Staff

• Trina Cooper-Bolam

  Affiliate
  
  

  Trina Cooper-Bolam is a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at Concordia University with a PhD in Cultural Mediations from Carleton University. Previously, Cooper-Bolam held senior positions at the Aboriginal Healing and Legacy of Hope Foundations–organizations working to transform the legacy of residential schools. Equally an academic researcher and an exhibition curator/designer, Cooper-Bolam is a key contributor to the Survivor-led Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall exhibition at Algoma University. Beginning in September 2022, Cooper-Bolam will initiate a program of collaborative transdisciplinary investigation of Shingwauk Home and Hall, recovering evidence and historical knowledge to support Survivor-driven in situ interpretation, memorialization, and Indigenous place-(re)making.

• Alexandra Nordstrom

  Research Assistant
  
  

  Alexandra Nordstrom is an MA student in the Department of Art History as well as a recipient of the Renata Hornstein Graduate Fellowship in Art History at Concordia University. Her current research examines how craft practices and Indigenous methodologies can be mobilized together as agents of activism. Alexandra completed her BA in Art History at the University of British Columbia where she was awarded the Trek Excellence Scholarship for Continuing Aboriginal Students.

• Shanna Ossé

  Communications Coordinator
  
  

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

  Shanna Ossé is the Communications Coordinator for Thinking Through the Museum, based at the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab. Shanna was raised and currently situated on the un-ceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory of Ottawa. Since graduating in Communications and Digital Humanities at the University of Ottawa in 2018, Shanna’s studies has pivoted from social media analysis to museum accessibility and decolonizing the museum space with the repatriation of looted artefacts during colonization. In 2018, working in conjunction with the Ingenium – Canada’s Museum of Science and Innovation and the University of Ottawa, she participated in the creation of the online exhibit The Digital Touch: Bringing Tangibility To Museums And Medicine, exploring digital tools and their uses to bridge the gap between touch accessibility, museum protocols and medicine. Her project, A Hole in a Heart, focuses on 3D imaging being transformed into 3D printed materials to aid in the surgical process of patching the Atrial Septal Defect in infants.

• Alex Robichaud

  Program Coordinator
  
  

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

  Alex Robichaud is the Project Coordinator for Thinking Through the Museum based at the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab. Alex grew up as a settler on Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) territory in New Brunswick. In 2017, Alex earned a Masters of Museum Studies at the University of Toronto with a focus on photography and curatorial strategies for themes of gender/sexuality and sexually explicit artworks. Since graduation, Alex has worked at the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab where they co-founded and coordinated a Curatorial Residency program that provides compensated curatorial opportunities for emerging museum professionals. This program has resulted in 3 public exhibitions (2019-2021): “Queering the Map: ON_SITE” curated by Lucas LaRochelle, “(Re)viewing the Syrian War” curated by Abood Hamad, and “Seascape Poetics” curated by Bettina Pérez Martinez.

• Shelley Ruth Butler

  Co-Investigator, Beyond Museum Walls Research Group
  
  

  Shelley Ruth Butler (PhD York University) is a cultural anthropologist who researches museums, curating, and heritage sites in Canada and South Africa. She co-edited (with Erica Lehrer) Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (MQUP 2016), and facilitates Curatorial Dreaming workshops for researchers, museums professionals, and community groups (www.curatorialdreams.com). Her first book, Contested Representations: Re-visiting Into the Heart of Africa (1999 & 2011) is a widely taught ethnography of a controversial exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum. expand

  Her interest in reflexivity and curating as a critical social practice is reflected in her contributions to Museum Theory: An Expanded Field  (2014) and Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power, Ethics (2012). Her newest curatorial research project explores the (im)possibility of exhibitions in response to suicide. She teaches interdisciplinary courses related to contemporary cultures with the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

• Jennifer Carter

  Co-Investigator, Beyond Museum Walls Research Group
  
  

