Writer Gladwell Pamba at Dawson Reads event Feb. 18

Gladwell Pamba is a Montreal-based writer from Kenya who has previously won writing fellowships including the International Literary Seminars, Oxbelly Writers’ Retreat, Greece & CC Adetula Fellowship for African Women in Creative Writing. She was the winner of 2025 Malahat Review Far Horizons Award & Ibua Manuscript Prize 2025. Gladwell has previously been nominated for the Best of Net and longlisted for Writivism Short Story Prize.

Her works are anthologized while others appear in The Rumpus, The Northwest Review, Waxwing Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is currently doing her PhD in English at Concordia University.

• Wednesday, Feb. 18, 4-6PM in 4C.1
• Opening reading by Dorji Dhatsenpa    
• A short reading and a Q&A

Standing room crowd at Social Science Week talk on Tik Tok

Dawson's Reception Room (5B.16) was overflowing on Feb. 10 for the talk entitled Feed-Work, Dream-Work: A TikTok Phenomenology by Samuele Collu, an Assistant Professor of Medical and Psychological Anthropology at McGill University.

In rapid fire style, he shared findings and insights from his research work over the last three years with McGill’s Scrolling Societies Lab. His work has focused on what is happening to young people when they are looking at content on Tik Tok.

He says the pyschic life is being territorialized by big technology companies. In his reasearch, he tracked facial expressions, eye movements and predictions of a viewer's emotional state. Research participants also journaled what they experienced. He likened it to talking about dreams.

Samuele does not aim to make people technophobic. He wants young people and others to understand what is happening to our brain on Tik Tok. The short answer to that is that after about 20 minutes many users go into a trance like state where they are very open to suggestions.