Faculty - Mél Hogan

4/9/2015
Intersecting media, e-waste, infrastructure, and the environment | IIT Lewis College of Human Sciences
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Intersecting media, e­waste, infrastructure, and the
environment
Faculty
Mél Hogan
Dr. Mél Hogan is an Assistant Professor of
Communication in the Department of Humanities at IIT.
One course she teaches is Environmental
Hometown
Montréal
Department
http://humansciences.iit.edu/profiles/m-l-hogan
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Intersecting media, e-waste, infrastructure, and the environment | IIT Lewis College of Human Sciences
Humanities
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Media(http://melhogan.com/website/tag/environmentalmedia/), looking at the
interplay between technology and landfills, e­waste, disease, pollution and so on.
Another course is Document Design, which brings together visual culture theory and
graphic design.
Lewis College: Where are you from originally?
Dr. Hogan: I’ve spent the better part of the last decade in Montréal, so I consider it
home even though I grew up in Ottawa. I’m French Canadian, from the Ontario side.
LC: Where did you move here from? What were you doing professionally before
coming here?
MH: I completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Curation at the University of
Colorado ­ Boulder, which is where I was living for the past two years. CU Boulder is
incredibly innovative in what it’s trying to do to bring together the arts, information
studies and media studies. I was lucky to have a position there in the midst of those
developments, which have further influenced the way I teach and conduct research,
valuing collaboration, interdisciplinarity and merging theory and practice. I have also
worked as a freelance graphic designer or consultant since 2001, and I continue to be
involved with mat3rial.com, with a niche focus on archive design for the digital
humanities.
LC: What is your academic background (degrees and majors)?
MH: After completing an undergraduate degree in Sociology at Acadia University (Nova
Scotia), I was pretty certain that that would be the extent of my academic journey! I
took a few years off, and then I went to Algonquin College in 2001 to be trained as a
graphic designer. This has proven to be the single most rewarding decision of my
career, because now design bleeds into everything I do, all types of research and
production. From there, while working as a graphic designer, I enrolled in a grad
Production Diploma at Concordia University with the idea of complementing my design
knowledge with web, video and audio skills. I ended up also doing and Masters in Media
Studies and a Ph.D. in Communication Studies there.
My Ph.D. was special in the sense that it was the second only to be considered a
Research­Creation Ph.D., whereby production is central to the final product. The idea is
that Research­Creation not only allows for new modes of knowing but also challenges
what counts (or has traditionally counted) as knowledge.
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Intersecting media, e-waste, infrastructure, and the environment | IIT Lewis College of Human Sciences
LC: What appealed to you about IIT? What are your thoughts on teaching at a
technology school, and how, if at all, has working at a tech school shaped the
way you teach/research your own academic discipline?
MH: There’s tremendous appeal for me with the direction Lewis College seems to be
going, in no small part thanks to the new Dean’s vision for the College, which seems to
highlight the importance of both theory and practice. My colleagues in the Humanities
have an incredible array of skills and interests which, I think, makes the department a
great place to work.
LC: What is your focus area, and what are you currently researching?
MH: I have a few areas of interest, intersecting at media, archives, the environment,
and surveillance. Theoretically, I’m interested in new materialism, and bringing the
body back into the discussion of new media. But my focus is on
infrastructure(http://culturedigitally.org/2013/11/bumblehive­and­sealand­big­data­
infrastructures/); on data storage centers in particular, and how they impact the
environment, and on how they risk displacing communities. I wrote a paper, published
in
TVNM(http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/11/13/1527476413509415.abstract)
on Facebook’s data centers as the archive’s underbelly, which launched this project and
anchored my interest in this facet of media and communication studies.
I also have an interest in visiting various rural towns in the U.S. to interview people in
areas where data centers have set up shop. My questions are about the ongoing
transformations of communities as a result of technological innovation, with work going
overseas, or industries becoming defunct, and now replaced by cloud computing
companies.
I have a collaborative project set up at technotrash.org(http://technotrash.org/)
(with Andrea Zeffiro at Brock University) where we collect stories of people’s use and
disposal of the gadgets in their life. We mainly have students across Canada and the
U.S. (so far) that are generating content. Students from Environmental Media at IIT will
be contributing soon, as will students from Tulane University, next term.
My work on surveillance is closely tied to my work on data centers. I’m interested in
surveillance from a political perspective, but I anchor that in a materialist framework:
for example, the interplay between the NSA’s water consumption to cool its servers,
and the failure of big data to prevent and contain environmental disasters.
Laura Forlano, from IIT ID, and I are currently setting up the Critical Futures
Lab(http://criticalfutureslab.org/) to explore the spaces in between the critical
approaches of the social sciences and humanities and the generative processes of
design. In particular, informed by science and technology studies, new materialism,
media and communications studies, the CFL is concerned with the ways in which the
http://humansciences.iit.edu/profiles/m-l-hogan
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digital is materialized, contextualized and embodied across a variety of scales, from city
infrastructures to the built environment, and from interactive objects to digital bodies.
Since 2009, I have been the co­editor of
nomorepotlucks.org(http://nomorepotlucks.org/), a journal of arts and politics. We
put out an issue every two months online and in print­on­demand. This is a project
supported by both the arts and academic communities. It grew out of my days of
community radio but also my early grad research into archival absences and silences,
themes that I continue to explore in other writings as well.
I keep my personal website (melhogan.com) up to date with all past and upcoming
conferences and publications, if anyone wants more information.
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