| Art exhibition explores energy futures | Publication | 2019-12-19 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, "Ruth Beer", Jessie Beier, "Sean Caulfield", Evan G R Davies, "Wallace Edwards", "Soheila Esfahani", "Caitlin Fisher", "Joan Greer", "Steven Hoffman", "Tsēmā Igharas", Sourayan Mookerjea, "Satoshi Ikeda", "Luke Johnson", "Patrick Mahon", "Janice Makokis", "Lisa Moore", "Tegan Moore", Mark Simpson, "Scott Smallwood", "Rachel Snow", "Diana Steinhauer", "Clarence Whitestone", "Kurtis McAdam" |
| Behind the Scenes: iDoc and Future Energy Systems | Publication | 2017-11-29 | Kenneth Tam, Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea, Natalie Loveless |
| Des résidents de Bonnie Doon se concertent pour réduire leur consommation d'énergie/Bonnie Doon residents work together to reduce energy useRadio-Canada (ICI Alberta) profile by Katrine Deniset on La Cité community energy transition project, La Cité Résiliente: A Decade in Transition. | Publication | 2020-02-18 | Sheena L Wilson, Danika Jorgensen Skakum, Jessie Beier, "Daniel Cournoyer", "Laurence Mailhiot", "Shafraaz Kaba", "Trina Larsen", "Jacob Komar" |
| Energy Fair/Foire de l’énergie – Dec 5, 2019Blog post about iDoc/SEF student event at La Cité Francophone. | Publication | 2019-12-06 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Future Energy Systems Hosts First Research Symposium | Publication | 2018-04-04 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea, MaryElizabeth Luka |
| Hello There | Publication | 2018-08-15 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Joint Statement: Idle No More, Defenders of the Land & Truth Before Reconciliation | Publication | 2018-09-13 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Just Living Together for Just Powers | Publication | 2018-08-15 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Just Powers: Making the Energy Transition Better for Everyone | Publication | 2019-09-10 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Launch + Learn/Casse croûtes et casse-têtes pour le climatBlog post about an SEF/iDoc community event with La Cité Francophone. | Publication | 2019-11-24 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Le Téleéjournal Alberta Profile on Prototypes for Possible Worlds ExhibitionNews broadcast on the Prototypes for Possible Worlds SEF December 2019 exhibition -- beginning at the 23:00 mark. | Publication | 2019-12-20 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless |
| Meet the 2019 EcoCity Edmonton Grant Recipients | Publication | 2019-05-21 | Sheena L Wilson, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Messagers’ Forum: Patrick MahonArt review by Dr. Madeline Lennon on Patrick Mahon's exhibition "Messagers' Forum". Centred.ca.
| Publication | 2020-11-04 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| New Research Initiative Seeks to Bring Marginalized Voices to the Debate | Publication | 2018-03-05 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Opinion: Imagining a Brighter Post-Oil Future Requires Broader InputAn opinion piece in the Montreal Gazette detailing After Oil School 2. | Publication | 2019-05-21 | Mark Simpson, Sheena L Wilson, Imre Szeman, Jordan Kinder |
| Petrocultures 2018 | Publication | 2018-12-03 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum, Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea, Natalie Loveless |
| Petrocultures: Day 1 | Publication | 2018-08-30 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Petrocultures: Day 2 | Publication | 2018-08-31 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Petrocultures: Day 3 | Publication | 2018-09-01 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Petrocultures: Day 4 | Publication | 2018-09-02 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Powered Up | Publication | 2019-05-03 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Understanding How Society Will Change as We Move to Renewable Energy Sources | Publication | 2018-03-29 | Kenneth Tam, Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| « Les étudiants prennent les devants » | Publication | 2019-12-12 | Sheena L Wilson, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| « Une exposition pour explorer les futurs énergétiques »Written and radio profile on the SEF exhibition in December 2019, "Prototypes for Possible Worlds." | Publication | 2019-12-17 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, "Ruth Beer", Jessie Beier, "Sean Caulfield", Evan G R Davies, "Wallace Edwards", "Soheila Esfahani", "Caitlin Fisher", "Joan Greer", "Steven Hoffman", "Tsēmā Igharas", "Satoshi Ikeda", "Luke Johnson", "Patrick Mahon", "Janice Makokis", "Lisa Moore", "Tegan Moore", Sourayan Mookerjea, Mark Simpson, "Scott Smallwood", "Rachel Snow", "Diana Steinhauer", "Clarence Whitestone", "Kurtis McAdam" |
| “I Love Machines”: VISCOSITY by Theatre YesReview of theatre installation featuring oil narratives. SEF/iDoc researchers were part of the panel following the event. | Publication | 2018-11-17 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| “Let’s Change Something Before Climate Changes Everything”Blog Post on the Change for Climate public speakers series. | Publication | 2018-10-25 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Author's Note: We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition | Publication | 2025-11-03 | Sheena L Wilson, Lisa Moore |
| Hacking the Techno-Transition: The Possibilities of Deep Energy LiteracyAbstract: This article takes the E.L. Smith Solar Farm at the E.L. Smith Water treatment plant in Alberta – a province at the epicentre of Canada’s oil and gas industry – as a case study for what I call deep energy literacy. An energy transition away from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources is a necessary first response to climate change. Deep energy literacy is a proposition, a set of theoretical concepts, through which to disrupt, or “hack”, technophilic transitions by attending to intersectional feminist and decolonial politics and solidarities. Technocratic solutions for decarbonization that do not radically reorient existing social, economic, and political relationships are failed solutions even before implementation begins because they have not addressed the root cause of climate change: a bankrupt extractivist worldview. This worldview is the cause of not only climate change but multiple converging crises. Deep energy literacy is a proposition grounded in relationality that can help us identify problems more holistically and thereby come up with solutions that not only address necessary energy transition shifts, but that do so while simultaneously addressing a plethora of other concerns – including but not limited to Indigenous (re)conciliation – by creating more equitable and just societies and ecosystems. Seen through the lens of deep energy literacy, this analysis of the processes through which the E.L. Smith Solar Farm project was approved illustrates that when decisions about new energy infrastructure are based in entrenched economic, political, social, and epistemological paradigms, they fail to disrupt the status quo and therefore fail to adequately address the root causes of climate change. To achieve a just transition many experiments need to take place; many of these experimentations will be imperfect. In the case study considered in this paper, I suggest that while deep energy literacy conversations were begun, they were not integrated fulsomely enough. Nonetheless, there are positive lessons to be taken from the E.L. Smith Solar Farm and integrated into future decision-making processes.
| Publication | 2022-10-18 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Molecular media and the society of platform spectacleThis essay examines the core theses of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1996) and Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History (1942) from the perspective of Harold A. Innis's Tendencies in Communication (1951). I want to understand theoretically how the toxic intermedia ecology of today's surveillance platform capitalism has functioned in the long period of racial capitalism. The argument is based on the fact that regenerative molecular media in interaction with an anti-fascist-oriented popular culture - now that tactical media has become obsolete as a critical strategy - become historically necessary. These are based on mere subsistence, as economic growth no longer prevails. They are to be understood as speculative molecular media that are able to theorize their prototypical possibilities.
| Publication | 2024-01-24 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Notes from the Energetic Quietus | Publication | 2019-12-10 | Jessie Beier, "Tegan Moore" |
| Oil Topography: Weaving the World of OilAbstract for "Oil Topography: Weaving the World of Oil," co-written by Ruth Beer and Thomas Borsa: Taking inspiration from Pendakis and Wilson’s (2012) call to “sight, cite, and site” oil, in this piece we consider how interventions in artistic material practice can offer up complementary, and at times entirely unique, modes of engaging with the materialities of oil and petro-media. Building on conversations of the past several years, we make particular reference to "Oil Topography" (2014), a hand-woven jacquard tapestry created and produced by Ruth Beer.
| Publication | 2022-06-14 | "Ruth Beer", "Thomas Borsa" |
| Reflections on Collaboration as Performance and the Performance of Collaboration in an Age of COVID and Climate CrisisNatalie Loveless and Sheena Wilson reflect on their history of working collaboratively, thinking through the complexities of feminist labour informed by research on the maternal as social performance and social fact. Whether resculpting academic political spaces in more sustainable ways or reshaping daily reality according to more ecological form, the authors argue for collaborative praxis—collaborative performance and the performance of collaboration—as a means of resistance and resilience in a time of political and climate catastrophe.
| Publication | 2021-07-20 | Natalie Loveless, Sheena L Wilson |
| River: Forking Paths, Monsters, Simultaneous Timelines and Continuity over 25 Years of Creative Practiceonline peer-reviewed journal. | Publication | 2021-09-12 | "Caitlin Fisher" |
| “A Snap of the Universe”: Digital Storytelling, as in Conversation with Caitlin FisherOnline peer reviewed journal. | Publication | 2021-02-07 | "Caitlin Fisher" |
| Induction to Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists | Award | 2025-11-14 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Research Award | Award | 2017-12-31 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Shifting Ground: Mapping Energy, Geographies and Communities in the NorthShifting Ground: Mapping Energy, Community and Geography in the North is a SSHRC-supported experimental artistic research project designed to provoke new thinking and action around resource extraction, energy transition, and socioenvironmental adaptation in communities of the circumpolar North. Led by an international team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, writers, and curators, this four-year project emerges from the necessity to create new aesthetic expressions that reflect the landscapes, lived experiences, and future imaginaries of anthropogenic climate change in more inclusive terms. At its core, Shifting Ground aims to deepen dialogue about climate change and generate alternative artistic representations that have been hitherto obscured, ignored, or downplayed in conversations around energy transition and transformation. By exploring these themes through the lens of contemporary art, Shifting Ground sets out to link local resiliencies with global concerns.
| Award | 2019-07-23 | "Ruth Beer" |
| SSHRC Insight Grant, “GardenShip & State: Art and the Environment as a Commons” | Award | 2020-04-22 | "Patrick Mahon", "Joan Greer", "Sean Caulfield" |
| E.E.R.K. (Energy Emergency Repair Kit) | Publication | 2024-05-12 | Mark Simpson, Jessie Beier, Sourayan Mookerjea, "Joan Greer", "Tegan Moore", "Tsema Igharas" |
| E.E.R.K.: ENERGY EMERGENCY REPAIR KITA fictional manual to help disrupt today’s all-too-real energy and climate emergencies. The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy, emergency, and repair. The E.E.R.K combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers.
Created collectively by artists, designers, and scholars working and living at various places on Turtle Island, the E.E.R.K. offers a host of situated activities and speculative probes designed to respond to today and tomorrow’s energy emergencies. The kit intermingles diagrammatic designs with instructional convolutions and perplexing protocols that supply non-programmatic yet highly pragmatic means for navigating, communicating, operating, and undoing the investments that have come to overdetermine energetic relations in the past, present, and future. Triggered most immediately by the pandemic moment circa 2020, with its strangely intermittent and inscrutable convolutions of fossil-fueled business-as-usual, the E.E.R.K. reflects and reckons the long-roiling and fully chronic energy emergency orchestrated over several centuries by racial-fossil capitalism’s mass production of injustices.
The E.E.R.K. positions energy as more than just a resource to be exploited and managed, more than an infrastructural obstacle to overcome, more than fuel for the nightmares that lie ahead (or that are, in too many cases, already here). As a generative, multitudinous fabulation, the E.E.R.K. probes energetic networks—the bonds of endeavour; the glow of affection; the pulse of attunement; the drive of subtraction; the charge of uncertainty; the resilience of exhaustion; the obstinacy of making do; the shadow of fossils; the pull of futurity; the zeroes and ones; the force of an otherwise—that, together, seem to compose the circuits of energy emergency now. | Publication | 2024-09-03 | Jessie Beier, Mark Simpson, Sourayan Mookerjea, Lisa Moore, "Tsema Igharas", "Tegan Moore", "Joan Greer" |
| How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation | Publication | 2019-08-01 | Natalie Loveless |
| We Were in It: Stories about Energy TransitionBringing together academics, scientists, creative writers, visual artists, lawyers, and policy makers, We Were In It is a collaborative effort to attack the problem of climate crisis from very different backgrounds and perspectives, through fiction. The fusion of scholarship, literary writing, research, and creativity allows the strengths of many forms of writing to address the unfolding crisis of our modern petrocultures. Relying on the brevity of flash fiction to reflect the ticking clock of the climate crisis, the stories contained in this collection are slick as oil but against oil. They are a speculation about the future, taking notes from the present and the past as a portal to a better world.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sheena L Wilson, Lisa Moore, Sourayan Mookerjea, "Ruth Beer", "Caitlin Fisher", "Satoshi Ikeda", "Soheila Esfahani", Evan G R Davies, "Luke Johnson", Natalie Loveless, "Kurtis McAdam", Katie Lewandowski, "Janice Makokis", "Patrick Mahon", "Scott Smallwood" |
| A Crisis of ConnectionShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Natalie Loveless |
| A Pandemic Love LetterShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Natalie Loveless |
| All That it Wasn'tShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Alone and in TroubleShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition. | Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Art, Ecology, and the Politics of Form: A Panel RevisitedThe following forum emerges from a panel called Art and/in the Anthropocene: A Debate on Sustainability and Ecology that was co-organized by Natalie Loveless and Jessie Beier for the Kule Institute for Advanced Study’s Around the World e-Conference in May of 2018. The conference panel invited discussion by six artist-scholars in addition to the organizers – Karin Bolender, Christa Donner, Mia Feuer, Leanne Olson, Scott Smallwood and Andrew Yang. Together they discussed two pre-circulated questions: one on sustainability and one on ecological form. Organized and edited by Loveless, the contributions in this forum respond to these questions. Yang argues for systems thinking in the context of art and ecology; Bolender considers multispecies care practices; Donner makes a plea for intergenerational empathy and collective problem-solving; Olson examines our disavowed relations to waste; Smallwood grapples with problems of representing the Anthropocene; Beier reflects, in a speculative-fictive form, on the folly of attempting to sustain our current ways of living and dying; and Loveless concludes with a reflection on art, ecological form and climate justice ethics. Together these short essays invite the reader to consider the role of art in creating new conditions for climate justice thinking and action.
| Publication | 2021-04-22 | Natalie Loveless, "Scott Smallwood", Jessie Beier |
| Beyond belief: Visionary cinema, becoming imperceptible and pedagogical resistance | Publication | 2019-10-01 | Jessie Beier |
| Blot Plot Neon ToxicShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Blue RoomShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2024-04-01 | Sheena L Wilson |
| CalfShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Lisa Moore |
| Close Encounters of the pedagogical kind: Science-fictioning a curriculum-to-come | Publication | 2019-06-12 | Jessie Beier |
| ConvoyShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Dispatch from the future: Science fictioning (in) the Anthropocene | Publication | 2018-09-01 | Jessie Beier |
| Ecofeminists Degrowth FuturesMulti-authored, critical-theoretical book chapter published by Routledge.
This handbook takes stock of ‘degrowth’, a concept and movement, gaining increasing visibility in the 2020s. Contributors explain contexts for degrowth’s significance, elaborate its diverse history and detail its unique approaches, practices, challenges and potential futures. Part I sets the ecological, economic and political contexts framing degrowth’s evolution as a significant concept for societies facing the challenges of deepening socio-political inequities and ecological unsustainabilities.
Part II identifies themes characterising degrowth movements in a sample of distinctive countries, starting with its origins in France. Part III shows degrowth ‘concepts in action’, explaining in practical ways the meanings of terms such as ‘conviviality’, ‘degrowth doughnut’, ‘frugal abundance’, ‘commoning’ and ‘defashioning’. Part IV offers analyses and forward-looking imaginaries for degrowth from the perspectives of distinctive agents, agendas and theoretical frameworks. Contributors engage with ecofeminist futures, utopian thought and show how degrowth is necessary to address poverty.
Highly experienced and knowledgeable contributors from varied scholarly and practitioner fields address a range of strategic, activist, policy, and research questions in this handbook. Grounded in empirical cases they identify significant social and ecological challenges, relevant to students, researchers, activists, policy-makers and practitioners at various levels within the wide range of fields in which degrowth can be applied. | Publication | 2025-06-25 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Emergency Transition or Decolonization? Historical Contradictions of a Neocolonial Satellite StateSingle authored, critical-theoretical book chapter in press with Routledge, expected 2026.
Post-Carbon Futures: Imagining (and Enacting) New Worlds through Transition Studies invites readers to join an invigorating conversation about the multitude of possibilities for conceiving and creating fulfilling post-carbon ways of life.
Offering diverse perspectives and abundant empirical examples, this robust volume sheds new light on how complex ecological, economic, and political factors contour processes of conscious cultural change. The works gathered here center contributors’ experiences and observations of life in an era of profound uncertainty. Bringing together theoretically informed considerations, ethnographic examples, and viewpoints from active transition movement participants, this book is certain to catalyze rich discussions about transition’s myriad opportunities and significance for socioecological change research. Fifteen original chapters highlight distinctive circumstances of post-carbon transitions as they play out in diverse communities around the world. These contributions are framed by a foreword by Arturo Escobar, a comprehensive introductory overview by the editors, and a dialogical conclusion that captures contributing authors’ key reflections on Transition Studies as an emergent field of knowledge production.
Post-Carbon Futures: Imagining (and Enacting) New Worlds through Transition Studies will inspire readers to contemplate how transition intersects with their own academic and/or activist interests and generate exciting new understandings of conscious cultural change in the twenty-first century. | Publication | 2025-09-03 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Energetic Investments in the "End Times"jessie beier's book "Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Futures" was published in November by Palgrave Macmillan and includes a chapter on energy, "Energetic Investments in the 'End Times'," pp. 107-152. | Publication | 2023-11-23 | Jessie Beier |
| Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures | Publication | 2018-07-20 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Energy Transition Research (Creation)Online art book/catalogue. | Publication | 2021-06-01 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless |
| Far From Home: Northern Canadian Students at an Urban Art and Design UniversityChapter in the book Relate North: Possible Futures that examines the complex role art plays in confronting complex social, economic, and environmental conditions.
