Our People

Fan is an assistant professor in and Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change. Her work aims to create more equitable, diverse and inclusive AI technologies by exploring how social inequalities and biases in AI can be interrupted and improved. Fan’s research team are identifying and breaking down the unseen social implications of using this technology by creating innovative alternative methods, resources and toolkits for AI with outcomes enhanced by equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

Gabriel is an Equity Specialist in the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism. She is an expert in fostering equity led educational environments which as a collaborator would largely inform the commitments to equity and social justice that form the basis of the network and our research activities especially as they impact our four partner institutions.

MacDonald is an Associate Professor in Communication Arts. Her interdisciplinary research examines feminist, queer, and anti-racist media activisms. She is a series editor for Ohio State University Press’s Digital Feminist Resistance book series and has co-edited two collections of digital feminist activism with Lexington Press. She is a member of qcollaborative, a multi-institional feminist design collective, and co-runs the online archive and research group Feminist Think Tank. She is a founding member of the Platformed Visual Misogyny International Working Group.

Momeni is anAssistant Professor in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her studies focus on comprehending individuals’ connections and interactions with digital media technologies and smart applications. Momeni explores how these technologies provide possibilities and empower users to perform an act, while they can also limit or disable users’ actions in different contexts. Momeni’s research interest and teaching expertise lie in the intersections of media studies, digital arts communication, human-computer interaction, multimedia storytelling, visual culture, digital media affordances, and smart technologies.

Wiens is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Rhetoric in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her work leverages queer and intersectional feminist perspectives to explore how people use media in critical and creative ways to foster community and speak back to power. Wiens is Co-Director of Feminist Think Tank, out of which our digital archive (Instagram: @aesthetic.resistance) is run and the co-edited collections Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices (Lexington Books 2022) and Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies (Lexington Books 2023) were born. She is a founding member of the Visual Methods Collective (ECREA), a research network invested in the study and application of visual research methods.

Evering is McMaster's Research Data Management Specialist. They hold expansive experience with research support, education, project management, advocacy, and knowledge translation; with fluency in social practice art, healthcare, community research, data, and systems development. Danica supports students, postdocs, faculty, and staff with RDM through the data lifecycle—Data Management Plans, storage and backup, data security, data sharing. With an MA in Media Studies from Concordia, they are interested in fostering RDM within curious scholars and disciplines.

Fink is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at McMaster University Library. Their talents lie in complex and innovative systems administration and project management. He also has an interest in the maker/hacker element in digital scholarship, and is frequently spotted tinkering with esoteric hardware.

Miya is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship. Her research and teaching interests include critical code studies, nineteenth-century American literature, and the digital humanities. She has held research positions with the SpokenWeb Network, the Kule Research Institute (KIAS), and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC). She co-edited the anthology Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (Open Book Publishers 2021), and her article “Student-Driven Digital Learning: A Call to Action” appears in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center (MIT Press 2021).

Sivojothy is a Data Analysis and Visualization Librarian who brings a background of research in data justice, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities. She is currently thinking through participatory data design which allow for visualizations that are empowering for the end user. She also has experience in Research Data Management—particularly data cleaning and curation.

Zeffiro is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts and academic director for the Lewis and Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship. Her areas of research include critical data studies, critical cybersecurity studies, data justice, and qualitative digital research methods. Her previous work on immersive mobile experiences, responsive installations, and virtual and augmented reality has appeared in academic journals, edited collections, and exhibited at the Banff New Media Institute and the California Nanosystems Institute and in public spaces in Montréal, Toronto, and New York. Andrea’s collaborative digital storytelling project, Techno Trash, is listed in digital humanities library reference guides at Loyola University, Virginia Tech, and Northwestern University.

Bashmechi’s research areas encompass gender, sexuality, sexual violence, social movements, and digital media. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals like "Sociological Spectrum" and "First Monday," and she contributed a chapter on "The Iranian #MeToo Movement" to the "The Other #MeToos" book in the Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations series. Farinaz is dedicated to bridging academia and public discourse, evident in her public sociology publications.

Crompton is an associate professor in Communication and Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and director of the Humanities Data Lab. Her research interests include linked data, data modelling, code as a representational medium, queer history, and Victorian popular culture. She co-directs the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project and is vice-president (English) of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques and an associate director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

Watson is an assistant professor in Information Studies and coordinator of the university’s Creator Space. She is the PI of the SongData project (www.SongData.ca) and her research is centered on issues of equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility in the US and Canadian Country music industries, her research focuses on interpreting the “Big Data” emerging from the popular music industry's efforts to track radio, streams, and sales (and ultimately capture revenue), in the current regulatory and media environment. Her research has been featured in national and international press, as well as in media outlets such as Apple Country Radio’s Color me Country with Rissi Palmer, the New York Times’s Popcast, CBC's The National and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Findings emerging from SongData projects have been cited as a major source in a report submitted to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in response to the National Association of Broadcasters' proposal to deregulate radio ownership, as well as in a Grammy Recording Academy report on inclusion and diversity in the music industry.

de Jesus is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies. She is a video essayist and moving images curator whose digital projects concentrate on girls, women, and folks of colour. Her current research-creation projects involve using participatory filmmaking to explore racialized girls’ experiences of COVID-19 inequalities and experimental animation to foreground Black girls’ resistance in surveillance records of police violence. With this experience in digital research-creation projects and participatory creative practice in community de Jesus will be essential in the development of the network’s research-creation activities and their translation to public-facing toolkits.

Easter is an Assistant Professor of Writing at York University. Her research looks at rhetorical theory, critical internet studies, and software studies.Her book, On Visual Rhetoric, co-authored with Christa J. Olson, received the 2022 University of Michigan/Sweetland Publication Prize in Digital Rhetoric. Her first monograph, “Coding Otherwise: Weird Programming Languages and Feminist Possibility” (University of Alabama Press) investigates “weird” or “esoteric” programming languages to explore how rhetorical constructions of the digital as disembodied, unfeeling, and ephemeral are co-constitutive with real, material power asymmetries. Case studies from this project have appeared in Rhetoric Review and Feminist Media Studies.

Ruest is an Associate Librarian in the Digital Scholarship Infrastructure Department at York University, and co-Principal Investigator of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded The Archives Unleashed Project, co-Principal Investigator of the SSHRC grant “A Longitudinal Analysis of the Canadian World Wide Web as a Historical Resource, 1996-2014”, and co-Principal Investigator of the Compute Canada Research Platforms and Portals Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge. At York University, he oversees the libraries’ preservation initiatives, along with creating and implementing systems that support the capture, description, delivery, and preservation of digital objects having significant content of enduring value.