Kirsten Emiko McAllister, Simon Fraser University
Kirsten Emiko McAllister is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research areas include Memory Studies, Visual Studies, Asian Canadian Studies, Settler Colonialism and Migration Studies. Her research focuses on how im/migrant communities remember political violence and over the last decade she has explored their complicated intersections with settler and Indigenous memories. From her position as a third generation Japanese Canadian, she has conducted archival research, ethnographic studies, oral histories and photographic studies on Japanese Canadian internment camps. Her interest in erasure and silencing has led her to experiment with autoethnographic writing which she has incorporated into her scholarly publications and articles for art catalogues. Her publications include Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (2006) (co-edited with Annette Kuhn); Terrain of Memory: a Japanese Canadian Memorial Project (2010); a series of articles and chapters on a range of topics, including photographs of internment camps taken by Japanese Canadian internees, in journals like Visual Studies, Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue Canadienne de Sociologie, BC Studies, Space and Culture, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation’s series, Cultivating Canada, Communication, Culture and Critique, and the Canadian Journal of Communication. Her more recent work includes a study on contemporary Asian Canadian artists, transpacific memory, and histories of persecution. She is completing an edited volume with Mona Oikawa and Roy Miki on cultural politics after redress. With Yasmin Jiwani and Faiza Hirji she has contributed to discussions regarding #CommunicationSoWhite, including a forthcoming issue in the Canadian Journal of Communication, which criticizes the racism and colonialism of Communication Studies. Her recent projects on asylum seekers have been published in numerous collected volumes and journals. She is currently completing a manuscript on community-based art and asylum seekers for Palgrave Macmillan, which is entitled, “The Geography of Asylum SeeIkers: Art, Activist and the City of Glasgow”.