Research Statement
My past and present research uses interdisciplinary methods in order to understand the relationship between film form, context and theory. I examine the history of screen culture to think about the ways in which media and the cultures that surround them shape and reflect relations of power.
My new research project examines logging films in the Pacific Northwest from the 1920s to the 1960s. Looking at training, promotional, and ethnographic films sponsored by industry and government in Canada and the United States, my work aims to understand how “extraction media” operates. These films do not simply represent or document a process of resource extraction, but play a key role in that process – in social, perceptual, and material ways. An important part of this work is understanding the effects of environmental racism and in particular the ways in which film served to legitimize the expropriation of Indigenous land and sovereignty in the service of logging and other forms of resource of extraction. As part of this project, I have had the privilege of collaborating with Tom Child, N̓a̱msg̱a̱mk̓ala of the Kwagu’ł First Nation to better understand ethnographic films made about, and in collaboration with, the Kwagu’ł, as well as to help repatriate these films so that they are accessible to the community today. Doing this work has helped me understand how historical research might serve not simply to illuminate and explain past injustices, but also to help communities resist and repair the effects of extractive practices past and present.