Mary Bunch

Co-director of the Peripheral Visions CoLab,  Mary Bunch is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and a Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability, Vision and the Arts at York University. She mobilizes queer, feminist, disability and decolonial frameworks to better understand peripheral worldmaking imaginaries in media arts. A member of York’s Digital Justice Research cluster, and executive committee member of Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, she connects embodied and multisensory engagements with image and story, to a correspondent political ontology – that is, the social and political implications of different perceptions of reality. Her theoretical concept development emerges both alongside, and through her creative practice. Her theory of access aesthetics as worldmaking proposed that access aesthetics is a political ontology. She develops this approach in “Blind Visuality in Bruce Horak’s Through a Tired Eye” (Studies in Social Justice, 2021) and “Access Aesthetics – Toward a Prefigurative Cultural Politics,” which introduces her co-edited special issue on Access Aesthetics of Public: Art|Culture|Ideas. Bunch co-created the media arts works Gather, Resonance, Emerging from the Water BETA, and Parkway Forest Time Machine. She has published articles in such journals as Culture, Theory and Critique, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies; and Feminist Theory.

Dolleen Tisawii’Ashii Manning

Co-director of the Peripheral Visions CoLab, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning is a Queen’s National Scholar in Anishinaabe Language, Knowledge and Culture (ALKC), Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. A member of Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation and an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, she points to her early childhood grounding in her mother’s cultural lessons as her primary philosophical influence and source of creativity. Manning has wide-ranging interests in Anishinaabe ontology, mnidoo interrelationality, epistemological sovereignty, critical theory, phenomenology, and art.  By tracing the fragile undulating threads of Anishinaabe ontologies found in everyday practices, she seeks to better understand the ways that Anishinaabe knowledge systems resist canonical academic values and textual dependent modes of address. She is particularly interested in the subtle, persistent challenge posed by the taken for granted orality of these thought systems. Such customary knowledges are often implicitly conveyed in gesture, speech, and everyday ways of being. Using various methodologies, including storytelling, textual analysis, and community-engaged research creation, she brings these ways of knowing into rigorous debate with contemporary discourses in continental philosophy and critical theory. Her research takes up what she terms Mnidoo-Worlding, outlined in“The Murmuration of Birds: An Anishinaabe Ontology of Mnidoo-Worlding” (In Feminist Phenomenology Futures, Eds. Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowski,  2017). She is also interested in Anishinaabe philosophies and cultural practices related to imaging, dreams, visions and their pathologization as hallucination in settler cultures. Her recent work includes the co-created the media arts works Gather, Resonance, Emerging from the Water BETA, and Parkway Forest Time Machine. 

 

Brad Necyck

Lia Tarachansky

 

Aylan Couchie

Galit Ariel

 

Summer Rayn Catt

 

Anne Michael Riley

 

 

Jorge de Oliviera (awaiting confirmation)