Participating Scholars

Sanem Güvenç

Sanem Güvenç is a sociologist based in Vancouver and teaches Critical Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she focuses on posthumanism, the Anthropocene, and philosophy of science and medicine.  Her previous research areas were eugenics in 1930s Turkey and neoliberal governmentality in contemporary Turkey. Her articles were published in journals such as Social History of Medicine, New Perspectives on Turkey, and Comparative Studies on South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.  She is the co-editor of 2019 “Natural Sciences in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Formations, Practices, Intersections.” She’s also written on political theory within the context of Turkey’s 2013 Gezi movement and on Michel Foucault’s governmentality. Currently she is working on a book manuscript titled “Topologies of the Void”.

Jamie Hilder

Jamie Hilder is Assistant of Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish people. His study of the International Concrete Poetry Movement, Designed Words for a Designed World, was published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2016. He maintains an active and often collaborative creative practice that makes use of writing, video, performance, and sculpture. His current fields of research include Pedagogy as Gift, The Aesthetics of the Broken, and The Anxiety of Ingratitude.

Andrew Martindale

Andrew Martindale is an archaeologist whose research explores the histories of Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America, primarily that of Tsimshian and Musqueam communities. He thinks that working collaboratively with Indigenous descent communities creates a fundamental interdisciplinarity between the traditions of western and Indigenous scholarship. His recent work is an explicit evaluation of the links between the science of material history and the literature of Indigenous oral records over the Holocene. This work has demonstrated the remarkable capacity of Indigenous oral records to accurately record millennia of history, something that while obvious to Indigenous communities is less well understood in the non-Indigenous settler-colonial state. These results also cast some light on the vulnerabilities of different knowledge frameworks, including those of science, to ethnocentrism in the description and explanation of history. Andrew’s work addresses these in both anthropological theory and, increasingly, the interpretation of archaeology in Canadian legal history of Aboriginal rights and titles and in the realm of Indigenous law. He is part of a joint Musqueam-UBC platform for research and teaching partnerships focusing on history and archaeology. He also works with First Nations communities using archaeological methods to locate unmarked cemeteries and graves, including those associated with Indian Residential Schools.

Ernesto Peña

Ernesto Peña is a professional designer, turned professional educator, turned professional researcher. In the years that passed between the first and the last stage in this ongoing process, he became a problem-solver with a deep interest in the root causes of those problems and rigorous methods to address them. This journey has taken him across continents, languages, and disciplines. It has made Ernesto an eternal learner and teacher, a big-picturer and a dot-connector. Peña holds a Master’s degree in Information Design and a Ph.D. in Language and Literacy Education from the University of British Columbia. As an independent academic researcher, he is into design, media and digital humanities. His research interests include visual literacy, semiotics and rhetoric, visualization, typography, typometry and editorial design, among others. He is a faculty member at the Master of Educational Technology at UBC, where he teaches about the history and evolution of the concepts of text and technology.

PJ Rayner

PJ Rayner has spent the last two decades working in teaching and learning spaces. They currently with work with a variety of UBC disciplines and departments to help them answer big, existential questions, such as: who are we as a learning program, why are we here in this university, what is it we want to offer students, and how might we best build a learning program? PJ’s work with so many diverse disciplines has fostered their love for interdisciplinary education, which is reflected in their MA and MSc graduate degrees. Their current research focus is on utilizing knowledge translation strategies to help bring diverse disciplines into conversation with one another. PJ identifies as a genderqueer, white settler, with western European ancestry, raised on the traditional territories of the Aamjiwnaang Annishnabe nation, and currently living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.