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ABOUT

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Research interests:

  • Adult learning, especially in social movements and environmental activism contexts

  • Issues of epistemology in public knowledge projects in relation to digital media and data practices

  • Environmental media and encactments and productions of learners' subjectivities

  • Power, knowledge, subjectivity

  • Sense media (sensor technologies) and more-than-human sentience

  • Media practices (especially user/data cultures)

  • Ontology and (more-than-human) subjectification

  • Environmental education (post-critical)

  • Post-qualitative methodologies and new empiricisms

  • Non-representational research methodologies; inventive and creative methodologies

  • Continental philosophy, poststructuralist theory, posthumanist philosophy, especially the work of Gilles Deleuze​

I am Lecturer in Adult Learning and Education in the Department of Educational Studies at The University of British Columbia. Previously, I was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology at Concordia.

My research focuses on adult environmental education and adult learning in environmental movements in relation to spaciotemporal shifts and data imaginaries of media practices and digital culture. I am interested in how learner subjectivities develop as part of social change and social movements. I focus on adult education through continental philosophy, posthumanism and its relation to knowledge and ontology. My emerging focus is on personalized sense media and sensor technologies in projects focused on public knowledge and adult learning for social change, and how adult environmental education is increasing infused with innovative projects that create techno-utopias of data-objectivity. My latest project investigates non-human sentience, chaos, and the idea of speculative environmental digital futures through data proliferation and how these are are informing the idea that data democratization is seen as a 'solution' to adult learning about climate change at the brink of the post/Anthropocene. My writing is frequently informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, continental philosophy, and posthumanist though.  Methodologically, my recent work takes up the idea of non-representational methodologies and concept work as research creation.  

I completed my PhD in Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education from the University of British Columbia with a focus on adult learning and public knowledge projects in relation to digital media, environmental communication, and productions and enactments of 'knowing' in activism contexts. My MA was in Communication and Culture (York University, Toronto), and BA in Communication (Simon Fraser University). 

As part of my doctoral research, I focused on shifting formations of subjectivity amongst a proliferation of diverse environmental media practices and technologies aimed at adult learning in environmental movements. I examined how ENGOs conceptualize adult learners as subject in their digital practices and also focused on tensions between visual culture for environmental change, and non-representational practices and methodologies.  As part of this work, I examined the textures and affective atmospheres of what campaigns and digital media activism do as part of environmental campaigners’ efforts in claims to educate and mobilize the public, and how to think about eNGOs and environmental activists’ knowledge practices and people’s material (sensed & embodied) encounters with these texts (as materials and discourses) and practices.

I have published in (see publications above) Environmental Education Research, Critical Studies in Education, the Canadian Journal of Communication, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture; the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Continuum: Journal of Media and Culture, and Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies.

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