October 29, 2026
Amanda Ciafone, associate professor in the Department of Media & Cinema studies with an appointment in the Institute of Communications Research, and six ICR doctoral students presented at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). The 50th anniversary conference, “TechnoPower · TechnoScientific Futures,” was held in Toronto, Canada, from October 7-10, 2026. In addition to Ciafone, ICR students Namita Gupta, Yewon Hong, Jiwon Jenn Oh, Adrian Wong, and Nini Zhou, along with Ruonan Wang, a PhD student in the College of LAS, participated in the four-day event.
Amanda Ciafone presented the paper “Speculative Aging Futures–Affordances of Retirement Finance Interfaces.”
Jiwon Jenn Oh and Namita Gupta organized a series of three panels on “Technospeculation: From Predictive Tools to Imaginative Futurity.”
Oh also presented two papers: “From Critical AI Literacy to Co-Liberation: Interfacing Community-Based Knowledge Work in AI Pedagogy” and “Drowning in the margins: housing vulnerability and datafied invisibility inurban flood disasters in South Korea.”
Gupta presented “Who Suffers from Unequal Breath in Delhi? Managing Crisis through Technology.”
Yewon Hong presented “Robonosis: A Theory of Robotic Intimacy and Affective Contagion.”
Ruonan Wang and Nini Zhou co-presented “Invisible labor: the work and exploitation in AI Comic industry” and Zhou also presented her paper “The Platformization of Pregnancy in China: Situating Neoliberal Governance in the Patriarchal Context.”
Wang was also a chair of “Assemblages, Discourses, and Imaginaries of Power and Control.”
Adrian Wong presented “Bargaining power and capital reproduction under new means of information.”
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