F.9 Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures
Sat Oct 21 / 10:15 – 11:45 / KC 101 103
chairs /
- Leah Decter, NSCAD University
- Carla Taunton, NSCAD University
This roundtable/launch event will be made up of artists featured in the Special Issue of PUBLIC Journal, “Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures,” co-edited by the co-chairs. This issue, which features Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, and white settler contributors, addresses increasing appeals for non-Indigenous (BPOC and white settler) cultural workers to advance decolonial expressions, relations, and paradigms. Like the issue, the roundtable loosely coalesces around the following questions: How might arts-based interventions from diverse non-Indigenous perspectives contribute to critical shifts in the dominant settler imaginary and the colonial systems it substantiates, including in arts and culture and academic institutions? How can this work be carried out in ways that support, rather than occlude, Indigenous movements, and recognize the nature of power relations in settler states that are a result of intersecting systems of colonization and racialization? What is the role of Indigenous-non-Indigenous and other forms of collaboration in this work?
keywords: unsettling, decolonizing, collaboration, settler colonialism, arts-led methodologies, relationality, settler imaginary
session type: roundtable, launch
Leah Decter is an inter-media artist and scholar based between Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, and K'jipuktuk where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies at NSCAD University. Working from a critical white settler perspective her research and artistic practices address pedagogical and social-spatial dynamics in settler colonial contexts through the ethics of being-in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty. Decter received a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queens University, an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute and was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York University. She has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada, and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Malta, Netherlands, India, and Australia. Her most recent writing has appeared in C Magazine (with Tania Willard), Paved Meant (Paved Arts), Qualitative Inquiry and Performance Matters Journal and a Special Issue of PUBLIC Journal, “Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures,” she co-edited with Carla Taunton, was published in 2022.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD). Her research explores arts-based critiques of settler colonialism as well as methodologies of decolonization and settler responsibility. She contributes to many national collaborative research partnerships including Thinking Through the Museum, The Pilimmaksarniq/ Pijariuqsarniq Project: Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership, and The Counter Memory Activism project. Her article with Dr. Sarah E.K. Smith in the Journal of Canadian Studies “Unsettling Canadian Heritage: Decolonial Aesthetics in Canadian Video and Performance Art” was recently awarded the Best Peer-Reviewed Article Award by the Canadian Studies Network. She has several co-edited publications, such as, RACAR: Continuities Between Eras: Indigenous Arts, PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies towards Decolonizing Futures and the Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada. Taunton works as an independent curator and was a curatorial team member of Abadakone at the National Gallery of Canada (2019).
