select works
books
Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan
Duke University Press, 2022
The contributors to Re-Understanding Media advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan’s key text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, repurposing his insight that “the medium is the message” for feminist ends. They argue that while McLuhan’s theory provides a falsely universalizing conception of the technological as a structuring form of power, feminist critics can take it up to show how technologies alter and determine the social experiences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. This volume showcases essays, experimental writings, and interviews from media studies scholars, artists, activists, and those who work with and create technology. Among other topics, the contributors extend McLuhan’s discussion of transportation technology to the attics and cargo boxes that moved Black women through the Underground Railroad, apply McLuhan’s concept of media as extensions of humans to analyze Tupperware as media of containment, and take up 3D printing as a feminist and decolonial practice. The volume demonstrates how power dynamics are built into technological media and how media can be harnessed for radical purposes.
In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics
Duke University Press, 2014
The world is getting faster. This sentiment is proclaimed so often that it is taken for granted, rarely questioned or examined by those who celebrate the notion of an accelerated culture or by those who decry it. Sarah Sharma engages with that assumption in this sophisticated critical inquiry into the temporalities of everyday life. Sharma conducted ethnographic research among individuals whose jobs or avocations involve a persistent focus on time: taxi drivers, frequent-flyer business travelers, corporate yoga instructors, devotees of the slow-food and slow-living movements. Based on that research, she develops the concept of “power-chronography” to make visible the entangled and uneven politics of temporality. Focusing on how people’s different relationships to labor configures their experience of time, she argues that both “speed-up” and “slow-down” often function as a form of biopolitical socialcontrol necessary to contemporary global capitalism.
articles
A Manifesto for the Broken Machine
Camera Obscura, Duke University Press, 2020
“Sexism at [insert your favorite tech company here] has ceased to be a surprising headline. In 2017, former Google employee James Damore made headlines when he sent out a company-wide memo warning that diversity-based raining and hiring was bad for business. His leaked memo suggested that women’s biological
differences make them less capable than men of working in and with tech.”
Many McLuhans or None at All
Canadian Journal of Communication, 2019
“The Many McLuhans symposium took place at the University of Toronto on September 21, 2018, to honour and celebrate the designation of Marshall McLuhan: The Archives of the Future into the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This vast collection is made up of roughly 50 metres of archive documents in multiple media forms and 6,000 published items, including books heavily annotated by Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s archival collection is preserved and held at Library and Archives Canada, and his research library is held at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.
Going to Work in Mommy’s Basement
Boston Review, 2018
“In February 2016, the Internet buzzed with news that Roosh V—a pickup artist and creator of the anti-gay, anti-feminist website Return of Kings—appeared to be hiding out in his mother’s basement. Life imitates meme: the readiest insult to sling at such men—that they live in Mommy’s basement—turned out in this case to be true. Roosh V’s violent rhetoric really was compensating for a lack in the real world. However, the troll in Mommy’s basement is no joke; he is an emerging cultural and political figure, and Mommy’s basement—or its workplace analogue in the world of tech, a theme to which I will return—is an increasingly significant incubator for conservative ideas.”
Exit and the Extensions of Man
transmediale, 2017
“What does a real man do when things get tough at home? Runs out to buy cigarettes. Or so goes the male fantasy, as Sarah Sharma argued in her 2017 Marshall McLuhan Lecture, organized annually by transmediale and the Embassy of Canada in Berlin. The male fantasy of exit—the Sexit—pervades the masculine cultural imaginary at every level of society, from domestic space to the political sphere. After Grexit and Brexit, it should be abundantly clear how “pulling out” is a deceptively simple solution to real-life entanglements, and how the very privilege to imagine doing so is fundamentally a male prerogative. ”
Because the Night Belongs to Lovers: Occupy and the Time of Precarity
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2013
“Occupy did well to gather the spaces of everyday life: the streets, parks, squares, front steps of banks, city halls, classrooms, foreclosed buildings, and chapels. The physical occupation of a space, proximity to one another, signals the return of politics. Franco Bifo Berardi argues solidarity is based on the territorial and physical relationship between workers*one that cannot be sustained in the fragments of time produced by the neoliberal restructuring of labor.”