Stephen J. Neville is a PhD candidate in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. His research explores how the intersection of sound, media, and power shapes the conditions under which voices are made audible or silenced. Currently, he leads a project titled, “Losing your voice to AI,” funded by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, which maps the emerging industry of health-related machine listening to address problems of data privacy, consent, and discrimination.
Neville is also a Métis musician. A song from his recent album, OFF TRACK (2022), “Going Home”, reached #5 on the Indigenous Music Countdown, mirroring themes of cultural reconnection that animate his research into Indigenous sound archives and land-based research creation. Neville’s academic research and artistic practice have been supported by fellowships and grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Social Science Research Council in New York, Mitacs Globalink, and Canada Council for the Arts. He was also a visiting scholar at the Erasmus Research Centre for Media, Communication and Culture in Rotterdam, and a former cohort member of the Digital IDEAS Summer Institute at the University of Michigan. With Greg Elmer, he is the coauthor of The Politics of Media Scarcity (Routledge 2024) which foregrounds marginalized histories and storytelling as a challenge to dominant narratives in media studies. His work has appeared in Culture, Theory & Critique, Convergence, Surveillance & Society, Social Media & Society, and the Canadian Journal of Communication.