Although concerned mainly with research and knowledge exchange in art and design education in the north and the Arctic, the contributors touch on issues and topics that will have wider interest. For example, the sociocultural and geopolitical dimensions of living in rural and urban settings in northern, remote and peripheral regions. In each essay, the notion of possible futures is about more than postulation, embracing art-infused praxis and inquiry with Indigenous and nonindigenous groups in the north and the Arctic. The book will interest a wide constituency including, for example, anthropologists, cultural geographers, sociologists, artists, designers, art educators and practice-based researchers. In addition, the chapters will be relevant to students in the arts or education and policymakers concerned with Arctic and northern issues on contemporary art, craft, design, and education.
| Publication | 2023-11-23 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Flower PowerShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Lisa Moore |
| Hands of an AngelShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Haraway’s Dog: Teaching Research-Creation as Interdisciplinary Method | Publication | 2018-12-19 | Natalie Loveless |
| Hegemony without hegemony: Gramsci, Guha and post-Western MarxismThis chapter focuses on Ranajit Guha’s critical reformulation of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony for understanding colonial state formation and defends his thesis of an ‘autonomous domain of subaltern politics’. Reading Ranajit Guha’s masterwork, Dominance without Hegemony (1997), in relation to Jacques Rancière’s historiographical theorization in The Names of History (1994), this chapter articulates the constellation of a historiographical narrative poetics of contradiction in Guha’s engagement with Gramsci’s problematic in order to historicize the concept of hegemony for our present. The chapter argues that Guha’s concept of an ‘autonomous domain of subaltern politics’ is both relevant and critical necessary for a pluriversal, post-Western Marxist theory and historiography, and that the domain of the social reproduction of means of subsistence, in its separation from the formal domain of capitalist commodity production, constitutes an autonomous domain of subaltern class politics, global in scale.
| Publication | 2024-01-12 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Intermedia Research Creation and Hydrapolitics: Counter-environments of the Commons | Publication | 2019-12-01 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Introduction: Seeds and Tools | Publication | 2022-03-08 | Natalie Loveless |
| Mapping New Genre Arctic Art | Publication | 2021-11-19 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Mask, ExplodedShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Lisa Moore |
| MiasmaShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Out of GasShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition. | Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sheena L Wilson |
| PEI III, Leviathan OdysseyShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Research and Creation: Socially-engaged art in The City of Richgate Project Trans. K. Kasahara | Publication | 2019-03-28 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Service StationShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2024-04-01 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Shifting Ground: Art Exhibition as Informal Pedagogy on the Changing ArcticThe chapter addresses the urgent need for innovative teaching and learning models that create and examine human-land relationships as collective expression. It presents how artists and art educators in northern regions of Canada and Finland address the impacts of climate change and natural resource extractions. Their art practices, which include aesthetic, material,
interactive, time-based, sound, and performance elements, as well as viewer engagement in exhibitions, serve as a means to advocate for social, cultural and environmental
justice. These regions share the urgency of landscapes in distress impacted by climate
change, challenging distances of remote communities, land (and water) use, histories of
colonialism and questions of sovereignty. Many local environmental conflicts are ongoing in Northern Finland and Canada, some of which have persisted for decades, causing
community members to experience uncertainty and frustration. Artists and educators
reflect on and respond to land use, mining, forestry and related conflicts that determine
the region’s possible future and life. They also are optimists in their promotion of positive change. | Publication | 2024-01-01 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Shikata ga nai | Publication | 2019-10-22 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Snakes and LaddersShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Survival of the Most Collaborative: Climate Justice as a Logics for Flows of Air | Publication | 2025-09-01 | Sheena L Wilson |
| The Goddess Must be AngryShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sheena L Wilson |
| The Potential of Art and Design for Renewable Economies in the Arctic | Publication | 2021-12-14 | "Ruth Beer" |
| The SoundShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Lisa Moore |
| The SpillShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Lisa Moore |
| Thirty-seven years, her neighbour’s versionShort story in the fiction book We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition.
| Publication | 2025-03-31 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Thoughts on an Unfinished Composition | Publication | 2021-04-08 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| Tracing a black hole: Probing cosmic darkness in Anthropocenic timesIn April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project released an unprecedented image of a supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy Messier 87. The image, which shows a dark disc outlined by swirling hot gas circling the black hole’s event horizon, exhibits a 55 million-year-old cosmic event in the Virgo galaxy cluster—a void of stellar mass measuring some 6.5 billion times that of our sun. Situated within today’s (Good) Anthropocene scenario, characterized as it is by both the rise of an inhospitable planet but also a range of good vibes and affirmative mantras, this tracing explores this newly “discovered” black hole in terms of the unthinkable questions and speculative trajectories it raises for education and its futures. Through a series of forays into astrophysics, historical examples of cosmic imaging, and further exploration of the image created by EHT, this tracing outlines the black hole and its apparent horizons in order to propose a strange vantage point from which pedagogical problem-posing might be interrupted, mutated, and relaunched. By turning to that which lies outside of the traditional science classroom—beyond the school, beyond curriculum, indeed, beyond the planet itself—this tracing seeks to probe this black hole event in terms of its weird and weirding pedagogical trajectories so as to speculate on unthought possibilities for resituating (science) education in the age of the Anthropocene.
| Publication | 2021-12-08 | Jessie Beier |
| Trafficking in Petronormativities: At the Intersections of Petrofeminism, Petrocolonialism, and Petrocapitalism | Publication | 2019-08-29 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Why is intersectional agility Greta Thunberg’s rhetorical superpower?Summary
Power Shift traces recent social and cultural shifts in how we understand and imagine energy, the environment, and the challenges of global warming. Across the globe, the need to transition to renewables has become the guiding reality of our energy present and future, despite continuing resistance to change. But what does this moment of energy transition look like for those struggling to make it happen in a way that benefits every individual and all communities?
Featuring brief essays on 101 key terms by scholars, artists, and activists from around the world and across disciplines, Power Shift offers an expansive, kaleidoscopic guide to the history of petromodernity, recent technological and social developments, and pathways to new energy futures. The book offers new insights into the emergent politics of energy, contrasting today’s environmental and climate movements with the geopolitical contests of the Cold War era. It explores the still unfolding story of energy transition by focusing on the ongoing struggles of communities and individuals against decisions made by corporations, governments, and international organizations. | Publication | 2025-04-01 | Sheena L Wilson |
| You can learn a lot of things from the flowers...a short essay about the Carbon Capture Library and images of the installation, published in "The Forecast", ed. Elena Siemens, coming out later this year. | Publication | 2021-09-30 | "Luke Johnson" |
| Accessible Pedagogies for the “End Times”: Work, Energy, SustainabilityWhat is the work of accessible pedagogy given the convergence of crises in which education is situated today? Taking this question as a starting point, this talk outlines an approach to accessible pedagogy that centres work, energy and sustainability in order to develop an intersectional and critical disability framework for rethinking inclusive art education practices.
| Activity | 2024-02-13 | Jessie Beier |
| Art and Activism at the End(s) of the World(s) | Activity | 2019-11-10 | Natalie Loveless |
| Art and Climate Justice Action: Materializing the AnthropoceneThis talk asks what artistic approaches and sensibilities can offer to debate surrounding Anthropogenic climate change, attending to the difference between art on ecology and art that is formed ecologically. As well as giving theoretical and art historical background for this distinction, Loveless speculates on how the politics of form (what a form does in the world) intersects with ecological ethics when the use of fossil fuel resources (as, in Olafur Eliasson’s 2015 Ice Watch, those needed to ship 300 pound blocks of glacier ice to the center of Paris) are central to the production of artworks addressing ecology, global warming, and climate debt. Offering nuanced reflection on such works, this talk highlights the importance of a multi-sensorial and multi-species understanding of ecological ethics that takes the question of aesthetic form seriously in the context of art on and in the Anthropocene. | Activity | 2019-03-29 | Natalie Loveless |
| Art and/in the Anthropocene: A Debate on Sustainability and Ecology | Activity | 2018-05-01 | Natalie Loveless, Jessie Beier |
| Art, Activism, and Global Crisis | Activity | 2022-04-21 | Natalie Loveless |
| Art, Activism, and Global Crisis speaker and workshop series(Event organized) September 2020-May 2021 SSHRC-funded speaker and workshop series. Each presentation is by an artist or scholar interested in "modest" ephemeral performance forms that work to engender political consciousness (specifically with regard to climate justice). Speakers/conveners included Marilyn Arsem, Dylan Robinson, Stephanie Loveless, J.R. Carpenter, and Stephanie Springgay. | Activity | 2020-09-01 | Natalie Loveless |
| Art, Activism, and Global Crisis speaker and workshop series(Event organized) September 2020-May 2021 SSHRC-funded speaker and workshop series. Each presentation is by an artist or scholar interested in "modest" ephemeral performance forms that work to engender political consciousness (specifically with regard to climate justice). Speakers/conveners included Marilyn Arsem, Dylan Robinson, Stephanie Loveless, J.R. Carpenter, and Stephanie Springgay. | Activity | 2021-04-08 | Natalie Loveless |
| Art, Ecology, Energy and Speculative FuturesThis presentation provided an overview to the Speculative Energy Futures initiative, including an introduction to the project, explorations of our theoretical catalysts, and a series of video intermezzos featuring curated virtual conversations with several members from the team. | Activity | 2018-09-01 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Jessie Beier |
| Art, Science, One Health and Learning to DrawThere has been a lot of discussion about using art to communicate scientific findings/messages but little exploration of how science can inspire art or art inspire science. More discourse is needed to explore where and how the arts fit into One Health and how One Health approaches fit into the arts. Engaging with artists who are working in this space, using art to inspire change, to challenge assumptions will serve as a starting point for these conversations.
This session will explore Immune Nations, a collaborative and interdisciplinary creative-research project focused on the theme of vaccines. As a participant who co-led aspects of the initiative, I will share insights into my creative contributions and broader reflections on the project, concluding with thoughts on combining qualitative and quantitative analysis.
The presentation then examines two historical representations of the body: a dissection image from Andrea Vesalius’ On the Fabric of the Human Body (1548) and a surrealist "exquisite corpse" drawing. These works highlight the interplay between rationality and irrationality, questioning the traditional mind-body dualism.
Next, I will guide the audience through a collaborative exquisite corpse drawing exercise, fostering dialogue and creativity. While such group activities carry an element of unpredictability, they often lead to engaging discussions. If time permits, the session will conclude with a brief look at the intersection of art and politics, drawing on the surrealist example to illustrate this dynamic relationship. | Activity | 2025-03-13 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Artist talk(lecture) at Messagers’ ForumOpening Talks to accompany art exhibition | Activity | 2020-09-16 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| Artists Making Change: Art for Social Change | Activity | 2021-02-25 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Arts of the Anthropocene | Activity | 2019-11-22 | Natalie Loveless |
| Audio Games Lab: Audio and Musical Puzzle Mechanics in GamesTalk given at the Game, Music and Sound Design Conference. This talk, focused on several novel audio puzzle mechanics from the game "The Lost Garden," a 3D first-person escape game that deals with the soundscapes of climate change. The game was developed in Unity along with Chunity, a strongly-timed language for real-time audio synthesis and processing within Unity. Scott Smallwood also discussed his mandate as a game studio within an academic institution, and the orientation towards games as interactive musical albums.
| Activity | 2022-10-26 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| Black GoldArtist talk as part of Tsēmā Igharas's solo exhibition
| Activity | 2021-02-26 | "Tsēmā Igharas" |
| Bodies in CrisisKeynote address. | Activity | 2023-09-15 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Celebrating the Emergency Act and the Enforcement of Carceral Law: What Other Futures are Possible?Conference session for Petrocultures 2022: Transformations.
Abstract: There is a lot of debate among Canadians about the trucker convoy and how it was handled. Opinions do not divide clearly according to party-lines, or even separate out in coherent ways across the political gamut. This talk provided a short analysis of the trucker convoy through an intersectional, feminist, decolonial lens, speaking specifically to the petrocultural extractivist logics maintained across the spectrum of political alliances. | Activity | 2022-08-25 | Sheena L Wilson |
| CoLAB Meeting: Diggin' In to the IPCC Special Report Discussion and workshop on the most recent IPCC 'Special Report.' | Activity | 2019-02-08 | Jessie Beier, Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| CoLAB Meeting: Energy Imaginaries + The Perfect Storm: Energy Transition GameThis event featured a test-run of the Perfect Storm: Feminist Energy Transition role-playing game, developed by Dr. Sourayan Mookerjea. The Perfect Storm game enables players to explore the cultural and class politics of energy transition in Canada, while also providing an opportunity to examine gamification as an instrument of spectacular participation. How might you prevent a ‘perfect storm’ of ongoing climate change events through energy transition politics and policy? | Activity | 2018-10-26 | Sourayan Mookerjea, Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Jessie Beier, Charles Stubblefield, Ipek Oskay, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| CoLAB Meeting: Expanding the Infrastructural Imagination Discussion of questions around feminist infrastructure and community-building that are focused on developing collective responses and alternative imaginaries to today's pressing ecological issues | Activity | 2019-04-12 | Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum, Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless |
| CoLAB Meeting: Materializing Climate ChangeThis meeting featured a reading of Dr. Nicole Shukin’s 2015 article “Materializing Climate Change: Image of Exposure, States of Exception”, followed by a discussion of how both artistic and scientific representations might be mobilized in order to produce moving, material images of the historical crisis of climate change. | Activity | 2018-12-07 | Sheena L Wilson, Danika Jorgensen Skakum, Jessie Beier |
| CoLAB Meeting: ‘Sensing the Anthropocene’This discussion featured a workshop with Dr. Natalie Loveless in relation to her current project ‘Sensing the Anthropocene,’ which explores the role and import of artistic practice and research in relation to today’s pressing ecological, and by extension, socio-political and representational, issues. By focusing on a series of large-scale art projects focused on ecological questions and issues, we explored both the limits and potentials of art for raising climate justice awareness in the context of policy meetings such as IPCC and COP. | Activity | 2019-03-08 | Natalie Loveless, Jessie Beier, Sheena L Wilson |
| CoLAB/IRS/Space & Culture Meeting: Energy ImaginariesThis event featured a test-run of the Perfect Storm: Feminist Energy Transition role-playing game, developed by Dr. Sourayan Mookerjea. The Perfect Storm game enables players to explore the cultural and class politics of energy transition in Canada, while also providing an opportunity to examine gamification as an instrument of spectacular participation. How might you prevent a ‘perfect storm’ of ongoing climate change events through energy transition politics and policy?
| Activity | 2018-10-26 | Sourayan Mookerjea, Charles Stubblefield, Ipek Oskay, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Commoning and Common-beingThis presentation interrogates North-centric theories of the commons (Ostrom 2015, Bollier and
Helfrich 2019, Kostakis and Bauwens 2014, Hardt and Negri 2009) from the perspective of the
longue durée of Indigenous and subaltern resistance against development dispossession and
environmental racism. Drawing on my research on oil sands development in Alberta, Canada and
smart city development in Kolkata, India, I argue against claims which position commons/commoning/common between the market and the state. I argue that such claims are
based on uncritical, liberal and Eurocentric conceptions of markets and states which fail to grasp
their historical inter-relations and which ignore their formation through multiple colonialisms
involving the construction and exhaustion of commodity frontiers and the enclosure (and
destruction) of subsistence commons. Bringing together the thought of Ranajit Guha, Maria Mies
and Veronica Bennholdt Thomsen and Massimo De Angelis (2017), I argue that commoning is best
understood as both the social metabolic possibility of a racial capitalist world-economy and the
contemporary inter-state system as well as an autonomous domain of subaltern politics (and selfgovernment) based on the metabolism of social reproduction. This argument is illustrated through reflections on the contradictions of renewable energy commoning in the context of the politics of energy system change. | Activity | 2024-10-22 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Contemporary Art/Design: Imaging Canadian Arctic Landscape through Heritage Crafts and Photo-based Artificial Intelligence | Activity | 2021-06-17 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Convergences: Research Creation Project, An interdisciplinary artwork/speculationIn this presentation for Petrocultures 2022: Transformations Ruth Beer discussed “Convergences,” a multi-modal, collaborative, interdisciplinary research-creation installation presented as part of the exhibition Prototypes for Possible Worlds (collaborative December 13-16th, 2019) at the University of Alberta. For “Convergences” artists, creative writers, an Indigenous legal scholar, and Indigenous (Cree) Elder storytellers worked together to underscore the imperative, in Western Canada and elsewhere, for energy transition to take into account social and environmental justice.They advocate for transformation that addresses inequality and non-human abuse through the inclusion of feminist and indigenous perspectives and ways of knowing, and strengthening intercultural relations. Their collaboration resulted in the production of the interconnected components for the “Convergences” installation. | Activity | 2022-08-24 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Critical Energy Research and the Molecular Media of PraxisThis invited talk was given as part of a round table discussion with guest speakers Sourayan Mookerjea (University of Alberta) and Mijin Cha (UC Santa Cruz) in celebration of a new book - Energy and Environmental Justice: Energy and Environmental Justice Movements, Solidarities, and Critical Connections - by Tristan Partridge (UC Santa Barbara / CREW co-founder). | Activity | 2023-05-25 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Critical Theory of Technology Reading + Working Group SeriesOngoing bimonthly series at Intermedia Research Studio | Activity | 2018-09-28 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Decarbonizing and Carbon Catching for Planet Positive Futures: Surviving the pandemic and global warming | Activity | 2021-03-15 | "Satoshi Ikeda" |
| Decolonizing Degrowth/Pluriversal RegenerationIn recent years, through the contestation of symbolic figures, campaigns such as #RhodesMustFall have highlighted the lasting impact of colonialism in the public realm. These campaigns exist alongside wider debates about the less visible legacy of colonialism in contemporary power relations and the ongoing exclusions and oppressions that they sustain. In the education sector, and in Universities in particular, these discussions have prompted reflection on the possibilities and advantages of decolonising the curriculum. Attempts to diversify a Euro-centric and culturally hegemonic syllabus, have revealed more deep-rooted, structural challenges than a mere re-shuffling of the personnel that appear on reading lists. At the same time, important discussions have started in a wide range of research fields and disciplines on the colonial assumptions underpinning established intellectual traditions and research practices. This project poses the question of what it means to decolonise the methodologies used for engaging in intellectual production. We need to ask whether the concepts and questions through which we inscribe our inquiries are committed to modes of thought that perpetuate and sustain coloniality.
