered’ populations deemed as “vulnerable”. For a patient-centered analysis on these news representations, I interviewed British Columbians with Long COVID (n=10), who proposed recommendations to counter existing constructions within news media around “vulnerability” and COVID-19 outcomes. Drawing on Foucault’s work on biopolitics and Butler’s “vulnerability”, I outlined the intersections of ableism, social disparities, and stigma faced by people with Long COVID and disability communities. My research identified biopolitical discursive choices that categorized groups as deserving of access to life, and others not. My combined findings from my news media analysis and patient interviews provided insights into how we may disturb the manufactured consent to ableist discourses.

Narrating from the Margins: Independent Journalism and Environmental Counter-Narratives in Indonesia

Vinisa Nurul Aisyah, SFU

Indonesia's democratic regression has intensified the marginalization of environmental issues in mainstream media, much of which is owned by political and business elites with vested interests in extractive industries. In this context, independent digital media outlets have emerged as critical sites of resistance, producing environmental counter-narratives that challenge dominant developmentalist discourses. This project examines how Indonesian independent journalists operating at the margins of the journalistic field construct and legitimize environmental counter-narratives.

Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory, and Vivien Schmidt's Discursive Institutionalism, this study investigates five independent media outlets: Project Multatuli, Floresa, Ekuatorial, Konde.co, and Magdalene. Through textual analysis of news content and in-depth interviews with journalists and editors, this research addresses three interrelated questions: how marginal journalism employs discursive strategies to represent environmental issues differently from dominant narratives; how editorial values and institutional ideas are coordinatively and communicatively articulated to shape counter-narrative production; and how these outlets construct antagonisms against dominant narratives while articulating environmental struggles within broader chains of social demands, including those grounded in gender justice, locality, and indigenous rights.

This study understands dominant media narratives as a modulating force that continuously calibrates public affect and attention away from environmental accountability. Independent Journalism thus operates as a form of discursive resistance that disrupts these modulations, reclaiming journalistic authority from the margins and contributing to comparative journalism studies, environmental communication, and Southeast Asian media scholarship.

The Construction of the Figure of the “Ukrainian Refugee” Inside the Russian Federation

Daria Hetmanova, SFU

At the end of March 2022, the Ukrainian media outlet Graty published one of the first witness accounts of a Mariupol resident describing the process of passing through the Russian-set "filtration camps" in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. As was later revealed by numerous journalistic and human rights investigations, in these facilities forcibly deported Ukrainian civilians were screened and questioned, with their biometric and digital data extracted; those rendered "suspicious" during the filtration process faced the possibility of physical abuse and/or extrajudicial detention. The "filtration camps" formed one node within the broader logistics of the forced transfer of Ukrainian civilians to the territory of the Russian Federation in the spring of 2022, where Ukrainian citizens were placed into "temporary accommodation centers" (TACs) across Russian territory. In this paper, I attend to the previously underdocumented experience of placement of Ukrainian citizens in TACs. By looking into the logistical and discursive organization of the Russian state-organized resettlement of forcibly deported Ukrainian citizens inside Russia, I aim to map out the way the figure of the Ukrainian refugee was constructed during this process, with their "refugeeness" used as a "moral-political tactic" (Lippert, 1999) by the Russian state in its efforts to mobilize the discourse of humanitarianism around forced deportations.

Algorithmic Modulation and Racialized Visibility: How Digital Platforms Govern Violence and Resistance Against Black Women Journalists in Canada and Kenya

Joan Letting, SFU

Digital journalism heightens visibility while expanding exposure to networked harassment. This paper reads online violence against Black women journalists as algorithmic modulation, where platforms continuously recalibrate visibility, affect, and attention to produce differentiated vulnerability. Drawing on Deleuze’s control societies, it argues that platform governance no longer relies on fixed discipline but on dynamic modulation that adjusts exposure and amplification in real time. Here, Black women journalists occupy “affective visibility positions,” where high professional visibility meets racialized and gendered risk. 

The paper uses a comparative frame to examine Canada and Kenya as distinct yet interconnected digital environments. In Canada, algorithmic amplification and institutional racial bias fuel sustained, often subtle harassment. In Kenya, modulation is shaped by political contestation, electoral cycles, and coordinated digital publics that produce intense harassment events. In both cases, visibility is produced by platform logics that prize engagement, conflict, and emotional intensity.

