Professor Patrick McCurdy (PhD, LSE) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Ottawa, Canada. His research draws from media and communication, journalism as well as social movement studies to view media as a site and source of social struggle. Professor McCurdy's work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and edited collections. He is the co-author of Protest Camps (Zed, 2013) and co-editor of three books: Protest camps in international context: Spaces, infrastructures and media of resistance (Policy, 2017); Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism & Society (Palgrave, 2012) and Mediation and Protest Movements (Intellect, 2013).
Since 2013 he has taken an active interest in the struggle and evolution of oil sands/tar sands advertising, campaigning and contestation in Canada from 1970 until the present day. In 2016 Professor McCurdy won SSHRC & Compute Canada’s national competition, The Human Dimensions Open Data Challenge for “Mediatoil,” his online searchable database of oil sands imagery (www.mediatoil.ca). In April 2018, Patrick was awarded the 2017 Early Researcher Award from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa. Also, in 2018, Professor McCurdy released a graphic novel based on his research called “The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet.” The comic was co-developed with and published by Ad Astra Comix (Ottawa) and is also published as an open-source download by the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Currently, Professor McCurdy is working on a three year SSHRC Insight Grant (2018-2021) studying the legacy of “Tar Sands”, a banned and long-forgotten 1977 CBC docudrama about Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed’s negotiations of the Syncrude agreement. The project uses “Tar Sands” to analyze the rise and confluence of ‘the synthetic’ (energy, media and politics) and draw links between past and present conflicts over bitumen extraction. Patrick is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press for a project-based monograph and is also making a documentary film about “Tar Sands”.