Hemispheric Encounters: Developing transborder research-creation practices

Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices is a partnership project that seeks to develop a network of universities, community organizations, artists, and activists across Canada, the US, and Latin America actively working in and with hemispheric performance as a methodology, a pedagogical strategy, and tool for social change. We activate this network for the purpose of sharing strategies and resources, forming transnational alliances, and developing more advanced understandings of human rights concerns affecting multiple sites in the Western hemisphere. Our project is especially timely in forming transborder coalitions for exchanging hemispheric knowledge, an action that could not be more urgent as growing rights emergencies require the coordinated action of activists in the Americas: the dramatic rise in nativism and populism and related spread of anti-immigrant sentiment; the growing expulsion of refugee migrants from Central America; the displacement of Indigenous communities by mining and pipeline projects; and record-high rates of gender and sexual violence, among others.

The partnership generates original understandings of embodied practice as a unique method of conducting research on, and ethically tackling, these humanitarian and ecological challenges. Specifically, it seeks to define, explore, and experiment with "hemispheric performance practice" as a distinctive practice-based, anti-colonial, transborder, and collaborative mode of knowledge production. In doing so, we mobilize a set of innovative live and digital research-creation formats that are designed to increase public engagement, shape public discourse, and reach diverse audiences across the Americas and beyond the academy. At the centre of the methods is a performative model for bridging "north" and "south" that promotes multi-sited and multilingual collaborations and that recognizes all participants as co-producers of knowledge. We seek not only to explore how performance offers creative tools for addressing social justice issues and working transnationally, but also how politically inflected research-creation practices shift how we ask research questions, engage with research subjects, and value research outcomes. Performance is defined as an embodied act, from artistic activities such as performance art and theatre to cultural practices like ritual, protest, and enactments of self in everyday life. It is also conceived as a political process--acts of doing that can both reiterate and alter existing geopolitical realities.

The initiative will draw on academic and community partners to train students in practice-based methods for transborder political engagement and will structure methods development around three thematic research clusters: Oralities, Mobilities, and Ecologies. These clusters will serve as the basis for research-creation groups, field schools and other gatherings, archival and publication activities, and long-term intersectoral collaboration across the hemisphere. Clusters align with transnational experiences of, and political responses to, pressing political shifts: Mobilities references border politics and conditions of the migrant trail; Ecologies points to legacies of resource extraction and land politics; and Oralities signals practices such as Indigenous storytelling, testimony, and diverse forms of communication and translation linked to histories of minority struggle and violence. Projects undertaken foster bottom-up connections among scholars, artists, and social justice groups as well as the creation of hemispheric knowledge; both provide decision makers with a rich vein of insight into the rapidly changing cultural landscapes of the Americas and a stronger sense of the constructive role Canada can play in these areas.

Principal Investigator
Laura Levin, York University 

Co-Investigators
Alina Pena-Iguaran, Universidad de Guadalajara
Amparo Marroquín, Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas
Arseli Dokumaci, Concordia University
Diana Taylor, New York University
Dot Tuer, OCAD University
Jennifer Willet, University of Windsor
Julie Nagam, The University of Winnipeg
Kathleen Buddle, University of Manitoba
Kimberly Sawchuk, Concordia University
Marcial Godoy, New York University
Maria Jose Contreras, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Mark Sussman, Concordia University
Natalie Alvarez, Ryerson University
Paolo Vignolo, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Peter Kulchyski, University of Manitoba
Peter Morin, OCAD University
Pilar Riano-Alcala, The University of British Columbia
Roewan Crowe, The University of Winnipeg
Selena Couture, University of Alberta
Sergio Andrade, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Shauna Janssen, Concordia University
Smaro Kamboureli, University of Toronto
Véronique Leduc, Université du Québec à Montréal
Warren Cariou, University of Manitoba