Undergraduate Fellow
Petrina is a Philosophy Specialist at the University of Toronto, where she also works as a teaching assistant. She’s interested in philosophy of religion, particularly multi-faith dialogue and global engagement. As a recent Laidlaw Scholar, she researched conceptions of miracles and their role in fostering interreligious understanding. She’s also interested in critical media theory, particularly how algorithmic content shapes ideology and political agency. Outside of school, she’s on the executive team of the G7 Research Group and will spend the summer volunteering with Odd Arts, a UK-based theatre organization running creative programmes in prisons and other justice settings.
Fellowship Project: Algorithmic Conditioning, Cinematic Form, and the Data Subject
This project examines how algorithms transform cinema from a space of reflection into a system of behavioral conditioning. As short-form algorithmic platforms fragment films into engagement-optimized clips, viewers are shaped into predictable, emotionally legible subjects whose responses align with commercial imperatives. Here, technological advances that could have fostered utopian imagination instead undermine democratic potential. Algorithmic media doesn't merely reflect our social dystopia—it actively produces it by eliminating ambiguity and replacing shared meaning-making with isolated feedback loops. Drawing on the works of Comolli, Adorno, and Chun, this research explores how the collapse of cinematic meaning into algorithmic response compromises our capacity to envision alternatives to current social arrangements.