Current Research

My research focuses on the intersection of media and social justice within community-engaged frameworks. More specifically, my research explores the question: How do media technologies and institutions shape marginalized communities, publics, and networks? I approach this subject through an intersectional and intermedial lens, and think through how access to technologies like film, video, digital media, social media, and print media is affected by sexuality, race, class, gender, ability, and other identity lenses. I use a multi-method approach that draws from archival sources alongside semi-structured interviews, surveys, and ethnography to come to a more fulsome understanding of the role media have played in the formation of marginalized communities.

I have two on-going research projects

The Personal is Digital: Remediating and Digitizing Canada's Intergenerational Feminist & Queer Media Heritage

SSHRC Insight Grant-funded project with PI Marusya Bociurkiw, Co-PI Jonathan Petrychyn

‘The personal is political,’ a rallying cry of second wave feminism, was an assertion that the experiences and affects of women’s subjective experience resonate with, and are influenced by, larger socio-political contexts. This research-creation project will examine the personal archives and narratives of queer and feminist media creators whose films, videos, print materials and ephemera remain embedded in domestic space, rather than in bricks and mortar archives, and remediate them into digital archives. In placing some of the more vulnerable personal archives within the digital realm, we will also position them in the context of Canada’s media heritage. The digitization of vulnerable archives “is never a merely technical process, entangled as it is with power differentials, racial and national imaginaries” (Agostinho 2019, 141). Rather, as our project will demonstrate, feminist archival digitization is a processual methodology of care-based research. Building research relationships, gaining information through participatory processes, and working with vulnerable communities to bring their audio-visual archives into a digital space accessible to younger generations is as much about the process as it is about outcomes. Our goal with this research-creation project is to facilitate an intergenerational digital knowledge transfer of intersectional queer, feminist, and racialized activist media from the late 1970s to mid-1990s in Canada into contemporary media arts activist practice.

Digital Cinema and the Toronto Queer Film Festival

My second project is a community-engaged research-creation project on developing an intersectional film festival within our present moment. I focus here on my experience organizing the Toronto Queer Film Festival since 2019, an independent experimental festival organized by centring work by queer and trans people of colour, undocumented/migrant folk, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, and other marginalized members of the queer and trans community. In my organizing, I work with the other members of our collective to centre queer, disability, and migrant-justice perspectives within all aspects of the festival – from programming work by marginalized queer and trans filmmakers and providing above industry-standard artist fees, to providing well-paying jobs with health benefits to our staff. In my scholarly work on the festival, I seek to document and theorize the Toronto Queer Film Festival as a form of mutual aid and as a concrete network of care. Since working with the festival, I have successfully procured over $725,000 in arts council and other public funding for the festival, which goes to support both staff and filmmakers.

Research Creation

Laboratory of Feminist Memory. 2018-2019. Curatorial project. Glad Day Bookshop, Toronto. Co-curated with Marusya Bociurkiw, Axelle Demus, Mary Grace Lao, and Aisha Afzal. Cabaret-style salon interrogating the disappearance of lesbian and queer women’s space.

Passiflora: Fervors of the Body Politic. 2017. Film screening. Ryerson University. Co-curated with Claudia Sicondolfo and Ad Hoc film collective. Projected digital English subtitles over a 16mm French-language print of the film.

Circles. 2015. Hypertext. A digital story documenting affect in the CUPE 3903 strike at York University. Created in Twine.

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