The paper also shows how resistance appears in practices that disrupt modulation: digital refusal, collective solidarity, and strategic reconfigurations of visibility. By combining Black feminist theory, platform studies, and surveillance scholarship, it advances the concept of affective visibility modulation as a way to understand how digital infrastructures govern both harm and resistance in contemporary journalism.

2. Media and Representation

Chair: Dr. Victoria Thomas

Digital Mobilization of Outrage Surrounding Liam Conejo Ramos on TikTok

Emily Ecklan, SFU

Trump's politics often aim to extract outrage from the American people through spectacle. The mass presence of ICE agents and detainments is one of the administration’s latest spectacles, invoking outrage in the American people. This mobilization can be witnessed in anti-ICE protests occurring across the nation. While affective outrage aids in mobilizing people on the ground, my research aims to highlight how digital mobilization around ICE detainment plays out through the medium of TikTok. 

In an effort to better understand the ways affective outrage sticks to groups across the political aisle, my research examines how affective outrage is expressed and captured on the platform TikTok, surrounding the detainment of Liam Conejo Ramos. To conduct this research, I analyzed two viral examples of how influencers, both a pro-ICE and an anti-ICE, express outrage in their commentaries. This mobilization highlights the gap between the two depictions of the detainment as a place where misinformation can spread. Analysis of these two TikTok videos, their comments, and other public data is used to measure and depict what this outrage translates to online. Scholars like Jodi Dean, Dan Gretton, Jeff Rice, Sarah Ahmed, and others are used to build an affective framework incorporating populism, outrage, spectacle, and networks, which is utilized as a lens to analyze these two videos.

“It is absolutely not your fault”: Popular Feminism and the Representation of Sex Education and Sexual Violence in Sex Education

Noelle Gesner, SFU

This paper examines Sex Education as a form of entertainment-education that modulates affect, resistance, and control within contemporary feminist discourse. Situating the series in a political climate marked by increasing restrictions on sex education and reproductive rights, it argues that popular television operates as a critical pedagogical resource for youth. 

The analysis explores representations of sexual violence through Aimee’s sexual assault narrative, where solidarity emerges not from sameness but from shared structural conditions. The show resists the limitations of “popular feminism” by centering intersectional experiences and emphasizing systemic inequities over individualized empowerment. These dynamics are further developed through depictions of collective rage, which reframe anger as a productive, political response to patriarchal violence.

Finally, the paper argues that the series imagines sex education as a collaborative, community-based process that challenges institutional control and censorship. By depicting knowledge as dialogic and relational, Sex Education positions youth not as passive recipients but as active participants in meaning-making. Ultimately, the series demonstrates how entertainment media can function as a site of resistance, fostering critical awareness and collective agency.

The Digital Reboot of the Antebellum Era Minstrel Show: How the Spectacle of Black Female AI-Generated Influencers Utilizes Digital Blackface and the Jezebel Stereotype to Subvert Black Women 

Bukola Balogun, SFU

To successfully subvert a group of people, it is imperative to own and control their representations in society and condition others to view them as non-human. In the 19th century, apart from chattel slavery, minstrel shows were one of the most popular vehicles in which Europeans could define Blackness. Through blackface performances, white men curated a distorted image of Blackness that was used to justify the mistreatment and degradation of Africans in society. While minstrelsy’s popularity and acceptance have since waned, its tenets have resurfaced through various online tools. Known collectively as digital blackface, this phenomenon refers to how non-blacks co-opt blackness online for political, economic or personal gain. This paper argues that the spectacle of Black Female AI-Generated influencers uses digital blackface to co-opt the image of Black women and hyper sexualized representations through the Jezebel stereotype to engage in a damaging legacy of dehumanizing, exploiting, commodifying, and fetishizing Black women.  

3. Labour and Alienation

Chair: Laya Behbahani

Spatiality, Reclamation, and Repair through Black Creative Cultural Labour in Vancouver

Kiara Okonkwo, SFU

Black life in Vancouver continues to be shaped by the systemic erasure of Hogan’s Alley, a historic Black community demolished in the 1960s. The histories and legacies of the Black Pioneers and Black communities across Vancouver remain marginalized in mainstream historical narratives. In the 2010s and 2020s, however, a growing number of Black cultural and non-profit organizations have emerged to reclaim history, reassert presence, and imagine new communal futures for Black life in the City of Vancouver. Guided by an Afrofuturist framework, the project treats Black spatial world-building in Vancouver as a matter of cosmopolitan rights and justice. By examining how cultural and creative organizations, centering Black repair, reclamation, and futurity, challenge Vancouver’s legacy of erasure and create new spatialities grounded in place, presence, and possibility. Using qualitative methods, including content and discourse analysis of municipal policies and funding structures, semi-structured interviews and participant observation with Black cultural and creative workers, this research explores the material and mediated processes through which Black organizations do their work, create socio-cultural change, and are supported by funding structures.

