Carla Rice

Carla Rice is Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair in Feminist Studies and Social Practice and Founding and Academic Director of the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She specializes in feminist, difference, and disability theory and in research creation methodologies with a focus on changing systems and fostering social well-being and justice.

Keynote Talk: The Work of Stories in the World

Since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples have cultivated storytelling as a key knowledge generating, archiving, and dissemination praxis, establishing storywork as the original research method on Turtle Island, the Anishinaabe name for what is currently known as North America. In recent years, story-based methods have gone mainstream as settler academics, policymakers, thought leaders, and those in the business world have begun to recognize the centrality of narrative to knowing and meaning-making. With this growing recognition of stories as powerful objects in cultural, economic, and political spaces, there is an urgent need recuperate story for decolonial and liberatory ends and for people to find new ways to move together in the face of rising neo-fascism, structural inequities, and the climate crisis. In this presentation, Rice offers a conceptional overview of story making methodologies developed through the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice, a research hub Rice founded over a decade ago to explore ways that equity-seeking communities can use art and story to advance social wellbeing and justice, and to forge coalitional alliances. Attendees will also learn about various methodological approaches to story work with diverse justice-seeking groups that intentionally open conversations about systemic (rather than individualized) injustices in education, health, and other sectors.