No. 552 - June 10, 2026

  • Coming Events:

    - Transcendent Memory: State Violence, Solidarity, and Community-Based Research in Postwar El Salvador
    - Poetry by the River
    - Workshop: Using AI Tools for Literature Searching
    - Workshop: Data Sources at Western
    - Workshop: Working with Digitized Primary Sources
    - Workshop: Designing Data Visualization Dashboards
    - Workshop: Story Maps for Knowledge Mobilization
    - FIMS Seminar Series: Sananda Sahoo

  • Important Dates:

    - Wednesday, June 10, 2026 - FIMS Convocation Reception (10:30 AM) and Ceremony (3:00 PM)
    - Thursday, June 18, 2026 - Meeting of the Board of Governors (10 AM, WIRB 3000)
    - Monday, June 22, 2026 - Native Plant Giveaway (11:30 AM - 1 PM, Western Community Garden)

  • Awards & Accomplishments:

    - Alissa Centivany
    - Anabel Quan-Haase

  • Publications & Presentations:

    - Aloa Alota (PhD'25, Media Studies)
    - Chris Arsenault
    - Pinar Barlas
    - Juan Andrés Bello
    - Lucia Cedeira Serantes
    - Alissa Centivany
    - Busra Copuroglu
    - Anastazia Csegeny
    - Maria-Gorretti Ekhorutomwen
    - Giada Ferrucci
    - Alison Hearn
    - Heather Hill
    - Santasil Mallik
    - JP Mann
    - Franciso Mendina
    - Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood (BA'12, MIT)
    - Sodiq Onaolapo
    - Danica Pawlick-Potts (PhD'25, LIS)
    - Anabel Quan-Haase
    - Joanna Redden
    - Paulette Rothbauer
    - Nafiz Zaman Shuva (PhD'20, LIS)
    - Sarah Smith
    - Luke Stark
    - Aditi Vashistha

  • In the Media:

    - Juan Andrés Bello
    - Alissa Centivany (with Dorotea Gucciardo, Alison Hearn, Joanna Redden and Luke Stark)
    - Joanna Redden

  • Additional Activities of Note:

    - Juan Andrés Bello
    - Alissa Centivany
    - Amanda Grzyb
    - Joanna Redden

  • News from the FIMS Grad Library:

    - Reading Week Closure
    - The Terrace is Open
    - Upcoming Events at the Library
    - Make of the Month

  • Next Issue:


Coming Events

Transcendent Memory: State Violence, Solidarity, and Community-Based Research in Postwar El Salvador
June 4 - December 22, 2026
Main floor of Weldon Library
Accessible during  the open hours of the library
Description: The exhibition is curated by Dr. María Laura Flores Barba with assistance from Amanda Grzyb and Reynaldo Hernández. It includes a range of artistic, architectural, and documentary pieces that reflect the diverse work of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador collaborative research team (www.elsalvadormemory.org). More details.

Poetry by the River
Saturday, June 13, 2026
12:30 p.m. (kick off starts at 1PM)
Innovation Works, 201 King Street
Description: Guest Anna Swanson will be reading from The Garbage Poems, and will be joined by poets Tom Cull, Cassidy Gregorio, and others. There will be music with Derek and Shawn Durant. Follow Antler River Poetry for updates. This event is free to attend and accessible. Co-sponsored by Antler River Poetry, the London Arts Council, and Melissa Adler's SSHRC-funded prohect, "What the Antelope Knows."

Workshop: Using AI Tools for Literature Searching
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Zoom (register)
Description: This workshop explores how AI tools can be used for literature searching. It looks at the difference between AI chatbots, search engines, and academic search engines before offering some strategies for finding scholarly sources with them (read more).

Workshop: Data Sources at Western
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Zoom (register)
Description: This session will provide an overview of licensed data sources that Western Libraries provides access to. as well as open (free) data sources. International data sources, Canadian data, opinion polls are part of our offerings. Guidance on where to find data will be part of the overview.

Workshop: Working with Digitized Primary Sources
Thursday, June 25, 2026
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Zoom (register)
Description: This workshop looks at digitized primary sources. Finding these materials takes practice and requires multiple strategies in a range of repositories, many of which are searchable online today. Learn strategies for finding digitized primary sources and be inspired to do further research in libraries and archives.

Workshop: Designing Data Visualization Dashboards
Thursday, June 25, 2026
12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Zoom (register)
Description: ArcGIS Dashboards are widely used to communicate data in a clear, dynamic, and interactive way—supporting research, decision-making, and public engagement. From tracking severe weather events with the Northern Tornadoes Project to monitoring infrastructure, campus operations, and environmental change, dashboards help turn complex data into accessible insights.

