Communication Research for Social Change 2025 Project Showcase

Martyrdom Inc

Bassam Abun-Nadi

This podcast project explores how both local and diasporic actors in the Palestinian community combine indigenous methods with the rapidly changing media landscape to commemorate Palestinian martyrs, overcoming the challenges to memory preservation posed by Palestinian statelessness, diaspora, and settler-colonialism.

In commemorating martyrs through funeral processions, print media, multi-lingual social media content, and through resistance music, Palestinians have largely adapted to their statelessness and diaspora and have transformed their traditional obstacles into advantages. These commemorative strategies, whether traditional and deeply rooted or innovative and cutting-edge, incorporate digital methods resulting in a high degree of intertextuality. I call this memory preservation industry Martyrdom Inc, and the episodes of this series have been added to my podcast PreOccupation: A-Not-So-Brief History of Palestine.

The Racial Question Must Be Answered: Anti-racism as a Project against Denial of Humanity

Mamadou Ba

This project examines, from my position as a Black person and from my trajectory of activism, race as a political and epistemological question central to contemporary democracies. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of public intervention in Portugal and Europe, I argue that racism is not an anomaly but a structural legacy of colonial domination and racial capitalism. Through a hybrid methodology that brings together autoethnography, archival research, and critical theory, I analyse both “recent” archives of activism and media (2017–2023) and “distant” colonial vestiges that continue to shape national imaginaries. By translating personal writings, institutional documents, and extensive photographic and videographic material into a critical narrative, I propose an “object-event”: a visual and textual intervention linking lived experience with the genealogy of antiracist thought. Engaging with decolonial theory, Black Marxism, intersectionality, and Afropessimism in a multidisciplinary shape, I situate Portuguese antiracist struggles within broader global movements, aiming to reinsert race into debates on justice and democracy as a transformative horizon. The project emerges from a deeply autoethnographic engagement, using my lived experience as both analytical lens and political engagement. The hostility and persecution I face, from the far right to hegemonic institutions, are not personal deviations but structural reactions triggered when the racial order is named from its margins. My position as a Black activist, researcher, and public figure becomes a site where theory and vulnerability converge, revealing how colonial logics organise democratic life and transform the Black subject into a target of surveillance and containment. This project thus rethinks humanity itself, producing new corporealities, spatialities, and regimes of sharing and knowledge that expand the possibilities of human coexistence.

Breaking The Digital Skinner Box: Participatory Sensemaking in the Age of Antisocial Media

Ciaran Irwin

COVID-19 represented the first instance of a global pandemic since the advent of Web 2.0 and social media; biological and memetic virality intertwined, with tragic results. COVID-19 cases disproportionately impacted those most vulnerable in our societies, while an “infodemic” of true, false and contested information revealed similar inequalities and power dynamics in our communications infrastructures. In an economic context where tribal anger, fear, outrage and conflict are more easily cultivated and commodified than social cohesion and shared sensemaking, the ruptures and reconfigurations of our online and offline communities continue to shape our lives today.

Starting from my experiences with anti-2SLGBTQIA+ movements in 2022 and their connections to prior anti-vaccine & anti-lockdown protests, my project begins with framing misinformation and polarization as externalities of business models that prioritize engagement and market dominance over social cohesion or informed decision-making.

Combining research into social media infrastructures and tech industry business models with my background in the design and delivery of media, live events, and workshops, the next steps of my project are to co-create public engagement workshops across a range of communities and contexts. In partnership with SFU’s Digital Democracies Institute, and with an initial focus on healthcare workers and frontline health communicators, our first workshops seek to bridge the gap between research of online dynamics with offline experiences around conflict, mistrust and vaccine hesitancy.

Building on this work, future workshops are designed to engage participants in understanding how social media works in the attention economy, the downstream, offline effects of platform business models, while considering how we might reclaim context and co-create our online and offline spaces, by and for the benefit of the communities themselves.

A Cultural Biography of the Ghana Must Go Bag: Migration, Materiality, and Meaning

Imaobong Udofa

A checkered plastic bag, once a symbol of forced migration, now walks the runways of Paris. Its story begins in Asia, where waterproof tarp material was used to shelter migrant homes in China and Hong Kong. Over time, the bag circulated widely, becoming a practical companion for those in transit. In 1983, it was carried by thousands of Ghanaians expelled from Nigeria, so emblematic it earned the name “Ghana Must Go.” This project traces the cultural biography of the Ghana Must Go bag through archival research, oral histories, and documentary filmmaking. It explores how meaning gathers around objects that move, how histories of migration, survival, and reinvention become embedded in material form.

The bag has become a global artifact, its symbolism shaped by displacement, endurance, and reinvention across borders. Its visibility is shaped by power: who frames its story, who profits from its image, and who insists on its significance. Like many cultural artifacts, its meaning is not fixed but continually negotiated. This film asks what it means to narrate an object whose story remains open to contestation and reclamation.

Project Compassion Now (PCN): Crisis, Graphic Design, and Public Intervention

Shafira Vidyamaharani

What's in a logo? Graphic designer Shafira Rezkita Vidyamaharani presents the development of a branded entity through the lens of grassroots activism, artistic production, and subcultural heritage at the height of British Columbia's ongoing toxic supply crisis. Inspired by early HIV/AIDS activism and the 1987-1994 "Imagevirus" project by Canadian art collective General Idea, "Project Compassion Now (PCN)" is a research-creation project that uses mechanisms of repetition and viral transmission to investigate how logos assemble meaning through a series of graphic design objects such as stickers, posters, and ephemera. An accompanying, site-specific exhibition will be on view at the Belzberg Library of Simon Fraser University's Harbour Centre Campus starting Friday, December 5th, 2025 until 2026.