I’m an Associate Professor (Film and Media) at Queen’s University (Kingston, ON).

I’m the host and editor of The Data Fix, launched January 2023. Tune in to listen to scholars – thinkers & feelers – discuss with me the various promises made by Big Tech and the stories people tell themselves about the future.

I’m the Co-editor of Heliotrope, an online journal that encourages raw and experimental writing (managed and co-edited by Tessa J. Brown).

I’m also an Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Communication (since 2019) and on advisory board for The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory (since 2023).

Between 2019-2024, I was the Director of the Environmental Media Lab (EML).

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Academic trajectory: Before relocating to Kingston, I was an Associate Professor in Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Before that, I held a tenure-track position at the Illinois Institute of Technology (now Illinois Tech), in Chicago. I’ve moved a lot - maybe too much.

My undergrad was at Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, followed by a Graphic Design program at Algonquin college, in Ottawa. I did my graduate training at Concordia University, in Montréal: a Communication Studies Graduate Diploma (GrDip), an MA in Media Studies and a research-creation PhD in Coms. I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Curation at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Since 2012, my research has been on the environmental impacts and the political and social implications of data centers and data infrastructure. As an extension of research that looks at alternatives to water- and energy- intensive data storage, I’m a PI for a SSHRC IG project (2021-2026) about DNA-based data storage. I also work on questions of health, and was a member of the Health Humanities Working Group at the University of Calgary during my tenure there.

My research to date has been published in journals like Convergence, Culture Machine, Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, Ephemera, First Monday, Television & New Media, and the Canadian Journal of Communication among others.

I especially enjoy writing as a form of public scholarship, such as The Pandemic's Dark Cloud, The Future of Death (in the Cloud) and Sweaty Zuckerberg and Cool Computing. I also really like participating in podcast interviews, like for “Stream if you wanna die faster” and This Machine Kills.

With Stefan Laser and Edward Ongweso Jr., I’m working on a collection of predictions, a book project under contract with Mattering Press.

I’m currently supervising the following students, Michelle Bunton (Queen’s, MA), Tessa J. Brown (Queen’s, PhD) and Noah Scheinman (Queen’s, PhD). Students I’ve supervised to completion include: Crystal Chokshi (UCalgary, PhD); Drew Thomas (UCalgary, MA); Tessa J. Brown (UCalgary, MA); Madeleine Mendell (NYU, MA), and Sean Willett (UCalgary, MA).