Academic Title: Associate Professor
Office: EA3118
Phone: 403.440.8513
E-mail: mtruscello@mtroyal.ca
BA (University of Waterloo)
MA (Univesity of Waterloo)
PhD (University of Waterloo)
Michael Truscello is an Associate Professor in English and General Education at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta.
Scholarly Interests:
His research interests include anarchism, the politics and poetics of infrastructure, petrocultures, and media studies. He is the author of Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2020).
He is co-editor with Ajamu Nangwaya of Why Don't The Poor Rise Up? Organizing the Twenty-First Century Resistance (AK Press, 2017).
In 2013, he co-edited with Uri Gordon a special issue of Anarchist Studies on anarchism and technology.
In 2011, he released the documentary film Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity.
He would like to acknowledge that he lives and works on the Treaty 7 traditional territories of the Blackfoot, Sarcee, and Nakoda peoples.
Teaching Statement:
I think my emphasis in the classroom on civic engagement, derived from years of experience with teaching and activism, creates an atmosphere in which students want to interrogate the world around them while acquiring a lexicon and methodology for doing so. My goal in the classroom is to challenge the students, but not in a dogmatic or domineering fashion. I want to convince them to want to care. I do so in part by creating what Joseph Lowman, author of Mastering the Techniques of Teaching, calls "intellectual excitement," a combination of clear presentations and stimulating emotional impact on students. While many professors exhibit a desire to impress the students with concepts beyond their reach, I learned long ago to focus on clarity of thought and the ability to demonstrate concepts from different perspectives. Students need to understand how to analyze ideas and integrate them into new situations.
Scholarly Activity:
Truscello, M. Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure. MIT Press, 2020
Truscello, M., co-editor with A. Nangwaya. Why Don’t The Poor Rise Up? Organizing Twenty-First Century Resistance. AK Press, 2017.
Truscello, M. “The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet,” South Atlantic Quarterly 122.4 (2023): 811-826.
Truscello, M. with Adam Carlson. “Technocratic Fiction, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Counter-Insurgent Infrastructure.” September 6, 2023. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00111619.2023.2254221.
Truscello, M., with Renae Watchman. “Blood Quantum and Fourth Cinema: Post- and Paracolonial Zombies,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video. January 2022.
Selected Grants, Honours and Awards:
Invited keynote speaker, “Nihilism.Hope Conference,” Cultural, Social and Political Thought, University of Victoria, April 24, 2016. My talk, “Political Suicide,” is available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUouHI4B7e4.
Academic Prize: “Silver Medallist, Best Dissertation in Canada.” Conferred by Canadian Association for Graduate Studies. 2006.
Fellowship: "Aid to Research Workshops and Conferences in Canada (co-applicant)". CAD25,000. Conferred by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). March 2010.