Research Working Groups
CACS-ACÉC hosts Research Working Groups which aim to build community and capacity in new research directions.
The purpose of CACS working groups is to facilitate collaboration and intellectual exchange on any topic related to cultural studies.
If you are interested to join an existing working group, please contact the Working Group Convenors as indicated below. New working groups can be proposed by reaching out to a member of the CACS board.
| GROUPS | CONVENORS |
|---|---|
Ronald Cummings, Jamie Magnusson | |
Kerry Sinanan | |
Sanjukta Banerjee, Agata Mergler | |
Brent Bellamy | |
Patrick Teed | |
Robin Love, Lisa Conway |
Queerly Gendered Poetics of Upheaval
As cities become increasingly privatized and militarized because of their emergent role in coordinating the flow of finance for racial capital, access to collective life is ever more pressing. Our working group studies how marginalized queer and trans communities innovate genres of collective life expressive of queerly gendered poetics of upheaval. We invite queer and trans artists, poets, grassroots organizers, cultural workers, members of exiled communities, and scholars to share strategies and narratives for survivance, marronage, errant intimacies, assemblages, and other queer poetics of upheaval.
Convenors:
Ronald Cummings
Ronald Cummings (he/him) is Professor of Caribbean literatures and Black Diaspora Studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Cummings is co-editor (with Nalini Mohabir) of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
Jamie Magnusson
Jamie Magnusson (they/them) is an Associate Professor of Adult Education and Community Organizing at OISE. Magnusson’s community work spans street-based harm reduction outreach, sex worker justice, encampment justice, food security, community safety and queer and trans abolitionist organizing.
Research Assistant:
Hadley Howes
Hadley Howes recently completed their Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University. Their research in abolitionist and artistic praxes is informed by their experience working with queer/trans social justice initiatives, creating art in public space, and their international exhibition history working in research-rich, site-responsive and multimedia installation.
Contact: hadleyhowes@gmail.com
Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Settler Colonialism: Global Connections
This working group will engage questions on these terms and positionalities, considering their political urgency, from comparative global perspectives, in the context of a culture of contestation and ongoing Canadian settler state violence that is materially and ideologically connected to Western projects of global imperialism. The lives and rights of Indigenous peoples globally, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Sudan, to Palestine, to Turtle Island are under intensifying colonial-capitalist violence (Aníbal Quijano), often sponsored by Canadian interests. We will aim to situate cultures and histories of settler colonialism within comparative perspectives in order to illuminate shared structures and to forge connected responses and actions.
Convenor:
Kerry Sinanan
Kerry Sinanan is Associate Professor in Global pre-1800 Literature and Culture. She specializes in the Black Atlantic, Caribbean slavery and race, and the global dimensions of Black, Indigenous, and Caribbean resistance and abolition up to the present. She has published widely on Black Atlantic writers such as Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, as well as on Jane Austen, whom she examines as a writer of empire. As an anti-racist pedagogy practitioner, she runs regular teach-ins and workshops on undisciplining 18th and 19th-century studies and on decolonial curriculum.
Contact: k.sinanan@uwinnipeg.ca
Cultural Translation and Mobility
This Working Group seeks to explore cultural processes, spaces, and objects through the intersectional lens of translation and mobility. Foregrounding translation as a creative, relational, multimodal, multisensory, and embodied process and practice enmeshed with geographic, social, linguistic mobility and its attendant frictions, resistances, and transformations, we want to facilitate conversations and transdisciplinary collaborations among researchers and creative practitioners interested in this nexus.
