Conducting Creative Research: Refuse, Relate, Return: Decolonial Practices in Process

Conducting Creative Research: Refuse, Relate, Return: Decolonial Practices in Process
A conversation between Julie Bull, Vanessa Andreotti, and Rita Wong

Friday, December 3^rd, 2021
3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Eventbrite: https://bit.ly/2ZfnF8g

Join our panel as they discuss decolonial practices in educational systems, environmental ethics, and Indigenous research ethics.

Vanessa Andreotti, PhD, will talk about how modern education tends to imprint four constitutive denials: 1) the denial of the historical and systemic violence that is necessary for modernity to exist; 2) the denial of the limits of the planet; 3) the denial of entanglement and interdependence, and; 4) the denial of the depth and magnitude of the planetary challenges before us. Modern education is usually associated with the expansion of creativity and the imagination, very rarely we have conversations that problematize how it conditions and limits the ways we see, feel, imagine and relate.

Julie Bull, PhD, will present on Indigenous research – from their doctoral dissertation – where they did several unconventional things, like using poetry, to disrupt dominant notions of scholarly writing and scientific rigor. The presentation is also about Indigenous research ethics and the practice imperative of doing research in relationship – to ourselves (know thyself), to research participants, to the communities, and to the academy. Their doctoral studies focused on how research ethics boards (REBs) and their members administer ethics review and clearance/approval processes for research with or about Indigenous Peoples and their territories/lands/ waters. They centered their learnings and longitudinal thoughts, reflections, and poetry related to Indigenous research ethics after more than 15 years of being at tables, delivering keynote lectures, and supporting community- driven research.

Rita Wong, PhD, will talk about how rivers and their guardians can teach us so much about how to be humbly human in this precarious moment. From illegitimate pipelines on unceded Coast Salish land, to fertile valleys and destructive hydro dams in Dane Zaa territories, water is one of the best teachers we could hope to learn from.