Welcome to a new academic year at the ICCIT! I hope you’ve all had a restful and fulfilling summer.
The ICCIT is a place where creativity and critique meet practice. Our interdisciplinary faculty hail from a variety of fields—from media studies, to history, to business, to science and technology studies. Together, we’re ready to spend the 2024-25 academic year helping our equally diverse cohort of students design a better future.
Beginning with the founding of our first undergraduate program in 2000, the ICCIT has aimed to use the humanities and social sciences to address the problems and promises of technology in the twenty-first century. In the years since then, we’ve grown into a powerhouse faculty of 29 professors, who supervise dozens of affiliated graduate students and lead four innovative undergraduate programs. This includes the recently launched Technology, Coding, and Society (TCS) major, a first-of-its-kind program that teaches students essential computer coding skills alongside the ethics and consequences of using them.
The coming year will see our first cohort of these TCS students arrive within the ICCIT alongside other exciting developments centred within the institution. On the cusp of the new semester, we have already seen the launch of the Platforms and Society journal by Dr. Julie Chen and the appointment of Dr. Beth Coleman as director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI). Our affiliated graduate students have also been busy, from Christine Tran’s co-founding of the Content Creators Research Network to Réka Gál’s securing of a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Technische Universität München. We have worked hard to support undergraduate students as well. This has included interactive events hosted by Dr. Samar Sabie in her Open Design Collaboratory and the forthcoming launch of the ICCIT Professional Experience workshop series (more details coming soon!).
The momentum of these faculty and student accomplishments carry us into the new academic year and empower our ongoing aim to support humanities and social science research—both across the tri-campus and Canada as a whole.
I like to say that the ICCIT’s focus on the transformative power of technologies—whether that include the light bulb, the personal computer, or artificial intelligence—transcends all the noise and hype accompanying these innovations. Rather than getting caught up in the distracting glare of shiny new tech, our institution appraises these innovations in a critical fashion. As I begin my third year as Director of ICCIT, I find myself increasingly proud to be part of an institute that is consistently at the forefront of social change. It is thrilling to work in a place where philosophies and political economies of technology are part of the processes of prototyping new designs.
The future is often uncertain, with new technologies reshaping our world seemingly overnight (and often in ways that are intertwined with global conflict and local inequities). In the coming year, I look forward to questioning, experimenting with, and engaging this technological moment alongside the talented faculty and students of the ICCIT.
Together, we can design a more just future.
About the Director
Sarah Sharma is a Professor of Media Theory and Director of the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (ICCIT) at the University of Toronto. Her first book In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 2014) challenges the popular sentiment that the world is ‘speeding up’. Working against this myopic focus on speedup, the book introduces a new approach to time called ‘power-chronography,’ locating the ways in which temporality operates as a key relation of power structured at the intersection of a range of social differences and technologies. 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 Towards a Techno-Feminist Refusal (Duke UP) is expected to be out in 2025.