Ariella Aïsha Azoulay – Imagine Going on Strike!

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s new book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, separates each chapter with a set of prompts or invitations: “Imagine going on strike!”

These prompts— addressed to museum workers, photographers, historians, and the governed—are tools in the larger project of unlearning imperialism, beginning with the multiple ways in which we all participate in imperial violence in our various roles and locations.

In the distinguished event of 2020-21, Ariella Azoulay will enter into conversation with Razan alSalah (assistant professor, Communication Studies) and Krista Lynes (associate professor, Communication Studies; Canada Research Chair in Feminist Media Studies and Director, Feminist Media Studio) of the Feminist Media Studio, in order to understand striking as a pedagogical, political and aesthetic method for unlearning and resisting imperial violence.

The discussion will be centred on striking in an effort to devise concrete commitments, calls to action, or protocols for unlearning imperialism, divesting, and/or decolonizing the Feminist Media Studio and the larger institutional structures and communities in which it participates.

The Feminist Media Studio supports and critically engages the complexity of mediations of gendered and queer social life in the context of the unfinished histories of European and American empire, enslavement, and colonization. It supports collective and collaborative study, as well as activist, curatorial, and artistic engagements which draw from the political potency and aesthetic experimentation of feminist media practice. Such creative and critical aesthetic engagements are firmly located in the intersectional feminist politics of the contemporary moment, an age marked by the proliferation of new media that have radically reconstituted not only the character of visual culture but also its channels of transmission and circulation.