Massive/Micro Sensemaking: Towards Post-Pandemic Futures

Mary Elizabeth Luka; Annette N Markham; Dan Harris

doi:10.17742/IMAGE.MM.12.2.1

Authors

Mary Elizabeth Luka University of Toronto
Annette N Markham RMIT University, Melbourne
Dan Harris RMIT, Melbourne

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.MM.12.2.1

Abstract

In what ways have forms for engendering the interconnection and materiality required for creative production changed in the time of COVID-19? How and why have our notions of imagining and visualizing cross-cultural production and its modes of research, analysis, and representation shifted? The global pandemic and responses to it through various forms of cultural production have seen an explosion of productivity and collective social actions as well as the reinforcement of entrenched systemic racism and other forms of discrimination and imbalance. In this special issue, authors weave together a series of dialogues, methodological approaches, and materialities that reflect on the visuality of the experiences that were first developed through shared critical autoethnographic practices during and after an international Massive Micro Sensemaking experiment involving 165 people.

Author Biographies

Mary Elizabeth Luka, University of Toronto

Mary Elizabeth (M.E.) Luka is Assistant Professor, University of Toronto and an award-winning producer of digital content for television, exhibition, and digital platforms. Luka examines co-creative production and dissemination in arts, culture, and media, including creative hubs and networks in Canada, UK, USA, and Australia. M.E. is a founding co-lead for the Critical Digital Methods Institute at University of Toronto Scarborough, and policy co-lead for Archive/Counter-Archive, a national partnership involving 27 universities and cultural organizations in activating audiovisual archives created by Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), the Black community, and People of Colour, womxn, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities. Luka has published in academic journals and books, and is completing a solo manuscript, A(rtspots) to ZeD: Digitizing Arts Documentary in Canada, and a collaborative manuscript, Dirty Methods: Feminist Epistemologies and Methodologies for Research. More information can be found at https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/acm/mary-elizabeth-luka

Annette N Markham, RMIT University, Melbourne

Annette N. Markham is Professor at RMIT University and Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia, and Professor (MSO, on leave) of Information Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has a long history of studying identity practices in digitally saturated contexts and is an internationally recognized scholar of innovative and ethical practice in digital research and design. Her work focuses on facilitating more creative, adaptive, and ethical practice for social research by disrupting the vocabularies around method. She founded the Future Making Research Consortium and has facilitated dozens of arts-based experiments and seminars to build data and digital literacy through critical pedagogy. Her work can be found in multiple academic books and journals. More information and links to publications can be found at annettemarkham.com

Dan Harris, RMIT, Melbourne

Dan Harris is an international expert in creativity studies combining critical theory and creative practice methods. Harris also writes and researches on performance, gender, and diversity. Harris is the series creator and editor of Creativity, Education and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan), has authored over 100 articles/book chapters and 17 books, in addition to public productions of plays, films, and spoken word performances, and has won over $2.9 million in competitive research funding since 2010. Harris is currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, RMIT Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow, and the Director of Creative Agency research lab.

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