6 February 2025 | University of Amsterdam
In this seminar, after an overview of the history of Canadian comics and how contemporary comics are produced, distributed and received in Canada, we will concentrate more specifically on comics that focus on Indigenous topics and ecological issues to investigate how the medium is used to address and advocate for increased visibility of indigenous culture and the natural world. The often-reductive conflation of the indigenous into the natural here serves as a way in which indigenous creators grab attention, but also as a cultural construction to be interrogated.

29 January 2025 | Maastricht University
“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order excavate the meaning—and power—of visualizing data. Exploring two examples of early data visualization—the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and Description of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists—this talk will connect Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race.