Workshop: Story Maps for Knowledge Mobilization
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Zoom (register)
Description: Story Maps are widely used across the world as a dynamic knowledge mobilization tool—transforming data, research, and stories into engaging, interactive web experiences. By blending maps with text, images, and multimedia, they make complex ideas accessible and impactful.

FIMS Seminar Series: Sananda Sahoo
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
12:00 p.m. - 1:20 p.m.
Attend in person: FNB 4130
Attend online: Zoom
Presented by FIMS Postdoctoral Associate Sananda Sahoo as a special Summer Seminar. Title and abstract TBA.


Important Dates

- Wednesday, June 10, 2026 - FIMS Convocation Reception and Ceremony
- Thursday, June 18, 2026 - Meeting of the Board of Governors (10 AM, WIRB 3000)
- Monday, June 22, 2026 - Native Plant Giveaway (11:30 AM - 1 PM, Western Community Garden)


Awards & Accomplishments

Assistant Professor Alissa Centivany has been appointed one of two 2026-27 Western Massey Fellows. Massey College is a prestigious think tank at the University of Toronto that brings together graduate students, distinguished academicians, and established leaders from all disciplines, industries, and backgrounds to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge exchange. Western Massey Fellows receive Senior Resident privileges at Massey College, allowing them to actively participate in its intellectual and social life.

Professor Anabel Quan-Haase was honoured with the CITAMS Career Achievement Award. CITAMS - Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology - is affiliated with the American Sociological Association. This award recognizes a sustained body of research by a section member who has provided multiple outstanding contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the areas relevant to the section.


Publications & Presentations

Aloa Alota, PhD'25 (Media Studies), authored an article titled "As Alberta flirts with separation, debates over immigration intensify," published in New Canadian Media on June 2. The article was also republished by The Walrus on June 10.

Assistant Professor Chris Arsenault, Assistant Professor Alissa Centivany, and LIS doctoral candidate JP Mann, co-authored the following paper:

Arsenault, C., Centivany, A., & Mann, J. (2026). “Proprietary publisher pushback: An analysis of responses from the “Big Five” academic journal firms to business model critiques from Canadian researchers” in Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS/Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI.

JP Mann presented the paper at the CAIS/ACSI Conference.

Professor Centivany also co-authored the following publication with LIS PhD student Aditi Vashistha:

Vashistha, A., Nayak, A., Centivany, A., Gautam, A. (2026), “Synthetic Agents, Personhood and Legitimacy in Representational Contexts,” presented at Aligning AI for Safety, Sustainability, and Humanity, Western University, June 2026.


Aditi Vashistha presented the paper on behalf of the group. 

Additionally, Professor Alissa Centivany appeared on two panels:

Invited Panelist: “Responsible AI”, Canadian AI Conference, Simon Fraser University: https://www.caiac.ca/en/conferences/canadianai-2026/responsible-ai

Lead Panelist: “Empowering Community Through Repair”, Canadian Repair Convention, Dalhousie University


The Starling Centre supported the Civil Society Summit on the AI Industry, held in Montreal on May 22-23. All of the Starling co-directors - professors Alissa Centivany, Alison Hearn, Joanna Redden and Luke Stark - attended and Professor Redden co-presented a "Preliminary Report-Back from the People's Consultation on AI". Other FIMS connections included Danica Pawlick-Potts (PhD'25, LIS), who sat on a panel titled "Intersections of Canadian and Indigenous data sovereignty," and Professor Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood (BA'12, MIT), who moderated a panel titled "How union and worker co-ops are responding to AI."

Associate Professor Joanna Redden additionally gave two invited talks on "AI Governance in Practice: Why Attention to Impact Matters" in May, the first to the York Centre for AI and Society on May 7 at York University, and the second to the Data and Model Protection in Generative AI workshop co-located with the Canadian Conference on AI, Robots & Vision at SFU, May 25.

Pinar Barlas, LIS PhD candidate, Professor Alison Hearn and Associate Professor Joanna Redden presented their paper titled, "Big 'Mother' is Watching: Investigating the Impacts of the Canada Revenue Agency Automated Applications," at the Data Justice Conference in Cardiff on June 2.

Assistant Professor Juan Andrés Bello will be one of the speakers at this year's DC/DOX in Washington, DC, June 11-14. Professor Bello will participate in a panel titled, "Archival Storytelling & the Documentary Imagination."

