The Praxis Studio at UVic


News and Events

Here's what's happening this year (2020-21):

  • 19 May: Samuel, Julie, Faith, and Jentery co-presented at SpokenWeb 2021. The title of their talk was "Designing Prompts for Literary Audio Studies."
  • 10 May: Congrats to Samuel, who passed his focused field PhD exam in Postcolonial Media Fiction with distinction.
  • 3 May: Congrats to Julie, who passed her focused field PhD exam in Technologies of / and the Hormonal Body with distinction.
  • 22 April: Jentery gave a talk at Hartwick College on the topic of "Pedagogies for Contemporary Media and Fiction."
  • 9 April: Congrats to Faith, who completed her English MA project in sound and disability studies, a podcast episode titled, "Listening as Access."
  • 31 March: Julie posted a video recording of her NMI 2021 talk, "Endocode: Boundary Collapse in the Endocrine System."
  • 25 March: Tracey is also presenting at New Materialist Informatics, hosted by the U. of Kassel.
  • 25 March: Jentery is giving a talk at Lawrence Tech as part of their Humanity + Technology lecture series.
  • 23 March: Julie is presenting at New Materialist Informatics, hosted by the U. of Kassel.
  • 24 February: Julie is facilitating a "literary machine listening" session for SpokenWeb.
  • 1 February: A hearty welcome to Lexy Townsend, who joined the Studio this term.
  • 11 January: Alana is teaching Indigenous Studies 300 this term.
  • 7 January: Samuel is giving a talk at MLA 2021 as well, on "'Worlding' and Aqua-scapes in Lagoon."
  • 7 January: Alana is giving a talk at MLA 2021 on "How the Indian Act Reified Whiteness in Canada."
  • 18 December: Please join us in congratulating Dr. Tracey El Hajj! Today she successfully defended her dissertation on "Tactical Network Sonification."
  • 8 December: Congrats to Julie, who passed her major field PhD exam in Science and Technology Studies with distinction.
  • 7 December: Congrats to Samuel, who passed his major field PhD exam in Postcolonial Literature and Theory with distinction.
  • 27 November: Tracey is moderating a panel at UVic with Tiffany Chan, Amanda Dash, Erin Kelly, and Jentery on the topic of "Automated Writing." Join us online at 10:30am Pacific.
  • 3 November: Julie ran a literary machine listening workshop for "Readers Are Listening" at UVic.
  • 1 October: Join Julie, Tracey, and Suzanne Kite online for "Digital Ethics: AI, Algorithms, and Surveillance" (10am-12pm PST), a 2020 Independent Media Arts Alliance (IMAA) roundtable part of "Digital Shift." All IMAA 2020 events are free, and the roundtables will have French/English translation and ASL interpretation.
  • 25 September: The 2020 CSPT graduate conference, "Alterity of Affliction / Afflictions of Alterity," is online today. Julie organized it with Jon Nash.
  • 17 September: Samuel joins the Praxis team this year. They'll be working with SpokenWeb and also contributing to our Experimental Worldbuilding project.
  • 1 September: Congrats to Julie, who received a SSHRC graduate scholarship for her project, "The Quantified Self: Radical Biohacking and the Biocapital of Bodily Intervention."

Who We Are

We are a group of researchers who study the aesthetics and politics of media by blending theory and history with storytelling and prototyping:

  • Samuel Adesubokan (English)
  • Tracey El Hajj (English; graduated in 2020)
  • Julie M. Funk (English and CSPT)
  • Stefan Higgins (English and CSPT; graduated in 2020)
  • Hector Lopez (English; graduated in 2020)
  • Faith Ryan (English; graduated in 2021)
  • Alana Sayers (English)
  • Jentery Sayers (English and CSPT; director)
  • Lexy Townsend (English)

We value decolonization, situated knowledge, the space of place, and integrative approaches to media: old + new, analog + digital, still + moving, popular + experimental, immersive + meta.

We respectfully acknowledge that our studio is located on the unceded territory of the Lkwungen peoples and the Songhees, Esquimalt, and W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations, whose ongoing historical relationships with the land continue to this day.


What We Do

We identify pressing topics in media studies, articulate them as studio themes, research and write about them, prototype scenarios for them, and facilitate events to engage them. Our current themes are:

  • Experimental Worldbuilding: rejecting mastery to imagine better worlds for games and playable fictions
  • Addressing AI: examining AI's entanglements with health, precarity, and creativity
  • Uncanning Sounds: bringing literary audio from the past into the present

If you'd like to know more about our research, then please don't hesitate to contact us or attend an event.


What We Aren't

We are not a blog, brand, dev team, fab lab, digital humanities project, or humanities computing centre. We do not offer courses, either, but if you want to learn about digital tools and methodologies, then we recommend contacting our amazing colleagues at the Digital Scholarship Commons (DSC), Obsolete Computing and Media (OCaM), and the Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC).


Support and History

We are housed in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria; we partner with English, Visual Arts, the HCMC, and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought; and we collaborate with the DSC and Special Collections. We are members of the SpokenWeb project, and our research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and the SpokenWeb SSHRC partnership network. We began as The Maker Lab in the Humanities in 2012 and became The Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies in 2019. All work belongs to our researchers (not to the studio), and no position is unpaid.


Contact Us

We're located in UVic's Clearihue building. You can email our director, Jentery Sayers (he/him/his), at jentery@uvic.ca.

Thanks for visiting. We built this site with files from Mike Choi's "Paper" theme.


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