Schedule

Rineem Saleh

Platform Infrastructures and the Fragmented Necropolitics of Technocentric Witnessing of Gaza

 This paper examines how social media platforms serve as technoscientific infra- structures that facilitate a piecemeal, technocentric (Sengupta et al., 2021) form of witnessing and “knowing” of genocide in Gaza. With a focus on digital embodiment, this paper  examines how social media platforms structure the conditions through which technology frames the encounter, feel, and response to violence in Gaza. While much of the scholarship on war and conflict has focused on the numeric and visual (Sontag 2003; Butler 2009), I argue that the piecemeal nature of viral, audio and video representations shared on viral social media platforms feed affective yet epistemically unstable and incomplete modes of  communication, that fall short of creating a space for witnessing and solidarity, and effectively serve as a necropolitical (Mbembe, 2003) engine.

Dr. Ariel Ducey

Keynote — Attending to Affect in Research

In this talk, I will share and analyze examples from my research of attending to affect — examples of observing and being a part of interactional moves that seem to shift what is possible to feel and think, conceptualizing these moves as operating at the level of affect. This talk focuses on interactional moves that narrow what is possible to feel and think, reinforce disciplinary and professional power, and “align some subjects with some  others and against other others” (Ahmed 2004). The purpose of the talk is to take seriously everyday, embodied interaction with others as the material in which ideas, measures,  values, ideologies, and edicts must take form in order to be effected. By working through concrete examples of affective defensiveness and retrenchment, we can also begin to see how, by comparison, seemingly trivial or trivialized interactional moves that expand what is possible to feel and think are so important and radical.

Break 12:00 - 13:00

Anuneeta Chatterjee

Challenging Digital Disembodiments: A Study of Embodied Experiences of Youth of Color Across Borders and Digital Spaces

At present, over half of the world’s youth are connected over the internet, especially through various social media networks. Given the prevalent incorporation of on- line worlds in youth lives, this research theorizes social media use as an embodied form of  continuous labour within the framework of racial capitalism (McMillan Cottom 2020). The goal of my study is to focus on the experiences of youth of color in transnational contexts as they are refracted by digital spaces in their material and embodied sense. The study is  grounded in a global Southern feminist framework (Banerjee and Connell 2018) that is the- oretically and analytically located in understanding how racial capitalism and the technologies of self are manifested in the lives of these youth. The study is twofold, in that it seeks  to understand the experiences of aspiring creators of color and understand the embodied experiences of youth who do not post or seek to be influencers but continue to be tethered  to the internet owing to its all-encompassing and inescapable nature. I will use constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2014) as my analytic method to present in-depth interview accounts of youth of colour who create lifestyle content with the aspiration to earn  money through social media platforms as well as from those who engage with the lifestyle content by influencers who present transnational lifestyles. Along with this, I will present data from ethnographic field notes and reflections from walk-along (Kusenbach 2003) with content creators as they engage in the production and creation of their content and how they navigate the material and symbolic conditions around it. I argue that along with the extraction of personal information, digital platforms obscure an extraction of material and symbolic labour that disproportionately affects people of colour. This study explores how  the embodied experiences of young people are shaped within racialized and neocolonial algorithmic technologies. Primary research contributions entail a push towards the creation  of alternative practices and programs in government, social, and educational sectors that  centre youth’s labour and capacity to create in ways that foster care and community, instead of reenacting extractivist platform practices. Consequently, my work will extend the  literature on youth migration and digital social worlds.

Ruqayyah Adenike Baderinwa

Decolonizing Labour Studies: Intersectional and Decolonial Analysis of Black Muslim Women’s Workplace Experiences

Black Muslim women professionals navigate workplaces shaped by overlapping forces of anti-Black racism, gendered Islamophobia, and migration-related exclusion. While intersectional scholarship has documented compounded disadvantages along gender, race, and migration status, the experiences of Black Muslim women remain largely invisible in labour and migration studies. This project intends to address this gap by offering the first transnational study of their workplace experiences in Nigeria and Canada. It asks: How do race, religion, gender, and migrant status interact to shape opportunities and constraints across postcolonial and settler-colonial contexts?  To answer these questions, I adopt a decolonial, intersectional Labour Process Ethnogra- phy (LPE) grounded in Global Southern epistemologies. The study integrates intersectionality, decolonial ethnography, and Labour Process Theory, and is structured around Care  Circles - small, trust-based gatherings where Black Muslim women reflect collectively on workplace experiences. These Circles, complemented by interviews and workplace diaries, will generate rich accounts of daily negotiations, exclusions, and strategies of resilience. By centering Black Muslim women’s voices, this study challenges the North-centric and Middle East-focused framing of Muslim women’s labour research. It traces cross-border patterns of inequality, highlights strategies of resistance and solidarity, and advances a decolonial feminist methodology of care. In doing so, it expands global understandings of intersectional disadvantage and resilience, and offers new tools for analyzing how race, religion, and gender are configured across different labour regimes.

