News and Events

Here's what's happening in the Studio in 2022-23:

28 April: Julie's giving a talk on "Hormone Media Logics in the Networked Era" for CCA 2023 at York University.
27 April: Asia, Samuel, and Jentery are presenting their research on audio for the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta.
19 April: Congrats to Asia! She's graduating this year after successfully defending her English honours thesis on literary depictions of robot workers.
13 March: Abby is part of a brilliant dev team that prototyped a new video game called My Celium.
23 January: UVic Libraries awarded Asia a Lowens Fellowship to conduct her research on techo-anarchist publications, including zines.
9 January: Jentery's teaching a genre studies course on games and interactive fiction this term.
15 November: Julie and Jentery published an essay on "Autoethnographies of Mediation" in this new edited collection.
31 October: Mark your calendars. Leonard J. Paul joins us this Thursday, November 3rd, at 9:45am Pacific for the final "Player Stories" event this term.
28 October: Many thanks to Amanda Phillips for visiting us yesterday as part of the "Player Stories" series. It was a wonderful conversation!
12 October: We're excited to announce that Whitney "Strix" Beltrán will join us on Thursday, October 20th, at 9:45am Pacific for the next conversation in our "Player Stories" series.
28 September: We're thrilled to host Maddy Myers next week (Thursday, October 6th, at 9:45am Pacific) as part of our "Player Stories" conversation series.
14 September: Congrats to Madyson, who won this year's Mairi Riddell Memorial Book Prize for the best essay in UVic's English graduate program.
12 September: Congrats to Samuel on receiving a graduate fellowship in UVic's Centre for Global Studies.
12 September: A hearty welcome to Abby Fry, who joined the Studio this month.
9 September: Julie's teaching GNDR 219: Bodies and Critical Media Practices this term.
9 September: Samuel's teaching ATWP 135: Academic Reading and Writing this term.
7 September: Jentery's teaching a grad seminar this term on the topic of player stories. He's also teaching "Contemporary Media and Fiction."
6 September: We're thrilled to announce our Fall 2022 "Player Stories" speaker series.
29 June: Jentery published "Minimal Computing from the Labor Perspective" with Tiffany Chan in DHQ.
20 June: Asia gave a talk on "Time Loop Terror" at UBC during the "Because It Lasts" conference on children's and young adult literature and media.

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)
Abby Fry (Writing and Greek & Roman Studies; 2022-23)
Julie M. Funk (English and CSPT)
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)
Faith Ryan (English; graduated in 2021)
Alana Sayers (English; 2019-21)
Jentery Sayers (English and CSPT; director)
Lexy Townsend (English; 2020-21)
Asia Tyson (English; graduated in 2023)

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 acknowledge and respect the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on whose traditional territory the University of Victoria stands, and the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ 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, prototype scenarios for them, and facilitate events to engage them. Our current themes are:

Player Stories: examining how people document and narrate their experiences with games
Uncanning Sounds: stewarding creative audio from the past into the present
Media Literacy: fostering the "people skills" of critical media practice across UVic

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), Historic Computing Lab, 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 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.