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Joshua Neves
Director
Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) lab
Associate Professor in Film and Moving Image Studies
Canada Research Chair
2011 - PhD, Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Joshua Neves' research centers on global and digital media, with a particular focus on China, Asia and the Global South; cultural theory and political theory; problems of development and legitimacy; media urbanism; digital ethnography; cultures of optimization; in/convenience.
He is the author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (Duke University Press, March 2020) and co-editor (w/ Bhaskar Sarkar) of Asian Video Cultures: in the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017). Dr. Neves has co-edited journal special issues on “Media Populism” (Culture Machine), “Optimization” (Review of Communication), and Paranoia (Discourse, in progress). His essays are published in Social Text, Discourse, Film Quarterly, Cultural Critique, Sarai, Cinema Journal, The Media Fields Journal, Culture Machine, Review of Communication, Rethinking Chinese Television, A Companion to Documentary Film History, The Routledge Companion to Risk and Media, Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture, among others.
Dr. Neves is currently working on three book projects: (1) a collaborative book w/ Aleena Chia, Susanna Paasonen, and Ravi Sundaram on TechnoPharmacology (under review with Meson Press / University of Minnesota Press); (2) a popular book, Data Pharmacy, exploring contemporary relations between data and pharmaceutical capitalisms; (3) and a monograph, tentatively titled Smart Bodies, examining how global smart technologies shape emergent cultures of optimization that reimagine human capacities and unequally distribute augmentation across the world system.
Masha Salazkina
Collective Member
Professor (Film Studies), Cinema
Concordia University Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Cultures
PhD (Yale University)
Masha Salazkina's work incorporates transnational approaches to film theory and cultural history. Her first book In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico (University of Chicago Press, 2009) positions Eisenstein's unfinished Mexican project and theoretical writings within the wider context of post-revolutionary Mexico and global cultures of modernity. She co-edited the collections Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (both from Indiana University Press).
Dr Salazkina has published essays in Cinema Journal, Film History, October, Screen, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, KinoKultura, and many edited collections on topics such as geopolitics of film and media theory; theorizations of World Cinema; political histories of amateur film production, history of film festivals of Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema; international networks of radical political filmmakers in the 1960s-70s; Soviet-Italian film institutional exchanges; the history of the Soviet film institute (VGIK); translations of Marxist film theory in Italy and Cuba; the reception of Soviet culture in Latin America; Soviet-Indian film co-productions. She has also been coordinating translations and publications of film writings from around the World.
Her current research centers on the shared cinematic cultures of global socialisms and in the 20th century.
Marc Steinberg
Collective Member
Associate Professor, Film Studies, Cinema
Graduate Program Director, MA & PhD, Cinema
PhD (Brown University), MA (McGill University), BA (McGill University)
Marc Steinberg is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, and director of The Platform Lab. His research focuses on animation, media industry studies, and digital media, focusing on the rise of digital platforms in particular. He is author of the award-winning book Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) which historically situates the practices of merchandising or the media mix in relation to the anime industry. Along with its expanded Japanese translation it won the ITRA-BTHA Book Prize (Senior Prize) from the International Toy Research Association (2014), and the Japan Society for Animation Studies Book Prize (2015). His second monograph, The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Commercial Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), tracks the platform-led transformation of film, media, and Internet cultures. Offering a comparative study of the platform economy with a focus on Japan, the book examines the managerial, medial, and social functions of platform theories and practices. His third book, Media and Management (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), co-written with Rutvica Andrijasevic, Julie Yujie Chen and Melissa Gregg, takes a longer view of management’s entanglement with media, presenting an essential account of how the media devices we use today inherit the management practices governing factory labor.
His article “From Automobile Capitalism to Platform Capitalism: Toyotism as a Prehistory of the Digital Economy” was recently published in Organization Studies, and other work has appeared in Asiascape: Digital Asia; Social Media + Society; Journal of Visual Culture; Theory, Culture & Society, among other journals.
He is currently at work on three related projects. The first examines the effect media platforms have on animation production and circulation, with a continued focus on media industries and transmedia practices in the wake of platformization. The second maps the intersection of management theory and just-in-time systems, with an eye to how just-in-time manufacturing meets on-demand streaming in services such as Netflix. The third project analyzes convenience as a retail strategy (e.g. convenience stores) and as a promise by digital platforms.
Orit Halpern
Collective Member
Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology
PhD (Harvard)
Orit Halpern is an Associate Professor in Sociology at Concordia University. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She has published widely and has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first book titled the Smartness Mandate is a history of “intelligence” and decision making in post 1970’s design, economics, artificial intelligence, and the life and human sciences; the second project, tentatively labelled Planetary Experiments investigates how we are designing planetary futures and managing uncertainty through an array of techniques ranging from biomimetic design to financial algorithms.
She has also published a monograph Beautiful Date: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) examined histories of big data, design, and governmentality; along with numerous articles and new media works in venues such as E-Flux, Grey Room, Public Culture, Social Text, the Venice Biennial for Architecture, and ZKM Karlsruhe. She is also the director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster, a laboratory bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and the social sciences and Directs the D4 :Disrupting Design Research Group for Ethical Speculative Design.