The Critical Theory in Hard Times research network was initiated in February 2019 at Manchester Metropolitan with a research cluster event centred on the question: ‘What does it means to be critical today?’ This academic year, we hope to reflect on the relationship between coloniality and critical thought today. Our efforts as a network to re-think critical theory beyond the silos of particular traditions of critical traditions (including but not limited to postcolonial and decolonial thought, feminism, critical race theory, Frankfurt School, Gramscian, Bourdieusian, Foucauldian approaches, deconstruction), lead us to ask about the potential for dialogue and engagement between these approaches concerning the question of (de)colonisation. This workshop will ask to what extent a dialogue between these traditions, or a clarification of the terms of their incompatibility, can contribute towards identifying the resources that they provide towards creating a global critical theory.
We are looking to experiment with the format of our engagement by hosting less formal modes of presentation in order to encourage discussions between contributors rather than a series of presentations. | Activity | 2021-05-05 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Dissent in/as Solidarity: Confronting Anthropocene Banality | Activity | 2018-10-27 | Charles Stubblefield, Danika Jorgensen Skakum, Jessie Beier |
| E.E.R.K.ing the ProvincesAbstract:
The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy; emergency; repair. The E.E.R.K. combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers. Prompted by the urgency of climate change and the injustices of racial-fossil capitalism, it brings together theory and poetics in order to provoke and inspire critical inquiry and creative imagining about what could come next. If energy emergencies loom everywhere, what possibilities for care and repair might they ignite?
This presentation will introduce some key features of the E.E.R.K., focusing on the disruptive energies it can inspire while reflecting on the provincializing potentials of research-creation as a mode of endeavor. At stake and on offer is the force of E.E.R.K. as at once noun and verb. | Activity | 2025-03-28 | Mark Simpson |
| Earth FortunesEarth Fortunes is an augmented reality (AR) installation developed collaboratively by artists and engineers, and created as part of the multi-year project, Speculative Energy Futures. The installation generates energy fortunes based on the computer model GCAM: the Global Change Analysis Model and serves scenarios responsive to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways or SSPs. Users shuffle and deal with beautifully-illustrated fortune-telling cards and access the AR via a QR code. The large triptych, itself a form of data visualization of the engineering data, launches the AR fortune-telling experience encouraging questions around sustainability, equity, social justice and the kind of futures we want or can imagine.
Earth Fortunes was presented at the 2023 HASTAC conference, which engages with creative and design-based approaches to technology and education, particularly around issues of social justice and allied movements of design justice, data justice and data feminism, algorithmic accountability, (digital) literacies, open knowledge, and accessibility in all its forms.
| Activity | 2023-06-08 | "Caitlin Fisher", "Evan Davies" |
| Emergency Signals: Hearing Energy, Listening For RepairThe Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy; emergency; repair. The E.E.R.K combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers. The panel presentation introduced the various sonic dimensions and dynamics of the E.E.R.K. so as to explore the import of sound for the reckoning of energy and its emergencies.
| Activity | 2023-05-02 | Sourayan Mookerjea, Mark Simpson, Jessie Beier |
| Emergency Transition or Decolonization? | Activity | 2024-11-22 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Energy Emergency Repair Kit | Activity | 2025-07-17 | Jessie Beier, Mark Simpson |
| Energy Emergency Repair Kit (Fire Drill Version)Performance of the Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) at Petrocultures LA. | Activity | 2024-05-17 | Sourayan Mookerjea, Mark Simpson, Jessie Beier |
| Energy Humanities, Just Powers + Energy Systems | Activity | 2019-05-07 | Danika Jorgensen Skakum, Charles Stubblefield |
| Energy Transition in Time of Crisis: Research-Creation Responses | Activity | 2020-06-19 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless |
| Energy Transition in Time of Crisis: Research-Creation ResponsesEnergy In/Out of Place: A Virtual Energy Humanities Research-Creation Workshop, June 15–19 2020. | Activity | 2020-06-15 | Natalie Loveless |
| Environmental and Climate Justice Perspectives on the UNFCC Conference of PartiesThree workshops held between 1-3:30 pm MST on May 12, 2021.
Workshop 1 Growth, Degrowth and Regeneration; Workshop 2 Climate Finance and Ecological Debt; Workshop 3 Regenerative Alternatives to Racial Capitalism and Colonialism. | Activity | 2021-05-12 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Environmental Studies Association of Canada conference at Congress 21Film screening of "Pikopaywin: It is broken" and subsequent discussion. | Activity | 2021-06-03 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Feminist Collaboration and Affective Resilience | Activity | 2017-10-13 | Natalie Loveless |
| Feminist Living (and Dying): Collaboration, Resilience, and Dissent | Activity | 2019-10-03 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless |
| Feminist SolaritiesFacilitating on-site collaborative work around the theme, "Feminist Solarities," aimed at making a concrete, ongoing contribution to public consideration of the challenge and potential of energy transition. | Activity | 2019-05-23 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| From Relational to Ecological Form | Activity | 2021-02-27 | Natalie Loveless |
| Global Indigenous Networks: GardenShip and State As one of the Organizers of Decolonial Conversations, Patrick Mahon is contributing to the overall planning and coordination of the project, and the hosting of the conference, and will be involved in the Global Indigenous Networks Conversation with Jeff Thomas. And, as co-curator, with Jeff Thomas of the landmark initiative, GardenShip and State (2020-24), Patrick’s shared work with Jeff asked: How we can work together and create together as a global community to restore the planet—while respecting differences and seeking to repair divisions and address injustices brought about by colonialism? GardenShip and State was an artistic research project conceived at the intersection of environmental critique, decolonial theory, and artistic practice. The project examined urgent issues confronting us today and the measures states and non-state actors can, or should, take to resolve them. These challenges are of global concern because local actions and global effects are intertwined, as evidenced by the destructiveness of the environmental crisis on humans and other than humans experiencing the effects of colonialism. At its core, GardenShip and State argued that decolonial critique is an intercultural, dialogical approach that seeks to redress social and ecological imbalances and their effects in the present, not least in terms of how different communities understand and interact with their local environments. The conversation between Patrick Mahon and Jeff Thomas will focus on GardenShip and States’s emphasis on the Two-Row Treaty of 1613 between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch, which is considered a living document today. It was a central feature of their collaborative initiative that resulted in an exhibition involving 20 artists, as well as a conference, community projects, and a book. | Activity | 2025-03-16 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| Hacking the Techno-Transition | Activity | 2019-09-23 | Sheena L Wilson |
| How to Make Art at the End of the World, RevisitedInaugural Speaker, Critical Conversations. | Activity | 2021-02-11 | Natalie Loveless |
| iDoc: Intermedia and Documentary - Future Energy Systems Theme 4 ProjectPoster presentation at Future Energy Systems Open House, October 5, 2017. | Activity | 2017-10-05 | Charles Stubblefield, Jessie Beier |
| Imagining Otherwise in Times of CrisisKeynote address for Imagining Otherwise, Speculation in the Americas: An Interseminars Culminating Symposium. | Activity | 2023-09-16 | Natalie Loveless |
| Inappropriate Bodies and Anthropocene Ethics | Activity | 2020-02-15 | Natalie Loveless |
| Institutions of UNknowing: equity & justice work in the academy?A dialogue between Nat Hurley, Natalie Loveless, Carrie Smith, and Sheena Wilson.
| Activity | 2023-05-18 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless |
| Interdisciplinarity as InterventionIndividual was Organizer and Chair | Activity | 2019-10-25 | Natalie Loveless |
| Interlocking Oppressions at the Bitumen Frontier: Notes on a Dialectic of Subsistence Regeneration and Feminist Degrowth | Activity | 2021-07-07 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Intermedia Research Studio Meeting: Intermedia Research-Creation | Activity | 2019-11-01 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Intermedia Research Studio Orientation: Research Creation Maker Space Open House | Activity | 2018-09-28 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Listening to Climate Change through Urban Sound WalksAbstract:
In this talk, I will discuss the concept of urban sound walks as a practice for understanding the current state of our technological world. The talk will advocate for walking in general, as a life practice (or life hack), but will focus specifically on the practice of sound walks. The talk will include discussion of the sound walk on October 11, focusing on lost waterways, as well as the history of sound walks, and the different approaches to the practice. In addition, I will introduce the concept of deep listening, and will lead a short deep listening meditation designed by Pauline Oliveros. | Activity | 2024-10-18 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| Mobilizing the FluxKit for Energy Transition: Curating Research-creation in times of polycrisesABSTRACT:
This workshop session will focus on the FluxKit for Energy Transition (2025), a research-creation output from Speculative Energy Futures (SEF), a multi-year (2017-2025), interdisciplinary project that has brought together artists, activists, scientists, engineers, social science and energy humanities researchers, policy experts, Indigenous legal experts, and Indigenous knowledge keepers from across Turtle Island. Together, this team has examined the climate crisis from manifold perspectives, using scholarly inquiry, arts-based and creative process, as well as Indigenous spirit and ceremony to bring attention to the social and cultural dimensions of a just energy transition. As the active research phase of the project ends, the afterlife of SEF will continue as the FluxKit, a mobile, research-creation ‘tool kit’ and set of calls to action that uses art to inform climate justice now and into the future.
Justine Kohleal will have the FluxKit on hand, and will first provide a brief overview of its theoretical and methodological underpinnings before delving into her experience curating the FluxKit in a non-museum context: as a pop-up exhibition at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (November 7-11, 2022). Kohleal considers how the FluxKit troubles ‘normative’ curatorial and display strategies, positioning curatorial practice as a form of research-creation in which curatorial ‘care’ is expanded to include social relations as well as the more traditional art object. The FluxKit thus highlights how curatorial practice when understood as a form of research-creation helps foster spaces of collaboration and co-inquiry.
| Activity | 2025-03-28 | Justine Kohleal Hartlieb-Power |
| Mobilizing the FluxKit for Energy Transition: Research-creation in times of polycrisesABSTRACT:
Living, working, and conducting research on the ‘oil rich’ lands of Turtle Island (colonially known as Canada)—where pro-extraction propaganda abounds and climate crises grow more acute with each passing season—energy transition and climate justice must necessarily be intersectional and decolonial. This panel and interactive workshop session will focus on Speculative Energy Futures (SEF), a multi-year (2017-2025), interdisciplinary project that has brought together artists, activists, scientists, engineers, social science and energy humanities researchers, Indigenous legal experts, and Indigenous knowledge keepers from across Turtle Island. Together, this team has examined the climate crisis from manifold perspectives, using scholarly inquiry, arts-based and creative process, as well as Indigenous spirit and ceremony to bring attention to the social and cultural dimensions of a just energy transition. Now, as the active research phase of the project ends, the afterlife of SEF will continue as the FluxKit for Energy Transition (2024), a mobile, research-creation ‘tool kit’ and set of calls to action that uses art to inform climate justice now and into the future.
Justine Kohleal will first theoretically and methodologically contextualize the FluxKit, which has been designed for use in art, educational, policy, and community action spaces, before activating various aspects of the kit for conference goers. Having the FluxKit onsite will not only enable the presenters to explore how art can be used to break down barriers regarding decolonial and socially just climate transitions, it will also prompt attendees to imagine how the FluxKit might be conceptually adapted to their own spheres of influence. Their panel thus highlights the role creative practices play in developing climate imaginaries that lay beyond our techno-bureaucratic fantasies, and will generate dialogue across deeply entrenched divides born of the overlay of petroculture on stolen Indigenous lands.
| Activity | 2024-11-11 | Justine Kohleal Hartlieb-Power |
| Molecular Media and the Question of Anti-Fascist Popular CultureConference panel: Research-Creation Producing Needed Knowledges for the Climate Emergency. | Activity | 2024-05-18 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Molecular Media for Capital Sequestration: Interlocking Oppressions and Just Transitions | Activity | 2019-10-21 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Moving Outdoors and Across Borders: Walking as Climate PedagogyPresentation with Rachel Epp Buller. | Activity | 2025-11-19 | Sheena L Wilson |
| New Logics for the Climate CrisisConference presentation for the conference panel: Research-Creation Producing Needed Knowledges for the Climate Emergency. | Activity | 2024-05-18 | Sheena L Wilson |
| On Climate Justice: Why We Need to Understand Just Transition to Understand Everything ElseKeynote address. | Activity | 2023-04-23 | Sheena L Wilson |
| On Situatedness and Ecological Form | Activity | 2019-11-07 | Natalie Loveless |
| On the Communicability of the Future: The Class and Cultural Politics of Energy Democracy and Climate Action in CanadaThe class and cultural politics of low-carbon energy transition now imposes itself on an ever widening range of social movement mobilization, both explicitly and implicitly, as the role of environmental crises in the making and unfolding of social injustices comes to be more widely understood (global warming especially). In the oil producing Canadian province of Alberta, social justice movement articulations of alternative visions of the future, in order to be possible must not only be communicable, but must also negotiate with (in order to criticize or displace them) scientistic, technocratic and “business as usual” models, projections and transition pathways constructed by a nexus of governmental agencies, energy industries and ngos like the World Energy Council as well as with racist and neo-fascist conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fantasies. This paper, drawing on my ongoing research, Feminist Energy Futures: Powershift and Environmental Social Justice, examines the ideological, media, and cultural-political strategies of climate action, energy democracy and just transition activism, protest and movement-building across a range of social movement organizations and popular cultural formations in Canada including Indigenous Climate Action, Blue Green Canada, The Leap, Climate Justice Edmonton, Extinction Rebellion, Our Time (for a Green New Deal), the Alberta Federation of Labour and their publics and constituencies. In doing so, I take an intermedia ecological approach which draws upon the theoretical insights and methodological strategies of Canadian communication theory, cultural studies, political ecology, the critique of political economy, post-Western Marxism, critical race theory, social reproduction and subsistence perspective feminism in order to interrogate the conjunctural conditions of communicability of regenerative futures and real utopias. The paper thereby seeks to draw lessons from the contradictions of proprietorial class power and of anti-systemic social movement futurism for the theory and praxis of degrowth, commoning and eco-socialism.
| Activity | 2021-02-27 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| On the Geopolitics of Contamination: Research-Creation Notes for a Degrowth AestheticMookerjea's talk draws upon subsistence perspective ecofeminist degrowth theory, world-ecology and intermedia theory in order to provide a critical overview of how the impact of proliferating ecological crisis can be better understood in terms of the accumulated violence of interlocking oppressions, multiple colonialisms and ecologically unequal exchange characteristic of the longue durée of racial capitalism. Examining examples of environmental racism and environmental injustice in Canada, India and the global South, this lecture outlines the importances of feminist, anti-racist, eco-socialist and degrowth politics for advancing renewable energy system change and for delinking from our contemporary, crisis-prone global political economy. Drawing on recent research-creation interventions from the Speculative Energy Futures collaborative research project, the talk concludes with a consideration of the twin roles of speculative and regenerative molecular intermedia for inhabiting conjunctural contradictions and for organizing enduring subsistence political ecologies.
| Activity | 2023-10-27 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Petrocultures 2022: TransformationsChair for Petrocultures 2022: Transformations virtual panel Intermedia Research-Creation, Resistance Visual Art and Ecological Envisioning: Regenerative Sympoesis Beyond Petrocultures with panelists Ruth Beer, Lisa Moore, and Sourayan Mookerjea. | Activity | 2022-08-24 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Petrofeminism, Deep Energy Literacy & Other Feminist Futures | Activity | 2018-01-19 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Power Shift: Energy Transition and Energy Futurity | Activity | 2021-06-02 | Natalie Loveless |
| Racial Capitalism in Canada: Lessons for the Environmental Justice MovementDrawing from his monograph in preparation, "Interlocking Racisms: Multiple Colonialisms, Accumulated Violence, and Degrowth Plenitude," Sourayan Mookerjea interrogates the limits and possibilities of climate and environmental justice mobilization around the slogan of a green new deal in Canada. Despite this movement’s enthusiasm for the cultural politics of Indigenous Resurgence and its rhetorical support for decolonization, Indigenous land based sovereignty organizations keep themselves at a distance from its conventional statist political imaginary. Moreover, a northern-centred, climate emergency panicked imaginary seems to be losing popular momentum in a conjuncture marked by green passive revolution and fascism redux. This is taking place both nationally and transnationally while new formations of interlocking racisms enable the advance of class projects from above. Sourayan Mookerjea examines the crisis prone fault lines of this emergent conjuncture in Canadian society historically. He foregrounds the Canadian state’s articulation through interlocking neocolonial systems of oppression and argues for the importance of molecular social revolution against toxic cultures of empire now weaponized on replay.
| Activity | 2024-02-15 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Racial Capitalism, Multiple Colonialisms and the (post-)Fossil Frontier: Green New Deals, Green Passive Revolution (and Fascism Redux) | Activity | 2021-06-30 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Research-Creation Producing Needed Knowledges for the Climate EmergencyChair for conference panel: Research-Creation Producing Needed Knowledges for the Climate Emergency.
| Activity | 2024-05-18 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Rethinking Petrocultures, War, and Democracy Through Theological LensesSheena Wilson delivered an invited virtual talk at Trinity College’s 2022 Earth Day event.
