Critical Media Lab

Posters for Student Activism - a Visual/Sonic Online Workshop Event
2022-01-27 15:30 - 17:00 (America/New_York)
Feed your creative being while connecting to the themes of UWaterloo’s Critical Tech Talk Series discussing the ethics of Technology.

Critical Tech Talk 2: Wendy Chun
2022-02-10 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
The SECOND event in this series of honest talks about innovation features Wendy Chun, Director of the Digital Democracies Institute.

Critical Tech Talk 3: AI Five Ways
2022-05-16 19:00 - 21:00 UTC
As artificial intelligence grows more prevalent every day, even to the point of making life-and-death decisions for humans, principles of Responsible AI must be implemented to ensure safety, dignity, privacy, and autonomy for all. In this roundtable discussion, hear from five experts across different professional and disciplinary backgrounds on their approaches to the field and perspectives on the future of responsible AI.

Critical Media Lab Showcase
2023-08-02 17:00 - 19:00 UTC | Critical Media Lab, ECH 1205, University of Waterloo
The Critical Media Lab is thrilled to invite our colleagues and friends to our project showcase. Student work from ENGL 494, CS 889, and the XDM master’s program will be on display. Please join us to celebrate the creative and critical works of our fantastic students!
This event will be held in Area 151 at the Communitech Hub (151 Charles St. W, Kitchener, Ontario) on Wednesday August 2, 2023.
Please contact engl-cml@uwaterloo.ca for more information.
Poster Design by Bella Goudie

Getting started with micro:bit workshop
2024-03-08 13:30 - 15:00 UTC | Critical Media Lab, ECH 1205, University of Waterloo
In-person workshop at the Critical Media Lab (151 Charles St W, Kitchener)
Friday, March 8 at 1:30 PM
This workshop is designed for anyone who is interested in getting started with microcomputers but doesn’t know where to begin. For better or worse, microcomputers like the RaspberryPI and Arduino have become synonymous with maker culture and DYI projects, offering modestly powerful computing in a pocket-sized package. As more rhetorical work embraces field work, on the surface these relatively inexpensive tools seem to offer nearly unlimited potential for extendibility, but the barriers to entry are often steeper than imagined, with coding, finding support, and troubleshooting hardware faults all potential pitfalls. Using the BBC micro:bit as a platform, this workshop will guide attendees in the basics of its onboard sensors including sound, light, and temperature, to create an environmental logger. As attendees build a device that interacts with their surroundings they’ll be encouraged to think through how things and humans “co-shape each other” (Wakkary). No previous experience with microcomputers or coding is required.
The workshop will be facilitated by PhD candidate in the Department of English, Chris Rogers.
Please RSVP using the QR code on the poster. Contact medialab@uwaterloo.ca with any additional questions.

CML '26 Showcase
2026-08-12 16:00 - 19:00 UTC | Critical Media Lab, ECH 1205, University of Waterloo
Join the Critical Media Lab for the 2026 showcase featuring interactive, geo-electro-sensor projects by students enrolled in ENGL 799: Media Geologies. The event will open with a guest talk by Guelph-based media and surveillance scholar, Stephen J. Neville on copper cultures. No registration necessary, families and friends welcome, refreshments will be served.
August 12 | 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM | ECH1205
About the course: ENGL 799 (Media Geologies, Dr. Marcel O’Gorman) acknowledges the deep geological histories and futures of media technologies, building new ways of understanding human co-evolution with more-than-human agents. The topic will be informed by media theory, philosophy, speculative fiction, sculpture, installation, and media art.
Projects by: Sophia Heidebrecht, Robert MacIsaac, Juliana Stacey, Kc Dickson, Mélika Hashemi.
Guest talk: Stephen J. Neville: On the conductivity of technical survivance: An introductory dialogue between old copper cultures

About the talk: Copper landlines are having a comeback! While this might be hastily written oﬀ as media nostalgia, discourse around landline telephones includes nodes of survivalism and intentional rejection of digital culture. In this presentation, I interpret landline discourse in terms of technical survivance to better understand the political and cultural motivations that underlie people’s eﬀorts to return to outdated circuits. This framing updates Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of technical survivals in conversation with Vizenor’s survivance, which describes Indigenous people’s active and creative resistance against oppression. From this, I suggest that the reassertion of older tools despite the availability of ‘high-tech’ alternatives be interpreted as a form of resistance to dominant technocultural power. In challenge to a narrative of technological devolution, technical survivance is positioned as the basis for dialogue across Indigenous and Western histories, environments, and worldviews. Towards that end, technical survivance is used to reframe the contemporary renaissance of copper landlines while relaying with the much older Indigenous copper culture of North America’s Archaic Period that ended with the return of stone tools. Rather than interpreting the decline of Indigenous copper culture as an archaeological conundrum, I aim to repatch it as a conductive connection for technological inquiry and intercultural exchange.
Speaker bio: Stephen J. Neville is a media and surveillance scholar based in Guelph. He is currently a Fellow at the Infoscape Research Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University and an aﬃliate researcher at the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies at York University. Supported by a SSHRC doctoral award and a Data Fluencies grant from the Social Science Research Council, Neville received his PhD in 2026 from the joint-program of Communication & Culture at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. Neville is also a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario. His research into Indigenous sound archives and land-based research creation was awarded the 2025 Mahmoud Eid prize for research into media and diversity by the Canadian Communication Association. With Greg Elmer, he is the coauthor of The Politics of Media Scarcity (Routledge 2024) which foregrounds marginalized histories and storytelling as a challenge to dominant narratives of abundance and digital divides in media studies.
