Projects

Currently, there is no policy-oriented study in Canada investigating the employment challenges faced by Black and Indigenous people, people of colour, and women who undertake technical and craft jobs on film sets. This project will explore the working lives of movie workers from historically marginalized communities, with a goal of supporting these groups to overcome structural barriers and combat discriminatory practices in the workplace. To attain this goal, Dr. Tracy Ying Zhang collaborates with NABET 700-M UNIFOR, a Toronto-based union for film, television, and new media technicians.   Team Members:   Dr. Tracy Ying Zhang  Bernice Manalo, Training and Programs Coordinator, NABET (co-applicant)  Samantha Rice, Senior Vice President, NABET Nicole Matthews, Office Manager, NABET Esha Khan, Co-Chair of the BIWOC Committee Lokchi Lam, Research Assistant, York University Angela Stigliano, Research Assistant, York University   This project is supported by SSHRC-funded Partnership Engage Grant.   Project Website: Governance | Explore Our Policies — NABET 700-M UNIFOR

This project investigates global AI governance by analyzing how geopolitical dynamics and technosocial factors shape regulatory frameworks across regions. Using machine learning, network analysis, and stakeholder interviews, it explores the structure of governance networks and aims to identify opportunities and risks for international cooperation, promoting responsible and inclusive AI regulation. This project is supported by funding from the SSHRC Insight Grant and York University’s Global Research Excellence Fund.   Muyang Li, Assistant Professor, York University

Designing Sound Futures (DSF) brings together a transdisciplinary York University research team, community-based partners (Community Music Schools of Toronto; Kwartzlab Makerspace; Blurring the Boundaries Arts), industry partners (System80, Hale), and academic partners, including the TMU Re/Lab and the Canadian Accessible Music Instruments Network. Our mandate: challenge exclusionary boundaries in music education, the arts, and culture and: Transforming educational, community, and industry relationships while creating new forms of design, music and participation. Creating new forms of music and new pedagogies informed by EDI principles — through community-led and disability-led design (bell et al, 2019) of adapted and new instruments, including the BAMMsynth (Building Access in Music Making) analog semi-modular synthesizer. Supporting disability-led design of interface properties, controllers, and adapted/new instrument design, including MIDI 2.0 tools we are developing. Developing toolkits with cutting-edge materials that can be channeled into community-based and community-led social innovation.   Team Members:  Kurt Thumlert, Education Andreas Kitzmann, Humanities Melanie Baljko, Engineering Casey Mecija, Communications & Culture James Andrew Smith, Engineering Bil Tzerpos, Engineering Jason Nolan, Re/Lab Richard Marsella, Director CMST   Designing Sound Futures is supported by York’s Catalyzing Interdisciplinary Research Clusters (CIRC) initiative.   Project website: Designing Sound Futures   

Training may be the preeminent pedagogical model of the 21st century, yet its many contexts remain largely undertheorized as sites of communication shaped by embodied experiences and technological mediators. Training occurs at all life stages, in both formal and informal educational settings. Athletes train to enhance strength or agility. Young children are trained in fine motor skills and toilet use. And while all humans undergo training of some kind, the term increasingly applies to non-human learners. In addition to pets and circus animals, machine learning relies on training data to perform tasks, from chatbots to text-to-image generators. These technologies have become essential tools in classrooms and workplaces, creating a feedback loop between human and machine learning.   This research aims to explore the sociotechnical assemblages of training contexts, within three distinct communities of practice. My work in experiential education positions training as a mode of job preparedness, especially within postsecondary programs that aim to bridge classroom learning and professional practice within the broader context of digital media and remote labour, where job preparedness increasingly unfolds across virtual platforms and networked environments. In this setting, I explore how training regimes shape students’ subjectivity and labour futures under the logics of employability. 2) I also investigate training as physical fitness, with a focus on group exercise classes as sociotechnical assemblages in which human bodies are disciplined and optimized through interactions with apps, algorithms, and spatial design. 3) Finally, I examine the function of training data in machine learning systems, especially in the development of large language models (LLMs), where “learning” occurs through processes that reproduce normative linguistic patterns and social hierarchies.   Drawing on interviews and discourse analysis of key training documents within each community of practice, this work aims to develop a postdisciplinary theory of training as a pedagogical framework that […]