This virtual talk was given at the 2022 Trinity College Earth Day Event:
Doing Theology Amidst Epochal Shifts. | Activity | 2022-04-22 | Sheena L Wilson |
| RUBIX 2023Keynote address for Rubix, an annual exhibition, symposium, and showcase event that celebrates the scholarly, research, and creative (SRC) activities within The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University. Every year, RUBIX brings together brilliant minds from across the fields of media, design, and creative industries to explore, innovate, and impact the world we live in. | Activity | 2023-01-26 | Natalie Loveless |
| Sensing the Anthropocene: Aesthetic Attunement in an Age of Urgency | Activity | 2019-02-13 | Natalie Loveless |
| Situated Practices in Precarious Times | Activity | 2021-05-04 | Natalie Loveless |
| Sound Table – The Sounds of the Anthropocene. Panel participant.
| Activity | 2019-11-11 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| Sounds of the Anthropocene | Activity | 2019-11-21 | Natalie Loveless |
| Speculative Energy Futures: Workshop #1PI and Co-I led this intensive 3-day research creation workshop for the participants of the Speculative Energy Futures project.
| Activity | 2018-03-09 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Sourayan Mookerjea, Jessie Beier, Mark Simpson, "Ruth Beer", "Sean Caulfield", "Salvatore Cucchiara", Evan G R Davies, "Soheila Esfahani", "Joan Greer", "Steven Hoffman", "Ursula Johnson", "Satoshi Ikeda", MaryElizabeth Luka, "Patrick Mahon", "Janice Makokis", "Tegan Moore", "Lisa Moore", "Tsēmā Igharas", "Scott Smallwood" |
| Speculative Energy Futures: Workshop #2PI and Co-I led this intensive 4-day research creation workshop for the participants of the Speculative Energy Futures project at the Banff Centre for the Arts. | Activity | 2019-06-03 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Sourayan Mookerjea, Jessie Beier, "Soheila Esfahani", Evan G R Davies, "Satoshi Ikeda", "Tegan Moore", "Tsēmā Igharas", "Sean Caulfield", "Joan Greer", "Patrick Mahon", "Steven Hoffman", "Janice Makokis", Mark Simpson, "Scott Smallwood", "Rachel Snow", "Caitlin Fischer", "Lisa Moore", "Ruth Beer" |
| Speculative Energy Futures: Workshop #3 PI and Co-I led this intensive 4-day research creation workshop for the participants of the Speculative Energy Futures project. | Activity | 2019-12-12 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Sourayan Mookerjea, Jessie Beier, "Ruth Beer", "Sean Caulfield", Evan G R Davies, "Wallace Edwards", "Soheila Esfahani", "Caitlin Fisher", "Joan Greer", "Steven Hoffman", "Tsēmā Igharas", "Satoshi Ikeda", "Luke Johnson", "Patrick Mahon", "Janice Makokis", "Lisa Moore", "Tegan Moore", Mark Simpson, "Scott Smallwood", "Rachel Snow", "Diana Steinhauer", "Clarence Whitestone", "Kurtis McAdam" |
| Speculative Molecular Intermediain this presentation for Petrocultures 2022: Transformation, Dr. Mookerjea discussed time-bias poems he composed for three collaborative group research-creation probes, The Energy Emergency Repair Kit, and Seed Time 1 and 2, created for the Speculative Energy Futures research project. Drawing on subsistence perspective ecofeminist degrowth theory, world-ecology, and, the work of Canadian communication theorist Harold Innis, he examined the historical constraints and contradictions through which these research-creation works seed the possibility of critique and regenerative praxis in the ruins of the colonial regime of art. | Activity | 2022-08-24 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Spores of Critique: On the Aesthetics and Poetics of Critical Practice SeriesOngoing bimonthly series started January 2019 | Activity | 2019-01-01 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| System Wide Enablers: Energy HumanitiesJoint presentation at the 2019 FES Research Symposium. | Activity | 2019-05-06 | Sheena L Wilson, Mark Simpson |
| Teaching Sustainability and Climate Justice in Catastrophic Times: Journaling in the PluriverseHosted virtually by the University of Alberta, and organized by Dr. Amanda Spallacci, Dr. Orly Lael Netzer, and Dr. Julie Rak — the Teaching Life Writing Conference brought together scholars from around the world to consider current approaches, challenges, and opportunities related to life writing and pedagogy.
Joan Greer's presentation, "Teaching Sustainability and Climate Justice in Catastrophic Times: Journaling in the Pluriverse," invited readers “to join in a deep process of intellectual, emotional, ethical, and spiritual decolonization”. The visions and practices associated with the Pluriverse “are about recognizing the diversity of people’s views on planetary well-being and their skills in protecting it”. Dr. Greer's question: can journal writing and creative mark-making (text or image) in higher education provide a pluriversal form of generative thinking that can help respond to the above challenges of comprehensive decolonization and planetary well-being while contributing to student health and resilience?
| Activity | 2020-12-11 | "Joan Greer" |
| The Bitumen Commodity Frontier and Climate/Environmental JusticePublic talk given at the Social Spatialisation & Spatial Justice Workshop. | Activity | 2024-03-28 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| The Colonizers’ Model of ModellingPerformance lecture for The Institution of Knowledge Exhibition, which showcased research-in-action performances and installations that investigate the structures of knowledge currently configuring cultural and educational institutions, and that work to highlight forms of knowledge that have historically been excised from such spaces. | Activity | 2023-05-17 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| The Contemporary Crisis of ScienceSymposium organized by Dr. Mookerjea. | Activity | 2019-10-31 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| The Pedagogy of Form: 20th Century Art and Ecological Ethics | Activity | 2020-01-17 | Natalie Loveless |
| The Problematic of Images of the Canadian Arctic Landscape Depicting Everyday Extremes | Activity | 2021-11-11 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Toxic Media Ecologies 3: Critical Responses to the Cultural Politics of Planetary CrisisThe third Toxic Media Ecologies conference, organized by Dr. Mookerjea. | Activity | 2019-11-02 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Toxic Media Ecologies, Virtuous Vulnerabilities and Molecular IntermediaWhat stuff are societies made of today? What is the relationship between globalization as the movement of goods and money, as property and the reality of human and non-human body flows? How can the basic composition of the ego be described and how can it become the source of the common? What steps are conceivable to stop the permanent destruction of material and other assets? What elements would make up a political philosophy and practice of semi-permeable borders? How does one write a constitution for the coexistence of all mortals?
These and similar questions are currently driving not only science, but also philosophy and art. But they are far too big for a simple answer to make a difference in concrete life processes and economic, political, artistic contexts. The symposium The strengths of the weaknesses. societies in troubled timesis therefore dedicated to selected scenes and problem areas in which the vulnerability of the fabric of life becomes political and/or promising forms of dealing with the injuries of the Capitalocene are shown. Approaches and forms of practice are presented and discussed that turn alleged inability into assets. It is about artistic, political and philosophical approaches that deal with weakness, contamination, the ruinous, loss or mortality in a way that reverses these supposedly deficient moments in such a way that they become skills: vulnerability becomes openness for wounds; a skill in dealing with fragility; an ability to open up even in risky situations, to let the unknown and the astonishing approach you; to get involved with the other without fear, or also: to let him/her/it be. It is about an ethics of the individual, of half measures and partial alliances. It's about countering fantasies of purity that are currently picking up speed again with knowledgeable navigation in the impure. It's about locating what connects what divides and freeing concepts such as society, community and belonging from the grip of family and nation. | Activity | 2022-12-16 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| UCalgary Scholar Public Lecture: Genomic Media/Sustainable DNAOrganized talk organized through Sustainability Lecture Series, for the purposes of furthering cross-campus collaboration and research between the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta. | Activity | 2019-09-13 | "Mél Hogan", Sheena L Wilson |
| UNPOP: The Journey to SolarDo you have the Solar Sickness? Check out the 4th annual 2024 Renewable Energy Burner Symposium. Held on December 7th, 10 a.m. Pacific Time. This event is open to anyone interested in renewable energy and is free.
We have 12 speakers covering topics like: •"Curiouser and Curiouser” Playawide Renewable Energy Review • Temple of Together: Power Lessons Learned • The Burning Man Project 2030 Sustainability Goals Update • The Green Corridor and Humans Uniting for Better Sustainability (HUBS) • The Solar Library • Regional Burns - Solar Perspectives From Africa • Theme Camps - Renewable Energy Usage • Theme Camp - Bao Chicka Wow Wow • Together for Never - Art Micro Grid • Open Source Power Monitoring System Featured Artists of RAT in 2024 • RAT - What It Is. Plus Educational Opportunities in Renewables
This event is brought to you by Renewables for Artists Team (RAT). Come join use as we work with artists and renewable power. We also have a fine selection of renewable energy courses and lectures.
RAT can be found at: https://www.renewablesforartiststeam.org/ | Activity | 2024-12-07 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| Urban Just Transitions SymposiumParticipant in a roundtable discussion on urban just energy transition. | Activity | 2023-04-12 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Utopian and Regenerative Praxes, Degrowth, Crises and the Revenants of Racial CapitalismFredric Jameson’s injunction to “always historicize” (1984) applies no less to our conjunctural proliferation of crises. Not only have these all been long in the making but the 20th century trajectories of the exhaustion of historical natures (Moore 2015) ensure that environmental crises will continue to constitute the fulcrum around which class politics and imperialist war on a planetary scale will turn. This paper argues for a spatialized theory of class politics adequate to contemporary racial capitalism’s twinned auto-immune reactions of green passive revolution and fascism redux. Paramilitary violence against environmental justice and anti-poverty activists and, more generally, militarized policing and (extra-)legal repression of subalternized classes and communities in the name of climate action, resilience infrastructure and national security are emerging modalities of development dispossession resulting from speculative investment opportunities provided by smart green urban renewal (Caprotti 2014), industrial corridor geopolitics (Ramachandraiah 2016) and land grabs for solar farms (Yenetti et al. 2016, Rignall 2016), wind farms (Cormack 2018), biofuels (Renzaho 2017) and carbon sinks (Fairhead et al. 2012). Drawing on research conducted through the University of Alberta’s Feminist Energy Futures initiative on the class and cultural politics of renewable energy democracy and bringing together the theoretical insights of the literatures on varieties of capitalism, the multiple colonialisms framework, feminist social reproduction and subsistence perspectives as well as post-Western Marxism’s account of interlocking systems of oppression, this paper examines the prospects for the Left’s intervention in the speculative complex of passive revolution and fascism redux. The paper takes up the debate on the state between eco-socialists (Burkett, 2006, Lowy 2015) and the degrowth movement (Jackson 2017, Kallis 2017, Mies 2000, de Angelis 2017, Federici 2011) through the detour of a critical engagement with Jameson’s redeployment of Lenin’s classical transition theory of dual power. (2016)
| Activity | 2021-02-25 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Visiting Artist Lecture | Activity | 2021-01-21 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Visiting Artist Lecture | Activity | 2021-03-08 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| VPAG Presents: OPT 2021 Artist Talk Series, Virtual Artist Talk. | Activity | 2021-04-13 | "Luke Johnson" |
| Walking the Talk: Climate MovesTogether, we will explore place-based knowledge and walking as a first climate action that can inspire other actions: other ways of thinking about how we live and work now and how we’d like to create new habits and policies moving into the future. Join Rachel Epp Buller’s keynote address “Walking as a Climate Move.” Take part in guided walks with local plant and history experts. Participate in a somatic climate change workshop hosted by Montreal-based artist Emilie O’Brien. Learn about challenges, experiences, and best practices from City of Edmonton experts. How do we not just switch tech but shift our attitudes to address climate change?
At the symposium, and throughout the year, as part of the bigger Walking the Talk: Climate Moves project, we are asking: What can walking teach us about climate change? How can walking as climate action inform City work? How can embodied and experiential learning reshape how we make decisions in the City of Edmonton? How do we change the way we move, learn and play at the City of Edmonton to be responsive at the pace of climate change itself? | Activity | 2024-10-16 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Water is Life: A Visit with GardenShip & StatePanel discussion related to GardenShip and State with Jeff Thomas, Lori Blondeau, Tom Cull, Michael Farnan, Amelia Fay, Joan Greer, Mark Kasumovic, Mary Mattingly, Adrian Stimson, Andres Villar, and Michelle Wilson.
Focusing on the role of water as a life-giving force in the time of the Anthropocene, our panelists will introduce their works and activist projects to highlight the show’s overriding preoccupation with the environmental crisis and decolonization. Water is Life will present a mix of regional and international writers and artists who will demonstrate how art projects addressing environmental challenges and positive social change, may be productively intertwined to flow in the direction of hope and possibility.
| Activity | 2021-11-17 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| We Were In It: Experiments with Flash Fiction and EnergyPresented as part of Petrocultures 2022: Transformations. Lisa Moore's presentation discussed a collection of flash fiction and visual art edited by Moore and Sheena Wilson for Speculative Energy Futures, a collaborative research-creation based project at the University of Alberta, as well as the role of visual art and literature in the cultural politics of renewable energy system change | Activity | 2022-08-24 | Lisa Moore |
| Why is Energy Transition a Feminist Issue?A presentation as part of the Intersectional Research Showcase at the launch of the Research at the Intersections of Gender Signature Area. | Activity | 2019-03-28 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Why Research-Creation? Artistic Method and the Anthropocene | Activity | 2021-03-26 | Natalie Loveless |
| World-ecology and Hydrapolitics: Interlocking Oppressions in the Age of Exhaustion | Activity | 2020-02-07 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| “On Energy Transition and Renewable Futures" | Activity | 2022-10-03 | Imre Szeman, Sheena L Wilson |
| Connections in Friction: Socially Engaged Art in East Asia in Transnational Contact Zones | Publication | 2022-01-01 | Vicki Kwon |
| Moving Beyond Survival in Twentieth-Century Canadian Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction 1948-1989"This thesis examines settler-Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction (SF) by English-language and Francophone Québécois authors published between 1948 and 1989, in order to investigate how historical settler imaginations of disaster are articulated. This study is in service of several ends: first, to disrupt and interrogate the Canadian literary canon through the study of SF as a legitimate genre with important insights; second, to take a good, hard look at the development of what theorists have called a neoconservative and regressive genre in settler Canada and Québec; and third, to look to the past for strategies to live in an imagined future where worldwide disaster (“apocalypse”) has already transpired. I argue that the visions of the post-apocalyptic future that were prevalent in SF produced in Canada during the latter half of the twentieth century correspond to a singular narrative in SF that is based on and around tropes established by earlier SF and literary writing published in the US.
In the course of my research, I found that while most of the forty-four texts in this genre adhere to a specifically Canadian settler-colonial and ultimately instrumentalist worldview, there are several texts that demonstrate divergent attitudes and sociopolitical alternatives to dominant cultural imaginings of the methods of survival in the post-apocalypse. I focus my study on these few texts that I argue depart in significant ways from a dominant post-apocalyptic narrative, subverting the genre and taking it to new places. While doing so, I reference and make note of other texts and use them to illustrate my arguments, comparing and contrasting them with the main texts and tropes under discussion. In chapter order, the main theoretical lenses I employed are: 1. Canadian SF theory and environmental criticism, 2. ecofeminism and feminist posthumanism, 3. post-colonial and decolonial thought specifically focusing on Quebec and Indigenous issues, and 4. affect and queer theory.
This dissertation contributes to excavating and highlighting the colonial survival mindset that colours the stories we tell ourselves, and shines a light on the philosophies underpinning our actions as we move forward into the Anthropocene. It is a project that seeks to build imaginative capacity for writers, critics, theorists, and readers of SF. I argue that these scripts both cleave to and depart from reality, and that dominant settler assumptions based on individualism and garrison mentality as a way to survive crises ignore the crucial role of care and healthy community in encouraging human flourishing in its diverse forms.
