Sarah Sharma:
Sarah Sharma is Professor of Media Theory at the ICCIT/Faculty of Information and Director of the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching focuses on the relationship between technology, time and labour. In 2024 she was awarded a Desmond Morton Research Excellence Award at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She is the author In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 2014) which was awarded a NCA Critical Cultural Book of the Year award in 2014. Her edited volume (with Rianka Singh) Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Duke UP 2022) highlights her time as director of the McLuhan Centre between 2017-2022. Sarah’s next book, Insufferable Tools: Big Tech and the Broken Machine will be published by Duke University Press in 2025.
Shannon Mattern:
Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan NY Library Council; and, in 2025, the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. From 2004 to 2022, she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. You can find her at worksinspace.net.
Josef Nguyen:
Josef Nguyen (he/him/his) is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media and a faculty affiliate at the Digital Studies Institute. His work engages media studies, science and technology studies, and feminist and queer theory in order to investigate the contested meanings of technological labor and design in digital culture, with particular attention to consent and/as digital technology; creative labor and the creative economy; feminist, queer, and trans gaming; DIY, craft, and maker cultures, and fan media and fandom practices.
His first book, The Digital Is Kid Stuff: Making Creative Laborers for a Precarious Economy (University of Minnesota Press, December 2021), explores how youth are instrumental to the creative economy not solely as the future labor force but also as cultural sites for mediating the political, economic, and ideological meanings of a precarious creative economy itself. His new book, tentatively titled Confounding Consent in Technological Design and Digital Culture, is on the cultural politics of consent in emerging digital technologies—including consent-recording mobile applications, dating simulator games, and sex robots. Currently, he is the Production Editor for JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies until October 2027.
Sheila Murphy:
Sheila C. Murphy is a digital media scholar and teacher. Since 2002, she has been a professor at the University of Michigan, where she is faculty in Film, Television and Media and the Digital Studies Institute. Murphy is the author of How Television Invented New Media (Rutgers UP, 2011). She teaches and writes about the history of Silicon Valley, early video games, and the visual cultures of the Internet. Right now she is writing about the history of heteronormativity in coding as seen in early reported exploits and computer dating businesses dating back to the late 1950s and revising her forthcoming book project, Life on the Silicon Frontier: The Rise of Tech Innovation in California.
Emilia Yang:
Emilia Yang is a Central American artist, memory organizer and researcher.
Her creative practice utilizes expanded forms of media for the creation of community-based feminist, anti-racist and transformative justice memory projects and futures. She explores the role of memory, violence, emotions, performance, and participation in the political imagination.
She serves as the Director of “AMA y No Olvida, Memory Museum Against Impunity”, a community memory transmedia initiative in collaboration with the Association Mother of April, an organization of families of victims of state violence in Nicaragua.
Her art has been exhibited all over the world, including the Resistance Biennial in Guatemala, the Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica, the Museum of Jade and Pre-Columbian Culture in Costa Rica, Casa América and the Museum and Vanguard Art Center Neomudéjar in Spain, Le Commun Contemporary Art Building in Geneva, and the Games/New Media Summit at Tribeca Film Festival.
Yang earned her PhD in Interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practice at USC. She is the recipient of the Arts for Gender Equality Fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation and CARE USA, and the Hunting Family Faculty Fellow at U-M Institute of the Humanities.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design with a focus on Anti-Racism by Design.
Ariel Hasell:
Ariel Hasell is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan.
Broadly, her research examines how the contemporary media environment influences exposure to information about science and politics, the effects of that exposure on knowledge and beliefs, as well as public engagement with science and politics in society. She uses quantitative methodologies to examine how an individual’s choice of media content influences various attitudes and behaviors, including information evaluation, motivations to process and share information, and trust in institutions.
Her current research is focused on how social media are changing the nature of expertise and who is perceived to be an expert on topics related to science (e.g. sustainability and wellness) and politics (e.g. journalism and institutions).
Ariel earned her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Ellie Abrons:
Ellie Abrons is a licensed architect, principal of T+E+A+M, Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, and Associate Professor of Architecture at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she was the A. Alfred Taubman Fellow in 2009–2010.
Ellie’s research and creative practice is focused on the intersections of materiality, technology, design, and construction–with an emphasis on material reuse, the culture of images, and the effect of ubiquitous digitality on architectural culture and production. Recently, these interests have begun to coalesce around housing and urban technology, with a focus on equitable access to affordable housing.
In addition to her time at Michigan, Ellie has held teaching appointments at Princeton University, UCLA, and the University of Hong Kong and received residency fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and MacDowell.
Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Storefront for Art and Architecture, a+d Museum, Yale University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and the Architectural Association.
Ellie’s writing has been published in Log, MAS Context, a+u, and numerous edited volumes. T+E+A+M was a participant in the 2016 U.S. Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale, winner of the 2017 Adrian Smith Prize for the Ragdale Ring, and a participant in the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. T+E+A+M currently has projects under construction in Detroit and Hanover, NH on the campus of Dartmouth College.
Since 2019, Ellie has served as a Commissioner on the Planning Commission for the City of Ann Arb
Germaine Halegoua:
Germaine Halegoua’s research interests focus on the relationships between people, place, and digital media. In particular, she’s interested in how visions of digital media by public officials and urban planners often conflict with popular imaginations and everyday experiences of digital technologies and infrastructures.
Her more recent projects investigate digital placemaking; smart cities; cultural geographies and inequities of digital infrastructure and access; social media in neighborhood contexts; and social productions of place and identity online.
Her research and writing have been published in several anthologies, online venues, and journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Urban Technology, Planning Practice and Research, and Urban Affairs Review.
She is the author of The Digital City (NYU Press, 2020) and Smart Cities (MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, 2020), co-editor of Locating Emerging Media (Routledge, 2016) and Routledge Companion to Media & the City (2022), and special issues of Convergence on “Digital Placemaking” (2021) and JCMC on "Sensor-mediated Communication" (2023).
Matt Bui:
Matthew Bui, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, where he directs the Race and Data (RAD) Justice Lab and co-organizes the Urban Tech Collective (housed at the Digital Studies Institute). Bui is also a faculty affiliate with the Digital Studies Institute and the Program in Asian/Pacific Islander American (A/PIA) Studies at the University of Michigan.His research explores novel methodologies, frameworks, and practices for effecting data-driven racial and social justice.
Bui’s first book, Appetite for Data, under contract with the University of California Press, uses foodie platforms to examine and spotlight the mundane everyday interactions through which platform capitalism expands its reach while simultaneously obfuscating—and amplifying—racial and class inequalities within local communities. It also documents the “digital resistance recipes” through which grassroots organizations subvert and reimagine digital platforms as aligned with values of care and solidarity, calling attention to both the local and material impacts of digital platforms.
Bui’s research has received support from the Annenberg Foundation, Benton Foundation, Democracy Fund, Kauffman Foundation, and Urban Communication Foundation; and received recognition from the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and the Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC).
Prior to UMSI, Bui was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Alliance for Public Interest Tech at New York University. He received his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and a Graduate Certificate in Geospatial Information Science and Technologies. He received his MSc in Media and Communication (Research) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA in Communication from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Erykah Benson:
Erykah Benson is a Ph.D. Candidate exploring the topic of race, gender, and class in the online e-commerce world. She explores how, much like physical spaces, the digital world is a landscape that is riddled with the same origins of exploitation, but that it is also a place of creation, catharsis, and community. She does this by zeroing in on the world of e-commerce during a time of intense monetization and privatization of social activities.
Erykah draws on qualitative methods to explore Black entrepreneurs' experiences with selling art online, and how they reconcile monetizing their passion during a time of performative activism and a simultaneous hope for racial justice. She hopes to uncover how the dialogue around e-commerce and entrepreneurship in the digital space reflects what she defines as 'sociotechnical myths' about who is deserving of visibility and stability. Her work is in conversation with critical perspectives on artificial intelligence and reparations.
Quinn Hunter:
Quinn Alexandria Hunter is a sculpture and performance artist who works primarily with hair and the African American female body as material. She was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, and did her MFA work at Ohio University. Recipient of the I. Hollis Parry/Ann Parry Billman Award (2019), Quinn has exhibited and performed nationally. She is interested in the erasure of history from spaces, and how the contemporary uses of space impacts the way we, as a culture, see the past.
Her practice revolves around uncovering and unveiling truths. Digging into the histories of African Americans to find spaces and memories that have been lost, erased, or covered. With that information, she makes work that references specific spaces in the area to bring forth information that has been lost to time and erasure. Contending with erasure of Black bodies from historic and contemporary spaces, Hunter looks at the way erasure of historic labor is connected to the contemporary and how it affects space around us. The erasing of labor renders bodies, the spaces they work in, and the work itself, invisible. This erasure of labor is amplified in the labor done by women of color, in particular, the labor done by African American women in contemporary and historic domestic spaces. Through the use of her own labor and material resistance, she is combating and interrupting erasure by reinscribing the erased labor of historic African American women and allowing their work to be remembered through her own contemporary labor.
