Future Communications Conference | Open House

Friday, December 12, 2025 at York University (Keele Campus), Toronto, Ontario, Canada

This year’s theme, Encoded Worlds, invites us to think about how communication systems shape the ways we live, relate, and imagine possible futures. The nine sessions are organized into three thematic blocks that reflect the core questions guiding this year’s conference agenda:

• Group A: Digitality, Identity, and Culture (The ‘Self’ and the ‘Screen’)
  How digital platforms and cultural practices shape who we are, how we express ourselves, and how communities take form.
• Group B: Technology, Governance, and Ethics (The ‘System’ and the ‘Rules’)
  How infrastructures, platforms, and automated systems influence governance, power, and the ethical conditions of everyday life.
• Group C: Media, Space, and Materiality (The ‘World’ and the ‘Environment’)
  How communication is grounded in physical, spatial, and environmental systems, and how these settings shape collective experience.

Conference Schedule

• 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM - Registration
• 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM (90 minutes) - Session Block 1
  • Session 1A: Identities in Motion: Diaspora, Memory, and Representation
    This session explores how communities use media for resistance and identity building, and how contested political history is fought over and defined through film and news.
    
  • Session 1B: Encoded Governance and Platform Power
    This session explores how digital platforms and algorithms act as tools of political and economic control, creating systemic bias, exclusion, and global surveillance.
    
  • Session 1C: Urban Worlds and Spatial Imaginaries
    This session examines how city policy and gentrification attempt to control urban life, exploring how marginalized communities challenge these systems by creating new cultural maps and asserting their presence in public spaces.

• 12:00 PM – 12:15 PM Refreshment Break
  
• 12:15 PM – 1:45 PM (90 minutes) - Session Block 2
  • Session 2A: Creativity, Embodiment, and Cultural Practice
    Creative researchers use making, performance, sound art, and fabrication to explore how identity, resistance, and queer-feminist ecologies are produced through the body.
    
  • Session 2B: Algorithmic Systems and Affective Governance
    This session examines how algorithms and media infrastructures are deployed by states and corporations to manage emotion, reproduce bias, and enforce geopolitical power, from historical ideological education to the political economy of surveillance.
    
  • Session 2C: Material Infrastructures and Environmental Media
    This session uses creative works and critical research to expose the hidden environmental and ethical costs of digital infrastructures, offering new forms of ecological communication that challenge violence and reconnect us with the natural world.
• 1:45 PM – 2:00 PM  Refreshment Break
• 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM (90 minutes) - Session Block 3
  • Session 3A: Narrative, Affect, and Decolonizing the Self
    This session shows how powerful narratives - from cinema and speculative fiction to personal stories - are used to challenge external control over our cultural identity and our physical bodies.
    
  • Session 3B: Datafication, Platforms, and Digital Economies
    This session critically examines how platforms, credit systems, and smart cities function as powerful financial tools that extract data, reinforce economic inequality, and govern both individual behavior and urban space.
    
  • Session 3C: Space, Safety, and Embodied Futures
    This session investigates how we design future technologies and policies, from smart wearables to urban planning, to create safer, more accessible spaces for vulnerable people and bodies.
• 3:45 PM – 6:00 PM Conference Reception and end of term mixer. Everyone is welcome.