A workers' inquiry into the Philippine virtual assistant industry

Diana Limbaga, SFU

Globalization and the development of information and communications technologies have resulted in the rise of outsourced, communication-based labour in the Global South – like the growing virtual assistant (VA) industry in the Philippines. VAs complete various administrative and service-based tasks for their clients at a distance, who are often located in countries in the Global North. While Filipino VAs earn relatively higher wages than those in domestic occupations, they experience increased precarity as they are not entitled to health benefits or pensions, and their work is less secure as employer-worker relationships are mediated by job-seeking platforms. While there is a lack of scholarship in the VA industry due to its recent emergence, researchers have studied the analogous business process outsourcing industry in the Global South to consider its difficult working conditions and opportunities for collective action. This study will expand scholarship in the VA industry and ask the following questions: What are the lived experiences of virtual assistants in the Philippines? How are resistance and collective action fostered and hindered within this industry? To explore these questions, existing research surrounding platform labour and labour in the Philippines will be examined. Workshops will be hosted with VAs in attendance explore their current labour conditions, as well as any changes they would like to see in the industry. This industry is important to consider as there are noticeable gaps in existing Philippine legislation that do not protect virtual and platform workers. However, these workers play an integral role in developing the nation's economy.

Mapping Rank-and-File Organizing in BC Lower Mainland’s Circulation Sector

Kanksha Chawla, SFU

Research of logistics struggles and labour is more relevant now than ever: recent state interventions in Canada, such as the contemporary use of federal and provincial level back-to-work legislation like Section 107 to restrict strike activity, indicate an increasing intervention of the state in labour disputes in ways that limit workers’ ability to exercise collective power, placing them further from economic gains and bringing the political strike completely out of reach of workers. Simultaneously, developments in logistics and platform capitalism have heightened both the strategic importance of the sector and the various forms of control imposed on workers, including algorithmic management, surveillance, and speed-up. Workers in logistics have higher leverage within supply chains today, but face significant barriers to organizing that leverage into power. Understanding how workers navigate this contradiction is politically and economically urgent.

My literature-review grounded analysis asks: what are the strategies and tactics being used by logistics sector workers in BC’s lower mainland to win economic and political power within the sector, which strategies and tactics have failed, and how do national and international political-economic conditions shape these outcomes? My paper draws on Marxist insights on capitalist circulation and contemporary scholarship on algorithmic management and supply chain logics (Deborah Cowen and Charmaine Chua). I argue that logistics infrastructures function as apparatuses that discipline labour, while platform capitalism introduces new modulations of control and surveillance. Ultimately, this abstract proposes that studying circulation logistics through the lens of control and resistance reveals how capitalist modulation can be punctured by coordinated worker initiatives. The outputs of this research will concretely inform worker organizing efforts happening in Vancouver where 45% of world container shipments flow through.

Afternoon Panels – 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM

4. Environmental Communication

Chair: Dr. Amy Harris 

Salmon Back

Caitlin Price, Thompson Rivers University

Salmon Back is a 19-minute documentary film about environmental activism taking place in a small community. This film investigates potential solutions to salmon decline and current work being done to preserve wildlife in the Nicola Valley. Featuring various local perspectives, Salmon Back is a timely and community-engaged research project. Local Indigenous representatives, BC ranchers and a fisheries biologist unite in an impactful discussion on the decline of the salmon population and what can be done about it. This film explores water storage solutions, habitat revival/maintenance, the importance of collaboration and the impacts of climate change. Inspirational and grounded, this film connects to a wide variety of audiences. Thought-provoking use of storytelling and visual aids provide viewers with hope for the future, solution strategies and information on the current state of the Nicola ecosystem. Through semi-structured interviews locals share their personal stories, raise awareness about environmental concerns and highlight their efforts to save the ecological integrity of their homeland. The salmon decline has impacted Nicola Valley locals from all walks of life, together this community is working hard to do what has to be done. With emphasis on collaboration, Salmon Back is a call to all, the environment needs our help.

