publications

Haunting as a Methodology: An Annotated Bibliography (2023)

I created this annotated bibliography while working as Research Assistant for Settler Colonial Place-Making in Alberta: Sexualized Violence, Extractivism, and Cowboy Culture.

A SSHRC-funded research project run by Drs. Kara Granzow and Amber Dean, the main goal of Settler Colonial Place-Making in Alberta was to establish and expose the connections between sexualized colonial violence, an extractivist economy, and the celebration of cowboy culture in Alberta, Canada. In order to do that, Drs. Granzow and Dean sought to engage haunting as a decolonial methodology. But what might engaging haunting as a methodology (decolonial or otherwise) actually mean?

This annotated bibliography set out to answer that question.

Left: “1978 - 765? E. Hastings Street, Hotel Astoria,” File F4 Vancouver heritage survey 1978 - photographs, Series S535 Heritage survey reports and photographs, City of Vancouver fonds, City of Vancouver Archives. Right: Astoria Hotel, fieldwork photograph (author’s photo), 17 October 2018, Vancouver, BC.

“Beyond Pain Narratives?: Representing Loss and Practicing Refusal at the Astoria Hotel” (Urban History Review, vol. 48, no. 2, 2021)

Across conversations in the academy and in public discourse (news, social media, etc.), communities such as the Downtown Eastside are routinely portrayed as being in pain—to the exclusion of stories about how these communities are also strong, hopeful, loving, innovative, and so on. This is a problem because it presents communities as though they are only, simply, and inherently broken—which they are not. And yet, we still need to find ways to talk about and reckon with pain, particularly of communities whose pain has long been oversimplified and/or misunderstood. This paper sets out to start a conversation about how we might do so.