The EAHR | Media working group (Ethnocultural Art Histories Research in Media) seeks to connect faculty and graduate students across the university working at the intersections of ethnocultural art research, media, and digital art history. In Canada, the study of research-creation by racialized visible minorities is still in its relative infancy, particularly in the interdisciplinary fields of media arts, culture, and theory, where generally speaking, white male scholars outnumber “minority” faculty and women. With this lack of diverse and equitable representation in research environments, faculty and students of colour do not often find a good “fit” for their scholarship in the digital arts community.
While addressing this problem, EAHR | Media focuses on bringing multi-disciplinary perspectives to conduct exploratory, collaborative research and interdisciplinary training on questions and issues of race, gender, and intersectionality that can push and pull at the limits of the many different understandings of what constitutes “media” and “technology” within and across not only disciplines, but also, importantly, multiple ethnocultural communities.
Our mission is three-fold. First, we provide a platform to organize and showcase research and research creation on ethnocultural topics carried out at Concordia University. Second, through our invited speakers, we will be exposed to initiatives currently experimenting with innovative digital tools and techniques to create online co-authoring platforms to further engage and develop EAHR | Media research directions. Finally, our continually expanding inter-faculty network will work together on a proposal for EAHR | Media to become a formal university research unit and association with Concordia’s Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology.
(1) What are the implications of intersectionality theory and critical race studies for the politics of representation of people of colour and Indigenous people in new media art? What are the political dimensions, psychological effects, boundaries and meanings of these aesthetic choices?
(2) How can digital media better encompass the full range of human diversity including ability, language, racialization, culture, gender and age?
(3) What are the epistemological implications of data-driven analysis and spatio-tempo-temporal representations for the study of research-creations by or about ethnocultural communities?