Fatemeh Ejaredar

Solidarities in Diaspora: Reconfiguring Belonging and Political Engagement Across Borders

In this research, we interrogate how immigration and activism intersect to shape the meanings of home, diaspora, and solidarity. Based on 31 interviews with Iranian activists  in diaspora from different generations, we ask how their activism, intertwined with immigration, influenced their sense of minority status, belonging, and community. For many, activism  was central to their lives in Iran, deeply tied to their sense of belonging.  This connection made leaving difficult, yet political repression and economic difficulties of- ten made staying impossible. As a result, many describe themselves as exiled rather than  immigrants. Upon residing in Canada, these activists continued their engagement, often focusing on issues related to Iran. They connected with other Iranian activists in diaspora whether in Canada or other countries- to continue their activism, including during social movements  happening in Iran. However, many initially faced disillusionment, as the meaning of their ac- tivism outside Iran seemed diminished. Also, tensions within the diaspora, particularly re- garding differing views on foreign interventions like the US sanctions in Iran and US and  Israel wars on Iran, became more visible to them.  Over time, many participants found new forms of activism and solidarity, forming connec- tions with activists from other regions, particularly the Global South, recognizing their  struggles as interconnected. This transnational engagement reshaped their understanding of home, borders, and activism. Although they still feel strong attachments to Iran,  this connection transcends national borders or ideological nationalism. Instead, “home” becomes linked to rootsplaces, memories, and communitiesrather than to a nation-state.  Drawing on Anzaldúa’s concept of “Borderlands” and Southern imaginaries, we analyze  how these experiences configure new conceptual and practical meanings for diasporic activists. While still critically examining oppression in their homeland, through living in virtual borderlands, they also gain new perspectives on global struggles, particularly those  affecting the Global South. This study highlights how diasporic activism evolves through displacement and reconnection, revealing the transnational nature of political engagement and the reconfiguration of belonging and solidarity across borders.

Dr. Pratim Sengupta

Keynote — Bodies, Regimes and Urbanisms: Cycling Within and Against Coloniality

As a European invention that spread through colonization and then co-opted for  anti-imperial and intersectional struggles — across race, caste, gender, and religion — cycling (and the cycle) can be viewed a moral and affective window into coloniality across time  and space. The braiding I offer will draw upon from: historical analysis of anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and anti-casteist cyclists; personal archives of cycling and cycling activism in  Kolkata and Calgary; sociological analysis of the violent coloniality of regimes of migration; and our own, emerging empirical scholarship on the sensory-affective politics of cycling in Calgary from marginal perspectives. I argue that marginality in cycling has always been “framed” by various forms and legal impositions of coloniality, and offer a counter-imaginary  that is rooted in centring embodied joy in regimes of migration, rendering visible and countering infrastructural urbanisms, and growing marginal communities of cycling.

Break 12:00 - 12:30

Megha Sanyal

Dis/orienting technology from the Margins: Re-imagining technoscience through newcomer youths’ ethical-affective design turns

How can we dis/orient computing educational spaces away from its colonial, mechanistic and masculine imaginaries? In this talk, I present a part of my doctoral research of how Southern orientations to care must be made visible in technoscientific educational spaces in order to dis/orient its normative white colonial and masculine orientations. As part of a  longitudinal community-engaged research project, my research shows how we can co-de- sign such educational spaces while centering the stories of migration and experiences of  racialized newcomer youth of color as they navigate resettlement in Canada. Over a span  of 3 years, I co-designed computational simulations that were grounded in the youths’ ex- periences of migration to the Global North as well as their lives in Canada at the intersections of race, class and gender. The youth designed simulations that modeled their faint em- bodied memories of crossing a Himalayan river valley on their foot, memories of warm sand  as they played soccer on the beaches of Ivory Coast, and stories of exchanging gifts with  their childhood they met right before fleeing their home countries. Through the frame- work of ethical-affective design turns, what is revealed is the consistent and systematic  violence perpetuated by the colonial set up of the educational system in Canada and how  specifically the hegemonic practices of the STEM discipline enact this violence at the micro-interactional level. Furthermore, it is the affective, ethical, and embodied commitments  of the youth revealed through their labor of deep care that offers a counter-imaginary of untranslatability in technoscientific educational spaces.

