News and Events
- 20 March: Join us in person at 1pm Pacific for Dr. Bo Ruberg's talk, "How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games."
- 27 February: Join us online at 1pm Pacific for the 2024-25 Lansdowne Lecture in Media Studies at UVic. Dr. Kishonna L. Gray will share her research on "Designing Blackness in Digital Gaming."
Who We Are
We are a group of researchers who study the aesthetics and politics of media by blending theory with practice:
- Callum Carroll-Ireton (Computer Science)
- Enoch Hu (Greek & Roman Studies)
- Maya Wei Yan Linsley (English)
- Dayne Pettyjohn (English and Writing)
- April Rogers (English)
- Jentery Sayers (Media Studies and English; director)
- Marie Silhova (Pacific and Asian Studies)
- Samuel Adesubokan (English; 2020-24)
- Tracey El Hajj (English; graduated in 2020)
- Abby Fry (Writing and Greek & Roman Studies; 2022-23)
- Julie M. Funk (English and CSPT; graduated in 2024)
- Braeden Hallman (English; 2021-22)
- Stefan Higgins (English and CSPT; graduated in 2020)
- Madyson Huck (English; graduated in 2023)
- Hector Lopez (English; graduated in 2020)
- Emma Newtwon (Greek & Roman Studies; 2023-24)
- Faith Ryan (English; graduated in 2021)
- Alana Sayers (English; 2019-21)
- Lexy Townsend (English; 2020-21)
- Asia Tyson (English; graduated in 2023)
- Joel Wheeler (English; graduated in 2024)
We value decolonization, situated knowledge, the space of place, experimental methods, and integrative approaches to media: old + new, analog + digital, still + moving, popular + obscure, immersive + meta.
We acknowledge and respect the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt) Peoples on whose territory the university stands, and the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose 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, and hold events to engage them. Our current themes are:
- Player Stories: examining how people document and narrate their experiences with games
- Videographic Criticism: pushing the boundaries of the video essay as a scholarly format
- Uncanning Sounds: stewarding creative audio from the past into the present
- Media Literacy and Pedagogy: fostering the "people skills" of critical media practice
If you'd like to know more about our research, then please don't hesitate to contact us.
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 UVic Media Studies does!
Support and History
We are housed in the Media Studies program, which is administered by UVic's Faculty of Humanities. 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 in the Studio is unpaid.
Contact Us
We're located in UVic's Clearihue building. You can email our director, Jentery Sayers (he / him), at jentery@uvic.ca.
Thanks for visiting. We built this site with files from Mike Choi's "Paper" theme and last updated it on 25 February 2025.