My research shows that, in the post-apocalypse, which more often than not is marked by ongoing crises, people who are able to move beyond disaster survival narratives are the ones that in the end are able to create a life for themselves and others worth living—in non-hierarchical community, in relations of care, and in an acknowledgement of their posthuman entanglement with the non-human world and their environment. My findings from this study are that the imaginary of the post-apocalypse necessarily must incorporate community, connection, and post-anthropocentrism as key facets in order to truly move beyond the fear-driven regressive, exclusionary, and violent impulses of survival. Unsubscribing from the single version of the post-apocalyptic narrative that anticipates the garrison mentality as a necessary corollary of worldwide devastation can allow for a critical appraisal of the present in order to consciously move beyond survival and into the future."
| Publication | 2021-01-01 | Ariel Kroon |
| Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational FuturesThis study of Pedagogy at the End of the World investigates the “end of the world” scenarios that now characterize education and its reasons in Anthropocene times. Emerging through an interrogation of the apocalypse habits and anthropo-scenic views through which educational futurity is most often imagined, this study is oriented towards the creation of pedagogical concepts that work to problematize and resituate questions of educational futurity in relation to the planetary realities raised by today’s pressing extinction events. This research proceeds through a series of speculative studies of educational futurity, each of which is positioned as an experimental site for probing the limits of pedagogical un/thinkability so as to speculate, through concept creation, on alternative orientations to educational futurity. Importantly, each of these speculative studies endeavours to move beyond just analysis and critique of the epistemic constraints and conceptual affordances that have come to condition pedagogical possibility. By putting (apparent) educational givens into contact with a range of seemingly alien objects, transversal theories and strange examples, the speculative experiments that make up this work reframe and reorient both the educational problems and solutions raised by today’s end times scenario. It is from this experimentation that a weird pedagogy emerges, that is, an experimental (albeit always insufficient) pedagogical anti-model, a speculative programme for the unprogrammable that seeks to problematize, and ultimately counteractualize, potentials of and for Pedagogy at the End of the World. Through conceptual experimentation and weird encounters, this study aims to probe the limits of educational futurity, not as a way of surmounting or domesticating the unthought, but instead, as a mode of resituating educational problem-posing in relation to an unknown and unknowable future. As such, this study aims to practice experimental approaches to educational research that do not entail a rejection of the actual world and thus the real of impending ecocatastrophe, but instead opts for speculative modes and transversal styles of inquiry that might be capable of mutating and bifurcating educational future imaginaries. As such, this study asks: how might pedagogical thinking proceed when confronted with the unthinkable scenarios and unfathomable conditions raised by today’s anthropo-scenic milieu and its extinction events? What does educational inquiry entail when it confronts its own thresholds of rationality, or the limits of thought and thus a thought of limits, which, given education’s commitment to thinkability are demonstrably unpopular? How might educational problem-posing approach questions and issues that resist thought itself? And further, what are the conditions, preclusions, and exclusions that make something thinkable in the first place? By exploring the way in which contemporary educational un/thinkability is itself conditioned, this study is geared towards counter-actualizing both the narratives and methods that have come to overdetermine discussions of educational futurity so as to unsettle and singularize otherwise diminished conditions of pedagogical possibility. Through the speculative development of a weird pedagogy, this study of Pedagogy at the End of the World is not only framed as an experiment in pedagogical thought, but also aims to intervene within educational theory and research — into the process of study itself — so as to counter today's apocalypse habits and the banality of those end of the world concepts that have come to limit pedagogical possibilities, both now and into the future.
| Publication | 2017-09-30 | Jessie Beier |
| Perceptions and Practices of Flood Risk Management: A Case Study of Flood Risk Governance in High River, Alberta | Publication | 2019-04-01 | Eva Bogdan |
| Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation | Publication | 2019-12-01 | Natalie Loveless |
| Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, CulturePresenting a multifaceted analysis of the cultural, social, and political claims and assumptions that guide how we think and talk about oil, Petrocultures maps the complex and often contradictory ways in which oil has influenced the public’s imagination around the world. This collection of essays shows that oil’s vast network of social and historical narratives and the processes that enable its extraction are what characterize its importance, and that its circulation through this immense web of relations forms worldwide experiences and expectations. | Publication | 2017-06-01 | Sheena L Wilson, Adam Carlson, Imre Szeman |
| Prototypes for Possible Worlds ExhibitionThe first Speculative Energy Futures proto-exhibition featuring works that imagine or predict possible climate and energy futures, focusing on social justice and community well-being.
| Publication | 2019-12-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless |
| Chief Gordon Auger of Bigstone Cree Nation on Treaty Land Entitlement Claims and Upholding Treaty PromisesIn this interview, Chief Gordon Auger of Bigstone Cree Nation discusses his experience with Treaty Land Entitlement claims and upholding treaty promises.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| City of Edmonton and the Change for Climate Program: In Conversation with Andrea SolerAndrea Soler, Senior Community Strategist for the City of Edmonton's Energy Transition Unit, on consumerism culture and gendered reactions to climate change. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| City of Edmonton Energy, Transition and Leadership: In Conversation with Mike MellrossMike Mellross, General Supervisor of Energy Transition and Utility Supply Management for the City of Edmonton, on the City's climate change initiatives and Edmonton's possible energy and climate change futures. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| City of Edmonton Residential Energy Efficiency and Sharing Economies: In Conversation with Robyn WebbRobyn Webb, Senior Environmental Project Manager at the City of Edmonton, discusses transit-oriented and sustainable urban development. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Cultures of Energy: The Energy Humanities Podcast - Natalie Loveless | Activity | 2019-07-04 | Natalie Loveless |
| Cultures of Energy: The Energy Humanities Podcast - Sheena Wilson | Activity | 2019-08-08 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Elder Albert Yellowknee of Bigstone Cree Nation on the Impacts of Logging on Human and Non-Human Animals (Treaty 8 Cree Language Video)Interview with Elder Albert Yellowknee of Bigstone Cree Nation on the Impacts of Logging on Human and Non-Human Animals
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Elder Eliza Orr of Bigstone Cree Nation on her Experience With the Energy IndustryHighlight of an interview with Elder Eliza Orr from Bigstone Cree Nation discusses living off the land and shares her experiences with energy industries.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Elder Ray Peters of Bigstone Cree First Nation on Land based Learning, Language and HistoryElder Ray Peters of Bigstone Cree First Nation on land based learning, language, history, and education.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Elder Verna Orr of Bigstone Cree Nation on her Role as Cultural Advisor at NAIT and Sharing Land Teachings with her GrandchildrenElder Verna Orr from Bigstone Cree Nation discusses her role as a Cultural Advisor at NAIT and how she shares land teachings with her grandchildren.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Elders Donald Alook, Manager of Culture and Recreation for Bigstone, and Bertha Alook of Peekiskwetan" Lets Talk "Agency on Wellness, Employment Initiatives, and the Impacts of Industry on BigstoneElder Donald Alook, Manager of Culture and Recreation for Bigstone First Nation, and Elder Bertha Alook of Peekiskwetan Let’s Talk Agency, on recreational, wellness, and employment initiatives and the impacts of industry on Bigstone.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Angele Alook on Fracking in Bigstone Cree NationDocumentary interview with Angele Alook, researcher for Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, Indigenous sociologist/collaborator with Just Powers, and a member of Bigstone Cree Nation, on fracking in Bigstone Cree Nation.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Angele Alook on Indigenous SovereigntyHighlight of an interview with Angele Alook, researcher for Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, Indigenous sociologist/collaborator with Just Powers, and a member of Bigstone Cree Nation, on Indigenous sovereignty and relationships with the land.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Cindy Noskiye, Environment Officer at Bigstone Lands Office on the Impacts of DevelopmentHighlight of interview with Cindy Noskiye, member of Bigstone Cree Nation and Environment Officer for the Bigstone Lands Office, on the wildlife impacts of industrial development.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: David Kahane on Shaping Our Energy FutureHighlight of an interview with David Kahane, political science professor and the former Project Director of Alberta Climate Dialogue, on how societal values shape energy futures.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Elder Albert Yellowknee of Bigstone Cree Nation on Caring for the LandHighlight of interview with Elder Albert Yellowknee from Bigstone Cree Nation on taking care of the land for future generations.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Elder Mike Beaver of Bigstone Cree Nation on his Hopes for the FutureHighlight of an interview with Elder Mike Beaver from Bigstone Cree Nation discusses his hopes for the future and Indigenous knowledges.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Elder Mike Beaver of Bigstone Cree Nation on the Importance of WaterHighlight of interview with Elder Mike Beaver from Bigstone Cree Nation discusses the importance of water for ecosystems and community livelihoods.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Kim TallBear on WhitenessHighlight of an interview with Kim TallBear, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous People's Technoscience and Environment, an associate professor in the faculty of Native Studies, and an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, on whiteness, white subjectivity, and the privileging of non-Indigenous knowledges.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Robyn Webb, Senior Environmental Project Manager at the City of Edmonton on Design and SustainabilityHighlight of interview with Robyn Webb, Senior Environmental Project Manager at the City of Edmonton, on cities and sustainable design.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Sheena Wilson on Mobilizing for More Just FuturesHighlight of an interview with Sheena Wilson, Just Powers Principal Investigator, English and Cultural Studies professor at the University of Alberta's Campus Saint-Jean, and Co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, on mobilizing for more just futures.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Highlight: Sourayan Mookerjea on the CommonsHighlight of an interview with Sourayan Mookerjea, Director of the Intermedia Research Studio and Co-Investigator on iDoc and Feminist Energy Futures, discussing the commons.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Historical Capitalism, Oikos and the Ecological Crisis: In Conversation with Jason MooreJason Moore, Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University and author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, on capitalism, cheap nature, and the economy over the last few centuries. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Idle No More, Indigenous Law and Trudeau's Indigenous Framework: In Conversation with Janice MakokisJanice Makokis of Saddle Lake Cree Nation, an advisor and policy analyst working with Onion Lake Cree Nation, and an organizer with Idle No More, speaks about the federal government's Indigenous Rights Framework, decolonization, treaty rights and relationships, and women's roles in First Nations laws and legal orders. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| iDoc Highlight Video: Eriel Deranger on DecolonizationHighlight of interview with Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Director and Co-founder of Indigenous Climate Action, on how society could become more balanced without the violence of petro-capitalism.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| iDoc Interview: Elder Ray Peters (Cree)Elder Ray Peters of Bigstone Cree First Nation on land based learning, language, history, and education.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| iDoc, Energy Commons and the Role of Social Movements: In Conversation with Sourayan MookerjeaSourayan Mookerjea, Director of the Intermedia Research Studio and Co-Investigator on iDoc and Feminist Energy Futures, discusses his research on commoning, molecular media, and his feminist renewable energy transition role playing game, Perfect Storm! | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Indigenous Action on Climate: In Conversation with Eriel Tchekwie DerangerEriel Tchekwie Deranger, member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Director and Co-founder of Indigenous Climate Action, discusses Healing Walks, the economy, and decolonization. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Indigenous Governance, Resource Extraction and Stewardship: In Conversation with Josie AugerJosie Auger, member of and a councillor for Bigstone Cree First Nation, on the importance of the land in the Nehiyawak belief system, colonization, treaties, water, and both present and future relationships with extractive energy industries. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Indigenous Lives and Livelihoods near the Alberta Tar/Oilsands: In Conversation with Angele AlookAngele Alook, researcher for Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, Indigenous sociologist/collaborator with Just Powers, and a member of Bigstone Cree Nation, discusses Indigenous womanhood, colonization, feminism, and Bigstone Cree Nation's relationships with energy industries. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Intergenerational Knowledge, Residential Schools and Healing: In Conversation with Elder Verna Orr Elder Verna Orr from Bigstone Cree Nation discusses her role as a Cultural Advisor at NAIT and how she shares land teachings with her grandchildren. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| On Alberta Climate Dialogues (ABCD): In Conversation with David KahaneDavid Kahane, political science professor and the former Project Director of Alberta Climate Dialogue, discusses the development and learnings of the ABCD project. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| On Future Energy Systems and the role of FES in the Future: In Conversation with Larry KostiukLarry Kostiuk, the Director of Future Energy Systems, on the creation of FES and his thoughts on the future landscape of energy. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| On Intergenerational Knowledge and Living off the Land on Bigstone Cree Nation: In Conversation with Elder Eliza OrrElder Eliza Orr from Bigstone Cree Nation discusses living off the land and shares her experiences with energy industries. | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| On the Role of Edmonton Municipal Government in Energy Transition: In Conversation with Andrea LinskyAndrea Linsky, Senior Environmental Project Manager at the City of Edmonton, discusses her position, energy in Alberta, women's contributions to energy conversations, and energy resilient | Activity | 2022-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Political Ecology, Activism, and the Petrostate: In Conversation with Laurie AdkiniDoc is an intermedia documentary project tracking energy-transition research, discussions, and developments in Alberta, Canada, and beyond. In a series of over 100 interviews with scholars, policy makers, activists, and community members, iDoc records, archives and shares critical conversations about current and future energy systems.
| Activity | 2020-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Randall Noskiye of Bigstone Cree Nation, Environment Officer for the Bigstone Lands Office on the Impact of Industry on Treaty Land RightsRandall Noskiye, member of Bigstone Cree Nation and Environment Officer for the Bigstone Lands Office, on land rights and traditional hunting, trapping, and fishing in relation to the impacts of nearby industry.
| Activity | 2023-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Speculative Energy Futures: Why we need to think about the social and cultural aspects of energyProfile of Speculative Energy Futures for Creative Carbon Scotland | Activity | 2023-07-04 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless |
| The Scope of Just Powers: iDoc, Speculative Energy Futures and More: In Conversation with Sheena WIlsonSheena Wilson, Just Powers Principal Investigator, English and Cultural Studies professor at the University of Alberta's Campus Saint-Jean, and Co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, discusses the various projects under the Just Powers banner, women's participation in energy transition initiatives, and decolonization. | Activity | 2023-04-25 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Traplines and Resisting the Impacts of Oil and Forestry Industries on Bigstone Cree Nation: In Conversation with Elder Albert YellowkneeElder Albert Yellowknee from Bigstone Cree Nation discusses his experience with logging around his family's traplines and the impact of logging on human and non-human animals. | Activity | 2020-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Treaty Rights, Traplines and Resisting Oil and Gas on Bigstone Cree Nation: In Conversation with Cindy NoskiyeCindy Noskiye, member of Bigstone Cree Nation and Environment Officer for the Bigstone Lands Office, on the impact of industry on land rights and land use. | Activity | 2020-06-30 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Power LinesExhibition for 2020 Alberta Biennale. | Activity | 2020-09-26 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Energy Emergency Repair KitResearch-creation art-book | Publication | 2022-04-23 | Mark Simpson, Jessie Beier, "Joan Greer", "Tsema Igharas", Sourayan Mookerjea, "tegan moore", Lisa Moore, "catlin kelly-kuzyk", "jerome tave", "kyle lawson" |
| Mutation and Care in the Anthropocene | Publication | 2018-09-27 | Natalie Loveless |
| Deep Energy Literacy | IP Management | 2017-09-01 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Feminist Solarities | IP Management | 2019-01-02 | Sheena L Wilson, Mark Simpson, Imre Szeman, Darin Barney |
| Oil Loyal | IP Management | 2017-09-01 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Petrofeminism | IP Management | 2017-09-01 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Solarities | IP Management | 2019-01-02 | Sheena L Wilson, Mark Simpson, Imre Szeman, Darin Barney |
| Visualizing Nature in Art, Design, and Visual Culture in the Long 19th Century HADVC 455 B1 (*3): Visualizing Nature in Art, Design, and Visual Culture in the Long 19th Century
Winter Term, M 14:00-16:50
Instructor: Joan Greer | Activity | 2021-01-06 | "Joan Greer" |
| A People’s Green New DealSeminar on M. Ajl at the Intermedia Research Studio, University of Alberta. | Activity | 2024-05-09 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| A Tragedy of the CommonsThe exhibition, featuring the work of Sean Caulfield (in collaboration with U of A Department of Art & Design colleague Sue Colberg and Steven Hoffman from York University), fosters discussion on political action and environmental change.
| Activity | 2024-09-04 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Aesthetic Attunement in an Age of UrgencyUniversity-Wide Lecture, | Activity | 2019-01-28 | Natalie Loveless |
| Aesthetic Attunement in an Age of Urgency Invited University-Wide Lecture (part 2 of a “distinguished visitor” lecture series hosted by the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture) | Activity | 2018-11-28 | Natalie Loveless |
| ARCTIC MAKES II: Observations, Lessons and Solutions from the Geographic Periphery Group exhibition online (ongoing).
Two prints exhibited by Ruth Beer:
"Tuktoyaktuk + Water / Arkhangelsk + Oil" (diptych), photograph reprocessed by A.I, inkjet print, 2021, 40”x30” (each photograph).
and
"Tuktoyaktuk, Oil + Water," photograph reprocessed by A.I, inkjet print, 2021, 40”x30”
| Activity | 2021-06-15 | "Ruth Beer" |
| ARCTIC MAKES: Observations, Lessons And Solutions From The Geographic PeripheryOfficial exhibition URL broken. Alternative URL: https://julieforgues.ca/arctic-makes
Virtual group exhibition (ongoing). | Activity | 2020-04-30 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Art, Ecology, and ResilienceUniversity-Wide Lecture | Activity | 2020-02-04 | Natalie Loveless |
| Art, Ecology, and the Politics of FormPart 1 of a “distinguished visitor” lecture series hosted by the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture | Activity | 2018-11-07 | Natalie Loveless |
| Bituminous PartingsGroup exhibition from December 14, 2021 - January 7, 2022.
Bitumen: a generic term for an inflammable hydrocarbon such as petroleum or asphalt.
Parting: in geology, a thin layer of rock between two different strata in the Earth’s surface.
A separation between two geological strata, bituminous partings are a compression of life force parsing the temporal layers of the earth. Rendered by the pressure of passing centuries and accumulated history, a seam mere metres thick marks divisions between eras.
This print exchange is an opportunity to connect artists from around North America whose work encompasses concerns within the ecological/industrial/developmental fields. | Activity | 2021-12-14 | "Luke Johnson", "Sean Caulfield" |
| Black GoldSolo art exhibition from January 22 to April 16, 2021.
| Activity | 2021-01-22 | "Tsēmā Igharas" |
| Book Launch: How to Make Art at the End of the World + Animate LiteraciesGlass Bookshop and Latitude 53 celebrated the launch of Natalie Loveless's HOW TO MAKE ART AT THE END OF THE WORLD: A MANIFESTO FOR RESEARCH CREATION (Duke UP) and Nathan Snaza'a ANIMATE LITERACIES (Duke UP).
| Activity | 2019-10-10 | Natalie Loveless |
| Book Launch: Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation | Activity | 2020-02-05 | Natalie Loveless |
| borderLINE: 2020 Biennial of Contemporary ArtGroup exhibition Sept 26, 2020 - Jan 3, 2021. | Activity | 2020-09-26 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| BundleAn interactive installation for "Unpacking Energy Transition (FluxKit Beta Tests)" at SQUARE, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (November 7-11, 2022).
Bundle incorporates several different components folded into a literal “bundle” of knowledge: Indigenous oral storytelling teachings; a poetic zine that combines intersectional feminist and Indigenous ways of knowing and world-views, alongside Indigenous prophecies; cedar and tobacco, which are used in Indigenous teaching and ceremony; a birch-bark print; and other visually impactful images connected to place and Indigenous prophecy.
At SQUARE, we bring Bundle as both a portable folded canvas parcel, as it will circulate in the final FluxKit, and as a large hanging canvas interactive banner with pockets that contain the collection of the above-mentioned components. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | Sheena L Wilson, "Janice Makokis", "Kurtis McAdam", "Ruth Beer", "Patrick Mahon", "Barbara Mahon", "Shrmistha Kar", "Pat Makokis" |
| Carbon Catching Library | Activity | 2019-12-10 | "Soheila Esfahani", "Satoshi Ikeda", "Luke Johnson" |
| Carbon Catching LibraryThe Carbon Catching Library was conceived as an invitation to investigate knowledge about local plants, plant-based carbon catching, propagation, and interspecies care. The intent of the Carbon Catching Library deepens our capacities for plant, soil, and pollinator literacy, which are vital components in our path toward ecological and environmental harmony.