Convenors:
Sanjukta Banerjee, Translation Studies and Humanities, York University
Sanjukta Banerjee (PhD Humanities, York University) teaches translation studies and travel writing at York University. Her research explores the intersections of travel, translation, and multilinguality in processes of knowledge creation and circulation. Her work has been published in the anthologies Negotiating Linguistic Plurality Translation and Multilingualism in Canada and Beyond (McGill-Queen’s, 2022), A Multilingual Nation: Translation and Language Dynamic in India (Oxford UP India, 2018), and in the journals Studies in Travel Writing and Tusaaji: A Translation Review
Agata Mergler, Humanities, York University; University of Fine Art, Poznań, Poland
Agata Mergler (PhD Philosophy, Mickiewicz University, Poland; PhD ABD Humanities, York University) is working on a thesis “The Cultural Translation and Latin American Digital Art”. She explores the intersection of cultural translation, minor cultural practices, media art, and mobility, as well as artistic research, media theory, and comparative literature in her research, art, writing, and teaching. Recently, she co-edited Imaginations Journal for Cross-Cultural Image Studies, vol. 15, issue on research creation, and Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, vol. 49 no. 1-2, issue on post-magical realism. She has been a part of Haptic/Visual Identities, an internationally presented and exhibited art as research project, since 2016.
Contact: cultransmob@gmail.com
Peer Feedback as Method
This is a methods-based working group that explores collaborative, process-oriented models of peer and faculty feedback that adapt to who is present and what they need, emphasizing communal thinking over one-on-one evaluation. Grounded in critical pedagogy (bell hooks, Joseph Jacotot, and Paulo Freire), the group seeks to build an inclusive, grassroots network of cultural studies scholars committed to revitalizing feedback practices through trust, dialogue, and shared intellectual experimentation.
Convenor:
Brent Bellamy, English Literature & Cultural Studies, Trent University
An interdisciplinary humanities scholar who teaches communications, cultural studies, and English literature. Their program of scholarly research blends the study of narrative and capitalism with a critical focus on storyworlds and worldbuilding. He values mentorship and strives to create opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to engage in academic research, collaborative scholarship, and public presentations.
Contact: bbellamy@trentu.ca
Black Critical Theory
The Black Critical Theory Working Group provides an intellectual platform for scholarship that examines how racial blackness poses philosophical and conceptual dilemmas for the study of theory, culture, and society.
Convenor:
Patrick Teed, Faculty of Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English at the University of Toronto
Patrick Michael Teed is a Faculty of Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. As an interdisciplinary scholar working in the theoretical humanities, his scholarship covers a wide terrain of interests, including: Black critical theory; psychoanalysis; racial slavery and abolitionism; continental philosophy; and science and technology studies. His available essays can be found in: differences, CR: New Centennial Review, Social & Cultural Geography, Rhizomes, TOPIA, and Lateral and he guest edited a special issue of TOPIA focusing on Black critical theoretical approaches to the keywords care and cure. He is currently working on two book projects. His first, Deconstructing Life: Epigenesis, Antiblackness, interrogates the racism structural to critical theory’s enchantment with postgenomic science and his second, Whither Abolition?, provides an immanent critique of abolitionist literature and theory.
Current Members:
Bahar Banaei, Joshua Falek, Marcelle-Anne Fletcher, Tapji Garba, Tiana Reid, Patrick Teed, Sheba Wiafe
Contact: Patrick.teed@utoronto.ca
Mucking About: Cultivating Community in Research-Creation Across Disciplines
This working group invites (but is not exclusive to) scholars and artists engaged in research-creation across disciplines to meet to discuss, witness, challenge, and encourage each other in their artistic processes. It understands community as essential to artmaking and is interested in the varied forms of working, knowing and being that emerge through art practice. It is furthermore interested in how these things fit, misfit, aIect, or are aIected by the demands of academic research and research-creation in an academic setting, and in what it takes to build artistic community in a place that is often competitive and, for graduate students, isolating. We will consider research-creation in relation to areas of critical inquiry (postcolonial and critical race studies, critical disability studies, queer studies, Black and Indigenous studies) that have long engaged in the creative process of proposing alternative and lively ways of being, learning, knowing, and relating.
Convenor(s):
Robin Love, Trent University
Lisa Conway, Concordia University
Contact: rolove@trentu.ca