Research Interests

Dr. Suzanne Smythe works at the intersections of adult literacy, digital equity and community-based learning. Her current research program explores new technologies, literacies and digital justice in community-based adult learning settings, asking questions such as,

How are automation and datafied ecosystems transforming literacies and pedagogies in community settings?
How do we perceive and intervene in digital and algorithmic discrimination and exclusions as these occur in everyday encounters in digital education?
What new theories, methods and critical and experimental pedagogies make more just digital ecosystems possible?

See for example, The new literacies of automation (SSHRC IG) with Nathalie Sinclair (co-PI), Gwenaëlle André and Haidekaye Williams.

Dr. Smythe has recently taken a detour to explore COVID19 as literacy work. In the project Mapping and theorizing technology innovations among digitally excluded communities during COVID19 with Nathalie Sinclair, Amea Wilbur, Marcela Mancilla-Fuller, they ask how frontline literacy and language outreach workers repair gaps, fissures and inequalities in advice and technologies available to newcomer communities during the pandemic:

What do these pedagogic inventions and practices say about information ecoystems available to racialized communities?
How might these interventions inform more responsive and intuitive health literacy advice and information?