2024-25 UTM-JHI Annual Seminar: Indigenous Science
When and Where
Description
Guest: Prof. Laurie Rousseau-Nepton, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics
This public session will feature a screening of the five-part National Film Board series North Star about Dr. Rousseau-Nepton, the first Indigenous woman in Canada to earn a PhD in astrophysics. We will invite Dr. Rousseau-Nepton for an interview (following the screening), led by two undergraduate co-applicants. This session will help us examine varied ways of knowing. Evan Moritz, a member of our core group and doctoral student from U of T’s Centre for Theatre, Drama and Performance whose research prominently involves Indigenous science (with fieldwork centred in Iqaluit [Nunavut]) will join this session as an additional interlocutor.
Lunch will be available from 12:30 p.m. onwards
About the Series
The recent pandemic has made it abundantly clear that scientific insights must be communicated clearly and effectively so that the public understands and ‘buys in’ by changing its behavioural practices collectively. Persuasive social theatre and suggestive performance techniques are crucial parts of scientific communication strategies — the sciences need the theatre! This need for ‘self-theatricalization’ will only grow in the future, as most key sciences in the 21st century will be ‘embodied sciences.’
On the other hand, there is (and continues to be) a rich and important history of playwrights putting science and scientists on stage, thereby creating interfaces and highly visible public discourses at the intersection of society, religion, politics, knowledge creation, and ethics.
In this series, we’ll examine some of the manifold modes in which sciences and theatre-and-performance art continue to interact. We’ll explore key areas of contact between science/technology and theatre/performance; which sciences and scientists currently attract theatrical interest; where and how scientific knowledge begins and ends — and who needs to know it; and how theatre and performance can best contribute to such re-conceptualized ‘scientific knowledge.’
