Urbain Occupations Urbaines

Shauna Janssen is a PhD Humanities student in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. Broadly, her research works across and in between the disciplines of architecture and performance studies, spatial theory and oral history, drawing from a mixture of discourses about the relations between contemporary art and historical architecture, theories of the city, and contested urban spaces. Shauna’s doctoral project documents the conditions from which art and spatial practices emerge in the city and the processes and methods by which in situ, performative, public, and community based art projects bring into representation and rearticulate diverse modes of agency. An urban activist and independent curator, Shauna is the founder of Urban Occupations Urbaines (UOU), a platform for facilitating creative engagements and collaborations with urban environments in transition and decay.