RECENT WORK

Remediating Toxic Images: Relating Practices for Representational and Environmental Justice

Journal article
Spring 2025
RACAR Vol. 50(1)

The photographic works of Amber Bracken, Stephanie Foden, Alex Jacobs-Blum, and Josée Pedneault, exhibited at the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben Cohen as part of the inaugural Photo East Festival, reflect ways reciprocal relationships with nature are expressed and the worlds they sustain. From learning wonder and restraint while searching for blueberry patches, to living with and in defense of the unique and diverse landscapes that nourish us. From recognizing a river, such as the Mutuhekau Shipu/Magpie River, to have legal personhood, to acknowledging the depth of our connections to the natural realm; how we are of rivers, lands and skies.

(We are) of rivers, lands and skies

Curatorial project

Jan. 29, 2025 - Apr. 3. 2025
Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben Cohen, Université de Moncton & Photo East Festival

Grounded in research conducted in and with Aamjiwnaang First Nation, this paper advocates for combining two approaches to develop a critical and just eco-photography practice: attunement to haunting and participatory methods of visual discourse analysis, such as elaborated images. The first calls for an affective engagement with photographs that is concerned with identifying depictions that centre liveness—understood as complex, dynamic, and resonant existence—rather than those that merely expose a life. The second approach asks community members to reflect and intervene on photographs. Together, these perspectives spur recommendations on how to bear witness to the environmental harms caused by extractivism without further reinscribing frontline communities as expendable.

Spreads from Remediating Toxic Images published in the Spring 2025 issue of RACAR

Conference presentation

Jun. 1, 2025, 1.00pm - 2.30pm
Environmental Studies Association of Canada Conference, Congress 2025, George Brown College

Practicing attunement: creative methodologies for representational and environmental justice

In spring 2024, elevated levels of benzene in the air above Aamjiwnaang First Nation led the Anishinabek community to declare a state of emergency, renewing media attention. Images of warning signs and the offending industrial facility abounded. The focus on petrochemical infrastructure at the detriment of depictions of the community cements perceptions of the area as a pollution sink, obscuring its enduring role as a home. Given that the discursive erasure of Indigenous realities usher their material destruction, combatting exposure to environmental harms involves making visible and valuable what is at stakes: the lives, the ecosystem, and the kinship between the two. Or, put another way, care for representational justice is the antidote to an extractive scopic regime which depreciate certain lives in order to render them available for injury. With this in mind, in this paper, I explore the potential of creative methodologies that center attunement—understood as a deepened and intentional listening practice, one that is generous, grounded, relational, multisensorial, accountable and reflexive—to advance both representational and environmental justice.

Author Meets Critics Session: Danielle Taschereau Mamers’ Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing

Conference presentation

Jun. 4, 2025, 10.15am - 11.45am.
Canadian Political Science Association Conference, Congress 2025, George Brown College.

With Danielle Taschereau-Mamers, Gerald McMaster, Mark Rifkin, Gabrielle Moser, Robert Jackson and Marta Bashovski

Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing asks how do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such documentary practices and settler colonial ways of seeing be refused? In this book, Danielle Taschereau Mamers investigates how the Canadian state has used documents, lists, and databases to generate, make visible—and invisible—Indigenous identity. With an archive of legislative documents, registration forms, identity cards, and reports, Taschereau Mamers traces the political and media history of Indian status in Canada, demonstrating how paperwork has been used by the state to materialize identity categories in the service of colonial governance. The book’s analysis of bureaucratic artifacts is led by the interventions of Indigenous artists, including Robert Houle, Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Rebecca Belmore. Bringing together media theories of documentation and the strategies of these artists, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing develops a method for identifying how bureaucratic documents mediate power relations as well as how those relations may be disobeyed and re-imagined. By integrating art-led inquiry with media theory and settler colonial studies approaches, Taschereau Mamers offers a political and media history of the documents that have reproduced Indian status. Most importantly, she provides an innovative guide for using art as a method of theorizing decolonial political relations.