Introduction

Yoke-Sum Wong left UK higher academia after wasting too much time in it and returned to Canada in the summer of 2016. She is now teaching at AuArts (formerly ACAD). She is a historical sociologist and journal editor who became lost in multidisciplinary meanderings and experimentations. During the last few years she has devoted her energy into organizing/curating international workshops, and exhibitions that bring together artists, art practitioners and academics from all disciplines. These meetings have helped produced a book co-edited with Karen Engle (University of Windsor), called Feelings of Structure (2018, MQUP).

She gets bored easily.

Karen Engle (PhD): I am an associate professor of Media Arts and Culture in the School of Creative Arts, at the University of Windsor. Research interests include visual culture (especially photo-based work), theories of affect, memory, and modernity. Having spent time in various disciplines (English literature, Sociology, and Visual Arts). I am a committed inter-disciplinarian. Writing is my primary medium, although I am exploring pinhole photography for this event.

Recent publications include: Feelings of Structure: Explorations in Affect, co-edited with Dr. Yoke-Sum Wong (2018, McGill-Queen’s University Press), “Fragments of Desire” with Trudi-Lynn Smith in Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 7, no. 1 (2016), “The Boondoggle: Lee Miller and the Vicissitudes of Private Archives” in Photographies, 8, no. 1 (2015): 85-104)., I am also author of the book Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination (2009, McGill-Queen’s University Press)

Craig Campbell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin.

I am fascinated with the way that making things, making art, curating exhibitions, and organizing workshops can function as devices for thinking. I was grateful when Erin Manning and Brian Massumi articulated this in their book Thought in the Act. They gave me some language to describe something I’d been doing my whole life.

I am a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia curatorial collective (www.ethnographicterminalia.org) and have been involved in many different making- and curating-based initiatives. Aside from creative endeavors as well as arranging for groups of people to meet and travel together to do, make, say and think stuff, I have a persistent desire to experiment with and theorize modes of description and evocation.

My book Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberia was published by the University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2014. Current projects include the cultural history of an unbuilt hydro-electric dam in Central Siberia, the weird time of a shadow, re-mediations of socialist encounters, and the aesthetics of damaged, degraded, and manipulated photographs. I am is also involved in an initiative called Writing with Light, to explore the persistent mattering of photography and photo-essays to cultural anthropology.

Personal website: www.metafactory.ca