2022
APRIL:
AM Kanngieser and Zoe Todd
2021
JANUARY:
Stephanie Loveless
FEBRUARY:
J. R. Carpenter
MARCH:
Rachel Epp Buller
JUNE:
Amanda Gutiérrez
OCTOBER:
RESEARCH-CREATION
IN URGENT TIMES
NOVEMBER:
Fiona Foley
Artistic practices and forms have a critical role to play at times of crisis. Art seeds the critical and speculative imaginations needed to trouble our current ways of living and dying; it prioritizes aesthetic and affective spaces within which we not only reflect on what is so, but to work on imagining and modelling things otherwise in ways that both integrative, in terms of transforming the materiality of daily life, and excessive, in terms of reaching beyond what we currently know to be possible.
Art, Activism, and Global Crisis is a series of outreach events that include public-facing presentations, masterclass workshops (held virtually), and an eColloquium accompanied by an online exhibition and publication. Highlighting and nurturing crucial thinking on art, activism, and social justice at a moment of global crisis, the speaker series, masterclass workshops, and eColloquium will bring together an interdisciplinary and international roster of voices (artistic and academic) on art, social justice, ecology, performance, and politics that, perhaps counterintuitively, given the urgency that generally attends the terms of crisis, work through "slow" practices like durational performance, deep listening, and sensory attunement. All events will focus on the need for a complex understanding of ecological, de-colonial, and anti-capitalist ethics in contemporary debate on the role of art and global crisis.
In the context of COVID-19, how we do our research is necessarily changing. Art, Activism, and Global Crisis is deeply collaborative and organized by adapting forms and methods that traditionally took place in person. However, more than a stop-gap initiative intended to maintain research until things can return to "normal", this project will move methods with a proven track record on the ground into the virtual realm, experimenting to extend the limits of what we heretofore imagined feasible online. This series of outreach events will build research-creation capacity and political agency by bringing local practitioners, researchers, and students into conversations with scholars, artists and activists from across the country and abroad, thinking through what it means to make art informed by social and ecological justice politics responsive to the demands of planetary crisis.
Supported by the President’s Grants for the Creative and Performing Arts from the Killam Research Fund at the University of Alberta, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.