Lois Klassen @ INSPIRE Seminar Series: Research and Creation in Sites of Ethical Demand – Models of Conduct and Practice
If you missed Lois Klassen’s talk on Research and Creation in Sited of Ethical Demand as part of the INSPIRE series you can watch the recording here.
Lois addresses important questions that situate the category and production of “Research-Creation” projects within the Canadian context including decolonizing efforts in research and academia in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada and BC’s recognition of the UN Declaration of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) as well how Canadian colonial legacies affect us all globally. For example, Klassen mentions how a third of the world’s mining is regulated through Canadian laws and how the practices of Canadian mining companies in Central America have a direct impact on the flows of asylum seekers at the Mexican-U.S. Border.
In the talk, Lois describes a series of ethical dilemmas and approaches when working with artists across disciplines and calls for thinking about who’s ethics do we consider in academia when we work across disciplines with artists and communities at risk. She invites us to look at community-based research models developed by some first nations communities in the Canadian context as potential models to think through ethical demands posed to artists when working with communities that face state violence, such as asylum seekers or refugees.
Lois Klassen is an artist, writer, and researcher based on Coast Salish Territory (traditional and unceded) in what is referred to as Vancouver. Known for long-range projects that invite and engage participants in collective actions, Klassen’s projects deliberately face ethical demand by way of social, aesthetic and material methods. Her project, Reading the Migration Library, invites collaborations in small press publishing of content related to current and historic approaches to migration.
Klassen was a 2020 Fulbright Fellow at University of Texas in El Paso (Center for Inter-American Border Studies and the Ruben Center for the Visual Arts) and is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Critical Media Art Studios at Simon Fraser University. Lois Klassen serves as the coordinator of the Emily Carr University Research Ethics Board and is a member of the Canadian Association of Research Ethics Boards Circle of Experts.
Read more about Lois Klassen’s work here.
The INSPIRE seminar series focuses on the role of art, artists and activism in times of violent conflict and war. In this monthly online space, with invited researchers and artists, we explore arts-based methods, collaborative methods, ethics of doing research with artists, arts as transformation, engaged scholarship; all in the context of violent conflict and war. The seminar series is part of the INSPIRE project, funded by the Research Council of Norway from 2020 to 2023.