FEATURED AUTHOR
Tanner Mirrlees
Tanner Mirrlees is a critical political economist of the global digital media technology and cultural industries.
Biography
Tanner Mirrlees is the Director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University. A passionate educator, Mirrlees has designed and taught more than twenty-five unique social science and humanities courses across disciplines such as communication and digital media studies, political science and international relations, and the history, sociology and philosophy of technology. His current research focuses on topics in the political economy of communications such as Empire and communications and war and media, work and labour in the creative and digital industries, and far-right hate groups and social media platforms. Mirrlees is the author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire's Cultural Industry (UBC Press, 2016), Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization (Routledge, 2013), co-author of EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2019), and co-editor of Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) and The Television Reader (Oxford University Press, 2012). Mirrlees is also the author of over sixty publications, including research articles, book chapters, book reviews, encyclopedia entries, magazine articles and op-ed pieces. He has given over seventy-five public presentations across academic and community venues. Mirrlees is the president of the Canadian Communication Association (CCA) (2020-2022), the former convenor of the CCA’s annual meeting for the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a research associate of the Decimal Lab, a steering committee member of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism (CHBE), and a co-organizer of The Capitalism Workshop.Websites
Books
Featured Title
Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHCFyyefJa4
Published: Jun 18, 2020
A lecture on the special relationship between the US military and Hollywood underlying war movie making.
The Digital Revolution and its Discontents
Published: May 07, 2019
Mirrlees scrutinizes the rhetorics of "technological optimism," "technological pessimism," and "technological revolutionism," examines how Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (the "FAANG") shape digital technology with help from governments, and highlights some popular ways that workers, citizens, policy-makers, and publics are trying to reform and redesign the digital age in support of democracy and social justice.