Horizons - Plenary 1

The Plenary includes the talk "Framing the Research Relationship with Indigenous Nations" by Dorothy Christian and the keynote talk "Creative Solidarity and the Futurities of Community-engaged Research" by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez.

Dorothy Cucw-la7 Christian is Secwepemc and Syilx from the interior plateau regions of what is known as British Columbia. She is happy to be a good relative to her Coast Salish cousins while she lives, works, and plays on their lands. Her research centralizes land, story, cultural protocols and how Indigenous Knowledge informs and guides interrelationships with Canadian Settler society. Her curiosity in how cultural knowledge influences Indigenous production practice started when she was working for the national broadcaster VisionTV to bring Indigenous stories to the national screen. While she writes scholarly chapters and participates in community on many levels, Dorothy remains involved in the Indigenous visual storytelling culture in Canada. She serves as a Board member of the Indigenous Screen Office in Toronto and has curated programs for the 2018 and 2019 ImagineNative film festival, the largest Indigenous film festival in the world.

Dr. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez is Professor at the University of Toronto. His research and scholarship are concerned with questions of symbolic boundaries and the dynamics of cultural production and processes of identification in educational contexts. He draws on cultural studies, decolonial/postcolonial and feminist theory, and critical sociology to inform his understanding of curriculum and pedagogy as encounters with difference. He is the Principal Investigator of the Urban Arts High Schools Project, a study of specialized arts programs in public schools across the United States and Canada, and the author of The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School, and ethnographic study of processes of elite identification and the production of privilege. Currently, he is the Director of the Youth Research Lab at the Centre for Urban Schooling of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where he is Principal Investigator of the Youth Solidarities Across Boundaries Project, a participatory action research project with Latinx and Indigenous youth in the city of Toronto. At the YRL, he also oversees and supports several youth participatory action research projects, including the editorial board of in: cite, a youth-run online research journal, as well as a study of the practices of participatory facilitators. His theoretical work focuses on the relationship between creativity, decolonization, and solidarity.

Community activists, educators, and scholars have leveled profound critiques of the ways in which universities, funders, and other high status institutions express commitments to community engagement without addressing the structural factors that implicate them in the production of inequality and marginalization. Despite these critiques, universities and funders continue to act “as if” they were not implicated in and actively produce the conditions that undermine their own expressed commitments to marginalized communities. This paradox is akin to the ways in which expressions of solidarity often lack a serious commitment to political action and to transforming the conditions that make solidarity necessary in the first place. In this keynote, Gaztambide-Fernández offers a critique of community-engaged research as an expression of a privileged solidarity that fails to engage in transformative practice. Through the frameworks of cultural production and the pedagogy of solidarity, Gaztambide-Fernández will propose “creative solidarity” as an approach to community-engaged research that centres Black, Indigenous, and Brown futurities, and that risks the future of the university as a status-producing institution.