Author Archives: David Gaertner
Recoding Relations: Dispatches from the Symposium for Indigenous New Media
David Gaertner and Melissa Haberl In June 2018, scholars, developers, artists, and community members from over twenty institutions and three continents gathered on the ancestral and unceded territory of the WSÁNEĆ, Lkwungen, and Wyomilth peoples to participate in the inaugural Symposium for Indigenous New Media (SINM). As part of the University of Victoria’s annual Digital […]
“the road to reconciliation is paved with g—dintentions”: Lack as Resistance in Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer
Joshua Whitehead’s inaugural book of poetry, Full-Metal Indigiqueer is a series of poems told through Zoa, a trickster figure rendered through the lens of technology. Whitehead combines the figures of the singularity, virus, and hacker into a narrator that inhabits and deconstructs the Western literary cannon and popular media culture by infiltrating and re-writing the […]
Indigenous Speculative Fiction Definitions & Questions
Below are definitions of Indigenous speculative fiction brainstormed at the end of term by students in English 373: Indigenous Speculative Fiction. You can read the syllabus for that class, including the reading list that these definitions are built from, here. We began the course with this simple definition of sf: Speculative fiction uses genre conventions […]
Strategic Plans for the Apocalypse: Critical Engagement with Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves
Groups of 4-5 Assignment Framework Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves ends with a new beginning. While capitalist-driven climate change is leading to the decimation of settler nation states (and the rapid decline of the settler population), French and his family are full of hope for the futures of Indigenous peoples—particularly now that Isaac, who holds […]
ENGL 373: Indigenous Speculative Fiction
Note: In the early marketing materials for this class I used a creative commons image of Marina Bay Sand and the Gardens by the Bay supertrees in Singapore. Using this image for a course like this erases Singapore’s own colonial history and the oppression of the Indigenous Malays. I have removed the image, but it may […]
(ASTU 260) Knowledge Dissemination: Communicating Research to Public Audiences
PDF available here: ASTU 260_2019 Course Description: This course is motivated by the teachers, researchers, and students that are changing the ways in which research and knowledge is shared within and beyond the academy. Universities are not insular. As a “public good” (Nixon), universities both produce knowledge and disseminate it to the public for use […]
Repression and the Settler Gothic
The horror novel ‘says, in a symbolic way, things we would be afraid to say right out straight… it offers us a chance to exercise… emotions which society demands we keep closely at hand.’ —Stephen King In the British Gothic tradition, what returns from the repressed is that which has been subjugated by Enlightenment sensibility: […]
