people

Dr. Aynur Kadir, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, is an Indigenous Uyghur scholar, filmmaker and curator with a research focus on the documentation, conservation and revitalization of Indigenous cultures and languages. Her work bridges the gap between Indigenous studies in Canada and in Asia. Her research interests are in global indigeneity from the Uyghur in China to Coast Salish and Six Nations in Canada; transnational Indigenous diplomacy; and the safeguarding and revitalization of languages and cultural heritage through digital technology and collaborative initiatives.

Dr. Shana MacDonald, Associate Professor, University of Waterloo. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, situated between film, media and performance studies, examines intersectional feminist social and digital media, popular culture, cinema, performance, and public art. She is an internationally curated artist who explores the community-building potential of practice-based, site-specific art interventions in public space. She is the founder of the Mobile Art Studio (MAS), a transitory creative lab space that brings art out of the gallery and into public participatory spaces. 

Dr. Milena Radzikowska is Chair and Full Professor in Information Design at Mount Royal University. Her work contrasts design thinking situated within engineering and computing science with one that has its grounding in humanities-based praxis. Her research is functionally feminist, and she is currently working on such “wicked” design problems as marginalization through data display and reconciliation in post-conflict zones.

Dr. Jennifer Roberts-Smith is a Full Professor and Chair of Dramatic Arts at Brock University. is an artist-researcher, whose transdisciplinary work in performance, digital media, design, education, and social justice has appeared in theatres, exhibitions, and scholarly publications internationally. She is interested in the ways that theatre offers people with differing perspectives, expertise, and lived experience opportunities to work together toward better futures. Her recent projects have supported community-driven interventions into cycles of harm perpetuated by systemic racism in Nova Scotia (in the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation project); reconciliation in post-conflict zones in Colombia (in Design for Peace); women’s prison reform (in Theatre for Relationality); and disability rights (in Aesthetics for Accessibility and Remote Embodied Synchronous Teaching and Learning for Accessibility ).

Dr. Stan Ruecker is Professor of Graphic Design Professor of Graphic Design & Design for Responsible Innovation at the University of Illinois. His current research interests are in the areas of experience design, humanities visualization, the future of reading, and information design. He has supervised graduate students and led seminars on experimental interface design, organizational innovation, strategic planning, research methods, and interdisciplinary research project management. His work focuses on developing prototypes to support the hermeneutic or interpretive process.
Dr. Brianna Wiens, Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo. She works at the intersections of digital culture, rhetoric, and feminist media studies. Across these fields, she leverages queer and intersectional feminist perspectives to examine the rhetorics, politics, and design of technologies and digital artifacts, and asks questions about power at individual, community, and structural levels. Dr. Wiens’ commitment to academia is also a commitment to political mobilizing and to scholarly activism–a constant feminist reminder that the personal (as well as community and structural) is political. Alongside Dr. Shana MacDonald, she is the Co-Director of the Feminist Think Tank, a research-creation collective that advances research on feminist media, art, and design, out of which she co-runs the digital archive Feminists Do Media (Instagram: @aesthetic.resistance).