Conveners

Loren March is a queer and trans geographer and PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning. Their work focuses broadly on queer urban ecologies, examining affective relations in contexts of urban redevelopment and the bio/necropolitics of urban greening initiatives in Toronto. Loren engages with the possibilities of queer affective ethnography as a style of doing research that pays attention to marginalized relational lifeworlds, experiences and stories. They are interested in the generative possibilities of research, in experimenting with representational possibilities, and in using creative methods that can take academic work beyond the university and conventional written forms.

Gregoire Benzakin is a PhD candidate in the department of Geography and Planning. At the intersection of infrastructure studies, more-than human geographies and philosophy, his research explores the pluriversal dimensions of digital infrastructures. Focusing on the controversies surrounding Sidewalk Toronto, a smart city project which was abandoned in May 2020, Gregoire combines ethnographic methods with speculative philosophy to recast the project’s failure, and deploy an alternative narrative of Sidewalk Toronto as an unsettled trajectory. He is interested in exploring methods of dramatisation that reframe what it means to inherit failed infrastructure projects and nurture the possibility of other stories, other worlds and other futures, on the basis of what is already here but often unperceived, the latent virtualities in the cracks of our modern ground.