workshops & lectures

Metal is at once durable and impressionable, natural and extracted. In this talk, I consider the affordances of metal as both holder and inciter of memory, with a focus on gold in the making and maintaining of colonial territory in the British Empire. In particular, I consider how gold is at the symbolic and material centre of the settler cosmologies of land that enabled colonialism: molded into the Crown, panned out of gold rush rivers, and undergirding the currency, gold materialized colonial sovereignty. Through a discussion of the concept of Crown land and the public memory of gold mining that persists in museums and gold-panning theme parks, (especially Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), I consider how gold continues to ground the metaphysics of colonial territory.

“Metals and Memory: Gold and the Metaphysics of Colonial Territory,” McLester Colloquium, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States. February 26, 2020.

In this workshop, I discussed my own and my students’ ongoing work as the Story Nations Collective, done in collaboration with various people of the Rainy River First Nations. The Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations project is a participatory digital collaboration. Featuring an interactive annotation tool, an audio-book, audio-visual media such as photographs and digital stories, and ongoing conversations with present-day community members, the website engages with questions of treaty relationships, ceremony, and public memory. This digital storytelling site is a contemporary counternarrative to the missionary’s historical document and a platform that allows the diary to be made more accessible and available to the public in a digital format.

“Digital Storytelling with Indigenous Nations,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States. February 25, 2020.

At the University of Tübingen, several of my students and I attended the ‘Problematizing Morality: Ethnographic Approaches to the Normative Dimensions of Everyday Life’ Summer School. A disciplinarily and nationally diverse group, we learned much from each other. Professor Monique Scheer and I co-taught one masterclass, and I gave a keynote lecture entitled ‘Ceremonial Morality: What a History of Oath-Making Reveals about Practices of Living in a Good Way.’ During the same week, I was named an Ambassador for the University of Tübingen – please approach me to learn more about this.