Lecturer & Researcher
Institute of Communication, Culture and Information Technology
ICCIT
University of Toronto
Mississauga

Research Interests || Technology and the Body

"The face" is its own organizing system: an ideological unit of citizenship independent of the original corporeal body it represents, but more than the unitary whole--confounding established scientific thinking.

The face is a visual icon organizing the construction of identity that is at times more authoritative than actual embodiment.

Teaching Interests || Visual Culture and Interaction Design

Teaching Philosophy:
As an instructor, I like to stir students up from their complacency. I believe that my role is not just to convey information and ideas that form the foundation of teaching, but also to push the students to use those ideas to advance their own creativity and critical thinking.

I believe that the role of an instructor should be that of a facilitator. To facilitate successful learning that students need to become invested in their work through interaction and critical exploration rather than repetition and memorization. I believe that the student experience should involve both practical experience and meta-reflection on the domain of inquiry. 

My PhD thesis investigates ``the face`` as both as a medium of ideological content and as a set of socio-institutional practices legitamizing ``essential`` identity. I have chosen to take this dual approach to open-up and problematize the Face-identity myth--the connotative linking of facial imagery to concepts of essential identity. The face-identity myth draws on a central tension in Western democracies-between the Enlightenment status of the individual and the dehumanizing individuation of the body through national identity schemes.

Drawing on a variety of empirical materials such as scientific articles, government documents, and cultural texts, my thesis is an attempt to position `the face` as a unique technique of discipline. My genealogy of the face unpacks the face-identity myth in order to understand its implications for citizenship and the construction of self in the modern institution-state.