Graduate Students

Onder is a PhD student in the Social and Cultural Analysis program at Concordia University in Montréal. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Public Administration from Ankara University, Turkey. He completed his Master of Science and his first PhD in Sociology at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. His research interests are situated at the intersection of political anthropology, organizational anthropology, social movements, legal anthropology and ethnographic research. He has been working as the Coordinator of Concordia Ethnography Lab since 2017. Currently he is studying on the politics and the ethnography of environmental organizations; i.e., how and in which ways these organizations establish relations with environmental social movements, how they deal with governments and bureaucracies, and how they perceive the concept of “activism”.

Adriana is a museologist, researcher, and consultant in human rights and social justice museology. Currently, she directs ElevateMuse which is a research and consulting initiative she founded to contribute to the development of the museology of social justice and human rights. At Concordia University’s Ethnography Lab she also co-initiated a Working Group devoted to researching Human Rights issues. The research group’s current project is a study of the ethnography of museums addressing issues of Human Rights. 

In her 20 years of work in the museum field, Adriana created and directed the Department of Communications at the National Museum of Colombia and served as Associate Vice-President of Cultural Programs at the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles, California.

In Canada, she also worked at the Royal British Columbia Museum, collaborated with the first international exhibition of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights of Chile in Montreal, curated the Temporary Museum of Memory and Solidarity with the Armed Conflict in collaboration with the Colombian community in Quebec, and she has provided consulting services to the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

Early in her research career, she began investigating what was known at the time as museology of peace and reconciliation, in relation to memory and identity construction, with Dr. Peter van Mensch as the adviser. In 2000, she presented her M.A. research project on Museology of Peace and Reconciliation for Colombia through Indigenous Intangible Spiritual Heritage at the international museology course The Role of Museums in the Development of Peace and Tolerance, in Dubrovnik, Croatia. And she has since continued her research in connection with community building, social justice, and human rights. Additionally, Adriana taught exhibitions and public programs development at the University of San Diego, USA.

Adriana holds an M.A. in Museology from the Amsterdam University of the Arts-Reinwardt Academy, Netherlands. She also holds a Graduate specialization in Cultural Management from the Universidad del Rosario, and a B.A. in Social Communication and Journalism from the Universidad Javeriana, Colombia.

She is now pursuing a doctoral degree in Social and Cultural Analysis at Concordia University, with Dr. Meir Amor as the advisor. Her doctoral research builds on her M.A. thesis and focuses on the movement of museums as agents of social change, combining advocacy with memory and geared to address issues of social justice education and human rights protection. She is interested in the social impact of museums and the development of an innovative framework of human rights for museums in connection with service, capacity and community building.

Gabrielle Lavenir is a third year PhD student in Concordia’s Social and Cultural Analysis program. Her research focuses on older people who play videogames, with an interest for what happens at the intersection of ageing and play, particularly in terms of subjectification and normativity. Her research also look at the strategies of older adults who, stuck in the middle of several normative enterprises, still manage to make room for games.

Gabrielle holds a master in sociology from Sciences Po Paris, is on the board of the Observatoire des Mondes Numériques en Sciences Humaines (Paris), and is part of TAG here at Concordia.

Kris Millett is a 2nd-year PhD student in the Social and Cultural Analysis program at Concordia University in Montréal. His academic research to this point has focused on how race and religious identities, news media representations, state actions and government legislation in Canada intersect and drive the reproduction of socio-economically marginalized groups. He holds a Honours B.A. in Political Science and English from Carleton University, and completed a Master of Arts in Canadian and Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Peterborough in 2014. Prior to graduate studies, Kris enjoyed a career as a professional historical research consultant, and is also a former secondary school English and Drama teacher.

Aryana is an environmental sociologist, PhD student and haphazard, year-round cyclist. She has a background in rural studies, and has worked for over fifteen years as a project coordinator and youth worker for various non-profit organizations in Canada in Latin America. Her doctoral research focuses on inventive methods, cycling infrastructures and mobility justice in small and intermediate cities. Aryana is also engaged in community projects relating to creative re-use/recycling and agro-biodiversity. She is currently a doctoral fellow with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Tricia Toso is a PhD candidate in Concordia’s Communication Studies program. In 2017 worked on the Cabot Square photo voice project, and is currently part of the Chronicles of the St. Pierre River research project. Her research interests are infrastructural systems and the ways the ways in which they interact with one another, geographies and ecologies, people and policy. One of her central research questions is, what is the role of infrastructure in the process of decolonization? How might the implementation and maintenance of infrastructural systems hinder or aid the restitution of Indigenous lands? What future imaginaries might allow for us to develop of model of infrastructure that participates in the decolonization of North America, and offer more equitable and sustainable provision to communities

Ceyda is a doctoral student in Social and Cultural Analysis program of Concordia. She is interested in the questions posed through actor-network theory and the -so-called- material turn. She is critical of sociology’s assumption of the human as the center of social relations. So, her PhD project works along the lines of machine agency, and she wonders whether and how it is possible to talk about nonhuman sociality, especially in the context of artificial intelligence research. She completed her Bachelor’s and M.Sc. degrees at Middle East Technical University’s Department of Sociology. She studied construction of common sense knowledge and everyday reality in World of Warcraft for her M.Sc. thesis.