For the FluxKit, Carbon Catching Library takes the form of a set of twelve zines by emerging artists. These zines think through the role of plants and the role of knowledge sharing about plants, in a time when we all understand that we need to be living in better relation with the flora and fauna that have, for too long, simply been taken for granted as resources. Instead, we need to get to know them as verdant kin, and appreciate them for all their gifts, including their carbon-catching capacity as we transition away from extractive energy systems.
At SQUARE, visitors are encouraged to take instruction from the Carbon Catching Library of zines and to start growing their own knowledge and plant-based Carbon Catching Libraries at home, in the workplace, or in any public space available.
Collaborating student artists: Ioana Dragomir, Mélika Hashemi, Rebecca Lai, Amy Leigh, Alissa Rossi, Sumaira Tazeen. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | "Satoshi Ikeda", "Luke Johnson", "Soheila Esfahani" |
| Climate Change Theatre Action: A Panel Discussion and Play ReadingA public reading and performance of short climate change plays presented biennially to coincide with the United Nations COP meetings. This event was organized by Selena Couture and Stefano Muneroni at the University of Alberta. | Activity | 2019-11-05 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea |
| ComforterWorried Earth: Eco-Anxiety and Entangled Grief an exhibition of work exploring how worry about climate change and ecological collapse is seeping into our lives and dreams, mixing with other fears and anxieties, and entangling with personal experiences of loss. In this ecosystem of grief, art is a place for picturing and shaping bad feelings, including bad feelings about the very act of making art. Each gesture of making is weighed against the desire to do no harm—and the impossibility of a harmless human life within the context of our extractive capitalist system. We grieve our own existence, as well as our eventual demise.
Worried Earth features the work of artists Breanna Barrington, Connie Chappel, Lauren Chipeur, Luke Fair, Laura Findlay , Natalie Goulet, Maureen Gruben, Tsēmā Igharas, Jenine Marsh, Kuh Del Rosario, and Xiaojing Yan. | Activity | 2024-08-22 | "Tsema Igharas" |
| Commons and Climate JusticeSOC502 Special Topics: Commons and Climate Justice
Winter 2022: January 5 - April 8, 2022
T 09:00 - 11:50 | Activity | 2022-01-05 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Convergences | Activity | 2019-12-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, "Janice Makokis", "Patrick Mahon", "Ruth Beer", "Clarence Whitestone", "Diana Steinhauer", "Sergio Serrano", "Kurtis McAdam" |
| Down PowerThe Department of Music Composition Area presents Thoughtropes, a concert of new works by faculty composers. Marnie Giesbrecht (organ) and Mark Segger (percussion) perform compositions from Mark Hannesson, Scott Smallwood, Nicolás Arnáez and William Northlich.
| Activity | 2025-01-17 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| Drift"drift" is a film that observes the shifting nature of water using moments of sublime beauty. Using footage collected during the artists’ two years of travel across continents and waterways, the work combines and remixes the colours, forms and surfaces of water to create imagery that is both dazzling and meditative. Overlooking the pavings of the Wilson Arts Plaza, drift offers an optical reminder of the transformational powers of water and light; expertly filtered through layers of technology, the work is a visual experience tailored to the urban environment, even as it reminds us of its limitations.
| Activity | 2023-07-20 | "Tsema Igharas" |
| Earth FortunesEarth Fortunes is a playful journey to explore some of the ways energy systems can affect our lives. You might be excited, worried, or unsure about future energy systems.
In the FluxKit, this will take the form of a mini divination station modeled on the 5 Shared Socioeconomic Pathways or SSPs.
For SQUARE, the cards were available to explore throughout the space. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | "Caitlin Fisher", "Steven Hoffman" |
| Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.)The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (EERK) is a speculative emergency kit that takes the form of a binder with emergency instructions and two cassette tapes with important information for survival, written from the perspective of a future apocalypse. The joke is that while the first cassette tape is available, should such old technology be found somewhere, explaining the apocalyptic situation, the second cassette tape with all of the answers has been taken over by mycelium and cannot be played. The moral: no one has the answers and we must all speculate and explore together, thinking in yet unthought directions, if there is any hope of collective survival.
At SQUARE, two members of the EERK team will activate and generate discussion surrounding prompts in the Kit. These will include: Nuclear Waste Safe Storage Protocol; Signalling the Energy Emergency, Ecological Debt Recovery Procedure; and the "Fungal-mentals" of Mycelial Energetics. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | Sourayan Mookerjea, "Tsema Igharas", "Joan Greer", Jessie Beier, "Teegan Moore", Mark Simpson |
| Energy Emergency Repair Kit as Speculative FutureJoin Dr. Kimberly Skye Richards and Dr. Sourayan Mookerjea for a fascinating conversation on how speculative futures can help build just, sustainable and healthy futures for the whole planet, and how we can start practicing it today. Speculative futures is an envisioning process and design approach that brings together arts, social sciences and humanities perspectives to address complex societal issues by inviting people to visualize new and potential futures. Increasingly, speculative futures is used to create solutions for the climate and biodiversity crises, as well as the entangled injustices and inequities faced by communities.
Dr. Mookerjea will discuss his current research on speculative media, including The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (EERK), a research-creation probe co-created with Jessie Beier, Joan Greer, Tsema Igharas, Sourayan Mookerjea and Tegan Moore for SEF’s FluxKit for Energy Transition. EERK explores the ecological, cultural and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy, emergency, and repair. It combines image, text and sound to play on the concept of a repair manual — a staple genre of self-help and self-making — while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers. | Activity | 2025-02-12 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Energy Transition: Pathways to Climate JusticeFrom 7-18 November 2022 Contextual Studies welcomed sixteen members of the Speculative Energy Futures (SEF) team to the University of St. Gallen as SQUARE’s inaugural artists-in-residence (three members were virtual, the remainder were in-person). Visiting Professor and SEF Principal Investigator Dr. Sheena Wilson led a two-week intensive course titled “Energy Transition: Pathways to Climate Justice,” taught with project co-lead Dr. Natalie Loveless and featuring lectures, seminar discussions, workshops, and guest-presentations by thirteen SEF team members. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Justine Kohleal Hartlieb-Power, "Ruth Beer", "Patrick Mahon", Sourayan Mookerjea, "Janice Makokis", "Kurtis McAdam", "Tsema Igharas", "Caitlin Fisher", "Evan Davies", "Sean Caulfield", "Soheila Esfahani", "Lisa Moore", "Scott Smallwood" |
| Essential Connections: The Body and the EnvironmentSaturday, August 17, 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM
1:00 PM: Presentation of two new works created on the Malvina site as part of the Essential Connections: The Body and the Environment project: a sound installation by artist Scott Smallwood, inspired by the sounds of Malvina, and a work by visual artist Sean Caulfield, inspired by the site’s flora and fauna.
2:00 PM: Printmaking workshop for all ages on the theme of the human body, with artist Sean Caulfield, whose work has been exhibited worldwide | Activity | 2024-08-17 | "Sean Caulfield", "Scott Smallwood" |
| Exhibition Opening: A Tragedy of the CommonsPlease join us for the opening of A Tragedy of the Commons. The conceptual catalyst for this
work is the research of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, specifically her design principles for the sustainable management of common-pool resources. In collaboration with Professor Steven Hoffman, who distilled Ostrom’s work into eight poetic yet provocative points, and Professor Susan Colberg, who provided typographic expertise, Caulfield developed a series of large-scale linocut, inkjet, and silkscreen prints. These are paired with sculptures made from reclaimed wood, creating a physical dialogue between the permanence of the printed word and the material history of our environment. The images on display were initially developed for the artist book Planet for Sale as part of Speculative Energy Future’s Flux Kit for Energy Transition, which will also be on view for the opening. | Activity | 2026-03-07 | |
| Fight Stopping Tools & Rules for SharingSeven + Seven: Printmaking Across Unknown Terrain explores visual dialogues and contemporary ideas among 14 artists from Canada and Australia. The resulting exhibition invites audiences to regard not only the vast distances across both these national geographical and psychological landscapes, but to also consider how relative perspectives in these two hemispheres examine similar themes of colonialism, extreme weather, consequences of the impact humans have on nature (and ourselves). Through hybrid applications of printmaking and the international diversity the exhibition explores, we might find two different cultures have more in common than we think.
Sean Caulfield exhibited two linocut prints, "Fight Stopping Tools" and "Rules for Sharing" from the series Tragedy of the Commons, created in collaboration with Sue Colberg (typography) and Steven Hoffman (text). Hoffman's text is a distillation of Elinor Ostram's Nobel Prize winning work on design principles for sustainably managing common-pool resources and avoiding tragedies of the commons in which individuals draw on finite resources in ways that run counter to the long-term common good.
| Activity | 2024-07-12 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Flaring Site (print from A Planet for for Sale) will be exhibited in Print Out Times, 2021, Taoyuan International Print Exhibition, Taoyuan Art Center, May 27 - June 20th , 2021.
| Activity | 2021-05-21 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Forest Voicesan interactive audio game. exhibited as part of exhibition curated by Natalie Loveless., April. 22, 2018
| Activity | 2018-04-22 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| Garden of Future Delights: Paintings and Augmentations in Process | Activity | 2019-12-10 | "Caitlin Fisher", Evan G R Davies, "Wallace Edwards" |
| GardenShip and StateThis exhibition brings together 21 artists and writers who engage in decolonial critique, environmental activism, and twenty-first century artistic practices to address what is arguably the problem of our times: environmental catastrophe. It asks how we can work together and create together as a global community to restore the planet – while respecting differences and seeking to repair divisions and address injustices brought about by colonialism.
Co-curated by Jeff Thomas and Patrick Mahon, the exhibition features a vast array of works, many produced over a two-year period and originally shown at Museum London in 2021-22. The results of conversations between the artists and writers, as well as oftentimes with members of their local communities, those artworks are being presented at the Thames Art Gallery alongside new and updated projects, offering a multi-sensory experience that inhabits the main gallery, and moves upward into the mezzanine space. Comprising textiles, photography, sculpture, video, gardening, and installation, the show invites gallery participants to see, to hear and to engage with aesthetically rich and culturally complex artworks that are simultaneously provocative and challenging –and also sources of hope.
This exhibit also features Troubled Critters & Healing Spells, a project by the local Hibernaculum Collective, which explores land and water decolonization, restoration, relationship, and reciprocity through traditional wild clay processes. | Activity | 2024-08-23 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| GardenShip and State Artist Panel Talk Panel in conjunction with the exhibition GardenShip and State. Artists on Panel: Jeff Thomas, Patrick Mahon, Ron Benner, Michelle Wilson,
| Activity | 2024-09-14 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| GardenShip and State: Art, Environment, and the Future of the Global CommonsExhibition co-curated with Jeff Thomas. Exhibition dates: October 7, 2021 to January 23, 2022.
| Activity | 2021-10-07 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| Guest Lecture for Climate Futures and the Just Transition Class | Activity | 2018-11-28 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Hiding in Plain SightVirtual exhibition ongoing.
The Embassy Cultural House is pleased to present its inaugural virtual group exhibition: Hiding in Plain Sight organized by Ron Benner. The exhibition focuses on the themes in the book "Hiding in Plain Sight" published in 2020 by St. Louis-based journalist Sarah Kendzior.
| Activity | 2020-10-30 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| High Grade Copper AnomalyTsema Igharas displayed her work High Grade Copper Anomalies, a set of three copper sculptures, in Erratic Behaviour, an exhibition that brings together contemporary artworks that centre human entanglements with geologic events, processes or entities, acknowledging rocks as vibrant matter that shape our understanding of time and place. While some artworks playfully evoke the animacy of boulders and rocks, others, like Igharas's sculptures, point to a world that is increasingly shaped by the climate crisis and faced with dwindling resources. Many of the artworks resist dominant patterns of waste and consumption through a shared commitment to working with existing, found, abandoned, salvaged and reclaimed materials—like Igharas's copper pennies reworked into sculptures. The featured artists offer a range of experimental approaches to the geologic, situating themselves and the viewer within the dynamic accumulation, erosion, flow, extraction and transformation of earth materials.
The exhibition ran from January 27, 2024 - April 21, 2024
| Activity | 2024-01-27 | "Tsema Igharas" |
| High-grade Copper AnomalyGUT_BRAIN is an exhibition series inspired by the primary movements of the digestive system: ingestion, propulsion, mechanical breakdown, chemical digestion, absorption, and elimination.
As earth’s metabolic rhythms have been made to converge with anthropocentric needs and desires, the nutrient cycling process has been disrupted, leading to environmental catastrophe. Our bodies-minds are mirroring what is happening in nature: environmental devastation is reflected in our diminishing microbiomes creating an epidemic of inflammatory diseases. We remain mirrors of the natural world: or rather, of the modified versions that we ourselves have created. Part of the devastation is related to the 20th Century war against bacteria and microbes for which antibiotics and pesticides were invented, a mission intrinsically linked to colonialism’s desire to modernize, valorize, and purify. In this context, we must bear in mind that our condition is currently that of ‘posthumans’: forever chemicals, pesticides, plastics are part of our bodies now as much as of our ecosystems. How can we conceive of possible futures considering the inevitable and lethal fusion of the technosphere and the biosphere? How are artists imagining epistemological breaks towards possible futures?
Tsema Igharas exhibited her artwork "High-grade Copper Anomaly," which explores copper mining practices as it relates to her ancestral home in Talhtan territory. The exhibition ran from September 5, 2023 - March 15, 2024. | Activity | 2023-09-05 | "Tsema Igharas" |
| How Oil Creates Who We Are: A Panel Response to VISCOSITYMembers of SEF/iDoc participated in a panel following a special edition of the theatre installation VISCOSITY with Theatre Yes. | Activity | 2018-11-13 | Mark Simpson, Jordan Kinder, Angele Alook, Adam Carlson |
| How to Make Art at the End of the WorldUniversity-Wide Lecture | Activity | 2019-11-14 | Natalie Loveless |
| Hughadēsłēł — give it all awaySolo Exhibition, SFU Gallery, Burnaby, BC, Canada 2022. This exhibition featuring new work by artist Tsema Igharas is concerned with land, embodiment, sustainability, and industrial extraction. Her preparation for this project ranged from harvesting and processing berries, teas, and salmon in her home Tāłtān territory to the development of sculpture with materials connected to mine sites.
| Activity | 2022-09-24 | "Tsema Igharas" |
| InterWoven LandscapeGroup exhibition from November 10, 2021 - ongoing. | Activity | 2021-11-10 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Introduction to GlobalizationSOC 269: Introduction to Globalization
Fall 2021 term: September 1 - December 7, 2021
MW 14:00 - 15:20 | Activity | 2021-09-01 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Inverse Insulations in a Seed Time Poem Cycle"Inverse Insulations in a Seed Time Poem Cycle," Digital Video, 8 minutes, 2020. Displayed in the online exhibition , organized by The Embassy Cultural House and GardenShip and State.
| Activity | 2021-04-22 | Sourayan Mookerjea, "Tegan Moore", "Joan Greer" |
| Kets’ok Echish Chō (Dancing-around, Huckleberries)Tsema Igharas exhibited her work Kets’ok Echish Chō (Dancing-around, Huckleberries) for the Shifting Ground – Muuttuva maa exhibition, which features aesthetic expressions that reflect the landscapes, lived experiences, and future visions of climate change and changing ecologies in the North. The exhibition features works by Canadian artists and Finnish artists from Lapland.
| Activity | 2024-02-02 | "Tsema Igharas" |
| LASERAlberta: Art, Climate, Energy, ActivismThis LASERAlberta panel involved the three researchers speaking on Just Powers, a research project addressing the impact and importance of de-colonial feminist theory and practice for thinking through alternatives to petrocapitalism, and discussing Speculative Energy Futures, a sub-project of Just Powers that brings together a carefully chosen group of artistic and humanities researchers with science, social science and policy experts to investigate the challenges of energy transition | Activity | 2018-02-28 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Sourayan Mookerjea, "Joan Greer" |
| Listening as Ethic; Walking as Method: Daily Practice and Art/Life InterventionInvited University-Wide Lecture (part 3 of a “distinguished visitor” lecture series hosted by the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture). | Activity | 2019-01-16 | Natalie Loveless |
| Made with the Arctic | Activity | 2022-04-26 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Messagers’ Forumart exhibition (catalogue forthcoming)
| Activity | 2020-09-16 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| Mutation and Care in the AnthropoceneUniversity-Wide Lecture | Activity | 2018-09-27 | Natalie Loveless |
| Nesting for the End of the Worlda group exhibition including a large installation by Cindy Baker and Ruth Cuthand, with 4-channel generative audio soundscape by Smallwood. | Activity | 2020-01-25 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| On the Politics of Form: Art and/in the Anthropocene | Activity | 2019-01-09 | Natalie Loveless |
| Paramancy: Volume 1 | Activity | 2019-12-10 | Jessie Beier, Mark Simpson, "Tsēmā Igahara" |
| Pathways to Modernity: Sculpture from Emily Carr University of Art and Design AlumnaeExhibition run: July 8 - September 10, 2021
| Activity | 2021-07-08 | "Ruth Beer" |
| PerfectStorm! Feminist Renewable Energy Transition RPGPerfect Storm: Feminist Energy Transition is an interactive, role-playing game that enables players to explore the cultural and class politics of energy transition in Canada.
In small groups, Perfect Storm players assume roles and respond to dynamic game situations, trying to prevent a perfect storm of catastrophic climate change by shifting Alberta to renewable energy.