Dr. Lucia Cedeira Serantes, Assistant professor (SA), moderated two panels during the 2026 Toronto Comics Art Festival (TCAF). On Friday June 5 during the Librarians and Educators Day she moderated the panel entitled "Being Human is Hard: Mental Health in YA Comics" with five comics creators of works that touch on different mental heath issues and have teens and YA as their main target audience. On Sunday June 7 during TCAF General Programming, moderated the panel "Publishing for the Revolution", with five comics publishers to chat about the role of comics to construct a better world.

Assistant Professor Busra Copuroglu presented a paper titled "Hanging Over Like a Lazy Rain Cloud: Describing a Feel in Rachel Cusk's Second Place," at ACCUTE 2026 (June 4-7). She also participated in a panel titled How Should a Person be Bored? 

Anastazia Csegeny, PhD student in Media Studies, presented the following conference papers:

"'A Little-Boy-Shaped Hole in the Universe': Caregiver Grief and the Catharsis of Re-Imagining in Rick Louis' Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars" at the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics annual conference on June 5, held at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, ON, as part of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

"'Rugged Unrestricted Life': Northern Voices, Histories, and Communities in Alison McCreesh's Degrees of Separation" at the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures annual conference on June 8, held at McGill University in Montréal, QC.

 

Professor Anabel Quan-Haase co-authored the following publications with HIS PhD student Maria-Gorretti Ekhorutomwen: 

Ekhorutomwen, M-G. and Quan-Haase, A. (2026). Social Media and Health Promotion among African Immigrant Communities in Canada: A Mixed-Methods Investigation. Poster presented at the African Day at Western Conference, organized by The African Institute, Western University. which was held on the 25th of May at Western University.

Ekhorutomwen, M-G. and Quan-Haase, A. (2026). AI, Health Information, and Bias: Examining Gaps in Governance and Accountability. Poster presented at the Aligning AI for Safety, Sustainability, and Humanity, Western University (AISSH-26) conference, organized by the Department of Computer Science, UWO. (In collaboration with Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, ON).

Maria-Gorretti presented the posters.


FIMS Postdoctoral Associate Giada Ferrucci co authored the following publication:

Ferrucci, G., Oliver, A., Belton, T., & Chacon, F. (2026). Toward Healing and Justice: Building Equitable Relationships with Community Archives in El Salvador. Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 13(1), 12.


Santasil Mallik, Media Studies PhD candidate, published a number of works recently. Firstly, he published the article "Contrapuntal Reading, Retraced: The Image, The Text, and The World in After the Last Sky" in photographies, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 174-195. It is a reworked version of the first chapter of my dissertation, which retraces Edward Said's hermeneutic of 'contrapuntal reading' in relation to Said’s engagement with photographic images.

Secondly, Santasil published the article "History in Light of Marginalia: Jitish Kallat's Antumbra" in the Montreal-based arts magazine Espace art actuel, Vol. 143, pp. 14-27. The article is bilingual, with the English-to-French translation by Catherine Barnabé.

And thirdly, he published a review of the book Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt by Benjamin P. Davis in Critical Inquiry.

Francisco Mendina, HIS PhD candidate, contributed a piece to the Global Health Equity Blog hosted by the Western Centre for Bioethics, titled "Listening to the limits of Understanding in Global Health."

Assistant Professor Nafiz Zaman Shuva (LIS PhD'20, now at Queens College, CUNY) and Professor Paulette Rothbauer co-authored the following paper:

“I was well informed. It was a great advantage”: Pre-arrival information seeking, information intelligence, and immigrants’ settlement, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, Online First, June 3, 2026. DOI: 10.1177/09610006261448918  


Professor Rothbauer also co-authored a paper with Assistant Professor Sodiq Onaolapo (LIS PhD'20), and Associate Professor Heather Hill entitled, “EDID initiatives for inclusive collections and spaces in academic libraries: Insights from Canadian university libraries” in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 52 (5): 103279. Volume 52, Issue 5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2026.103279.

Additionally, Professor Onaolapo published the following article:

Onaolapo, S. (2026). More Than Mere Documents: Examining the Roles of Collection Policies and Collection Strategies in Inclusive Collections in Canadian University Libraries. Collection Management, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2026.2675884


Associate Professor Sarah Smith presented the paper “Art diplomacy in North America” at the Art, Archives and Multilateral Futures workshop hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism in Geneva, Switzerland, June 5, 2026. 

ISIC 2026, held at McGill in Montreal, June 1-4 featured a number of FIMS-connected presenters and/or moderators, including Heidi Julien (PhD'97, LIS), Yimin Chen (PhD'22, LIS), Tiffany Veinot (PhD'09, LIS), Lisa Given (PhD'01, LIS), Danica Pawlick-Potts (PhD'25, LIS), and Professor Pam McKenzie. 