Repair, recalibration and resonance: weaving knowledge to recalibrate ecological communication

Miranda Post, SFU

Canadian environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and governments have historically lacked diversity in their conservation communications. The legacies of colonization, systemic racism, and classist scientific knowledge mobilization have shaped how environmental messaging is distributed and received. Addressing the triple planetary crisis—climate change and biodiversity loss—requires diverse voices and knowledge systems to unify audiences and inspire action.

This project examines two environmental communications case studies that embrace diversity, advance reconciliation, and promote ecological/cultural repair, in effect modulating the way ecological protection and storytelling might have taken place. Each case study will show how ENGOs integrate different knowledge systems and spokespersons to communicate about environmental issues. The inquiry focuses on whether organizations have publicly available Indigenous reconciliation or DEI statements or policies, how media messaging incorporates cultural and ecological messaging, and whether they weave in Indigenous or vocational knowledge alongside Western science. My hypothesis is that Canadian ENGOs focused on repair and reconciliation in external communications create campaigns that recalibrate ecological communication practices.

This project contributes to broader Canadian communication knowledge creation focused on weaving plural knowledges, employing respectful diverse communications practices, and designing communications as an exercise in reconciliation.

5. Sociopolitical Formations and Technology

Chair:Dr. Frédérik Lesage 

Navigating Neuro-Networks: Understanding How Persons with Brain Arteriovenous Malformations (AVMs) Utilize Online Support Groups

Angelica Parente, SFU Crim

Technology has opened up new forms of communication that can connect previously isolated people who share a similar experience or situation. Our interest was in understanding the role online support groups play in supporting people diagnosed with rare diseases. The current study employed a sequential mixed methods design to explore how persons with brain Arteriovenous Malformations (AVMs) – a complex and rare vascular abnormality - use online support groups. The first study involved a thematic analysis of content from a public Facebook support group, “AVM (Arteriovenous Malformation) Awareness.” The study highlighted treatment, recovery, and the diagnosis process as key topics of discussion. These findings then informed a structured interview guide for a second study involving interviews with 15 young adults from The Joe Niekro Aneurysm & AVM Foundation. Analysis of these interviews revealed four key themes, emphasizing the importance of community, technological advantages and shortcomings, and the role of caregivers. The findings highlight how online spaces can be effective in providing a sense of belonging and community that would be impossible with traditional forms of communication.

This work highlights how media environments reshape perception and attention.  In particular, this research demonstrates how online spaces impact the perception and navigation of rare diseases.

The Fragmentary Gaze: Abstraction, Signifiers and the Simulacra of Difference 

Ciaran Irwin, SFU

This essay suggests that the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and responses to it around the globe, present the clearest available perspective on the colonial logics of dehumanisation and exploitation that are embedded in our technologies. These logics stretch back to our earliest uses of primitive technology and work across three processes: categorisation- the creation of difference; abstraction- the separation of the object and the signifier; and instrumentalisation- the subjection of the human to the logic of the machine. The dimensions across which different categories are defined take place on lines of race and gender that have emerged out of colonial systems. Abstractions work to reduce and dehumanise the Other to facilitate their exploitation. Instrumentalisation is achieved when humans comply frictionlessly according to the expectations and logics of these processes. Exploring and historicising the relationships between these concepts with reference to relevant examples through history helps us contextualise how the processes driven by these logics have progressed at an exponential rate. The introduction of cybernetics outlines how this view has become all-encompassing, and the manifestations of these logics in Gaza hold implications for our shared future. I conclude with possibilities for deviations, alternatives, and means of resistance, highlighting a dialogue between two Palestinians on the transcendental, transformative potentials of beauty and grief.

Living through bitcoin: The co-construction of users and technology

Jennifer Mentanko, SFU

Once emerging technologies diffuse into society and become everyday artifacts, they often fade into the background of our lives where only inputs and outputs matter and their infrastructure and information flows remain largely invisible (Latour, 1987). For some users, the black box of technology remains open as they continually assign new meanings, uses, and cultural significance to an artifact, even after it reaches relative closure. This engagement with technology can give rise to communities that centre technology’s flexibility and its ability to catalyze societal change. By exploring these complex human-technology relationships, scholars can better understand what users do with technology, and what technologies do to users. For instance, Turkle’s ethnography on MIT’s hacker community shows how users’ relationships with their personal computer can inform conceptions of their relationships, values, philosophies, and themselves. On the other hand, in Turner’s (2006) investigation of the cyberspace community, The New Communalists, users imbued the early internet with “hippie” ideals such as reciprocity, community, and decentralizing, helping to shift the meaning of the personal computer from industry tool to personal communication device. This research advances empirical understandings of the co-production of users and technology through an investigation of the digital currency, bitcoin, and a community of users that call themselves “bitcoiners.” Grounded in communication studies, science and technology studies, and economic sociology, this project follows a community of bitcoiners as they engage with bitcoin not only as a socially constructed technology, but as a cultural artifact that mediates their lifeworld.

