Different Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies

Chair: Tara McPherson, Cinematic Arts and Media, USC

Joanna Chen Cham (UCLA Library)
“Incorporating Emerging Literacies into Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies: Understanding the Value Systems, Methodologies, and Choices behind the Metadata”

Adam Muller (University of Manitoba, English, Film, and Theatre), Struan Sinclair (University of Manitoba, English, Film, and Theatre), and Andrew Woolford (University of Manitoba, Sociology and Social Justice and Criminology)
“Embodying Empathy: Fostering Historical Knowledge and Caring Through a Virtual Indian Residential School in Canada”

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is a core faculty member of the IMAP program, USC’s innovative practice based-Ph.D., and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship. Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003) received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on American Culture, among other awards. She is co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, and Screen, and in edited anthologies such as Race and Cyberspace, The New Media Book, The Object Reader, Virtual Publics, The Visual Culture Reader 2.0, and Basketball Jones. The anthology, Interactive Frictions, co-edited with Marsha Kinder, is forthcoming from the University of California Press, and she is currently working on a manuscript examining the digital transformation of the archive as it mutates into the database.

Andrew Woolford is a professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba and former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is the author of ‘This Benevolent Experiment’: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide and Redress in the United States and Canada (2015), The Politics of Restorative Justice (2009), and Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty-Making in British Columbia (2005), as well as co-author of Informal Reckonings: Conflict Resolution in Mediation, Restorative Justice, and Reparations (2005). He is co-editor of Canada and Colonial Genocide (2017), The Idea of a Human Rights Museum (2015), and Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (2014). He is currently working on two community-based research projects with Indigenous residential school Survivors: 1) Embodying Empathy, which will design, build, and test a virtual Indian Residential School that will serve as a site of historical knowledge mobilization and empathy formation; and 2) Remembering Assiniboia, which will generate and develop an archive and memorial for the Assiniboia Residential School through hosting a reunion for former students.

Struan Sinclair is an associate professor and director of the Media Lab at the University of Manitoba, with research interests in digital cultures, virtuality, structures of emotion and empathy and intersections between psychology, philosophy and everyday technologies. His fiction, plays and new media pieces have been widely reprinted and anthologized and have received critical acclaim and awards internationally. His works include Everything Breathed (Granta), Automatic World (Doubleday), the forthcoming interactive memoir Tomorrowless, and the ongoing recombinant narrative project If/Then.

Adam Muller is the Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the University of Manitoba, where he works on the representation of genocide, human rights, and mass violence. He is the editor of Concepts of Culture: Art, Politics, and Society (2005), as well as co-editor of Fighting Words and Images: Representing War Across the Disciplines (2012) and The Idea of a Human Rights Museum (2015). Dr. Muller has a special interest in photography, and in 2014 curated Photrocity, an exhibition of Soviet World War Two atrocity propaganda photographs. He is First Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and also a Senior Research Fellow at the U of M’s Centre for Defense and Security Studies. In addition to co-editing a collection of essays on cultural genocide, Dr. Muller is currently co-directing the Embodying Empathy project, which gathers together survivors, scholars, and private-sector tech professionals to create a digitally immersive Canadian Indian Residential School.

Joanna Chen Cham is the Lead for Emerging Literacies Librarian at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she creates, delivers, implements, and supports digital scholarship and emerging literacies instruction and library services into undergraduate instruction. Prior to joining UCLA, Joanna served as the L.A. as Subject Resident Archivist at the University of Southern California, which included rotations at Occidental College and The Wende Museum, and as the Archive and Exhibit Manager at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Joanna has also previously worked at USC Shoah Foundation as a Nanjing Massacre Testimonies Indexer, the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies as a Civic Engagement Fellow, and USC Libraries as a ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow, and was an Association of Research Libraries/Society of American Archivists Mosaic Fellow, ARL Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce Fellow, and ALA Spectrum Scholar. She is an alumna of UCLA, where she received her Master of Library & Information Science and Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate, and of UC Berkeley, where she focused on Holocaust history and human rights. Her passions and experience working with survivors and stories of genocide inspired her to pursue librarianship in order to continue collecting, making accessible, and teaching the stories of different communities.