Our Team
Dr. Katty Alhayek
Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Katty Alhayek is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication. Her scholarship is grounded in decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist approaches to knowledge production. She is interested in exploring how marginalized communities, particularly women from the Global South, use media, discourse, memory, fandom, and everyday practices to exercise agency under conditions of war, displacement, and diaspora.
Her work spans gender and marginalization, media in conflict and displacement contexts, fandom and audience studies, and autoethnography, using community-engaged and participatory methods.
She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and a graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her work has appeared in leading communication, media, gender, and audience studies journals.
Ashley Jane Lewis
Associate Editor
Deanna Armenti
Associate and Creative Editor
Deanna Armenti (Fae/Faer, She/Her) is a Queer Faegender poet, zine creator, and interdisciplinary artist and researcher. She is a PhD candidate at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) in the Media and Design Innovation program. Deanna approaches her arts practice through a research-creation lens that centres making and process as knowledge generation. Her transdisciplinary arts practice is a multimodal inquiry into the decentering of Anthropocentric gender as a Transfuturist worldbuilding methodology. Sculptural installation, natural fibre textiles, and new media is incorporated with foraged matter as co-collaborators of the artwork. Inspired by kin centric ecologies and multispecies relations, her work foregrounds ontological multiplicity as an exploration of how gender can align with the ontology of other-than-human beings (e.g. plants, animals, vital matters). Deanna’s dissertation project, Ecogenders, is an inquiry into gender expansion through three eco-sculptures that decay and regrow into landscapes as sites of transition and outposts of futurity.
Francisco-Fernando Granados
Co-Founder and Editorial Board
Francisco-Fernando is a visual artist and student in the Media & Design Innovation PhD program. His research aims to understand how abstraction and practices of refugee inscription into readymade forms of subjective cultural and political recognition may become a means to queer modes of relationality at the intersection of visual and performance art. This project creates new paths of knowing by deviating from the practice of learning about the refugee experience to render it as data, turning instead towards learning from those experiences through the singular and unverifiable path of the aesthetic.
Past Team Members
Layal Shuman
Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Layal Shuman (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Design Studies. Her research and teaching contributions focus on critical design studies, critical university studies, and anti-oppression educational frameworks. She is the Co-Director of The Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought (SMACT (external link) ) at Toronto Metropolitan University's Creative School and the Co-President of the ARTS (external link) SIG in the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies.
Shawn Newman
Associate Editor
Having had an international career as a dancer and choreographer—and described as “[one] of Toronto’s finest dancers” (Paula Citron, Toronto Life)—after graduating from TMU’s Performance Dance program, Shawn earned his PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. He has taught in the Department of Gender Studies and the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s, the Department of Dance at York University, and in Performance at TMU. Currently, he is the Senior Manager, Research & Impact at Toronto Arts Council and Toronto Arts Foundation where he oversees both organizations’ research projects and partnerships, as well as devises strategy and planning for research and program evaluation. Previously, he was Executive Director of Public Access and Managing Editor of PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas. His research and teaching center social justice, representation, and power in cultural production and policy.