The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellowship in the Humanities

Carleigh Baker is a Métis/Icelandic writer based in Vancouver. As an organizer, mentor and advocate, she has made valuable contributions to the Indigenous literature community. Baker has won several awards including the City of Vancouver Book Award for Bad Endings, which was also a finalist for the Writer's Trust award for fiction and the Emerging Indigenous Voices award. Her book reviews and critical writing have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, The Literary Review of Canada, and EVENT magazine, amongst others.

During her time at SFU, Baker proposes to continue work on a new novel about unprepared altruists facing the Canadian wilderness in an attempt to save the environment, surviving only due to the generosity of the local Indigenous community. She also plans to work within SFU and with community collaborators on representation and space claiming, particularly in relation to Indigenous/settler relations. With SFU Galleries, she will engage in public outreach such as organizing workshops, talks, reading groups, film screenings, and other events that engage students, faculty and the public in questions around art and culture’s role in cultural representation, Indigenous methodologies, and other ways of defining and acquiring knowledge.

Denielle Elliott is an Associate Professor at York University, and the co-founder and co-curator of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography. As part of a research collective, Elliott has developed innovative methodological approaches to ethnography, resulting in an edited book (Different Kind of Ethnography, 2017) and a new monograph that promises to make significant theoretical and methodological contributions to our understanding of neurology, temporality and corporeal politics.

While at SFU, Elliott proposes to work on how experiments in ethnographic writing, creative arts and multimedia can shift our understanding of what it is like to be diagnosed and live with acquired traumatic brain injuries. Through public outreach, Elliott intends to hold an exhibition of the installation with a roundtable discussion, a graduate workshop and a public lecture, as well as a series of public conversations with artists who have created films, performances, literary works, animations, and paintings as part of their recovery. 

Lucia Lorenzi is an emerging scholar and artist who has made numerous contributions to public dialogues about sexual violence, regularly engaging with this issue through social, mainstream and alternative media channels. Lorenzi has been awarded for her public service with a prestigious Governor General’s award in Commemoration of the Persons Case, which is awarded to Canadians who have made significant contributions to advancing gender equality.

Lorenzi’s project at SFU involves researching her book about the Robert Pickton case, focusing on how city design, planning, and funding relate to questions of memory and violence. Specifically, she aims to understand how the particular history, geography, and culture of the suburb of Port Coquitlam both afforded Robert Pickton the ability to commit the crimes he did there, and have shaped the ways in which his murdering of women of the Downtown Eastside was ignored, investigated, remembered, or forgotten. Using her training as an illustrator, Lorenzi aims to produce a short ‘’zine’ documenting her experiences researching the violence of her hometown. She also plans to work within SFU and with community collaborators to host a public symposium on the issue of public memory and gendered and sexualized violence, as well as other activities with students and faculty.

Susan Mertens is involved with SFU’s Graduate Liberal Studies program and has praticipated as panel moderator and writing mentor in the six-week Shadbolt Seminar: The Arts and the City. Having forged a successful career as an arts critic and cultural commentator, Mertens has resumed her writing career and is currently working on an edited collection of the poems, letters and journals of Jack Leonard Shadbolt.

During her fellowship, Mertens proposes to re-invigorate Jack Shadbolt’s spirit of engagement using his own words and work. She plans to create a performative piece of life writing, One Summer on Hornby, choreographing Shadbolt’s words spoken against projections of his art, images from his sketchbooks and photographs from his personal collection and beyond. Her appointment as a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow is fitting is that her core project is to complete her edition of the writings of Jack Shadbolt, and thereby to give fresh and broad access to the interior candour and questioning of Shadbolt as a creative artist.

Dylan Robinson is a xwélméxw artist and scholar of Stó:lō descent. He is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. Robinson has conducted ground-breaking research on ethnomusicology, Indigenous ontologies of music, the sensory and affective politics of sound, the role of the arts in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the history and politics of Indigenous public art across the Americas.

While at SFU, Robinson proposes to work on the sensory politics of Indigenous Public Art and Indigenous Song-life, expanding on his monograph Hungry Listening on Indigenous and settler colonial forms of listening. In collaboration with Dr. Keren Zaiontz, another Fellow, he plans to chart the ways in which public art in Vancouver has shifted in relation to public discourses of accessibility, recognition and the right to the city as experienced by Indigenous people and the disabled/deaf community in Vancouver over the past decade. He will also collaborate on the creation of new walking tours and an experimental documentary short on “walking the Indigenous city.” In addition, he will compose a new outdoor curatorial score for listening to the built environment in the lead-up to the Soundings exhibition tour to Vancouver in Fall 2020. Lastly, Robinson will experiment with forms of writing that can convey the experience of Indigenous song and material culture, and develop a critique of the ways in which museums display Indigenous artifacts, objectify them and remove them from life.

Keren Zaiontz is an emerging scholar whose work has a public facing dimension through politically engaged art and performance. She has held a prestigious Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, and has been honored with visiting researcher positions at the Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival, and at the Mellon School of Theater and Performance at Harvard University.

For her project Zaiontz will develop a research-creation program to show how disability art and performance in a global city like Vancouver takes us beyond accommodation to disabled-led advocacy and self-determined futures. She aims to form a working group of disability artists, art-activists and scholars to examine the challenges of the disabled participating fully in city life; facilitate a series of intersectional walking tours for the PuSH performing arts festival, create an open access audio piece by walking with local writers invested in activist urban poetics, describing what they see for those who are blind while conversing about art practices. She will also draft chapters of her second book.