Just Powers Podcast

In this episode we will be reading “Performing Sovereignty: Forces to be Reckoned With” by Dr. Carla Taunton.

This text is included in the edited collection More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women, edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars, and published by Artexte in 2016. More Caught in the Act includes 29 comprehensive profiles of artists from across Canada, along with five contextual essays that place current performance strategies by women within broader art historical and cultural contexts. In the text by Dr. Taunton, she provides a critical account of several performance art interventions by Indigenous artists to explore the ways in which Indigenous performance art is connected to customary practices of transmitting histories, knowledges and cosmologies.

“Indigenous women’s performances tell important stories about their lived experiences while fuelling a dialogue about historic and contemporary individual and collective identities. Established performance artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Dana Claxton have claimed space for, supported, and mentored (a) new generation(s) of performance-based artists, among them: Ursula Johnson, Amy Malbeuf, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Maria Hupfield, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Caroline Monnet, Skeena Reece, and Jamie Black. Taken together, their performances explore Indigenous embodied practice and cultural knowledge, providing potent examples of performance-based assertions of self-determined representation, cultural continuance, and sovereignty” (Taunton, 2016, p. 35).

The complete anthology is available in hard copy through the Artexte website, at https://artexte.ca/en/editions/more-caught-in-the-act/.

Reference: Taunton, Carla. “Performing Sovereignty: Forces to be Reckoned With” In More Caught in the Act, Johanna Householder & Tanya Mars (eds), pp. 34-55. Toronto: Artexte, 2016.

This episode features a Read & Record of Liz Miller and Martin Allor’s 2016 essay “Choreographies of collaboration: Social engagement in interactive documentaries”, from Volume 10, Issue 1 of the journal ‘Studies in Documentary Film’ (Taylor & Francis).

In this text, the authors engage in a series of in-depth conversations with socially engaged Canadian directors, producers and distribution strategists, in order to analyze new opportunities for using interactive non-linear documentary in order to practice interventions towards social change.

“We spoke to the directors, producers and outreach strategists of three high-profile socially engaged Canadian web documentary projects to better understand how they were adapting their methods to navigate what scholar and practitioner Meg McLagan calls the media complex, where media moves across multiple platforms and is remediated and reframed along the way (2012, p. 305). Within this complex, impact does not culminate around a single text, but through a series of primary and secondary texts including articles, tweets, radio shows, community call outs, curated conversations, campaigns and more. Within this constantly shifting media complex, users have diverse interpretive frameworks and expectations around their ability to participate with, contribute to, or share with others. Makers and users are also convening in an increasingly crowded and busy mediasphere. As a result, directors must shift their expectations and create media and infrastructures that take into account limited attention spans as well as multiple layers of engagement” (Miller & Allor, 2016, p. 54).

This article was recorded with permission of the publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com. The article “Choreographies of collaboration: Social engagement in interactive documentaries” can be accessed in Studies in Documentary Film (Taylor & Francis) at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17503280.2016.1171686.

Reference: Miller, Liz & Allor, Martin. “Choreographies of collaboration: social engagement in interactive documentaries.” Studies in Documentary Film, 10:1 (2015), pp. 53-70. DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2016.1171686.

In this episode we will be reading “Amateur video and the challenge for change” by Dr. Janine Marchessault. This text is included in the collection “Challenge for Change”, edited by Thomas Waugh, Michael Brenda Baker & Ezra Winton and published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2016.

The collection offers an examination of the radical politics and cinema of the legendary documentary film program — Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle — which ran from 1967 to 1980 and produced films in both French and English, challenging audiences, subjects, and filmmakers to confront sexism, poverty, and marginalization in the hope of developing community as well as political awareness and empowerment. Here, Dr. Marchessault returns to an essay she wrote in the early 1990s, in order to offer a critical perspective on one aspect of Challenge for Change, namely, the way the program underplayed structures of power by emphasizing the immediate and seemingly unmediated nature of communication forms that were being animated by the NFB filmmakers involved in the project at the time.

