Visiting scholar: Associate Professor Kirsten McAllister

Kirsten Emiko McAllister is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Her research areas include memory studies, visual studies and political violence. Using fieldwork, archival research, spatial analysis and interviews she has researched questions of memory and space in relation to Japanese Canadian internment camps and refugees seeking asylum in countries like Canada and the UK.

Her books include Terrain of Memory: A Japanese Canadian Memorial Project (UBC Press 2010) and a collection she co-edited with Annette Kuhn, Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (Berghahn Books 2006). She is currently finishing a manuscript on a SSHRC-funded project on asylum seekers and community-based art in the UK and is conducting research for another SSHRC-funded project on transpacific memory and Asian Canadian experimental visual artists. While visiting the university, Assoc. Professor McAllister ran the RUPC seminar 'From National to Transpacific Memoryscapes: The Experimental Art of Jin-me Yoon'. Taking Jin-me Yoon's artwork as a case study, Assoc. Professor McAllister examined how experimental Asian Canadian art can explore memories of displacement and persecution. In particular, she focused on the shift from national to transpacific circulation of memories that began to take place in the 1990s in Canada. During her visit, she also guest lectured for the Master's class, Cultural Policy and Power, and met with the Faculty of Arts' engagment team to discuss a partnership between Simon Fraser University and The University of Melbourne that would connect the two institution's Indigenous art collections.