In the Media

Assistant Professor Juan Andrés Bello worked as an Archive Producer on the film Exclusion: Beyond Silence, which was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award. Iris Ng, the film's Cinematographer, was the winner in the Best Photography, Documentary or Factual category. The win was covered in an article titled "Ballinran documentary earns a 2026 Canadian Screen Award", published in the Stratford Beacon Herald on June 4.

Assistant Professor Alissa Centivany joined the call-in show CBC Maritime Connection on May 31 to answer listener questions about the right to repair movement.

Associate Professor Joanna Redden was quoted in an article titled, "Canada's AI strategy includes no new protections for water or climate," published in Canada's National Observer on June 4. 

Professor Redden was also quoted in an article titled, "Inside the black box reshaping Canada's benefits system," published on Ricochet on May 25.

Additionally, Professor Redden, Alissa Centivany, Dorotea Gucciardo, Alison Hearn and Luke Stark co-authored a response to the government's recently released national AI strategy that appeared in an article titled, "Canada Finally Has a National AI Strategy. Experts Hate It," published by The Walrus on June 6.


Additional Activities of Note

Juan Andrés Bello had the chance to walk the red carpet at the Canadian Screen Awards on May 31 due to his nomination in the Best Visual Research category for Mafia: Most Wanted. See the photo, snapped by George Pimentel. 

Assistant Professor Alissa Centivany co-organized the two-day Canadian Repair Convention, held at Dalhousie University May 21-22.

Professor Centivany was also active in policy and advocacy, providing expert testimoney to the Government of Manitoba's Standing Committee on Legislative Affairs on Bill 15 - The Consumer Protection Amendment Act, seeking repair-promoting reforms. The Bill later passed.

Finally, as co-chair and core expert of the AI Insights for Policymakers Program (CIFAR & Mila), Centivany provided consultation on AI to several federal and provincial agencies including the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Sante Quebec, Gov’t of Newfoundland & Labrador, as well as McGill’s Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy.

Post her appointment to the Order or Ontario, Professor Amanda Grzyb attended the investiture ceremony on June 1, where she was presented with her medal by the Honourable Edith Dumont, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario. See the photo.

The Data Justice Lab held it's fourth conference The Datafied State on June 1 and 2 in Cardiff. The event brought more than 200 people together to consider how data-driven technologies have transformed the state. The conference was co-organized by Arne Hintz, Lina Dencik, Emiliano Treré, Jess Brand and Joanna Redden.


News from the FIMS Grad Library

Reading Week Closure

The library will be closed from Monday, June 29th, 2026, to Friday, July 3rd, for Reading Week. Regular hours will resume on Monday, July 6th, 2026, at 10:00 AM.

The Terrace is Open!

With the return of the warm weather, we’ve opened the door to our terrace. FIMS students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to make use of this wonderful outdoor space during the library’s summer hours of operation. As a food and drink friendly space, the library’s terrace is a great spot for lunch or a coffee/tea break; please be sure to take any waste with you when you leave.

Upcoming Events at the Library

The FGL hosts workshops, lectures, and community events each term to support graduate teaching, learning, and research. Events are posted to our website (https://lib.fims.uwo.ca/events/) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/fimsgradlib/).

Meet-&-Greet with Rare Books

Student Library Assistant Christina Jacob is excited to share a Meet-&-Greet with Rare Books at the FIMS Graduate Library.

The FIMS Graduate Library is home to a number of Special Collections, including our Rare Books and Special Materials collection. These collections are available to browse online, but this is your opportunity to see them in person.

It turns out these books have a lot to say, not only about themselves, but how they got to FIMS, how they speak to the context of their time, and what collaboration on information finding can look like. During the event we’ll be discussing an overview of the collection as a whole, some of its history, and take a deeper look at four of the items in particular within the collection.

Coffee and cookies will be provided.

Thursday, June 11, 2026
12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
FIMS Graduate Library, 3020 D+E

Make of the Month – June – Paint by Number!

Take a break and join us for this month’s make of the month where we’ll be doing grown up Paint by Numbers! Work on your own canvas at your own pace, or add your touch to our collaborative community painting. No experience necessary. Just stop by, paint a little (or a lot), and enjoy a low-pressure creative space with others. All supplies provided.

Next Issue

The FIMS Bulletin is your source for news, announcements, and events pertaining to FIMS graduate programs. Submissions from the FIMS community are always welcome and may be sent via e-mail to fims-communications@uwo.ca.

The next issue of the FIMS Bulletin will be published on July 8. Other summer publication dates include August 5.