Erin Morton
ERIN MORTON (visual and material culture studies in Canada and Indigenous North America) earned her Ph.D. from Queen’s University at Kingston.
Research and Teaching:
My research and teaching explore visual and material cultural production in and around modern and contemporary North America, paying particular attention to the Atlantic Canadian context. Broadly speaking, my work examines the intersections of objects of art and culture with the reproduction of socio-economic hierarchies, focusing especially on issues of gender, Indigeneity, racialization, and locality. The classes I teach often use the lenses of public history, museum studies, tourism, and cultural studies to address these issues, among them HIST-3736 Visual and Material Culture in Canada; HIST-4705 Art, Tourism, and Modernity; HIST-5725 The Art of Public History; HIST-5702 Folk-Mass-Popular; and HIST-6725 Canada and the Making of Culture. As such, these classes help me to pose questions about whose knowledge counts in the field of cultural production.
I am currently completing two books with McGill-Queen’s University Press. The first is a single-authored study, entitled The Art of Public History: Exhibiting Folk Art in Nova Scotia, which examines the multiple and competing ways in which localized public history initiatives, from museum exhibitions to popular biographies, defined folk art in the province at the end of the twentieth century. This book critically assesses folk art’s complimentary and competing public definitions in Nova Scotia, as the purposeful work of untrained artists for their own everyday use; as the cultural work of labouring people, which required art-world recognition in order to have value outside of its context of production; and as a distinctively regional art form that cultural institutions employed towards economic development. In doing so, this project sheds light on the complexities of people’s interactions with culture at the end of the twentieth century within, against, and between the formal infrastructures of the state, transnational corporate capital, and the organizational frameworks of civil society – those everyday cultural practices within social relations that produce and reproduce power and value.
The second book is a collection of essays co-edited with Lynda Jessup (Queen’s University) and Kirsty Robertson (University of Western Ontario), entitled Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada. This volume comes out of a SSHRC-funded workshop (Lynda Jessup, PI) of the same title and looks at implications arising from study of the visual today, taking as its point of departure the national/ist rubric imposed on such study by the formation of the larger discipline of art history in the nineteenth century. And so, what happens now, we are asking, as these formations become more apparent as such – less a seemingly “natural” way of organizing knowledge, of knowledge production, of thinking? Is “Canada” (or, for that matter, any other nation) still relevant as a category of inquiry or as a site for knowledge production, now that we face neo-liberalism, corporate globalization, and what has been described as a “post-national” landscape?
My most recent project is a SSHRC-funded study called “Bordering the Vernacular: Canada, Folk Art, and the ‘New’ North America.” This book-length project analyzes the ways in which federal museums in Canada used folk art exhibitions to negotiate the transition from national culture industries to global cultural markets at the turn of the twenty-first century. It does so by examining the North American Free Trade Agreement’s definition and regulation of vernacular cultural forms, in relation to the circulation of folk art between the three NAFTA states – Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. This research thereby considers neoliberal globalization’s effects on the policies of state, civil, and corporate cultural institutions that collect and exhibit folk art and on the communities in which folk art is conventionally thought to be produced.
As part of an ongoing collaboration with Taryn Sirove, I have also published widely on the Igloolik-based film and video collectives Igloolik Isuma Productions and Arnait Video Productions, most recently in the journal Post Script (Texas A&M-Georgia Institute of Technology) and the edited collection Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, forthcoming).
Selected Publications:
“‘Eight Days Before the Election’: Politicians, Culture Industries, and Folk Art in Nova Scotia,” in The Sixties in Canada: A Turbulent and Creative Decade, edited by M. Athena Palaeologu, 340-362. New York and Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2010.
With Taryn Sirove, “Structuring Knowledges: Caching Inuit Architecture through Igloolik Isuma Productions,” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 29, no. 1 (2010): 58-69.
With the Cache Collective, “cache: Provisions and Productions in Contemporary Igloolik Video,” in Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Practices and Politics, edited by Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, 74-88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
“In Pursuit of the Textbook Authentic: Erin Morton in Conversation with Terrance Houle,” Fuse 31, no. 1 (2008): 26-34.
“Thinking the Next Step: “Norval Morrisseau—Shaman Artist,” Fuse 29, no. 4 (2006): 38-41.
With the Cache Collective, “Perservering Realpolitik: A Conversation with Marie-Hélène Cousineau of Arnait Video Productions,” Fuse 28, no. 3 (2005): 15-19.
With Taryn Sirove, “On Collectivity: Caching Igloolik Video in the South,” in Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, edited by Susan Knabe and Wendy Pearson. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, forthcoming.
Contact Information:
Office: Carleton 231
Phone: (506)458-7419
