Hi, I’m Rob Arcand.

I’m a writer, editor, web developer, and PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal.

My academic research examines the political economy of media technologies and their impact on social and cultural life. I draw on cultural studies, science and technology studies, economic sociology, media history, and other research disciplines as part of a sustained effort to study how technology shapes lived experience, from its phenomena to its social, cultural, political, and economic histories. I wrote an MA thesis about the music streaming platform Spotify and am currently working on a doctoral dissertation (initially supervised by Dr. Jonathan Sterne, now supervised by Dr. Darin Barney) about the history of the global financial sector as told through the display boards, trading terminals, stock tickers, and other interfaces through which financial markets have long been (co)constructed. I hold an MA from Duke University and a BA from The College of William & Mary in Virginia.

In addition to my academic scholarship, I continue to work as a journalistic reporter and cultural critic. I’ve held staff positions at the music outlets Pitchfork and SPIN, where I conducted interviews, covered breaking news, and wrote essays and reported features on popular music, music technology, and the political economy of the music industry. Beyond these positions, I have also published freelance writing on music, visual art, film, books, and technology with outlets including Artforum, Art in America, Billboard, BOMB, The Fader, The Nation, n+1, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rolling Stone, Vice, and more.

I also continue to work as a web developer, software engineer, and developer advocate. I have worked on a variety of products and teams ranging from scrappy startups to some of the biggest technology companies in the world, but tend to favor smaller front-end projects with JavaScript and associated technologies like React and Node. I also have a background as a Wordpress developer, am fairly comfortable with PHP and Python, and am always open to learning new technologies specific to your environment and team.

Feel free to get in touch at robarcand07@gmail.com if you’d like to work together, or just to say hello.