4/9/2015 Intersecting media, e-waste, infrastructure, and the environment | IIT Lewis College of Human Sciences Lewis College of Human Sciences Departments About Programs Faculty Alumni News & Events Contact Us Apply(http://admissions.iit.edu/) Intersecting media, ewaste, infrastructure, and the environment Faculty Mél Hogan Dr. Mél Hogan is an Assistant Professor of Communication in the Department of Humanities at IIT. One course she teaches is Environmental Hometown Montréal Department http://humansciences.iit.edu/profiles/m-l-hogan 1/4 4/9/2015 Intersecting media, e-waste, infrastructure, and the environment | IIT Lewis College of Human Sciences Humanities READ MORE PROFILES Media(http://melhogan.com/website/tag/environmentalmedia/), looking at the interplay between technology and landfills, ewaste, disease, pollution and so on. Another course is Document Design, which brings together visual culture theory and graphic design. Lewis College: Where are you from originally? Dr. Hogan: I’ve spent the better part of the last decade in Montréal, so I consider it home even though I grew up in Ottawa. I’m French Canadian, from the Ontario side. LC: Where did you move here from? What were you doing professionally before coming here? MH: I completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Curation at the University of Colorado Boulder, which is where I was living for the past two years. CU Boulder is incredibly innovative in what it’s trying to do to bring together the arts, information studies and media studies. I was lucky to have a position there in the midst of those developments, which have further influenced the way I teach and conduct research, valuing collaboration, interdisciplinarity and merging theory and practice. I have also worked as a freelance graphic designer or consultant since 2001, and I continue to be involved with mat3rial.com, with a niche focus on archive design for the digital humanities. LC: What is your academic background (degrees and majors)? MH: After completing an undergraduate degree in Sociology at Acadia University (Nova Scotia), I was pretty certain that that would be the extent of my academic journey! I took a few years off, and then I went to Algonquin College in 2001 to be trained as a graphic designer. This has proven to be the single most rewarding decision of my career, because now design bleeds into everything I do, all types of research and production. From there, while working as a graphic designer, I enrolled in a grad Production Diploma at Concordia University with the idea of complementing my design knowledge with web, video and audio skills. I ended up also doing and Masters in Media Studies and a Ph.D. in Communication Studies there. My Ph.D. was special in the sense that it was the second only to be considered a ResearchCreation Ph.D., whereby production is central to the final product. The idea is that ResearchCreation not only allows for new modes of knowing but also challenges what counts (or has traditionally counted) as knowledge. http://humansciences.iit.edu/profiles/m-l-hogan 2/4 4/9/2015 Intersecting media, e-waste, infrastructure, and the environment | IIT Lewis College of Human Sciences LC: What appealed to you about IIT? What are your thoughts on teaching at a technology school, and how, if at all, has working at a tech school shaped the way you teach/research your own academic discipline? MH: There’s tremendous appeal for me with the direction Lewis College seems to be going, in no small part thanks to the new Dean’s vision for the College, which seems to highlight the importance of both theory and practice. My colleagues in the Humanities have an incredible array of skills and interests which, I think, makes the department a great place to work. LC: What is your focus area, and what are you currently researching? MH: I have a few areas of interest, intersecting at media, archives, the environment, and surveillance. Theoretically, I’m interested in new materialism, and bringing the body back into the discussion of new media. But my focus is on infrastructure(http://culturedigitally.org/2013/11/bumblehiveandsealandbigdata infrastructures/); on data storage centers in particular, and how they impact the environment, and on how they risk displacing communities. I wrote a paper, published in TVNM(http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/11/13/1527476413509415.abstract) on Facebook’s data centers as the archive’s underbelly, which launched this project and anchored my interest in this facet of media and communication studies. I also have an interest in visiting various rural towns in the U.S. to interview people in areas where data centers have set up shop. My questions are about the ongoing transformations of communities as a result of technological innovation, with work going overseas, or industries becoming defunct, and now replaced by cloud computing companies. I have a collaborative project set up at technotrash.org(http://technotrash.org/) (with Andrea Zeffiro at Brock University) where we collect stories of people’s use and disposal of the gadgets in their life. We mainly have students across Canada and the U.S. (so far) that are generating content. Students from Environmental Media at IIT will be contributing soon, as will students from Tulane University, next term. My work on surveillance is closely tied to my work on data centers. I’m interested in surveillance from a political perspective, but I anchor that in a materialist framework: for example, the interplay between the NSA’s water consumption to cool its servers, and the failure of big data to prevent and contain environmental disasters. Laura Forlano, from IIT ID, and I are currently setting up the Critical Futures Lab(http://criticalfutureslab.org/) to explore the spaces in between the critical approaches of the social sciences and humanities and the generative processes of design. In particular, informed by science and technology studies, new materialism, media and communications studies, the CFL is concerned with the ways in which the http://humansciences.iit.edu/profiles/m-l-hogan 3/4 4/9/2015 Intersecting media, e-waste, infrastructure, and the environment | IIT Lewis College of Human Sciences digital is materialized, contextualized and embodied across a variety of scales, from city infrastructures to the built environment, and from interactive objects to digital bodies. Since 2009, I have been the coeditor of nomorepotlucks.org(http://nomorepotlucks.org/), a journal of arts and politics. We put out an issue every two months online and in printondemand. This is a project supported by both the arts and academic communities. It grew out of my days of community radio but also my early grad research into archival absences and silences, themes that I continue to explore in other writings as well. I keep my personal website (melhogan.com) up to date with all past and upcoming conferences and publications, if anyone wants more information. Lewis College of Human Sciences 10 W. 35th St., 14th Floor Chicago, IL 60616 Tel 312.567.3956 | [email protected] (http://www.linkedin.com/groups/IITLewisCollegeHuman Sciences4877410? home=&trk=anet_ug_hm&goback=%2Egmp_4877410&gid=4877410) Illinois Institute of Technology 3300 South Federal Street Chicago, IL 60616-3793 312.567.3000 IIT Social Media Directory(http://www.iit.edu/directory/social-media.shtml) Contact IIT Emergency Information http://humansciences.iit.edu/profiles/m-l-hogan 4/4
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