The Faculty of Arts is pleased to announce that six PhD candidates have been awarded the 2024 Wolfe Fellowship.
The Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy supports the Wolfe Graduate Fellowship for 91社区 graduate students in the Faculty of Arts. The Fellowship supports the research of PhD candidates whose thesis work reflects the themes of the Chair, whose mandate is to conduct research, teach, and perform public outreach regarding the intellectual foundations, nature and methods of scientific and technological innovation and to provide support to well-rounded students capable of making constructive contributions to debates surrounding science, technology, and society.
Congratulations to all of this year鈥檚 recipients.
Discover the 2024 cohort of Wolfe Fellows
Discover the 2024 Wolfe Fellows
|
Name |
Department: |
Thesis subject/title *: |
|---|---|---|
|
Emma Blackett  |
Communication Studies |
鈥淧sychoanalysis for a Blue Humanities.鈥� |
|
Sadie Couture  |
Art History and Communication Studies |
鈥淟ong Time, First Time: A History of Call-In Radio in the United States and Canada 1945-1975.鈥� |
|
Jay Ritchie 
|
English |
Intermedia and the effects of digitality on poetic production, circulation, and reception from 1970 to 2020 |
|
Maryam Roosta  |
Anthropology |
Temporary marriage among disadvantaged women in Iran |
|
Mehak Sawhney  |
Communication Studies |
"Audible Waters: Sounding and Surveilling the Indian Ocean" |
|
Muhe Yang  |
School of Information Studies |
Technologies to better support the interrelated needs of older adults living alone for physical activity. |
* title mentioned where specified on the Wolfe webpage.
Emma Blackett (she/they), is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies whose work is informed by queer/feminist studies, psychoanalytic theory, film studies, and ecocriticism. Her dissertation, 鈥淧sychoanalysis for a Blue Humanities鈥�, offers a critique of environmental subjectivity, taking as its premise the failure of public communications about ecological collapse to provoke action adequate to halting it.
Sadie Couture is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at 91社区 working at the intersection of media history, sound studies, and science and technology studies. During her tenure as a Wolfe Fellow, she will be working on my dissertation project, entitled 鈥淟ong Time, First Time: A History of Call-In Radio in the United States and Canada 1945-1975鈥� which focuses on the origins, development, and conventionalization of call-in radio and traces how technologies, policies, economies, and cultural desires impacted the format and pummeled it鈥攊mperfectly鈥攊nto the shape it is today. Calling-in鈥攗sing a telephone to connect to a radio station and subsequently be broadcast live鈥攊s simultaneously a technical process, a feedback system, satisfies the 鈥榩ublic good鈥� criterion of many regulatory regimes, offers an additional way to shape an audience, and generates cheap, usable content.
Jay Ritchie, is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. His SSHRC CGS-funded doctoral research examines how poets created what Fluxus artist Dick Higgins called 鈥渋ntermedia鈥� art, where two or more different artistic media are combined to create an artwork both between and beyond the artwork鈥檚 component media. Situating the turn towards intermedia in the context of the emergence of digital technology, his research examines the effects of digitality on poetic production, circulation, and reception from 1970 to 2020.
鈥淎part from providing vital, sustaining support for research and dissertation writing in the final year of my PhD, the Wolfe Fellowship allows me to attend conferences on digital media, the digital humanities, and science and technology more broadly,鈥� says Jay. 鈥淭he opportunity to share the research I have conducted while supported by the fellowship and to learn from other academics deepens my intellectual engagement with science and technology in the arts.鈥�
Maryam Roosta, is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at 91社区. Her doctoral dissertation is focused on the practice of temporary marriage among disadvantaged women in Iran. In Twelver Shi鈥檃 Islam, temporary marriage or mut鈥檃h is a contract lasting anywhere from an hour to 99 years between a man and an unmarried woman. While mut鈥檃h has traditionally been an urban phenomenon, the introduction of internet has reshaped the social arrangements between men and women who intend to contract mut鈥檃h. Maryam鈥檚 research shows that to better understand the boundaries between mut鈥檃h and transactional intimate relations is necessary to attend to the ways in which digital technologies such as the internet both enable and constrain women in contracting such relationships. In addition to Wolfe fellowship, her doctoral research is supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Qu茅bec - Soci茅t茅 et Culture (FRQSC) and Wenner-Gren foundation.
Mehak Sawhney (she/her) is a PhD candidate and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Communication Studies at 91社区. Her doctoral project titled Audible Waters: Sounding and Surveilling the Indian Ocean traces the production of oceanic territory through underwater sonic technologies in postcolonial India and the subcontinental Indian Ocean. Through a focus on hydrography, military security, conservation, and resource extraction, the project explores the politics of underwater monitoring technologies such as sonars as well as scientific disciplines such as underwater acoustics and bioacoustics. In so doing the project offers media theoretical reflections on the idea of the planetary, ongoing submarine colonialisms, and geopolitically situated ways to think about the relationship between sound, media and the environment.
鈥淭he Wolfe fellowship will support me in completing my dissertation as a final year PhD candidate at 91社区,鈥� says Mehak. 鈥淢y dissertation titled Audible Waters: Sounding and Surveilling the Indian Ocean focuses on the production of oceanic territory through underwater sonic technologies in postcolonial India and the subcontinental Indian Ocean. It is based on ethnographic and archival research in India and the US. The fellowship will be very helpful in supporting my work and stay for the next academic session as an international student in Canada.鈥�
Muhe Yang is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Studies at 91社区. Her doctoral research investigates how to design technologies to better support the interrelated needs of older adults living alone for physical activity. Older adults engage in physical activity for myriad purposes, including health benefits, associated sensory pleasures, and increased opportunities of socializing. Yet, older adults, especially those living alone, often encounter various barriers to maintaining their exercise routines, contributing to inactivity and falling short of recommended physical activity levels. Those barriers, including health problems, lack of motivation and social support, lack of exercise resources, not only span across individual, social, and environmental levels but also are often interrelated, as revealed in Muhe鈥檚 research findings to date.
For more information on the Wolfe Fellows please visit the Wolfe Fellowship homepage.听
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