Faculty

Hillary Kaell completed her doctorate in American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in the history and practice of North American Christianity. She is author of Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (New York University Press, 2014) and editor of Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec (McGill-Queens University Press, 2017). Her current FQRSC-funded project examines the development of a global Christian imaginary through the lens of child sponsorship programs.

Dr. Kaell has written for popular audiences online and in print, and collaborated on a number of public education projects, including as a paid consultant on the PBS television series God in America. Currently, she co-curates the Anthrocybib website and co-hosts the New Books in Religion podcast. At Concordia, she teaches courses related to U.S. Christian history, material religion, and anthropology.

She is a faculty fellow with Concordia’s Center for Sensory Studies and has just signed on as co-editor of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion’s book series at Palgrave Macmillan press.

WhiteFeather is a Canadian artist/researcher, educator and writer currently based in Montreal.

WhiteFeather has been professionally engaged in a craft-based bioart practice for over 15 years via material investigations of the functional, artistic and technological potential of bodily matter. Her work has ranged widely, from the utilization of human hair in traditional textile techniques, to rogue taxidermy soft sculptures of found flesh and bone, to digital/ pop culture representations of the body absent in the technological world. Her current focus, spanning the last three years and encompassing three different international, laboratory-based artist research residencies is on biotextile experimentation and the creation of new, aestheticized vital specimens through hands-on tissue engineering. Additionally, hacking laboratory apparatuses as part of the materiality of the work.

WhiteFeather is a multiple-award winning scholar and professional arts grant recipient, with an MFA in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University. She has shown and performed work in solo, group and collaborative exhibitions throughout Canada, in the US and Australia, given artist talks internationally and been featured in international magazines, newspapers, hardcover art books and television spotlights. WhiteFeather also saw her work, Alma, go viral in 2012 with 5+ million hits in 3 days, and then again in 2015, both times via reddit front page.

WhiteFeather is laboratory technician and coordinator for the Speculative Life Lab and coordinator for the Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster, both situated within the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University.

Dr. Orit Halpern is a Strategic Hire in Interactive Design and Theory and an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Montréal. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design and art practice. Her recent book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke Press 2015) is a genealogy of interactivity and our contemporary obsessions with “big” data and data visualization. She is now working on two projects.  The first, titled The Smartness Mandate, is a history and theory of “smartness”, environment, and ubiquitous computing and the second, tentatively titled Resilient Hope, examines the forms of planetary futures being produced and destroyed through high-technology large scale infrastructural projects.

She has also published and created works for a variety of venues including The Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, Configurations, C-theory, and ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.

She has an MPH. from Columbia University School of Public Health, and completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in the History of Science. She has also held fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, the Graham Foundation, Digital Culture Research Lab at Leuphana University, the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, and the BMW Stiftung Herbert Quandt.

My interests include the politics of communication, the issue of representation, critical policy analysis & critical visual sociology and anthropology, all with an eye to social justice issues as well as community and identity broadly speaking. Thus, I look at representation mainly through semiotics, anthropological and sociological theory, and with respect to the literature in visual cultural studies, communication and discourse analysis. I use various frameworks and lenses, generally with a critical focus. I am interested in theoretical investigations within the realm of semiotics and ethics broadly speaking especially in relation to communication and the visual. I conduct artistic research through creative research & exploration, again centering on concerns around visualities & representation.

Dr. Mayer’s research focuses on two areas of concern. First, it studies labor markets and worker organizations in the formal sector of the economy, with a regional emphasis on Latin America. Second, it examines the multifaceted everyday strategies utilized by workers active in the informal economy to resist violence, in Latin American countries. His research was published in: Journal of Politics in Latin America; Bulletin of Latin American Research; Journal of Social Policies; and Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He has co-authored (with Paul Posner and Viviana Patroni) a book, forthcoming with the University Press of Florida, entitledLaboring in Latin America: Democracy and Worker Organization in the Neoliberal Era.

My research deals with informal politics, particularly clientelism and patronage, and urban violence. My primary geographic area of interest is Latin America and the Caribbean.

I currently hold a SSHRC Insight Grant for a project investigating the link between Latin American citizens’ evaluations of governance along institutional, economic, and identity-based lines and their decisions to engage in clientelism; as well as a Fonds de recherche du Québec grant to study resilience to urban violence. I am also a member of the Fonds de recherche du Québec funded “Équipe de recherche interuniversitaire sur l’inclusion et la gouvernance en Amérique latine” (Interuniversity Research Team on Inclusion and Governance in Latin America, ÉRIGAL).

I direct the Lab for Latin American and Caribbean studies (www.llacs.ca) and am a member of the Governing Board of the Montreal Latin American Studies Network / Réseau d’études latino-américaines de Montréal (relam.ca).

Research interests

Comparative Politics; Informal Politics; Clientelism; Urban Violence; Developing Areas; Latin America; Mexico; Brazil

Educaton

PhD (University of Alberta)

Research interests

Indigenous Cultures, Ethnography, Far East & N.A.

Chris Salter is an artist, University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses, Professor of Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Arts, Co-Director of the Hexagram Network for Research-Creation in Media Art, Design, Digital Culture and Technology, Director of Hexagram Concordia and Associate Director, Milieux Institute for Arts,Culture and Technology.

Salter studied economics and philosophy at Emory University and received his Ph.D. in theater directing and dramatic theory/criticism at Stanford University where he also worked and researched at CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics). At Stanford, Salter studied with former Brecht assistant Carl Weber as well as pioneers of digital synthesis John Chowning, Max Matthews and Chris Chafe. In the 1990s, he collaborated with theater director Peter Sellars and choreographer William Forsythe/Frankfurt Ballet. He was visiting professor in music, graduate studies and digital media at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before joining Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 2005. He was also Guest Professor at the KhM in Cologne in 2010 and is continuing Guest Faculty at the Masters program in Media Arts History, Institute für Bildwissenschaften,Donau University, Krems, Austria.

Salter’s large scale installations, performative environments and research focuses on and challenges human perception, merging haptic, visual, acoustic and other sensory phenomena. Exploring the borders between the senses, art, design and new technologies, his immersive and physically experiential works are informed by theater, architecture, visual art, computer music, perceptual psychology, cultural theory and engineering and are developed in collaboration with anthropologists, historians, philosophers, engineers,artists and designers.

His work has been shown at major international exhibitions and festivals in over a dozen countries including the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Berliner Festspiele/Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Musée d’Art Contemporain (Montréal),National Art Museum of China (Beijing), Lille 3000 (Lille), Chronus Art Centre (Shanghai), Fondarie Darling (International Biennale of Electronics Arts – Montreal),HAU3 (Berlin), Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industriel (Gijon, Spain),Nuit Blanche (Paris), Vitra Design Museum (Germany), EXIT Festival (Maison des Arts, Creteil-Paris), STRP Biennale (Eindhoven), Ars Electronica (Linz), Pact Zollverein (Essen, Germany), CTM (Berlin), Villette Numerique (Paris),TodaysArt (the Hague), Todays Art.jp (Tokyo), Meta.Morf (Norway), MoisMulti(Quebec), Transmediale (Berlin), Place des Arts (Montréal), Elektra(Montréal),the Banff Center (Banff), Dance Theater Workshop (New York), V2(Rotterdam), SIGGRAPH 2001 (New Orleans), Mediaterra (Athens) and the Exploratorium (SanFrancisco), among others.

Salter is a regular presenter at national and international conferences, has given over 100 invited talks at universities and festivals worldwide and has sat on many juries including the Prix Ars Electronica among others. In addition to his artistic work, he is the author of the seminal book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010) and Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (MIT Press, 2015).