Irmak Taner is a Masters student in Anthropology with a background in Psychology and International Development Studies. Her research focuses on the social impact of mega-infrastructure projects with a focus on historical and sensorial experiences. She is interested in visual anthropology and visual arts as both a creative methodology and an artistics practice.

Genevieve Collins is a filmmaker and arts administrator currently undertaking a Master of Arts in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Concordia University. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Development Sociology from Cornell University. Her research interests include sensory anthropology and planetary futures. Her MA thesis project uses research design methodologies to engage with the future through the creation of an immersive sensory environment emulating speculative human habitats in space. The project synthesizes art and anthropology to craft a futurist vision and engage with speculative sensory futures.

Sarah is a Master’s student in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Concordia University. She is interested in sustainable development, gender equity, sensory ethnography, virtual ethnography and Anthropology of religion. She is a member of the Montreal Waterways project.

Pamela Fillion holds a Bachelors of Arts in Anthropology and English(Cultural Studies) from McGill University. She is currently completing her Masters in Anthropology at Concordia. Pamela is a disabled queer settler, artist, survivor, writer, crafter, and keen fermenter. She has been engaged in grassroots organizing and advocacy work in Montreal for over a dozen years. Since 2016, she has been running a project within which she regularly facilitates radical home economics workshops in the city. The kitchen and working with and around food is what she considers her hearth. Her research interests include critical ethnography, feminist anthropology, environmental anthropology, sustainability, food, and the anthropology of violence.

Pier-Olivier Tremblay is a SSHRC grant holder and doctoral student in Social and Cultural Analysis at Concordia University. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in sociology from Université du Québec à Montréal, and is currently a member of the Waterways working group at the Concordia Ethnography Lab. His current research focuses on human/non-human affective relationships and infrastructure.

Hanine is an avid activist and an aspiring anthropologist. She holds a BA in English Literature and a BA in Media/Communications, with two minors in Film/Visual Studies and Arabic Language, from the American University of Beirut. She is currently pursuing an MA in Social & Cultural Anthropology at Concordia University. She works as a researcher, journalist, writer, and translator, and dreams of becoming a thesaurus one day.

Melina Campos Ortiz is a Ph.D. student in Social and Cultural Analysis from Costa Rica. She is interested in development, activism, post-humanism, futures anthropology, and imaginative ethnographic practices. In her research, she will engage with anthropology as world-making and explore soil as her main subject. At the Concordia Ethnography Lab, she is part of the Montreal Waterways team.

Isabella is a Master’s student in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Concordia with interests in materiality, play, anthropology of religions, games, gaming, gambling, memory, embodiment, methods, sensory ethnography, ritual, fiction and how we make meaning.

She is currently a member of the Virtual Casino Ethnography research group and an ethnographer-RA on the “Minecraft as Classroom” research project.

Paula Bath is a Ph.D. student in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Concordia University. After learning American Sign Language (ASL) at the age of sixteen, Paula went on to study translation, discourse analysis, organizational communications, and cultural representation and to obtain a B.A. and M.A. in Communications from the University of Ottawa. Paula worked for 17 years as an interpreter, later specializing in developing translation quality standards with the federal government and most recently worked as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission. At Concordia, Paula’s research focuses on federal communications policy and her ethnographic work is both situated and dialogical. Paula brings together images and texts to explore moments when dominant social ideas, beliefs and social structures are lived, felt and discussed by people. Paula is thrilled to live and work in the spaces of sign and spoken languages – ASL, langue de signes québécoise, English and French. Paula is also a proud founding member of Spill-Propagation.com, an Artist Center for Creation and Production in Sign Language in Canada where Paula works to bring people into communication though the organizations three main artistic activities: Creation, Collaborative Production, and Research-Creation.

Ariana is an M.A. student in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Concordia and an enthusiast of visual storytelling. Her current research lies at the intersection of spirituality, human/non-human affective relationships and atmospheres of intimacy in the domestic space and the online world. Her most recent project is a short ethnographic film about domestic altars in Buenos Aires result of a collaborative research endeavour. She holds a BA degree in International Studies from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) of Buenos Aires, Argentina and has a background in gender studies. She worked for several years at Google, and in community organizations that advocate for women in Latin America. She is actively involved in a non-profit based in Montréal that supports survivors of gender violence.

Andrea is an M.A. Student in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Concordia. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from McGill University in Montreal. Between her degrees, Andrea spent a few years working various roles in the production of Visual Effects and Animation for feature films. As such, she is fascinated by the world-making qualities of different kinds of technologies and storytelling devices. Her current research lies at the intersection between ageing and care, transnational families, and material culture. At the Ethnography Lab, she is part of the Waterways team, and she is interested in exploring the mobilities and disabilities side of Montreal’s wintertime imaginaries.

For the past fifteen years, Anne-Marie Turcotte has closely collaborated with Inuit youth through her work with the Nunavik Youth House Association. Currently enrolled at Concordia in the Social and Cultural Analysis program, her doctoral research examines the hidden meanings of property destruction acts committed by Nunavimmiut Youth. Her interests are geared towards art-based methodologies and research ethics within the context of indigenous youth and children.