University of Ottawa

Research assistant

Assisted Prof. Boulou B’beri in his research efforts by conducting ethnographic interviews as well as developing and maintaining the AMLAC&S website.

Seminar

Academics for design competency

A seminar on visual presentation skills

APA, Chicago, MLA. These are formal systems that alleviate the burden of format, style, and grammar decisions for academics. Surprisingly, with the increase of presentations being a requirement of both student and professional life, there is no such system when it comes to visual communication. The results of this are in every classroom, every seminar, and at every conference: Fonts that are too small to be read at a distance, colour combinations that strain the eyes, powerpoint slides that make unfortunate “whooshing” noises.

Intercom Graduate Conference

Presentation at the University of Ottawa

The Knowledge Creation Cycle: A student’s perspective

The Johnny Cash Project

Contributing artist

Volunteered to illustrate a single frame of a mass cooperative internet video for Johnny Cash’s Ain’t No Grave (Gonna Hold Me Down)

(Source: thejohnnycashproject.com)

Misunderstandings Magazine

Featured artist

Illustrations published in a Toronto-based arts magazine.

Critical Themes 2011 Presentation

Protocol Z

The social organization of zombies

Presented at Critical Themes 2011 at The New School, NYC (April 15–16).
This essay analyzes the representation of distributed social organization in popular culture. Specifically, I explore this concept via the increasingly popular zombie narrative. As evident in Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel series The Walking Dead (2003–), there is a tension between the hierarchical structure of the family and the “flat” organization of zombies crowds. I argue that this tension stems from a cultural fear of not only zombies but also anxieties surrounding Manuel Castells’ “network society”. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a trend of non-fiction books, such as Crowdsourcing (2009), The Cult of the Amateur (2007), and You are not a Gadget (2010), that warn of an oncoming horde. However, the zombies of these books are the participants and users of the internet. Through an analysis of E. Canetti and A. Galloway’s (2004) concepts of crowds and protocol, I form an analytical framework that addresses the issues posed by S. Lauro and K. Embry’s A Zombie Manifesto (2008). The goal of this analysis is two-fold; first, to question how zombies have become a vessal for fears surrounding the distributed network crowd and second, to suggest that this horror sub-genre is an important space for experimentation within which one can investigate organizational possibilities.

Masters Thesis

Encyclopedism & Wikipedia

The concessions of a community of knowledge

Supervisor: Dr Pierre Lévy

Communication Graduate Student Association

Vice-President of External Affairs

Ottawa Tenants Conference

Communication strategist

Volunteered to organize the communication strategies for a not-for-profit organization.