In Fall 2023, SFU’s School of Communication celebrated its 50th anniversary with a program of events to revisit and explore a range of critical scholarship and practice that has been a feature of the School since the beginning. Curated around the theme, Communication as Critique, the 50th Anniversary celebrations featured the work of world-class scholars to engage with the legacies and future research of faculty and students in the School of Communication.  

Communication, Power and Knowledge in Automated Societies - September 14 | Speaker: Paola Ricaurte

Communication plays a pivotal role in shaping and being shaped by power dynamics and knowledge production. In the context of automated societies, the interplay between communication, power, and knowledge undergoes significant reconfigurations influenced by emerging sociotechnical mediations. In particular, the increasing incorporation of datafication, algorithmization, and automation as desired configurations of society is giving rise to novel forms of epistemic, sociocultural, economic, and environmental injustice that are especially affecting communities and territories of the majority world. Moreover, these sociotechnical configurations are not mere extensions of previous power structures but represent an ontological rupture—a fundamental shift in reality conceptualization, experience, and enactment—with consequences for every aspect of social life. The resulting ontological rupture disrupts the nature of reality and knowledge production, reinforcing existing power imbalances and hindering the pursuit of global social justice. In this context, communication scholars and the critical inquiry of society face some urgent questions: What role does communication and non-hegemonic epistemologies can play in reestablishing the fundamental assumptions that make coexistence possible? How does the majority world respond to the growing asymmetries of power and socio-technically mediated knowledge production? In what ways do historically excluded communities expand the concept of justice within automated societies? By exploring these questions, we can critically reflect on the potential of communication research to address these challenges and to engage in the struggle to ensure a dignified future for all.

The event was followed by a reception.

From Techno-Cultures to Techno-Critique: Gaming as Hybrid Spaces for Public Infrastructure and Community Building - October 5 | Speaker: Kishonna Gray

While public discussions around gaming culture focus on the toxic elements, there are thriving groups utilizing online environments and their related tools to sustain their communities. While trolls and other toxic actors (and resistance practices) may dominate the conversation, we must begin to center the communities that marginalized bodies create and sustain despite the toxicity (Banet-Weiser and Miltner, 2016; Gray, Buyukozturk, and Hill, 2017; Salter, 2017).

Additionally, gaming is also the inspiration for much of our innovative and contemporary world building (i.e. meta-verse). As such, the purpose of this talk is to explore these hybrid communities examining the role of transmedia in helping to create worlds and public infrastructures and sustain communities to foster identity development in both physical and digital contexts.  

The hybrid spaces within gaming culture that many marginalized groups inhabit are the few spaces that value the articulation of marginalized interests and viewpoints. As Anderson (2006) outlines, “cases such as these make it clear that ‘virtual’ worlds are only virtual in a limited sense; real-world issues can and do impinge on the fantasy landscape of games…” (as cited in Pulos, 2013). The hybrid conditions lead to a focus on “transmediated” reality to engage what Goran Bolin (2007) calls “textual production that travels over technologies” (243). The transmedia text involves intricate multi-platform narrative webs that, according to Henry Jenkins (2006), capitalize on the affordances of digital media convergence. The transmedia text, thus, requires cultural synergy of a multitude of mediated formats.  The visual of this mapping creates an intricate nexus of analyzing what identity and digital identity development means for marginalized users across platforms.  

Creative Practices, Social Movements, Policy Change - October 26 | Spry Memorial Panel | Speakers: Fenwick McKelvey, Lyana Patrick, and Kamala Todd | Moderator: Karrmen Crey

Identities shaped by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and citizenship are grounded in lived experience, and expressed in relation and resistance to dominant institutions, popular media, and public discourse -- structures that have historically sought to silence and erase these voices. In recent years, the field of communication studies has been transformed by interdisciplinary and critical scholarship and perspectives that centres marginalized voices and practices in research and society. In this stream, we feature and celebrate work that interrogates how marginalized and oppressed groups experience and respond to interlocking systems of oppression, including capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity, and explores the emancipatory possibilities fostered by activist politics and social movements in local, national and transnational contexts.

The Spry Memorial Lecture has a long history of tackling key issues facing Canadian media and its role in the national conversation.

When Intersectionality Becomes a Brand - November 16 | Speaker: Sarah Banet-Weiser

In this talk, I will discuss the various histories, practices, and uses of the political and cultural concept of intersectionality. I then turn to a contemporary cultural use of intersectionality, where the concept has been commodified and branded.  Despite the fact that the concept was conceived of by Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberle Crenshaw, and other Black feminists as an explicit intervention to think through the ways that Black women are left without a dominant narrative through and around which to organize their lives within the power structures of the US, I argue the consumerist branding of intersectionality has a core logic of whiteness. The move to brand intersectionality is a move that does not examine nor challenge structural relations of power when it comes to race and gender, but is rather a strategy that narrowly focuses on identity as a way to build a brand and to accumulate both economic and cultural capital. Branding intersectionality functions to not only erase history, but also to shed a light on singular acts of racism—by a cop, a celebrity, a social media influencer—without ever interrogating how these “singular” acts are merely one in centuries of unquestioned acts of racial discrimination that have been sedimented into law, policy, and everyday life.