Dr. Théo Lepage-Richer is a SSHRC/FRQ-SC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. There, he works on the environmental politics of computing in Canada, with a specific focus on the interplay between resource management, data extraction, and Indigenous dispossession. Previously, he was a SSHRC/FRQ-SC Fellow at Brown university, where he obtained a PhD in Modern Culture and Media. His recent work on government organization and artificial intelligence appeared in the journal Big Data & Society.
Education:
Brown University, Department of Modern Culture and Media, 2023.
Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media with a Graduate Certificate in Science, Technology, and Society.
Goldsmiths, University of London, Centre for Cultural Studies, 2014.
M.A. in Cultural Studies (with distinction).
McGill University, Department of English, 2013.
B.A. in Cultural Studies (with distinction).
Publications:
Refereed Journal Articles
Lepage-Richer, Théo and Fenwick McKelvey. “States of Computing: On Government Organization and Artificial Intelligence in Canada.” Big Data & Society 9.2, 2022: 1-15.
Leclair, Marichelle, Ann-Pierre Raiche, Marjolie Latulippe, Théo Lepage-Richer, Yanick Charette, Laurence Roy, and Anne Crocker. “Quantified Desistance: A Scoping Review of Conventions in the Scientific Literature.” Crime & Delinquency 68.10, 2022: 1794-1818.
Lepage-Richer, Théo. “Infrastructure of Vision: Envisioning the Future through Market Devices.” Computational Culture 7, 2019: 1-9.
Lepage-Richer, Théo. “Media After Life.” Media Fields Journal 14, 2019: 1-12.
Lepage-Richer, Théo. “If Madness Could Speak: Reconstituting the Discourse of Madness and its Relation to Truth.” Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 12.1, 2018: 88-98.
Lepage-Richer, Théo. “On Modes of Digital Embodiment.” Gnovis 18.1, 2017: 17-32.
Book Chapter
Lepage-Richer, Théo. “Adversariality in Machine Learning Systems: On Neural Networks and the Limits of Knowledge.” The Cultural Life of Machine Learning, Jonathan Roberge and Michael Castelle (eds). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 197-225.
Forthcoming
Dhaliwal, Ranjodh, Théo Lepage-Richer, and Lucy Suchman. Neural Networks. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming.
Research:
Dr. Lepage-Richer’s contribution to the study of new media technologies centers on the articulation of new ways to understand their environmental impact as well as their role in inscribing settler colonial practices of extraction in infrastructural form. Through archival research, fieldwork, and community engagement, his work contributes to the growing literature on the environmental politics of computing by focusing on how new media infrastructures render ecosystems and Indigenous lands alike legible as resources to be extracted. In doing so, he advances an environmentally rooted approach that locates the history of Canada’s media policy and infrastructures within that of extractivism and settler colonialism.