6. Critical Perspectives on AI

Chair: Prem Sylvester

How Far Can LLMs Go? Evidence from Extremism and Disinformation

Bomin Keum, SFU Crim

Large Language Models (LLMs) are explored as potential tools for identifying online radicalization and disinformation. Less known is how reliable they can be. We evaluated six LLMs - three online and three offline - across five datasets in extremism and disinformation. Extremism datasets include StormFront.org (n=383K), a white supremacist forum data with posts labelled as “Violent” (i.e. posted by users known to have committed violence) and “NonViolent” (i.e. posted by users known not to have committed violence), and Incels.is (n=455K), a misogynistic radicalization forum data with labels inferred using StormFront-trained classifiers. Disinformation datasets consist of Facebook (n=1.2K) and X (n=80K) corpora linked to Iranian and Russian information operations, labelled as real or fake. Each dataset is standardized and scored by LLMs using a single prompt that produces ordinal ratings (0-3) capturing the intensity of theoretically relevant signals: grievance, ideology, violence, emotion, conspiracy, and nihilism for extremism datasets and absolutism, emotion, urgency, moralization, causal simplicity, and political agenda for disinformation datasets. LLM-generated scores were used as features for classification. “Performance” (i.e. ability to distinguish violent from non-violent users and real information from disinformation) was measured through Cross Validation metrics of F1 (i.e., precision and recall). Results inform where LLMs improve predictive accuracy and where they introduce risks and limitations.

Armageddon, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI

Robert Duhaime, SFU

Public discourse around artificial intelligence is increasingly framed in apocalyptic terms. Across academic, professional, and everyday contexts, AI is described as a threat to work, creativity, meaning, and even humanity itself. What is striking, however, is not the diversity of these concerns but their remarkable uniformity. Regardless of background or expertise, similar anxieties repeat, suggesting a shared affective response rather than a purely technical or political disagreement.

This presentation reframes AI not as an external catastrophe but as a mirror. Rather than introducing something fundamentally alien, AI interfaces with existing social systems such as capitalism, authorship, intellectual property, and human exceptionalism, amplifying tensions that were already present. In this sense, AI may represent humanity’s first sustained attempt to communicate with a non-human intelligence. The discomfort it generates may be less about replacement and more about recognition.

Drawing on posthumanist theory and experiential insights from recovery, this talk approaches the current moment as a form of collective reckoning. Transformation does not begin with clarity or consensus, but with discomfort and the breakdown of familiar narratives. The hostility directed at AI often targets not the technology itself, but what it reveals about us.

Situated within the theme of modulation, this presentation explores how small shifts in perception, away from panic and toward reflection, may open new ways of relating to both AI and ourselves.

Is Art in the AI of the Beholder? Testing Human Art Recognition and Detection of AI-Generated Artworks

Maggie Ku, SFU Crim

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has introduced a new class of image generation tools capable of producing highly realistic and aesthetically sophisticated visual content. As AI-generated imagery becomes increasingly indistinguishable from human-created artwork, questions arise about how accurately people can identify its origin. This study examines accuracy rates in distinguishing AI-generated images from human-created artwork, with a focus on the relationship between the two accuracy rates.  

Data were drawn from Cunningham's 2025 dissertation, ""The AI of the Beholder: A Quantitative Study on Human Perception and Appraisal of AI-Generated Images."" A chi-square analysis revealed a significant association between accuracy in identifying AI-generated images and accuracy in identifying human-created artwork, with a moderate effect size. Given this association, a logistic regression was conducted to further understand the relationship between the two accuracy rates. Results indicated an inverse relationship, meaning that participants who were more accurate at identifying AI-generated images tended to be less accurate at identifying human-created ones, suggesting a trade-off in how people classify visual content.

These findings point to a perceptual bias in which increased attunement to the features of AI-generated imagery may come at the cost of recognizing what distinguishes human-created work. As AI-generated imagery becomes more embedded in everyday life, understanding how people perceive and misclassify it has meaningful implications for media literacy, digital authenticity, and public trust in visual content