Works
In Progress
A GEM Lab periodical of new research
Jan
2026
Love and obstruction: the Dual Bind of Chinese K-pop Fans
Shang-ru Jiang
In 2025, Super Junior celebrated their twentieth anniversary, marking two decades of my own K-pop fandom. As a Chinese fan, K-pop produces ambivalent feelings of distance and intimacy: our cultural roots are entwined with Korea, yet our media walls are taller than ever[...]
Dec
2025
Complications in the Soviet Ukrainian Archive during the Era of Ukrainian Independence
Anna Sidun
In the spring of 2024, Concordia University’s Visual Collections Repository (VCR) launched a project to address the discovery of a series of Soviet Ukrainian documentaries from the 1970s and 1980s[...]
Jul
2025
Corn, Peanuts, Garlic, and Film Objects: Media Rurality and the Post-Socialist Archive
Xin Zhou
My research traces the material and epistemic afterlives of an under-examined media form in Chinese film history: the science and education film (科教片)[...]
Mar
2025
Narrative Television and COVID-19: Maintaining the Hegemony of the “Normal”
Jared Aronoff
This article examines how narrative television in North America has portrayed COVID-19, often minimizing its impact and perpetuating a “return to normal” that sidelines meaningful societal changes.
Jun
2024
Nothing, Forever: Remix Aesthetics for the AI Age
Jake Pitre
In 2014, the filmmaker and editor LJ Frezza created a short video called "Nothing," which purports to contain "every shot from "Seinfeld" (1989-1998) where nothing happens" [...]
Apr
2024
Ziptease
Laura Laabs
In the middle of the jungle, Astro Bot and I stumble upon a peculiar object: a robotic or space suit resting atop a circular metallic platform. Without hesitation, Astro Bot hops into the suit[...]
Feb
2024
Encased Futures: The Futurity of Microelectronics and Miniature Cityscapes
Kerim Doğruel
It’s Christmas time. A television stands on a desk, Björk sits on a chair next to it. [1] She talks about the hours they spend together[...]
Jan
2024
Border Tunnels
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
Read an adapted excerpt from Juan Llamas-Rodriguez's book proposing a media theory of border tunnels, shedding new light on ongoing debates about border issues.
Nov
2023
Unlimited Data, Unlimited Desire: How Indian streaming platform ‘ALTT’ structures a relation between sex/desire, nationalism, and infrastructure
Sneha Kumar
Perveez Mody begins her book The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi with a story about a 24-year-old Muslim man who scaled a microwave tower outside the New Delhi railway station in 1998 and declared an indefinite hunger strike[...]
Oct
2023
The Postcolonial Uncanny
Luca Caminati
The book Traveling Auteurs rewrites a small fraction of Italian cinema history and reinserts the Global South into that narrative[...]
Sep
2023
Situating the Global Village: Developmentalism and Immersion in India’s Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE, 1975-76)
Sudipto Basu
SITE was more than a mere attempt to prototype a national TV grid in preparation for the launch of India’s own satellite.
Jun
2023
On Epidemic Media
Bishnupriya Ghosh
Contemporary expansions of the media concept provide a starting point for what epidemic media are and what they can do.
About
In Progress is an open-access periodical showcasing new works from GEM Lab researchers and collaborators. It aims to foster timely discussions around emerging media, past and present, with a particular focus on broadening conceptions of global, digital, and public culture beyond dominant North Atlantic contexts and epistemologies. The platform grows out of the GEM Lab’s Works-in-Progress series, started in 2017, a forum for experimental research methods.
In Progress publishes shortform (~1500 words) critical essays, speculative writing, and photo/video works in ten installments each year. We welcome submissions from a wide range of fields at the intersection of global and emergent media and aim to highlight the work of both graduate students and established scholars from the Montréal community and beyond.
To submit a proposal please send a short abstract and bio to our editors at: gem.lab.info@gmail.com. We are now soliciting our 2023 lineup.