Welcome to OPIRG Kingston

In Dunning 12, 6:30-8:30pm

Susan Cahill and Carla Taunton present “Performing Culture: Gender, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs”

This seminar investigates the ways in which identities were constructed, promoted, and maintained on behalf of those who were silenced due to their gender, race, and/or class. Including issues of imperialism, colonialism, power relations, and constructions of the Other(s), our discussion aims to explore how certain marginalised communities were exploited in order to legitimise the expansion, power, and wealth of the British Empire in the nineteenth century.

Susan’s Biography: Susan Cahill is a PhD Candidate in Visual and Material Culture at Queen’s University. Her main areas of interest include contemporary craft, gender, and globalisation. Susan’s current project focuses on a Southeast Asian organisation – Carol Cassidy and Lao Textiles – and how this company constructs its identity through exhibitions and displays throughout North America and Europe.

Carla’s Biography: I am a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University in the Department of Art and an alliance member of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. I am interested in local arts communities and I am a board member at the Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre. Recently, I graduated from Carleton University in 2006 with a MA in Canadian art history. My MA thesis, “Lori Blondeau: High Tech Storytelling for Social Change” explores performance art as a vehicle negotiating indigenous decolonization. Currently my research interests are indigenous performance art, contemporary indigenous visual culture, interventions and activism in the arts, as well as globalization theory