This was a special facilitation of the game for Speculative Energy Futures. | Activity | 2019-06-03 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Petro-Mama a Retrospective: What Air Quality Meant Then and What it Means NowPublic talk for a lecture series organized by Tatiana Konrad, University of Vienna. | Activity | 2024-03-18 | Sheena L Wilson |
| pîkopayin (It is Broken)Film screening of pîkopayin (It is Broken) for Congress 2023: Reckonings and Reimaginings. pîkopayin (it is broken) is a collaboration between Bigstone Cree Nation and Just Powers. The film foregrounds Bigstone Cree Nation members’ perspectives and insights on energy projects and activity within Treaty 8 territory.
pîkopayin documents Bigstone Cree Nation members’ experiences of resource-extraction projects and activity within the First Nation’s traditional territory—including the challenges these projects present, and the official and unofficial collective actions that have been organized to respond to the industrial use of Bigstone lands. | Activity | 2023-05-27 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Planet for Sale | Activity | 2019-12-10 | "Sean Caulfield", "Steven Hoffman", "Caitlin Fisher", "Sue Colberg" |
| Planet for SalePlanet for Sale is a speculative book featuring lino and woodblock prints alongside poems and text focusing on “the tragedy of the commons.” The book imagines a literal planet for sale, in which our shared, or ‘common’, resources are depleted and destroyed by people acting in their own self-interest. The book’s narrator specifically points to a ‘choice’ that was given to and made by people living at a certain time, whose actions and inactions created monstrous outgrowths and scenes of environmental destruction that, while fictional, are perhaps not dissimilar to what many people are experiencing today as the climate crisis worsens.
At SQUARE, the Planet for Sale book has been deconstructed and enlarged into a photo and text-based installation, with select text written by Steven Hoffman. Virtual and Augmented Reality artist Caitlin Fisher created accompanying AR/VR experiences in the space. Particular emphasis is given to the last section of the book, which illustrates the Nobel Prize-winning work of economist Elinor Ostrom’s eight points addressing how individuals may avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’ by acting in the common good of all people when managing resources.
The final book design was been done by Sue Colberg. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | "Sean Caulfield", "Steven Hoffman", "Caitlin Fisher", "Sue Colberg" |
| Print Out of TimesThis Taoyuan International Printmaking Exhibition invites outstanding printmaking works from 13 countries, including the United States, Canada, Russia, Australia, Bangladesh, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, India, etc., as well as domestic printmakers of different generations. exchange, re-sampling to examine how we view the meaning of time and space at the moment, how to respond to and re-interpret the current appearance and situation of the epidemic, which is full of all kinds of strange and ever-changing epidemics.
| Activity | 2022-04-08 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Pro-TO-type(s)art exhibition. June - July, 2021. Selected pages from artist's book, Sean Caulfield, Sue Colberg, Caitlin Fischer, Steven Hoffman
| Activity | 2021-04-08 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Prototypes for Possible Worlds ExhibitionExhibition ran from December 10, 2019 - January 11, 2020. | Activity | 2019-12-10 | "Ruth Beer", Jessie Beier, "Sean Caulfield", "Evan Davies", "Wallace Edwards", "Soheila Esfahani", "Caitlin Fisher", "Joan Greer", "Steven Hoffman", "Tsēmā Igharas", "Satoshi Ikeda", "Luke Johnson", Natalie Loveless, "Patrick Mahon", "Janice Makokis", "Kurtis MacAdam", "Lisa Moore", "Tegan Moore", Sourayan Mookerjea, Mark Simpson, "Scott Smallwood", "Rachel Snow", "Diana Steinheuer", "Clarence Whitestone", Sheena L Wilson |
| Research-Creation and Institutional FormResearch Seminar Series at Monash University, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance.
Abstract: An intervention into normative scholarly practice, research-creation (a sister term to practice-led and/or artistic research) has gained increasing visibility and validity over the past decade within the North American academy. Grounded in artistic means and methods, research-creation invites us to attend to the methods we mobilize as well as our modes of output and publication at the level of constitutive form. This research seminar will return to some of the key provocations laid out in Loveless' 2019 book How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, and opens onto questions of how and why it is important to champion research-creation attuned to social and ecological justice within our university spaces today.
| Activity | 2023-03-30 | Natalie Loveless |
| Research-Creation, Sound Studies, & Music PedagogyThis three-day event includes performances, panels, and public talks by artists and researchers from across disciplines and geographic locations. Panels included: investigating the role of research-creation for social and ecological justice research within university spaces; Grad students Petcha Kucha; exploring the role of research-creation as a methodological and dissemination tool in times of pressing global crises; a panel bringing together performance-based artistic researchers and scholars to discuss their work, and the works of others, in the public sphere(s); discussing the way that the pandemic has affected research-creation practices in design; discussing the role of music pedagogy in Research-Creation practices, both inside and outside of academia; and performances by lo bil, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Nicola Fornoni, Carron Little, and Dimple B Shah.
| Activity | 2021-10-22 | Jessie Beier, "Scott Smallwood", "Emily Doolittle", Catlin W Kuzyk, Shima Robinson Robinson Shima |
| Resisting Petrofeminisms: Toward More Just Feminist Futures | Activity | 2019-02-18 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Respondent, Alberta Summit: Mobilizing Intersectional Action on Climate Change and HealthRespondent for the Alberta Summit: Mobilizing Intersectional Action on Climate Change and Health. | Activity | 2024-03-26 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Rhys Williams Talk, Generic Energetic: Contemporary Popular Genres as Tools for Transition | Activity | 2018-04-06 | Sheena L Wilson, Sourayan Mookerjea, MaryElizabeth Luka |
| Rules for SharingSean Caulfield exhibited the print "Rules for Sharing" from the series A Tragedy of the Commons at the exhibition TRANSMUTATION. The exhibition featured a selection of printmaking work from national graphic and book artists responding to the concept of “Transmutation.” Curated by Carl Richardson and Reinaldo Gil Zambrano, this show was part of Spokane Print Fest which seeks to educate and inspire the local community on the traditional and contemporary practices of printmaking through curated gallery shows, artist demos and print workshops.
The exhibition ran from April 8-29, 2023.
| Activity | 2023-04-08 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Rural: Works Exploring the CountrysideGroup Exhibition from January 21 - February 18, 2022. Caulfield exhibited prints from the Planet for Sale and Stories of Division projects.
Living in the “countryside” is often framed, maybe romanticized, as a lifestyle more in touch with the land, historically because the settlements around it are supported by its cultivation. (How have the economics of rural living changed?) People here live more distantly, and accordingly develop different kinds of family and networks to relate. Distance creates new customs—conventionally a sense of independence and self-reliance. (What do we rely on rural communities for? What do rural communities rely on?) The landscape is a little more uninhabited, but it is still well-mapped and divided. What does a rural home look like? A rural school? A rural place of worship? A rural life? A rural philosophy?
Where does 'rural' begin and end? | Activity | 2022-01-21 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| Ruth Beer: Seep | SwellThe Burnaby Art Gallery and the Art Gallery at Evergreen in Coquitlam co-presented the exhibition Ruth Beer: Seep | Swell, an exhibition in 2 parts. Taking place across the 2 galleries concurrently, this exhibition contemplated Beer’s artistic research on the entwined relationships between humankind and our industries.
For decades, Beer has used sculpture to explore the depictions, constructs and myths of landscape. Her dynamic practice revolves around an ecological examination of our rapidly transforming Pacific Northwest region. Beer’s early explorations of minimalist abstract and elemental forms have evolved into an interest in materials and their relationship to culture and society. In the artist’s hands, raw natural materials are shaped through the cultural and sociopolitical forces that harvest them. Through an array of materially seductive artworks—glistening copper weavings, tapestries, bronze and ceramic stones, woven photographs and prints on paper—Beer offers timely reflections on themes related to belonging, human-land relationships and the pressing climate crisis.
Ruth Beer, Seep | Swell was co-produced between the Art Gallery at Evergreen and the Burnaby Art Gallery, curated by Katherine Dennis and Jennifer Cane. | Activity | 2024-11-30 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Scores for Energy TransitionPresented as part of "Unpacking Energy Transition (FluxKit Beta Tests)" at SQUARE, University of St. Gallen (November 7 - 11, 2022).
Scores for Energy Transition is a dice-and-card-based dialogic game that invites players to consider the kinds of energy we rely on every day, and how we might rethink our relationships between energy and our basic needs. Inspired in part by the event scores of Fluxus artists Yoko Ono and George Brecht, Scores for Energy Transition can be played as a turn-based game, encouraging activities including personal research, artistic expression, debates, and conversation; or they can function as prompts for solo contemplation.
At SQUARE, prototype sets of Scores for Energy Transition will be available for initiating conversations, speculations, and debates about energy reliance and transition, as well as identifying the holes in our knowledge and the limits of our imaginations!
| Activity | 2022-11-07 | Natalie Loveless, "Scott Smallwood" |
| Screening Climate Change: Knowledge Mobilization Through Popular MediaGuest Lecture for Contextual Studies, School of the Humanities at the University of St. Gallen. | Activity | 2022-04-28 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Seed Time: Sister Plantings for Regenerative Futures"Speculative Energy Futures: Prototypes for Possible Worlds" was a research-creation exhibition that showcased some of the initial explorations from the first year of a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-year project that brings together artists, designers, activists, engineers, policy makers, scientists, humanists, social scientists, Indigenous legal experts and more, to inquire into the complex intersections of climate change and energy transition as interlocking sites of possibility as we imagine/model a range of potential low-carbon just futures.
The "Seed Time: Sister Plantings for Regenerative Futures" research-creation project probes the slow speeds and infrastructural properties of Earth-bound seeds for political models of: (i) negentropic renewable energy; (ii) feminist conviviality and solidarity; (iii) regenerative gift and care economies; and (iv) zineseed-like molecular media for DIY serial reproducibility and learning-by-making. Seed time is composed of memory-storage, dispersal, pryiscence, imbibition, respiration, light, mobilization, sprouting, growth, and regeneration through which negentropic common-being creates a place for Earth-bound lifetimes, giving wisdom, taking care and creating common wealth. Past, present and future non-extractivist seed-communication points towards deep energy transitions to slow futures. The possibility for delinking from the toxic waste economy may be searched for by engaging with "seed Time."
| Activity | 2019-12-10 | "Joan Greer", Sourayan Mookerjea, "Tegan Moore" |
| Seed Time²Presented as part of the exhibition "Unpacking Energy Transition (FluxKit Beta Tests)" at SQUARE, University of ST. Gallen, Switzerland (November 7-11, 2022).
Seed Time² is a real and virtual “printing press” organized as a feminist media cooperative. It utilizes DIY (Do-It-Yourself) and avant-garde art methodologies, such as those associated with Fluxus (which emphasizes the process of artistic creation over the finished product), to disseminate decolonial strategies related to renewable energy transition. Seed Time² helps us imagine how we might dismantle oppressive institutions and practices, de-grow toxic, unjust economies and systems, and regenerate ecologies by placing feminist practices, values, and labours of care at the centre of our communities, economies, and societies.
At SQUARE, Seed Time² is activated through metaphoric and actual components related to seeds and their renewable energy: planting, pollination, germination, tending/nurturing, harvesting, gentle consumption, and composting for de-growing carbon and energy intensive food systems and agriculture, among other things. Cards distributed throughout SQUARE are meant to be taken away by visitors and include poems and seed motifs to generate discussion and thinking around carbon capture, regenerating biodiversity, intervening in the politics of land grabbing for mega-energy developments, and promoting feminist education, solidarity, and conviviality. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | Sourayan Mookerjea, "Joan Greer", "Tegan Moore" |
| Sensing the Anthropocene: Daily Practice and Art/Life Intervention | Activity | 2019-01-07 | Natalie Loveless |
| Shifting Ground: Mapping Project | Activity | 2022-02-10 | "Ruth Beer" |
| Shifting Ground—Muuttuva MaaThe exhibition "Shifting Ground – Muuttuva maa" at the Rovaniemi Art Museum is a result of a five-year interdisciplinary and experimental art and research project called "Shifting Ground: Mapping Energy, Geography and Communities in the North." The project explores the changes and communities in the Arctic region, aiming to stimulate new thinking and action around resource utilization, climate change, and socio-environmental adaptation. By exploring these themes through the lens of contemporary art, the project aims to connect local resilience with global concerns.
The exhibition was curated by Ruth Beer and ran from February 1, 2024 - May 19, 2024.
| Activity | 2024-02-01 | "Ruth Beer" |
| ShipwreckianaWater (Deshkan Ziibi) is the fifth in a series of 12 annual events. Each year, the event focuses on a word of the12-word phrase "You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life AndDeath," and activates it in myriad ways. This year's event will willingly wade the time away, in eddies, in sinks, in drains, in backwaters, through root systems, capillaries, infiltrating, inundating, as Isabelle Stengers put it, our "humid brains."
Water (Deshkan Ziibi) features Kate Armstrong, Bagida'waad Alliance, Dickson Bou, Penelope Cain, Shannon Cooney, Tom Cull, Melissa General, Farheen Haq, Sharmistha Kar, Claire Liu, Patrick Mahon, Thomas Mahon, Brady Marks, Laura Millard, Valerie Mills-Milde, Eli Nolet, Racquel Rowe, Jon Sasaki, Lou Sheppard, Quinn Smallboy, Jordyn Stewart, Mark Timmings, Paul Walde, Michelle Wilson, and more.
Water (Deshkan Ziibi) is presented by the artLAB Gallery in partnership with Art Gallery Of Hamilton, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Forest City Gallery, Futura Resistenza, Glenfiddich Artists-In-Residence, McIntosh Gallery, NAISA, NIMAC, Other Sights, SASAH, Thames Art Gallery, and WalkingLab.
Every year a 12 hour event takes place on December 12th from 12 noon to 12 midnight:
HOUR 7 (18 EST)
Thames Art Gallery PRESENTS Shipwreckiana by Dickson Bou, Jamie Dronyk, Sharmistha Kar, Peter Lebel, Patrick Mahon, Thomas Mahon, Valerie Mills-Milde, & Quinn Smallboy | Activity | 2024-12-12 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| SMART START Workshop | Activity | 2020-02-18 | Sheena L Wilson, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Special Topics: Commons and Climate JusticeSOC402 Special Topics: Commons and Climate Justice
Winter 2022: January 5 - April 8, 2022
T 09:00 - 11:50 | Activity | 2022-01-05 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Takers are WatchedCuratorial statement:
culture and art around the world have developed through exchange. Both the Canadian and Japanese artists are established printmakers. The themes of each artist range from imagery abstraction, nature, society and modern anxieties vary from artist to artist. The modern art world has become an era where paintings, prints, and photographs cannot be distinguished even in the category of two-dimensional art, and new expressions are being created by making full use of two-dimensional art, three-dimensional objects, and videos. If prints are considered as prints, they have the potential to be expanded into photographs and videos. There have also been attempts to photograph works and use them to create objects, and it can be said that the Canadian artists in this exhibition are freely working on these fusion attempts in their own country, which is something Japanese printmakers can learn from. But the common point between Canada and Japan is the beauty of nature and a love of nature, and this is a meaningful exhibition where you can feel that. | Activity | 2024-10-09 | "Sean Caulfield" |
| The Colonizers’ Model of Modelling Art InstallationArt installation for the Institution of Knowledge exhibition. | Activity | 2023-05-16 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called CanadaSeminar on Angele Alook for the Intermedia Research Studio at the University of Alberta. | Activity | 2024-02-08 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| The History and Theory of Sustainable DesignHADVC 309 A1 (*3) Sustainable Design
Fall Term, T R 12:30-13:50
Instructor: Joan Greer | Activity | 2021-09-01 | "Joan Greer" |
| The Lost Garden | Activity | 2019-12-10 | "Scott Smallwood", Audio Games Lab, "Sean Caulfield", "Peter Rockwell", "Stephan Moore", "Chenoa Anderson", "Joel Taylor" |
| The Lost GardenThe Lost Garden is a first-person audio puzzle game that features sonic exploration in an abandoned underground urban environment. As a stranger here, the player explores the soundscape of a world cut off from nature, perhaps a future us, by interacting with sonic puzzles that open doors to new areas, and, ultimately, the lost garden. Through listening and interacting with sounds, players are encouraged to consider the fragile nature of our natural soundscapes, and to speculate on what the story might be for the abandoned game world. As puzzles are solved, clues are revealed, and doors to new areas are opened, ultimately leading the perceptive player outdoors, to the lost (last?) garden.
Contributions by Sean Caulfield, Peter Rockwell, Nicolás Arnáez, Jessa Gillespie, Stephan Moore, Chenoa Anderson, and the Audio Games Lab. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| This Can't Wait: Billboards For Energy TransitionAn interactive installation for "Unpacking Energy Transition (FluxKit Beta Tests)" at SQUARE, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (November 7-11, 2022).
This Can’t Wait: Billboards For Energy Transition arose from the question: how can we use printmaking to incite social change? The project takes the 2018 IPCC report as its starting point, which declared that we have 9 years to halve our carbon usage to maintain 1.5 degrees of global warming. Billboard-sized ‘banners’ designed by emerging and established artists and designers subvert the language of advertising and re-conceptualize how we talk about climate action and energy transition within public spaces.
At SQUARE, three banners from This Can’t Wait are presented in the space, and nine are available in AR format, available via QR code, allowing you to superimpose our banners, created by the team in response to local conditions in Canada, to your home as a prompt to consider the ways in which you might engage with your local policy makers on matters of energy transition and climate action. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | Sheena L Wilson, "Ruth Beer", "Sean Caulfield", "Caitlin Fisher", "Patrick Mahon", "Thomas Mahon", "Janice Makokis" |
| Unpacking Energy Transition (FluxKit Beta Tests)From 7-18 November 2022 Contextual Studies welcomed sixteen members of the Speculative Energy Futures (SEF) team to the University of St. Gallen as SQUARE’s inaugural artists-in-residence (three members were virtual, the remainder were in-person). Visiting Professor and SEF Principal Investigator Dr. Sheena Wilson led a two-week intensive course titled “Energy Transition: Pathways to Climate Justice,” taught with project co-lead Dr. Natalie Loveless and featuring lectures, seminar discussions, workshops, and guest-presentations by thirteen SEF team members.
