Research

I study how images and documents mediate the lives, lands, and relations they depict. To theorize the visual politics of documents, I use a pair of analytical frames: art and media theory. As situated reflections on political worlds, artworks demonstrate the logics and effects of bureaucratic rationalities that circulate through documents, images, and archives. Through media theory, I trace the contours of colonial visibilities, examining the circuits of authority that imbue the recording, circulation, and archiving of paperwork with political power. Bringing art and media theory together, my research identifies critical and creative strategies for destabilizing authority structures reproduced by documents, images, and their archives.  

I’ve explored these questions across three major projects, including a book-length study of Indigenous artists' engagements with settler documentation of Indian status in Canada, a manifesto that argues for art as a method of political theorizing, and an archival and field-based analysis of the decolonial potential of bison reintroduction. A full list of my publications is available here.

Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing

This book-length study examines how the Indian Act, status cards, and other state-authored documents are technologies have materialized the category of Indian status in Canada. The project has two analytic lenses: first centering the critical and creative ways Indigenous artists have intervened in these documents: and second, engaging with media theories of visuality, inscription, cancellation, and remediation. Engaging art as a key dimension for generating decolonial futures, I demonstrate how artworks are guides for disobedient uses of state archives. Through this approach, I show that artworks are a method for theorizing political relations beyond the limits of bureaucratic rationality. Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing cultivates strategies for looking and thinking disobediently, in ways that challenge state authority and denaturalize practices of classification.

Art as Thought: A Methods Manifesto

To further explore art as a site of politics and mode of political thinking, I am pursuing a co-authored book project with Dr. Marta Bashovski, titled Art as Thought: A Methods Manifesto. We argue that political, media, and cultural theorists ought to engage with artworks as critical and creative thought, rather than as illustrations of existing or developing theories. We model a substantive approach to thinking with art in theory through narrative writing and practical exercises adapted from art history, visual studies, and media studies.

Bison Bison: The Life and Death of a Political Animal

Using bison as a case study, this project asserts that multispecies relationships are shaped by colonialism and critical to decolonization. Across a series of articles, book chapters, and essays, this project examines multispecies relationships in two sites of knowledge: settler archives and wildlife reintroductions. Bringing together decolonial media theory with archival, ethnographic, and visual studies methods, I conduct disobedient readings of settler archives and conservation policy in order to center Indigenous knowledge and engage bison as world-making subjects. This research has received support from SSHRC and McMaster University’s Arts Research Board, the Redd Centre for Western Studies, and the Whitney Western Art Museum.