Kate Hennessy - Digital Returns: Projects from the Making Culture Lab

Abstract: 

In this colloquium, Hennessy will discuss projects produced by the Making Culture Lab in collaboration with museums, galleries, artists, and Indigenous communities and organizations. In particular, Hennessy will use the conceptual lenses of continuity and belongings to reflect on the ways in which new technologies are facilitating the return of cultural property from museums and galleries to Indigenous communities and creating hybrid spaces of representation and engagement. Hennessy will highlight how collaborative, Indigenous, and feminist research methodologies have supported and inspired this work. 

Biography:

Kate Hennessy is an Associate Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology.  As the director of the Making Culture Lab, her research explores the impacts of new memory infrastructures and cultural practices of media, museums, and archives in the context of technoscience. Her video and multimedia works investigate documentary methodologies and foreground collaborative research creation approaches to address Indigenous and settler histories of place and space.

Her work has been published in journals such as Leonardo, American Indian Quarterly, Museum Anthropology Review,  Visual Anthropology Review, and PUBLIC. As a member of the Council of Canadian Academies’ Expert Panel on Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution, she was a co-author of the report commissioned by Library and Archives Canada titled Leading in the Digital World: Opportunities for Canada’s Memory Institutions. She is a co-founder of the Ethnographic Terminalia Curatorial Collective, which curates exhibitions at the intersection of ethnography and contemporary art each year in parallel with the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association.

Her work has been recognized with a number of awards. In 2008, she was part of a team who received the Society for Visual Anthropology’s Jean Rouch Award for Collaborative Ethnography (for Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs); in 2015, the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective was awarded the Council for Museum Anthropology’s Michael Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology. In 2017, she was awarded the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC’s Early in Career Award, which recognizes the contributions to the non-academic community made by faculty members who are at an early point in their careers. In 2020, she was awarded the Simon Fraser University Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology Research Excellence Award for Community and Participatory Research.