Research Interests

Dr. Suzanne Smythe works at the intersections of adult literacy, digital equity and community-based learning. Her current research program explores new technologies, literacies and digital justice in community-based adult learning settings, asking questions such as,

• How are automation and datafied ecosystems transforming literacies and pedagogies in community settings?
• How do we perceive and intervene in digital and algorithmic discrimination and exclusions as these occur in everyday encounters in digital education?
• What new theories, methods and critical and experimental pedagogies make more just digital ecosystems possible? 

See for example, The new literacies of automation (SSHRC IG) with Nathalie Sinclair (co-PI), Gwenaëlle André and Haidekaye Williams. 

Dr. Smythe has recently taken a detour to explore COVID19 as literacy work. In the project Mapping and theorizing technology innovations among digitally excluded communities during COVID19 with Nathalie Sinclair, Amea Wilbur, Marcela Mancilla-Fuller, they ask how frontline literacy and language outreach workers repair gaps, fissures and inequalities in advice and technologies available to newcomer communities during the pandemic:

• What do these pedagogic inventions and practices say about information ecoystems available to racialized communities? 
• How might these interventions inform more responsive and intuitive health literacy advice and information?
  

Research Highlights

• New Literacies of Automation
• Adult Literacy Policy and Professional Learning
• Digital Learning Community Engagement Project

Teaching