Future Communications Conference | Open House

Mark Hayward (York University) - “Platform Multiculturalism: Histories and Futures of Media Diversity in Canada”

What kinds of futures might we imagine for media supporting and serving cultural and linguistic diversity in Canada? How might the history of the role media has played in Canadian multiculturalism contribute to discussions about media, identity and culture? Focusing on how traditional media (radio and television in particular) are adapting to the dynamics of contemporary digital media economies, Dr. Hayward explores how the contested and conflicted history of media diversity in Canada might contribute to the critique and transformation of ideas of multiculturalism in light of the emergence of platform media.

Mark Hayward is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at York University and the author of the forthcoming Identity & Industry: Making Media Multicultural in Canada (MQUP).

 (PDF file) Future Communications 2019 Conference Schedule

Cheryl Thompson (Toronto Metropolitan University) -"Reading Black Canadian Newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s: How Black Beauty Culture Entered Department Stores and Drugstores"

In 2018, Dr. Cheryl Thompson joined the School of Creative Industries as Assistant Professor. She earned her PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University under the co-supervision of Dr. Will Straw and Dr. Charmaine Nelson. Her first book, Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture will be published with Wilfrid Laurier Press in April 2019. Prior to her position at TMU, Cheryl was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-2018) at the University of Toronto and the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and in the Department of English and Drama. In 2017, Cheryl gave a TEDx Talk at the University of Toronto Scarborough, titled “Why Positive Thinking is Not Enough.” In addition to her academic writing, Cheryl is a frequent contributor to Spacing.ca, and has published articles in the Canadian Theatre Review, Rabble.ca, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, GUTS Magazine, and ByBlacks.com.

 (PDF file) Future Communications 2018 Program

Colleen Derkatch (Toronto Metropolitan University) teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric and writing studies, and supervises graduate students in rhetoric, health humanities, and science and technology studies. Her research aims to understand and explain how language motivates and shapes human activity—how language produces, demarcates, and communicates systems of knowledge, expertise, and authority; how it organizes experience; and how it orients us toward certain beliefs and behaviours and away from others.

Nicole Cohen (University of Toronto), author of Worker’s Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (2016, McGill-Queen’s University Press)

Dr. Cohen is an assistant professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga and holds a graduate appointment in the Faculty of Information. She is the author of Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), which won the Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association in 2017.Nicole researches in the area of political economy of communication, particularly labour and organizing in the media and cultural industries, media work and journalism. Her research has been published in South Atlantic Quarterly, The Communication Review, Canadian Journal of Communication Studies, Democratic Communique, and several edited books in communication studies. Nicole collaborates on the international SSHRC-funded project, Cultural Workers Organize.