Brandon University prof to share three short films exploring the power of story

• Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/97770033021

Re•Search | Re•Vision | Re•Story — The Power of Story to Change Worlds

Join us for an evening talk and screening of three short films exploring the power of multimedia storymaking and the arts to change worlds with Dr. Carla Rice (University of Guelph, Ontario) and Dr. Patty Douglas (Brandon University). The event takes place Thursday, November 19th from 6:30-8 pm CST and will be broadcast on Zoom (https://zoom.us/j/97770033021).

COVID-19 has brought massive social changes and pushed many social justice researchers, activists and artists online, toward Internet-based knowledge and world-making. The pandemic has exposed, and intensified pre-existing inequalities and environmental crises produced by western logics and lifeways even as Indigenous resurgence, Black Lives Matter, and other change making movements, such as disability justice movements, have urgently contested these COVID-crystallizing troubles. While the pandemic has deepened inequalities and disrupted research and arts activism, it also has provided opportunity to imagine and fight for a radically different “normal.”

This talk introduces COVID era adaptions to the research creation practices developed through the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice (at the University of Guelph) that hold potential for sustaining community during the pandemic. We speculate about a livable future that we might presence in the now, first, through the work of artists LaNora Boror and Christina Battle (currently exhibiting at the AGSM) who point to the knowledge systems we, as a species, are urgently in need of in order to confront the crises currently facing life on this planet.

We then screen 3 short films that focus on the bifurcated affective economies that circulate around COVID, and how these contrary affective atmospheres surface in the multimedia stories of the diversely-situated faculty, including us, who participated in an on-line multimedia Experimenters workshop that Re•Vision devised in April 2020. However, we have never had to create stories quite like this: in isolation and entirely online, as the world rapidly transforms around us. We end with reflections about the need for new traditions from within that thicken our understandings of artful online knowledge creation led by disabled, Black, Indigenous, and Trans folks whose story-making expands felt states of difference—now entirely online in troubled times.

Carla Rice is Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph specialising in embodiment studies and in arts-based and creative methodologies. She founded Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice as an arts-informed research centre with a mandate to foster inclusive communities, social well-being, equity, and justice. Rice has received awards for research and mentorship, and has written on embodied difference, non-normative cultures, and accessibility and inclusion. More information about the Re•Vision Centre can be found at www.revisioncentre.ca.

Patty Douglas is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada and a Senior Research Associate at the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice (University of Guelph). She specialises in disability studies in education, critical autism studies and critical approaches to care using arts-informed and creative methodologies. Douglas leads the Re•Storying Autism in Education project at Brandon University, which is committed to promoting disability justice in education and health care systems through education and the arts. More information can be found at: @ReStorying www.restoryingautism.com