Vancouver Institute

CAN DEMOCRACY SURVIVE AI?

When: Where: P.A. Woodward Instructional Resources Centre, UBC’s Point Grey Campus, 2194 Health Sciences Mall, Vancouver.

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Dr. Taylor Owen

Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communication
Founding Director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, McGill University

Dr. Owen is a Canadian scholar and policy expert specializing in digital technologies, democracy, and international security. His research examines platform governance, information disorder, and the regulation of emerging technologies. Dr. Owen’s work has informed public policy debates in Canada and internationally, and he frequently advises governments and civil society organizations. He is the author of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (2015) and co-editor of The World Won’t Wait (2015) and Journalism after Snowden (2017). He writes regularly for major media outlets, including The Globe and Mail, and hosts the Big Tech podcast. Dr. Owen is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and a Fellow at the Public Policy Forum. In 2025, he was appointed to the Government of Canada’s AI Strategy Task Force.

Previous lecture

RE-IMAGINING REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Dr. Kimberley Brownlee’s research examines the social dimensions of human life, focusing on loneliness, belonging, social human rights, and freedom of association. Working in moral, political, and legal philosophy, she explores how sociability shapes human flourishing and how everyday interactional norms generate distinct virtues, vices, goods, and harms.

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RIVER IN PERIL: THE FRAGILITY OF THE MIGHTY FRASER RIVER

Dr. Jeremy G. Venditti is a geomorphologist and Director of the River Dynamics Laboratory at SFU. His research focuses on the fluid and sediment dynamics of large river systems, with particular attention to bedrock canyons, global sediment export, and the physics of extreme flooding. His work, including publications in Nature, has advanced understanding of flow and incision in bedrock rivers.