This work uses the embodied, Jewish identities of its three authors, and the experimental methodology of kibbitzing as a form of collective inquiry and self-reflexive praxis in order to demonstrate the limitations of chatbots to produce humorous narratives from an explicitly Jewish epistemology. ‘Kibbitzing’ is a Yiddish term, meaning a lively, informal way of thinking and talking together. It’s somewhere between joking, arguing and exchanging ideas. It is grounded in our relationships, histories and biases; kibbitzing is how we make shared meaning together through many voices.   Kibbitzing values contradiction, humour and the messiness of human conversation. Unlike AI chatbots, which follow scripted, dialogic, question-and-answer routines based on quantifiable patterns in data, kibitzing is unpredictable, non-linear and intentionally disorganized” (Laywine, Simon & Sinnreich, 2025).   We contrast the affordances of large language models (LLMs) and their associated chatbots with the context-based logics of Jewish joke craft and storytelling. This article goes on to demonstrate the risk of cultural erasure that is posed by the positivist, denotative meanings associated with ChatGPT’s attempts at producing jokes for, or about, Jews.   Article: Laughing to keep from [user input undefined]: ChatGPT, Jewish humor, and cultural erasure   In a subsequent article (forthcoming in Critical AI), we argue that generative AI’s positivistic and denotative logics treat identity as an additive construct, which is functionally incommensurate with intersectional frameworks when users aim to generate content that pertains to multiple formulations of identity. We analyze the outputs of text-to-image generator MidJourney and the large language model (LLM) ChatGPT for “shadow ontologies” of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality. We situate our argument within discourses on intersectionality driven by Black feminist scholars and queer theory critiques of social classification systems.   Article: What’s with all the Tapestries?: Intersectionality and the Discursive Vacuum of Generative AI   Our ongoing […]

Exclusion and marginalization in creative technology (CT) industries — sectors of production that combine media, design, and technology, including video games, animation, and visual effects — has been well-documented. Strategies to incorporate equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in these sectors include educational initiatives, funding support, networking, role model initiatives, and most prominently of all, mentorship programs. However, despite decades-long promotion of mentorship as a key EDI tactic, there has been little critical analysis of its functioning, role, and impact. This SSHRC Insight-funded project closes this gap by critically examining the assumption of mentorship’s impact on EDI, thereby contributing insight into how mentorship addresses, or fails to address, inequities in CT. We also identify approaches to mentorship that are robust, sustainable, impactful, and just.   Article: Best Practice or Buzzword? The Opportunities and Challenges of Mentorship for EDI in Creative Technology   Alison Harvey, PI Tamara Shepherd, Co-PI Dani Rudnicka-Lavoie, RA    

Over the last two decades, video games have grown into a major international creative technology industry that by many metrics outsell both music and film. Despite this mainstreaming of digital play, the workforce associated with its production remains homogenous and exclusionary. Interventions aimed at addressing imbalances in representation in games have been established in several countries, but there has been little assessment of their impacts for creating change in those industries nor reflection on how to communicate these outcomes. This SSHRC Partnership Engage-funded project explores the evaluation and communication of the outcomes of feminist action via a data visualization tool intended to interactively, accessibility, and safely convey the impact of inclusion in digital games.   Article: Situating and sustaining feminist action: lessons from digital games inclusivity organizing   Alison Harvey, PI Stephanie Fisher, Co-PI Hana Holubec, RA  

Over the last decade there has been an explosion in attention to questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), and values and actions often linked to EDI, including belonging, decolonizing, and justice. However, most institutions tend to frame actions to addressing equity, diversity, and inclusion as a separate consideration from activities aimed at supporting mental and physical wellbeing. This SSHRC Connection-funded event brings together international experts with the scholarly and practical knowledge required to bridge this gap and share and develop community-led strategies for EDI, working from the lens of communal and collective rather than individualized (self)care.   Alison Harvey, PI Bridget Conor, Co-applicant Victoria Sands, RA