Feminism in a globalized world

 

Montreal, March 15, 2013 – How might contemporary media art, documentary and independent film represent the complexity of feminist political struggles under globalization? That question drives the research of Concordia University’s Krista Lynes. She holds the new Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Feminist Media Studies, announced today by the Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology.

 

 “Our government is committed to attracting and retaining the world’s best and brightest researchers, supporting innovation, creating jobs, and strengthening our economy,” said Goodyear. “By investing in programs such as the Canada Research Chairs, we are fostering cutting-edge research and the generation of new innovations for the marketplace, which will benefit Canadians.”

 

For Lynes, a professor in Concordia’s Department of Communication Studies, the connection with the Canada Research Chairs program means ongoing support for her work. “Feminist media are as vital today as in the 1960s and 70s. It’s important to look at the ways in which they have made social life visible under global conditions of armed conflict, political struggle and exploitation,” she explains. 

 

Lynes will hold a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair, which is tenable for five years and renewable once. The Tier 2 Chairs are granted to exceptional emerging researchers, acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field. For each Tier 2 Chair, the University receives $100,000 annually for five years. 

 

“I congratulate Dr. Lynes on receiving this prestigious and important appointment. Her research is part of the vital work that is being done at Concordia in addressing today’s pressing societal challenges,” says Concordia President Alan Shepard.

 

The Canada Research Chair will provide funding for Lynes’s research into how the proliferation of new media technologies and their increased channels of circulation affect how feminist political struggle is visually represented. The CRC funding will also help Lynes establish a new Feminist Media Studio at Concordia. The facility will provide a forum for staging historical examples of feminist media art, plus an Open Studio for developing artistic means for visually representing forms of gender-based oppression and exploitation. 

 

The announcement of this new Canada Research Chair coincides with the publication of Lynes’s new book, Prismatic Media, Transnational Circuits. In its pages, she looks at how gender and sexuality in conflict zones are represented in contemporary art, experimental documentaries and independent films. Through case studies in the former Yugoslavia, India, Palestine and Afghanistan, she traces how experiments with form provide what she terms “prismatic visions” of sites of political struggle, and thus open space for complex and emancipatory relations among cultural producers, activists and viewers in a globalized present.

 

Professor Erica Lehrer, who is jointly appointed in Concordia’s Department of History and its Department of Sociology and Anthropology has been renewed for another five years as the Canada Research Chair in Post-Conflict Memory, Ethnography, and Museology.