Santanu Dutta

‘Making’ Films: Centering Violence and Coloniality of Forced Migration

Furthering critiques of entrenched constructs in technocentric and equity-focused makerspace education, I offer filmmaking as a critical ‘making’ that centers and sup- ports silenced histories and affects of youth learners through an embodied, affective and  relational practice. I sketch my argument using two codesign-based studies with refugee women of color making animated films. The first study follows Daisy, a refugee youth from Syria, who enlivened film through ‘making’ the earliest moments of civilian crises during imperial violence, the repressed visual and aural memories of life under refuge and escape,  imaginaries of land and people lost, as well as the challenges of racialized youth under regimes of resettlement in Canada. Through naming and making concrete the pain and loss  that remains unaccounted for in institutional spaces, Daisy’s filmmaking practice expands  the necropolitical and colonial realities that condemns lives into sudden refugeehood without dignity and care. In the second study, a group of young refugee women from Pakistan  made an animated documentary film based out of a community-centered interviews and storytelling that sought to remedy curricular omissions of the histories of erstwhile colonized  lands, namely the Partition of India in 1947. Arising from their own histories of sectarian religious violence, the youths’ work of making film rendered visible how the postmemories  of Partition survived among the adult children of survivors through intergenerational storytelling. In seeking stories and ‘making’ filmic representations, the transgenerational and  transnational reach of violent histories and forced migration revealed its ambiguity, untranslatability and “opacity” (Glissant, 1969) to the youth. Collectively, these studies argue  for an expansive view of ‘making’ using films, which foregrounds refugee and immigrant learners’ felt histories of violence, affective dispossession and colonial legacies through centering emotions of loss, pain and solidarity.

Chetna Khandelwal

Southern Climate Imaginaries: Advocacy at the intersection of environmental/climate justice and migration

This study aims to highlight Southern imaginaries of environmental/climate justice as they manifest for residents of India, Canada and the USA. Migration/displacement  emerge as central analytics in this research, given that: 1) Southern voices in Canada and the USA are affectively shaped by histories of international migration/displacement; and 2) Voices for environmental/climate justice in India are deeply concerned with issues of hyperlocal / interstate migration/displacement of human and more than human lifeworlds.  In both cases, individuals who engage in various forms of environmental/climate justice ad- vocacy are seen as crucial (although by no means exclusive) holders of climate imaginaries  for our collective futures. As such, I have been conducting in-depth interviews with individuals working in the environmental/climate justice space in various capacities (e.g. activists,  journalists, volunteers, lawyers, researchers, artists etc.). In this talk, I will provide a macroscopic and descriptive picture of my ongoing doctoral project. This includes detailing my  process of data collection; insight into methodology; various positionalities held by my participants; issues addressed in participant advocacy, etc. I will conclude by highlighting the  salience of migration/displacement in environmental/climate justice research attempting to center Southern voices. Ultimately, this project attempts to begin addressing erasures of Southern climate imaginaries that have historically prevailed in shaping visions for our collective climate futures.

Riann Lognon

Growing, Knowing, and Making Food with Newcomer Youth of Colour Under Racial Capitalism

The food we eat and the ways we produce, access, and prepare food are political and linked to the territories we are from (Dudley 2011; Settee and Shukla 2020). How immigrants and refugees make sense of, navigate, and prepare food within a new food system, is therefore  a critical area of inquiry in understanding the politics of food in migration. Despite the responsibilities newcomer youth take on to support the family through migration (Guruge et  al. 2015), including cooking, childcare for younger siblings, and interpretation, immigrant and refugee youth appear most frequently in the research as dependents indistinguishable from younger children. My proposed dissertation research aims to recover the embodied  foodways — food practices, labour, and knowledge (Spivey and Lewis 2016) — of newcomer youth as they are resettling in new lands.  The epistemic exclusion of newcomer youth in food research is further compounded by the dichotomy between production and consumption reinforced within food scholarship in the Global North (Goodman 2016), which decouples the labour of growing food from the labour  of preparing food. Employing theoretical frameworks stemming from Southern and Indigenous feminisms and critical phenomenology (Ahmed 2006; Arvin, Tuck, & Morill 2013; Ba- nerjee & Connell 2018), I argue that studying migrant foodways requires an approach that  historically emplaces embodied experiences within racial capitalism and colonialism without reproducing disconnections between humans and land. I will conclude by discussing three lines of inquiry that have emerged through this theoretical framing — growing, knowing, and making food — and the associated methods I propose in following these lines of inquiry.

