Chercheur·e du réseau


Faculté de communication
Michelle Stewart
Professeur.e
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM)
Faculté de communication
Département de communication sociale et publique
Intérêts de recherche
  • Communication politique et réseaux numériques
  • Nouveaux médias et citoyenneté culturelle
  • Datafication et démocratie
Informations générales
Numéro de téléphone : 
(514) 987-3000 x3412
Numéro de local : 
AB-9310
Principales réalisations
Of the North – Of Digital Selves and Digital Sovereignty: Digital Filmmaking and Cultural (Re)appropriation

At its Canadian premiere, Dominic Gagnon’s Of the North (November 2015) launched a passionate debate regarding the ethics of image appropriation and digital filmmaking about Indigenous communities.  Of the North follows Gagnon’s “natively” digital method, which involves the sampling and montage of public domain images and sounds posted by internauts themselves with the stated intent of documenting how people represent themselves online. In a controversy that crystallized around questions of “digital sovereignty,” Inuit critics decried the recontextualization of personal video posts by a film, they argued, that did not promote an Inuit view of Inuit experience. This article addresses the ways in which Gagnon’s digital method collapsed cultural contexts, bringing to light divergent cultural and generational expectations regarding digital presence and sovereignty. An analysis of the film’s heated reception and new digital works by young Indigenous filmmakers suggests an intercultural ethics for visual ethnographies.

Sarcellopolis: virtual cartographies of multicultural living in contemporary i-docs

This project explores the graphic interface design of interactive documentaries (i-docs) about housing projects between Canada and France. Against the backdrop of the modernist, utopian fantasies that constructed these large-scale housing developments, contemporary documentarians intervene in the social space of the multicultural city via creative interface design. I-docs like Highrise (Cizek, Katerina. 2010. “Out My Window.” National Film Board of Canada; Cizek, 2011. “One Millionth Tower.” NFB Highrise, November 5, 2011; Cizek, 2015. “The Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise.” NFB), (B4-Windows on the Tower, Jean Christophe Ribot, 2012), and Sarcellopolis (Sébastien Daycard-Heid and Bertrand Dévé, 2015) employ user interfaces that conjure the vertical and horizontal dimensions of social interaction in the urban built environment. They are most successful when they move beyond narrative to mobilize objects and space, thus enactingthe ‘promiscuous relations’ of urban experience and simulating the chance encounters of the urban public sphere.

Narrowcasting Hate: Rightwing Media and the Crisis of Digital Citizenship

Visible Evidence. Buenos Aires, Argentine. Été 2017.

Live-streaming from Malheur Refuge, Oregon, activists invoked a notion of imagined community, albeit, a broken one, ‘we’re hear fighting for your rights and they’re out to get us.’ That mingled affect of individualist heroism and the felt responsibility to protect liberalism coupled with the conspiratorial undertones of rightwing movements are easily read across the blogs and vlogs of the extreme right. This paper attends to the affective maneuvers audible in the Malheur livestream, paying attention to the specificity of the liveness, presence, and intimacy invoked by the narrowcasting of the vlog and compares these emotional-aesthetic appeals with progressive cinema’s reframing of these same movements in contemporary cinema. While there currently exists a solid body of communications research regarding rightwing movements online, this paper asserts that neither the metaphor of the imagined community (print/broadcast media) nor that of the echo chamber (social media) suffice to explain the affective work of rightwing media in the digital age.