DECOLONIZING SOCIAL THEORY
Intermedia Commons: Decolonizing Critical Theory. This research project examines the relationships between the history of the social sciences and modern colonialism, on the one hand, and the history of sociology and the popularization of modern racism on the other. Proposing a new problematic of the intermedia commons, this research contributes to the contemporary debates in global sociology, world-ecology, political ecology, post-Western Marxism and southern critical theory.
Feminist Energy Futures: Powershift and Environmental Social Justice is a collaborative research project that documents feminist-decolonial cultural production and political praxes with regard to energy democracy and renewable energy just transitions in Canada. The project builds decolonial social-reproduction feminist theoretical perspectives and energy-transition, solidarity economy intermedia resources (including stories, art, artefacts, memories, subaltern histories, communication media) that speak to the debates between degrowth and eco-socialist perspectives on just transitions and that interrogate the cultural and class politics of contemporary energy systems.
INTERMEDIA RESEARCH
Intermedia Commoning is a research project developing an intermedia praxis of sympoietic regeneration through commoning. Through case studies of development dispossession, this project explores the social contradictions that give form to all commons and the implications of social contradictions for the defence of existing commons or the generation of new ones. As social contradictions are not reducible to logical contradictions since they unfold in time and through space, intermedia research-creation probes are used to study how social contradictions are embodied and endured. The research-creation components of this project includes a series of time bias poems, subaltern counter-environment installations and digital storytelling tools.
Toxic Media Ecologies is a collaborative research project that that investigates ways power intoxicates the intermedia environments we find ourselves in at this conjuncture of proliferating planetary crises. How do intersecting systems of oppression fabricate spectacular crises while rendering invisible enduring and intensifying ones? How do they silence dissent, disarm critique, data-mine dreams, alienate solidarities, and disarticulate self-organizing common autonomies?
iDoc: Documentary and Intermedia examines how the antagonism between the political economies of “business as usual” and green capitalism nevertheless find common ground in governing, on a world scale, through varying degrees of local austerity. Once the terrain of political hegemony has come to be structured in terms of an imaginary opposition but a deeper social-symbolic connection between green passive revolution and fascism redux, how can a feminist communication platform help us find a way toward a just renewable energy transition?
Speculative Energy Futures: As the world-ecological crises of the capitalocene continue to deepen and the policing of austerity continues to slide into surgical war, the feasibility of just futures in a planetary context turns on the ability of global and popular environmental justice movements to invent institutions of anti-oppression and peace. What kinds of cultural production, this project asks, can help us delink from the cultures of patriarchal colonialism and racial capitalism and create pacific sanctuaries of common wealth?
Kolkata Wonderland: IT Outsourcing and Global Infrastructures of Inequality is a digital storytelling and online educational resource on outsourcing and uneven development in India. Co-directed with Dr. Gail Faurschou. Drawing on extensive field work in Kolkata between 2006-2010, this digital tool examines the effects of the development of a new Special Economic Zone for multinational IT & ITES corporations on the older urban fabric and lived environments of Kolkata and explores the division of labour and the linkages of urban places that connect the old city with the new suburb.
RePublicU
RePublicU is a collaborative critical university studies research project that explores the structural transformations that universities are currently undergoing. This research also aims at normative, imaginative construction. As my contribution to this collaboration, I am currently studying how universities in Western Canada are being pulled in opposite directions through linkages with green capital and the challenges of inventing a circular economy on the one hand and the vested interests of oil and other natural resource extraction industries on the other.
Research Network Collaborations
Just Powers: Power Shift, Energy Transition and Social Justice, University of Alberta
Arts and the Anthropocene Social Justice Research CoLab, University of Alberta