Dr. Pallavi Banerjee

Keynote — Mothering After a Genocide: Yazidi Mothers as “High Needs Refugees” in Canada

This paper illuminates the gamut of “motherwork” required for the resettlement  process of Yazidi single mothers who arrived in Canada as refugees in 2016 -17 after escaping a genocide perpetrated by Daesh in 2014 in Northern Iraq on the Yazidi community  – an ethnic-religious minority population in Iraq. Yazidis arrived in Canada as a “high-needs refugee group” and were resettled in four Canadian cities including Calgary. The research is based on community-engaged interviews conducted with 52 Yazidi families in Calgary, Canada that included 265 family members, most of whom were single mothers whose family members were killed in the genocide or are still missing. The resettlement program by the Canadian institutions felt severely short in meeting the needs of the Yazidi single mothers who came with deep trauma, disabled children and life skills that were not readily applicable in the western/Canadian economy. Mothering After a Genocide, parses out the hidden  care labour inlaid with what has been theorized as deep care, that compensated for the insufficient budgets, long waits for child support benefits, unfamiliar mental health provisions  and confusing laws. I argue that this care labor is in fact “motherwork” (maternal work  done in community to uplift the community) taken on by immigrant women service providers, volunteers, mostly older White Canadian women tasked with helping to resettle these  families and the advocacy labor the single mothers took on themselves to make settlement process work for their themselves and their children. I demonstrate the different forms of  “motherwork” that presents itself as a critique of the neoliberal refugee resettlement system of the global northern countries.

Break 12:00 - 12:30

Tania Villalobos Luján

Resonant Data: Designing to Count the Missing and the Dead in Defense of Life

In Mexico and across Latin America, feminicide and forced disappearance shape everyday life, producing territorial and affective ruptures. Statistical representations deny recognition and mourning through institutional, legal, and data systems that fail to account for, represent, or value certain lives. At the same time, communities respond collectively  through protest, mourning, and mutual support, insisting on visibility, recognition, and justice. Feminist activists, together with communities, construct counter-memories through  art, archives, and data justice practices, yet interaction design often remains constrained by abstraction and neutrality. My work investigates how data and interaction design can participate in what I have begun to conceptualize as embodied ecosystems of resistance, relational configurations in which bodies, territory, affect, data, and artifacts co-constitute one another within political struggle. Through two empirical projects: (1) embodied data physicalization workshops and activist dialogue, and (2) the co-design of Galaxies of the Disappeared, a counter-memory archive developed with Mexican collectives, I examine how emotionally intense data can be ethically engaged and reoriented into practices of care and solidarity. By tracing these processes, my research contributes a situated ethics for  emotionally charged data and aims to contribute to feminist interaction design by centering activist practices and approaches. I further explore how centering counter-narratives  and counter-memories as data practices offers a framework for ethical engagement with  data while reorienting how data is experienced beyond dominant technoscientific framings. More specifically, my research illustrates how data education can be oriented toward  centering activist practices that foreground the embodied and affective work of creating counter-memories. I have begun to conceptualize as a resonant perspective in which data,  as well as learning with and about data, centers emotional, embodied, and culturally situated ways of knowing through transnational feminist solidarities.

Dr. Yahya El-Lahib

Keynote — Disabled bodies and cross-border mobility: AI, coloniality and border surveillance

In this presentation, I examine the ways in which colonial modernity has intensified surveillance and control over disabled bodies through means of digital imperialism  and state-sanctioned violence. I ground the discussion using colonial modernity as a key theoretical foundation to understand the processes and mechanisms of state-controlled borders. As such, my claims situate artificial intelligence (AI) as a means of contemporary colonial modernity that manifests in how state borders are governed, structured, and managed to facilitate the operation of imperial and colonial migration policies. Through this framing, I provide examples to demonstrate how AI has intensified surveillance and control around migration processes and cross-border mobility. In doing so, I argue that  this has redefined transnational realities to serve multinational corporations as governing agents that benefit from the decline of the neoliberal state and nationhood. To illustrate this, I focus specifically on how AI’s use in the surveillance and control of state  borders have been complicit in shaping the experiences of migration, displacement, and settlement of disabled bodies. I conclude the discussion with necessary calls to reckon with tensions around the West’s stakes in AI’s deployment as needing to be understood as a form of colonial modernity in action. I end the presentation with recommendations for practitioners, highlighting strategies and tactics of resistance towards liberation as means to support disabled and displaced populations.