During the two-week course and residency at SQUARE, SEF animated an interactive pop-up exhibition "Unpacking Energy Transition (SEF’s FluxKit Beta Tests)." Presented throughout SQUARE’s atrium, "Unpacking Energy Transition" provided students, faculty, and community members with an opportunity to engage with the FluxKit, a ‘toolbox’ developed through SEF’s collaborative process that is intended to inspire participants to think differently about energy transition.
| Activity | 2022-11-07 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Justine Kohleal Hartlieb-Power |
| We Were In It Book LaunchThe launch of We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition (https://memorialuniversitypress.ca/Books/W/We-Were-in-It), one of the projects in the Flux Kit led by Lisa Moore and Sheena Wilson. Bringing together academics, scientists, creative writers, visual artists, lawyers, and policy makers, We Were In It is a collaborative effort to attack the problem of climate crisis from very different backgrounds and perspectives. The fusion of scholarship, literary writing, research, and creativity allows the strengths of many forms of writing to address the unfolding crisis of our modern petrocultures. Relying on the brevity of flash fiction to reflect the ticking clock of the climate crisis, the stories contained in this collection are slick as oil but against oil. They are a speculation about the future, taking notes from the present and the past
as a portal to a better world. | Activity | 2026-03-06 | Sheena L Wilson, Lisa Moore |
| We Were In It: Very Short Stories About EnergyAn interactive installation for "Unpacking Energy Transition (FluxKit Beta Tests)" at SQUARE, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (November 7-11, 2022).
We Were In It: Very Short Stories About Energy is a 180-page book of creative fiction written by Speculative Energy Futures team members during a series of writing workshops hosted by award-winning Canadian novelist and SEF team member Lisa Moore. Following writing prompts that supported non-fiction writers in finding new voices to explore anxieties, hopes, and fears surrounding energy transition, 14 members of the team came together to write 43 speculative stories about energy and energy transition, these were then illustrated by the artist Kamei Lim. The book ends with 4 prompts to inspire you to share your stories.
| Activity | 2022-11-07 | Sheena L Wilson, "Lisa Moore", "Ruth Beer", Sourayan Mookerjea, "Soheila Esfahani", "Satoshi Ikeda", "Evan Davies", "Caitlin Fisher", "Luke Johnson", Natalie Loveless, "Kurtis McAdam", "Janice Makokis", "Patrick Mahon", "Scott Smallwood" |
| Where the Bull DozesIn Pauline Oliveros’s Some Sound Observations, she tells a story about a bulldozer crashing into her home while she is eating lunch. Later, she wonders about "the sound of a bull dozing." While my piece does not include that sound, it does contain many field recordings collected in Wood Buffalo National Park in the northern boreal forest of Alberta, Canada, which is one of the last places on Earth where wild bison roam, along with many other endangered mammals and birds. Although today it is a national park, Indigenous people inhabited the region for more than 8000 years, and today it also supports Cree, Chipewyan, Metis and non-indigenous communities. Its park status protects it in many ways, yet its waters are under constant threat from the bulldozers and other machinery of Canadian oil sands mining operations. This piece is dedicated to Pauline, who reminded us that "natural sound is healing sound."
At SQUARE, Where the Bull Dozes was presented as an immersive audio experience. | Activity | 2022-11-07 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| Workshop: FluxKit for Energy TransitionA workshop featuring Speculative Energy Future’s FluxKit for Energy
Transition. Our FluxKit for Energy Transition is inspired by Fluxus, the 1960s conceptual art
movement. The iconic Fluxus. Fluxkits were often suitcases full of art-activation prompts to be disseminated to as many different communities and audiences as possible. Our FluxKit nests nine distinct but interdependent and interdisciplinary projects designed to catalyze participants as they unpack and encounter the kit’s contents. All of the pieces of the FluxKit share research and knowledge the Speculative Energy Futures team co-constructed over many years, and each contribution to the kit provides a prompt or a set of instructions to encourage individuals and groups who engage with the kit to collaboratively act on climate justice and build the local knowledges necessary to get through this
epochal transition. | Activity | 2026-03-06 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless |
| Written on the EarthGroup exhibition from March 4 - April 17, 2021.
Written on the Earth is an interdisciplinary exhibition with its catalyst in an invitation to a group of artists from the Northern Tornadoes Project, a research team at Western Engineering. Committed to charting the increasingly important evidence of tornadoes throughout Canada, the Northern Tornadoes Project involves data collection and analysis directed towards myriad objectives. The invitation presents the opportunity for these artists to respond to data arising from a specific area of environmental research and to consider how they can contribute to interdisciplinary engagements with pressing contemporary issues, particularly related to the environment, global warming, human/non-human ecologies, and indigenous views on land and stewardship.
| Activity | 2021-03-04 | "Patrick Mahon" |
| Accumulated Violence, or, the Wars of Exploitation: Notes toward a post- Western Marxism | Publication | 2018-09-01 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Attunement in the Cracks: Feminist Collaboration and the University as Broken MachineIn Time, Urgency, and Collaboration in the Corporate University. Special Issue of the journal Feminist Formations.
| Publication | 2022-04-08 | Natalie Loveless, "Carrie Smith" |
| Climate moves: reaching for threshold knowledge one walk at a timeWalking the Talk: Climate Moves is an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, intercultural collaboration of scholars and community stakeholders in Canada and the US that leverages walking as relational research and pedagogical method for action on climate. Walking the Talk turns to walking as a repeated, durational, embodied mode of learning, to help participants attune to local ecologies and reach for threshold knowledge of the interdependence between human, more-than-human, and ecosystem flourishing. This article, written midway through the pilot year, situates and reflects on learnings so far. Findings from the Kansas mirror lab show that regular walking cultivates relational connections, multispecies awareness, and embodied threshold concepts such as interdependence, with participants reporting increased ecological attunement, wellbeing, and recognition of walking itself as climate action. These insights suggest that walking methodologies are accessible, locally adaptable tools for cultural and organisational shifts towards climate justice. | Publication | 2025-12-03 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Ice Patches and Obsidian Quarries: Integrating Research Through Collaborative Archaeology in Tahltan TerritoryThis article presents the results of archaeological survey of ice patches in the vicinity of the vast obsidian quarries and artifact scatters found near Goat Mountain and the Kitsu Plateau in Mount Edziza Provincial Park, Tahltan Territory. During the survey, over 50 perishable artifacts were found, including stitched birch bark containers, wooden walking staffs, carved and beveled sticks, an atlatl dart foreshaft, and a stitched hide boot. Radiocarbon ages on 13 of the perishable artifacts reveal that they span the last 7000 years. These finds were made against a massive and stunning backdrop of scattered obsidian artifacts: bifaces, cores, flakes, and raw material nodules. This project collaborated with the Obsidian Discoveries Tahltan Tene Mehodihi Youth Group Hike and the “Our Ancestors’ Trail” museum exhibition. This collaboration resulted in connections between the archaeological results presented here, community learning, and artistic inspiration.
| Publication | 2023-10-31 | "Tsema Igharas" |
| Land Reclamation History interactive sound composition.
experimental online journal - page no.,issue no., vol., etc. n/a
| Publication | 2021-04-08 | "Scott Smallwood" |
| Listening in the AnthropoceneSounds of the Anthropocene, special issue of Sensate Journal.
Interactive sound composition in experimental online journal.
Page numbers, issue, vol, etc. n/a
| Publication | 2021-04-08 | Natalie Loveless, "Carrie Smith" |
| Renewable energy transition under multiple colonialisms: Passive revolution, fascism redux and utopian praxes | Publication | 2019-03-17 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| Solarities or Solarculture: Bright or Bleak Energy Futures and the E.L. Smith Solar Farm. | Publication | 2021-01-01 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Why are feminist perspectives, analyses, and actions vital to degrowth?FaDA Writing Collective: Corinna Dengler, Nadine Gerner, Taís Sonetti-González, Lina Hansen, Sourayan Mookerjea, Susan Paulson, and Anna Saave.
This essay explores feminist analyses of the historical dynamics of gender systems, which are fundamental to the work of challenging growth-driven political economies, and of designing more equitable and balanced ecosocial systems. Feminist theories and methods that acknowledge and support diverse voices, knowledges, and practices are vital resources for building on heterodox
degrowth movements. In dialogue with postcolonial, decolonial, indigenous, and anti-racist
efforts, intersectional feminisms have been unlearning and disrupting conventional politics of
knowing and action in ways that help forge more inclusive understandings and applications
necessary for degrowth futures. | Publication | 2023-05-03 | Sourayan Mookerjea |
| (Re)framing Big Data—S2E1For 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.
| Publication | 2018-11-05 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Against Purity—S1E2This episode features a ‘Read + Record’ of the introductory chapter to Alexis Shotwell’s 2016 book “Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times”. In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell proposes a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures. Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems today.
| Publication | 2018-08-13 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Amateur Video & The Challenge for Change — S2E2In 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.
| Publication | 2018-11-05 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Chainsaw: Theory and Practice—S2E5This Read & Record episode features a performative readings of the zine “Chainsaw: Theory and Practice” by Catherine Lavoie-Marcus in complicity with non-disciplinary artist Johanna Householder.
Originally published in 2017 as part of the Viva! Art Action Festival in Montreal and inspired by Householder’s performance work, the zine presents a conversation on the counter-usage of the chainsaw as an undetermined method for slicing the master’s home, bad habits, bullshit, the historical framework, pride, and ‘the real’. This reading is performed by Kinuk, the artistic collaborative duo of Ursula Johnson and Angella Parsons.
| Publication | 2018-11-05 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Choreographies of Collaboration—S2E3This 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. | Publication | 2018-11-05 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Disposition, in Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space — S3E6In this episode we read Chapter 2 from Keller Easterling’s 2014 book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, published by Verso Books.
In this book, Easterling offers an understanding of infrastructure as the hidden substrate — or binding medium — through which standards and ideas are shared between bodies. For Easterling, then, the notion of infrastructure as Extrastatecraft refers to the ways in which contemporary infrastructure spaces are manipulated and controlled in order to exert power and orchestrate activities that can remain unstated but are nevertheless consequential to many.
| Publication | 2019-04-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Energy Imaginaries—S1E5In this episode we will be reading Sheena Wilson’s 2018 article titled “Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures,” which can be found in Materialism and the Critique of Energy, edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti.
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. In Wilson’s contribution, she outlines the current barriers to energy transition and the need to expand and deepen energy literacy in order to help us collaboratively imagine and collectively move toward socially just—decolonized and feminist—energy futures.
| Publication | 2018-08-13 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| In Catastrophic Times—S1E4This Read & Record episode features a selection of chapters from Isabelle Stengers’ 2015 book In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. The book was translated from French to English by Andrew Goffey and published by Open Humanities Press in 2015.
In Catastrophic Times offers a welcome intervention into the current state of global political impasses and ecological catastrophe by outlining the cumulative impacts of global warming as a series of crises that will not “pass” before everything goes back to “normal.” As Stengers outlines through various examples—pollution, the poison of pesticides, the exhaustion of natural resources, falling water tables, growing social inequalities—the possibility of a global climate crisis is now upon us, in turn requiring new strategies and tactical experiments that are capable of seizing environmental issues and sociotechnical problems as political questions in order to resist the ‘coming barbarism’.
| Publication | 2018-08-13 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Indigenizing the Anthropocene—S1E1This Read & Record episode features Zoe Todd’s 2015 article “Indigenizing the Anthropocene”. This article is featured in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin and published through Open Humanities Press in 2015.
In Todd’s article, she insists on an ethical relationality with Indigenous Peoples and philosophies as both a necessary starting point for processes of decolonization, and as a move away from the conditions that created the Anthropocene, including the notion of the Anthropocene itself.
| Publication | 2018-08-13 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Indigenous Women and Knowledge—S1E3In this episode we will be reading “Indigenous Women and Knowledge” by Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez & Nathalie Kermoal. This text is featured in Living on the Land. Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place, also edited by Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez & Nathalie Kermoal and published through Athabasca University Press in 2016.
Living on the Land examines how patriarchy, gender, and colonialism have shaped the experiences of Indigenous women as both knowers and producers of knowledge. From a variety of methodological perspectives, contributors to the volume explore the nature and scope of Indigenous women’s knowledge, its rootedness in relationships both human and spiritual, and its inseparability from land and landscape.
| Publication | 2018-08-13 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Infrastructure, Infra-politics — S3E1For our first episode in Series III, we are excited to share an excerpt from Angela Mitropoulos’ 2012 book Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia titled “Infrastructure, Infra-politics.”
In this short excerpt, Mitropoulos positions infrastructure as an infra-political question of how affinities take shape, or not. Or as she puts it, “[i]nfrastructure is the answer given to the question of movement and relation”.
| Publication | 2019-04-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance — S3E2In this episode we read Deborah Cowen’s 2017 article “Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance”, which was published on January 25, 2017 on the Verso Books Blog.
In this article, Cowen explores the issue of infrastructure by focusing on how relations of power and of force rely on socio-technical systems, including infrastructural systems, which are themselves increasingly the object of struggle.
| Publication | 2019-04-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Materializing Climate Change—S2E6In this episode we will be reading Dr. Nicole Shukin’s 2015 article “Materializing Climate Change: Image of Exposure, States of Exception”.
This text is included in the edited collection Material Cultures in Canada, edited by Thomas Allen and Jennifier Blair, and published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2015. Material Cultures in Canada presents the vibrant and diverse field of material culture studies in Canadian literary, artistic, and political contexts today. This collection features sixteen essays by leading scholars in Canada, each of whom examines a different object of study, including the beaver, geraniums, comics, water, a musical playlist, and the human body. In Dr. Shukin’s contribution, she draws attention to photographic and filmic productions, or what she terms “cultural barometers”, that are designed to produce moving, material images of the historical crisis of climate change. | Publication | 2018-11-05 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Net-Zero Neighbours: The Blanchford ProjectIn this episode, recorded in early 2021, Sheena Wilson sits down with two project managers for Blatchford, a net-zero real estate development on the site of the old Edmonton City Centre Airport. The City had long slated the 200 hectare airfield for a world-class energy efficient community that will eventually be home to 30,000 residents.The Blatchford project broke ground in 2019 and is now welcoming its first cohort of residents. As of 2021, 100 people resided in Blatchford’s first 21 houses. Dr. Wilson speaks with Christian Felske of the City of Edmonton’s Renewable Energy Systems, and Tom Lumsden, City Development Manager, to talk about the challenges and hopes for this one-of-a-kind urban community. Does the build live up to the promise of the original conception?
| Publication | 2022-04-25 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Net-Zero Neighbours: The North Glenora ProjectIn this episode, guest-hosts Dr. Sara Dorow, professor of sociology (University of Alberta), and project research assistant Rezvaneh Erfani talk about Canada’s first ever net-zero multifamily social housing project. The North Glenora Sustainable Affordable Housing Project, led by Dr. Dorow and Dr. Arlene Oak, professor of human ecology (University of Alberta), began 8 years ago when the Westmount Presbyterian Church leased their land to the Right at Home Housing Society for a dollar. Now the church building and an adjoining complex of townhouses are home to 16 newcomer and refugee families. Listen as our guest-hosts talk with key players in this remarkable project that led a mature community through a transition to social sustainability, affordability, and net-zero development.
| Publication | 2022-04-25 | Sheena L Wilson |
| On Petrocultures: Or, Why We Need to Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else—S1E0For our first episode, we produced 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.
Petrocultures provides 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. | Publication | 2018-08-13 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Adam Carlson, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Performing Sovereignty—S2E4In 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. | Publication | 2018-11-05 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| The Deep Solarities: Charles Richmond — S3E2 | Publication | 2020-02-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier |
| The Deep Solarities: Cody SharpHead — S3E4 | Publication | 2020-02-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier |
| The Deep Solarities: David Dodge — S3E5 | Publication | 2020-02-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier |
| The Deep Solarities: Rocky Feroe — S3E3 | Publication | 2020-02-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier |
| The Deep Solarities: Sheena Wilson — S3E1 | Publication | 2020-02-10 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier |
| What can climate justice organizers learn from the "energy humanities?"Talking Radical Radio podcast episode with Sheena Wilson. | Publication | 2020-02-18 | Sheena L Wilson |
| International Youth Deliberation on Energy FuturesThe International Youth Deliberation on Energy Futures initiative is a joint research project between Lynette Shultz (UAlberta), Mark Simpson (UAlberta), Sheena Wilson (UAlberta), Derek Gladwin (UBC), Imre Szeman (Waterloo), Eva-Lynn Jagoe (UToronto), and Jordan Kinder (Petrocultures) bringing high school youth together from around the world to learn from each other about energy, energy futures, and energy literacy. | Publication | 2019-07-04 | Lynette Shultz, Mark Simpson, Imre Szeman, Sheena L Wilson, Derek Gladwin, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Carrie Karsgaard, Jordan Kinder, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Future Proofing Report -- La Cité Résiliente: A Decade in TransitionPage range: 1-164.
La Cité Résiliente: A Decade in Transition is a grass-roots community
energy transition project based in Edmonton’s Bonnie Doon neighbourhood, organized
by those who live and work in the area to think about what they want from and for
the future. | Publication | 2020-07-02 | Sheena L Wilson |
| Research Archive: "The Power of Art to Influence Social Change" | Publication | 2018-03-01 | Sheena L Wilson, Natalie Loveless, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| Power Shift | Publication | 2021-06-02 | Mark Simpson, Natalie Loveless, Kimberly Skye Richards, Vicki Kwon |
| Just Powers WebsiteThe website for iDoc and SEF, hosting open access FES-related outputs and providing a platform for research dissemination and the recruitment of new researchers. | Publication | 2018-08-15 | Sheena L Wilson, Jessie Beier, Danika Jorgensen Skakum |
| MAKING THE E.E.R.K.Blog post for Fordham University Press on making the Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.). | Publication | 2024-08-26 | Mark Simpson |
| Petrocultures | Publication | 2022-04-23 | Mark Simpson, Sheena L Wilson, Jordan Kinder |
| Seed Time: Sister Plantings for Regenerative Energy Futuresan online exhibition
| Publication | 2021-04-07 | "Tegan Moore", Sourayan Mookerjea, "Joan Greer" |
