Re/turning the gaze: unsettling settler logics through multimedia storytelling

Abstract

Drawing on three decolonizing feminist arts-based research projects, we discuss possibilities for making multimedia stories that counter, respond to, and re/turn the heteropatriarchal settler colonial gaze. All three projects use a participatory videomaking method that involves misrepresented communities producing short films to advance social justice. We explore how the creation of narrative videos by Indigenous researchers, educators, students, and artists, and allies offer multiple avenues for returning the interconnected gaze of heteropatriarchy and colonialism, creating a feminist decolonizing aesthetic-an embedded and embodied aesthetic-that consciously weaves together process and form. We consider moments of re/turning, refusing, and reckoning with the colonizing masculinist gaze through analyzing the videos organized along three themes: the catalyzing effects of educational experiences, both destructive and empowering; the complex decolonizing affects of love; and the pervasive and debilitating effects of everyday gendered racism in/beyond school. We offer reflective analysis by drawing on feminist decolonializing theories on the power in looking and in interrogating heteropatriarchal colonial discourse. Each of the stories that we analyze re/turns the interconnected gaze of heteropatriarchy/colonialism in ways that extend responsibility for colonialism, for misogyny, for racism, for gender/sexual normativity, to the viewers of these films-to all of us.

Story‐Making as Methodology: Disrupting Dominant Stories through Multimedia Storytelling

“…, , ); racialized and nonracialized youth with mental health issues, police, and mental health workers on system responses to youth with mental health issues (Ferrari, Rice, and McKenzie ); Indigenous and non‐Indigenous students, teachers, and parents on what is needed to decolonize public schools (Rice et al. ); with academics on the values underpinning, and their relationship to, their research programs (Rice et al. ); with Inuit professional artists and youth on building Inuit cultural voice; with aging activists on disability and aging arts movements; with queer women on speaking back to obesity epidemic and eating disorder discourses that erase or problematize queer bodies (Lind et al.…”

Elements of a counter‐exhibition: Excavating and countering a Canadian history and legacy of eugenics

“…The exhibition development process was initially informed by a close reading of the literature on the power of story as a research methodology, a form of knowledge transfer, and a site to enact change (Douglas et al 2019; Rice & Mündel, 2018, 2019; Rice, 2020; Rice et al, 2015, 2017, 2020; Rice, Chandler, Liddiard, et al 2018; Rinaldi et al, 2016; Viscardis et al, 2019). But as Cherokee scholar and writer King (2003) reminds us: “Stories are wondrous things.…”

“…We used artistic and interpretive ways of communicating the central ideas of the exhibition through multiple sensory channels. And Potawatomi‐Lenape scholar Susan Dion's story‐based research program inspired an engagement with decolonizing access to storytelling (Dion & Salamanca, 2018; Rice, Dion, Fowlie, et al, 2020; Rice, Dion, Mündel, et al, 2020). With these sources, and the life experiences and knowledge of the curators, as guides, we approached the exhibition with the following four orientations toward creative, accessible story and counter‐story.…”

Revisiting Stories and Voices of the Rogue River War (1853–1856): A Digital Constellatory Autoethnographic Mode of Indigenous Archaeology

“…My article intervenes and adds a focus on digitality while foregrounding Indigenous perspectives/truths. Rice et al (2020) begin to take up digital truth telling in their work on re/turning the heteropatriarchal settler gaze through Indigenous feminist multimedia storytelling, a different, yet important, context. However, my article is unique because the intersection of communication and archaeology is rarely discussed in interdisciplinary and disciplinary communication and media journals.…”