“While anthropology’s nefarious “participant observation” seeks to resolve power relations by positioning the observer inside the field to be investigated, the Fogo process sidestepped power altogether. It inscribed not a self-reflective gaze, one that takes account of the observer’s contradictory status of belonging, but a self-reflective observation that eliminated boundaries altogether. Using film, participants could observe their own behaviour on the screen a posteriori. Low theorized that the media – film, and as we shall see, especially video – could be made to function as a collective mirror, enabling communities “to view themselves, discover their strengths and bring their ideas to better order.” Thus , what came to matter was not so much the final product but the use of media ”as a sparkplug for process” (Low, 1973). Aimed at strengthening community communications, the process involved building consensus and advocacy around particular issues”  (Marchessault, 2008, p. 358).

Challenge for Change is available through McGill-Queen’s University Press. (link: http://www.mqup.ca/challenge-for-change-products-9780773536623.php)

Reference: Marchessault, Janine. “Amateur Video and the Challenge for Change.” Challenge for Change. Eds. Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton. Montreal: MQUP, 2010. Print.

For our first episode in Series II, we are excited to share a Read & Record of the 2018 article “(Re)framing Big Data: Activating Situated Knowledges and a Feminist Ethics of Care in Social Media Research” by Dr. Mary Elizabeth Luka & Dr. Mélanie Millette.

In this article, the authors seek to problematize assumptions and trends in “big data” digital methods and research through an intersectional feminist lens. Articulating their critique through a feminist ethics of care, the article poses a number of practical questions about practices of care in social media research, pointing toward future research directions.

“The sooner we understand social media data — big, small, thick, or lively — as a humanly constructed artifact shaped by power relationships and crafted according to certain values and standing points, the more we can realize how these processes enable and shape our decisions about our methodology. Both of our examples build on Annette Markham’s (2013) framing strategies and our own extension of Deborah Lupton’s (2015) notion of “lively” data, over time and through the “real” (materialized) worlds of situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988). This allows us to draw on an updated ethics of care to illustrate how different kinds of data—implicated at different registers of engagement over time — can “turn” us in practical ways to critically rethink the ongoing intersectional networks of relations, values, and ethical commitments that undergird our research and those of others” (Luka & Millette, 2018, p. 3-4).

The article is recorded and shared under a Creative Commons Licence and available as a full text and PDF online through SAGE Journals here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305118768297

Reference: Luka, Mary Elizabeth and Millette, Mélanie. “(Re)framing Big Data: Activating Situated Knowledges and a Feminist Ethics of Care in Social Media Research,” Social Media & Society, 2018, pp. 1-10. DOI: 10.1177/2056305118768297.

Introducing the Just Powers Podcast!

The Just Powers Podcast features readings and discussions of scholarly work focused on the pressing energy and environmental issues of our times. The first iteration of the podcast features a series of ‘Read & Records’ (or R&Rs) that highlight scholarly work by feminist and decolonial scholars that have informed both the thinking and practices of the Just Powers team, and that we hope can likewise influence the way others think through our current conundrum.

For our first episode, we are excited to share a Read & Record of the introduction to the recently published (2018) book Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman.

Petroculturesprovides much-needed research that addresses head-on the conceptual, philosophical, and theoretical challenges that emerge from a sustained examination of the social and cultural significance of energy in various forms—oil being only the most prevalent form at present.

“Oil and its outcomes – speed, plastics, and the luxuries of capitalism, to name a few – have lubricated our relationship to one another and the environment for the duration of the twentieth century. As we struggle to transition to less carbon-intensive energies and lifestyles, this collection provides scholars and engaged publics with a more nuanced understanding of oil as an energy source and substance imbricated into every aspect of our daily lived realities. Oil transformed our lives in the twentieth century. Might we transform our lives in the twenty-first century, reshaping our petrocultures into societies whose energy use doesn’t imperil the future and the environment we inhabit?” (Wilson, Szeman, & Carlson, 2018, p. 15-16).

The book is available from McGill-Queen’s University Press, and is also available from Amazon.

Reference: Carlson, Adam; Wilson, Sheena; Szeman, Imre. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018.