Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow
Paula Nunez de Villavicencio is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and a McLuhan Graduate Fellow. Her research focuses on the historical and political dimensions of media technology used for the governance and surveillance of select populations. She is the author of the recently published polyauthored monograph The Prison House of the Circuit (University of Minnesota Press 2022). More broadly, she is interested in information behaviours and practices, wearable technology, systems of AR, digital humanities and ethics. This research is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Fellowship Research Project—Optical Media from the Middle Ages to AI: Integrating Humans, Information, and Sight
Paula’s dissertation is titled “Optical Media from the Middle Ages to AI: Integrating Humans, Information, and Sight”. In it she explores how visual information systems across historical and sociocultural contexts produce modes of subjectivation through optical technologies that determine what we see, when we see, and how we see. By centring questions of the eye and the technical-biological interface in media studies, her research establishes a new theoretical foundation to approach questions of power, knowledge, and subjectivity. Her work looks at optical media from spectacles to VR headsets to examine our knowledge making practices for the governance of select populations.