Recently, Dr. Jeremy Packer and Dr. Sarah Sharma secured positions in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (ICCIT) at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), and have graduate appointments at the Faculty of Information (iSchool).
Both Dr. Sharma and Dr. Packer are experts of Technology and Culture. Dr. Sharma studies issues related to technology, time, and social differences, while Dr. Packer research areas are the history of media and communications technologies.
“The iSchool’s expertise extends far beyond its St. George campus walls and includes many partnerships such as the one with UTM. The addition of Professors Packer and Sharma is yet another valuable resource we can offer students, as the iSchool continues to build its knowledge base and course offerings,” says Wendy Duff, Interim Dean of the iSchool.
Sarah received her PhD from the Joint Programme in Communication and Culture at York/Ryerson in 2006. It was also in 2006 when she took up a tenure track position at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. There, she advised five PhD students to completion and served on over 20 dissertation committees. Most of her advisees have become faculty members themselves, some in the US, New Zealand and Australia.
Dr. Sharma is now nearing the end of her first semester at the ICCIT where she created two new courses at the undergraduate level: Intercultural Communication which focused on globalization, media, and identity, and a fourth year special topics course called Gender, Sex, Machines: Readings in Feminist Technology.
Prof. Sarah Sharma Appointed Director of McLuhan Program
In addition to her class work and research, Dr. Sharma is the new Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the Coach House Institute. At the McLuhan Centre she hopes to help foster a lively intellectual space open to the students and faculty at the University of Toronto but also the larger public to provoke new insight into the critical intersection of technology and culture. In fact, Professor Sharma’s research already extends the Toronto School into new conceptual and empirical terrain where bodies, labour, and social differences are made central to the scope of thinking about techno-culture. She will be offering an undergraduate/graduate course at the Coach House on time, space, technology and the Toronto School next year.
“I’m thrilled to be back in Toronto and to join both the ICCIT/iSchool, while having the opportunity to work in the place that has inspired so much of my own research and teaching.” Prof. Sharma says.
Her monograph In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics was awarded the 2014 National Communication Critical Cultural Book of the Year. She has published on such topics as the technological surveillance of the brown labouring body in public space after 9/11 (Cultural Studies); the need for an understanding of an embodied political economy within critical studies of media (Journal of Communication Inquiry); time as a political strategy for the Occupy movement (Communication and Critical Cultural Studies); the taxicab as a medium of communication (Social Identities: Journal of Race, Nation, and Culture); rethinking the non-place/public space dichotomy through the politics of labour (Cultural Studies).Prof. Sharma is currently working on a new project which brings a feminist technology perspective to such sites as the algorithmic culture, the so-called sharing economy, and platform capitalism.
Dr. Jeremy Packer
Prof. Packer is currently teaching a course at the ICCIT called “Drones, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence.”
“It’s been really enjoyable and the students are great. We’re investigating how these technologies are reorienting love, labor, and warfare. In particular, we are examining whether robots and artificial intelligences can replace humans in each of these realms,” Prof. Packer says.
Beyond reading books such as the Rise of the Robots and watching films like Her, the students are developing a relationship with a robot or form of AI to experiment with how they might work to solve a personal problem or extend their capacity to accomplish a given goal.
Formerly a professor at North Carolina State University and Penn State University, Dr. Packer has advised numerous PhD dissertation committees, and helped students become faculty at universities across Canada and the United States. He hopes to continue such work with the excellent PhD students in the iSchool.
Currently, he is working on two book projects with colleagues at other universities. The first investigates the rise of automation in military communications, surveillance, and enemy detection, most recently in the U.S. military’s drone program. The second provides a set of historical case studies in order to examine how throughout the past several hundred years communication technologies have been developed by the police, military, governments, and religious institutions to govern citizens and subjects.
Jeremy has been published in such journals as: Theory, Culture and Society, Cultural Studies, The Canadian Journal of Communication, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. He has also written and edited a number of books that include: Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History (Peter Lang, 2006), Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (SUNY Press, 2003) and Mobility Without Mayhem: Cars, Safety and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2008) and Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks (Routledge, 2012).
Both Sarah and Jeremy’s years of research experience, innovative ideas, and unique teaching methodologies will be a credit to both the students they teach and the colleagues they work with. Congratulations and welcome to the iSchool and McLuhan Program!
