The following faculty are seeking PhD students to advise in the 2023-2024 academic year. Please note that faculty members do not admit PhD students directly. All applications go through the Faculty’s admissions process: https://ischool.utoronto.ca/future-students/apply/phd-apply/
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Professor Ishtiaque Ahmed wants to work with students who are interested in studying Artificial Intelligence systems from a critical perspective. He is particularly interested in applying postcolonial/decolonial, post-secular, and feminist theories to analyze and design AI systems.
- Professor Christoph Becker is looking for PhD students who want to work on topics like designing for sustainability and social justice; ethics, values, politics, and power in systems design; psychological distance in systems design choices; and data curation for ML/AI fairness and justice. He is especially interested in students who want to bridge and combine technical perspectives and (critical) social perspectives and methods. Learn more here: Becker
- Professor Jeffrey Boase advises students who take quantitative and qualitative approaches to studying the social implications of communication technology.
- Professor Marie-Pier Boucher is interested in supervising students working in one of the following disciplines/fields/areas (or at the intersection of them): information and communication sciences, media studies, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), and urban studies. Specific focus of interests include: the artistic exploration of science and technology, ecology and the environment, the body and experience, biotechnology, and space technology.
- Professor Nadia Caidi is available to supervise. Her work is situated in the context of global migration and the role that information resources, institutions, and technologies play in the everyday lives of diasporic communities as well as the implications for the receiving countries. She is interested in how migrants and displaced people negotiate the multiple and overlapping local and transnational information environments they navigate, and how these processes come to embody new kinds of knowledge. Learn more here: Caidi
- Professor Priyank Chandra would like to supervise students interested in the following areas: studying sociotechnical practices of communities and individuals at the margins; design for social justice, ethics and algorithms, gig work, marketplaces, and informality. Learn more here: Chandra
- Professor Julie Yujie Chen is interested in advising students in the areas of digital labor studies, data work, platform studies, and political economy of communication.
- Professor Negin Dahya is looking for students doing community-engaged qualitative, ethnographic, and/or feminist research with an anti-oppressive lens. She is interested in students researching technology, equity, race and gender with a broad scope of domains including online activism, technologies that support or hinder migration and social inclusion, and technologies and learning.
- Professor Alessandro Delfanti is looking for students researching digital capitalism and the relation between technology and work.
- Professor Fiorella Foscarini is looking for students in the following areas: organizational culture and information culture; records creation practices; genres of organizational communication: Form, substance, and pragmatics of written and oral communication in organizational contexts; language and translation (particularly in relation to the Anglocentrism of recordkeeping concepts and standards).
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Professor Rafael Grohmann is interested in supervising students who research platform labour, artificial intelligence and work, data and work, inequalities and power relations around platform and data (i.e., gender, race, coloniality), workers’ organization, platform cooperativism, social media and workers, and media work/workers. Learn more here: Grohmann
- Professor Shion Guha seeks students who are curious about algorithms in the public sector, specifically, algorithmic biases and decision-making in child welfare systems working on understanding the algorithmic repercussions of overrepresented Indigenous children in Canada. I am interested in students from all disciplinary and methodological backgrounds who are interested in the field. I do computational, technical, critical and interpretive research. Learn more here: Guha
- Professor Jenna Hartel is looking to supervise students in her research area, everyday life information behaviour and practice, with a focus on leisure, hobbies, profound and pleasurable experiences, as well as applications of ethnography and creative or visual methods.
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Professor Safwat Hassan seeks PhD students interested in research areas related to applying machine learning (ML) techniques for information systems design, mining software repositories, DevOps, and requirements engineering. Students would work on innovating methodologies and frameworks to improve the quality of information systems and provide a positive impact on society. For more information: https://safwathassan.com. Learn more here: Hassan
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Professor Tero Karppi is looking for students who use media theoretical approaches and examine accidents, anomalies, and liminal events of network culture.
- Professor Patrick Keilty seeks students to advise in the following areas: porn studies/sex industries; queer and trans studies; archives; digital studies/technology studies; media archaeology; phenomenology/continental philosophy.
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Professor Cara Krmpotich is available to supervise students conducting research in critical collections management; Indigenized museology; and/or decolonial approaches to digital heritage. She is especially interested in students with a research focus in the Great Lakes and/or community museum settings.
- Professor Anastasia Kuzminykh is working in the area of human-AI communication. She is looking for PhD students who want to explore how to develop intelligent context-aware systems that can become effective collaborators to human users. The applicants can have a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Systems Design Engineering, Data Science, Psychology, Communication Studies, or similar fields. Learn more here: Kuzminykh
- Professor Irina D. Mihalache is available to supervise projects that explore the intersections between food and museums (e.g. historic kitchens and culinary history, food programming as decolonial work, food histories and migration as they are represented in museums, culinary professionals in museums, etc.).
- Professor David Nieborg is interested in supervising students who research platform power and politics (i.e., the political economy of platforms and apps such as Facebook and TikTok, etc.), the platformization of cultural production, platform ecosystems and infrastructures, media industries studies, game studies (with a focus on the game industry and game production studies), and cultural journalism.
- Professor Tegan Rajkumar-Maharaj is looking to supervise students on the following topics: deep representation learning & predictive methods in ecological modelling and environmental risk assessment, as well as real-world generalization, learning theory, alignment, and practical auditing tools (e.g. unit tests, sandboxes).
- Professor Matt Ratto seeks to supervise students interested in empirical, conceptual, and design-based research on the following topics; community-based solutions to energy transitions; posthuman theory and AI. Interested students should be prepared to engage in design and making practices, critical making, and research-creation as part of their thesis work.
- Professor Seamus Ross is looking for one student in one of the following three areas: remix and communities of practice, Emergent/”Rogue” Archiving, or PIs and open data archiving.
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Professor SA Smythe is able to support PhD student research across the following areas: black and migrant literary and cultural studies; black trans studies; black feminisms; black geographies; trans studies and trans poetics; abolition and its futures; transdisciplinary approaches to archives of diaspora, anticolonialism, and antifascism
- Professor Jia Xue is taking new PhDs who are interested in the areas of Human-centred AI, computational social science, data mining, violence, and abuse. More information is available here and at http://aij.utoronto.ca/. Learn more here: Xue
- Professor Eric Yu seeks students interested in developing systems analysis and design methods that position technology systems within a human social context. His current concerns are human-AI collaborative work, machine learning projects, architecting the cognitive enterprise, and design for digital living, including digital health and sustainability.
- Professor Sherry S. Yu seeks students interested in the areas of ethnic/diasporic media, critical journalism, media and diversity, and diasporic youth and digital storytelling. Learn more here: Yu