  Jennifer Carter is Professeure of Nouvelles muséologies, patrimoines immatériels et objets culturels in the Département d’histoire de l’art at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she teaches courses on the history and theory of museums. Prior to her appointment at UQÀM in 2011, Jennifer held the position of Assistant Professor in the Museum Studies program in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto since 2008.expand

  Jennifer conducts research in the areas of museology, representation, and architecture, and considers how these practices mediate, and are mediated by, the cultural institutions that frame them. A more recent research project takes up the emergent phenomenon of human rights museology. She has published essays in Museum Management and Curatorship (2012); National Museums: New studies from around the world (Routledge, 2011); La revue de l’Association québécoise d’interprétation du patrimoine (Montréal, 2010); and Chora Five: Invervals in the philosophy of architecture (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2007).

• Angela Failler

  Co-Investigator, Thinking Through The Museum
  
  

  Angela Failler (PhD York University, MA Dalhousie University, BA University of Saskatchewan) is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and former Chancellor’s Research Chair (2012-15) at the University of Winnipeg. She is Lead Researcher of UW’s Cultural Studies Research Group. She also teaches and supervises for the MA Program in Cultural Studies, and is a Research Affiliate with the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies. Her major research program is focused on culture and public memory.expand

  She is also interested in phenomena at the intersection of culture, embodiment and psychical life and has published writings on anorexia and self-harm in this vein. In addition, she directs the multi-institutional partnership development project Thinking Through the Museum: Difficult Knowledge in Public. She teaches in the areas of feminist theory, cultural studies, queer theory, and embodiment and subjectivity. In 2012 she won the Clifford J. Robson Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence at the University of Winnipeg.  Image c/o Seaweed Rudy. 

• Heather Igloliorte

  Co-Investigator, Beyond Museum Walls / Thinking Through The Museum
  
  

  Heather Igloliorte is Assistant Professor in Art History and Concordia University Research Chair in Aboriginal Art History and Community Engagement. She has curated “We Were So Far Away”: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools, based on the oral histories of eight Inuit former students of the residential school system; Decolonize Me (Ottawa Art Gallery, 2011); the online collaborative exhibition Inuit Art Alive drawing on oral histories, local archives, and community-based knowledge gathered during her dissertation research on the art history of the Labrador Inuit.expand

  Her teaching and research interests include the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture, mid-century modernist primitivism, and issues of colonization, sovereignty, resistance and resilience. Her publications include chapters in Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey (2009), Inuit Modern (2010), and Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (2012).

   

• Cynthia E. Milton

  Co-Investigator, Beyond Museum Walls Research Group
  
  

  Cynthia E. Milton is Professor of Latin American History the Université de Montréal. Her interdisciplinary research studies TRCs and alternative modes of truth-telling, and artistic representations and cultural interventions in the constructions of historical narratives in the aftermath of state violence and in the era of human rights. Major honours include the Bolton Johnson Prize for the best book published in her field. She is presently the President of the College the Royal Society of Canada.

• Monica Patterson

  Co-Investigator, Thinking Through The Museum
  
  

  Monica Eileen Patterson is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. From 2012-2014 she was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at CEREV. She received her doctorate in Anthropology and History, and a certificate in Museum Studies, from the University of Michigan. She is currently pursuing two projects based on her field and archival research in southern Africa: expand

  a monograph examining contested constructions of childhood in late apartheid South Africa, from 1976 to the early 1990s when negotiations for the transition to democracy began; and an experimental exhibit that allows former and current South African children to reflect on their experiences of childhood and explore the meanings of the apartheid past and its present-day legacies. Patterson is coeditor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline andCurating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places. She has also published in volumes including Encyclopedia of South Africa (2011),The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005), and Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics (2004). Monica is particularly interested in the intersections of memory, childhood, and violence in postcolonial Africa, and the ways in which they are represented and engaged in contemporary public spheres. Visit Monica Patterson’s page at Academia.edu.