Articles by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
Canadian Journal of Communication, 2021
Since 1919, the Hudson's Bay Company has sponsored films to document and advertise its trading op... more Since 1919, the Hudson's Bay Company has sponsored films to document and advertise its trading operations. Films such as Hudson's Bay Company Centenary Celebrations (1919), The Heritage of Adventure (1920), and Leipzig Exhibition footage (1930) offered views of North American landscapes and Hudson's Bay Company trading posts and department stores alongside ethnographic footage of Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on archival research conducted at the Hudson's Bay Company Archives and textual film analysis of these "fur films," this article theorizes their production and circulation within settler visual culture. Tracing the films' paths from the Eastern Arctic to Montréal, and from London, England, to Leipzig, Germany, this article demonstrates how these moving pictures participate in the entanglement of settler and infrastructural projects that characterize early twentieth-century Canada.
Published in a special issue of CJC on "Materials and Media of Infrastructure," edited by Aleksandra Kaminska and Rafico Ruiz
Canadian Journal of Film Studies / Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques, 2019
Geology offers a means to study, and make sense of, the earth’s physical processes, structure, an... more Geology offers a means to study, and make sense of, the earth’s physical processes, structure, and evolution through planetary time. For states and industry, geology is also a key tool for identifying subsurface oil, gas, and mineral reserves. This article examines how popular science and education films about earth science and resource extraction produced by the National Film Board of Canada between 1950 and 1970 contain a colonial impulse—reflecting settler logics of Indigenous displacement and white possession. During this period of intensified corporate and government interests in the Northwest Territories (including contemporary Nunavut) and Yukon, science films depicted Arctic and sub-Arctic landscapes as a new frontier for scientific research, southern exploration, and mining developments. By rendering Northern landscapes and subsurfaces into knowable sites for industrial and national development, Know Your Resources (1950), The Face of the High Arctic (1958), Riches of the Earth (Revised) (1966), The North Has Changed (1967), and Search into White Space (1970) re-inscribe these spaces within settler imaginaries, erasing First Nations and Inuit presence on the land or advocating for their assimilation into southern Canadian society.
Canadian Journal of Communication, 2018
Canadian nontheatrical cinema has historically positioned natural resource extraction as intrinsi... more Canadian nontheatrical cinema has historically positioned natural resource extraction as intrinsic to the country's economic development and national identity. During the 1940s and 1950s in particular with the discovery of Alberta's vast oil reserves, industrial and documentary films about oil extraction associated petroleum with nation-building and modernization. This article examines The Story of Oil (1946, National Film Board of Canada), A Mile Below the Wheat (1949, Imperial Oil), and Underground East (1953, Imperial Oil) as examples of such “petro-films” following the oil booms in Turner Valley and Leduc, Alberta.
Part of Special Issue "Communicating Power: Energy, Canada, and the Field(s) of Communication"
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2018
This article examines the politicization of natural resources like water and land, and broader en... more This article examines the politicization of natural resources like water and land, and broader entanglements of environments and politics, in Egyptian cinematic imaginaries. Youssef Chahine’s narrative film al-Ard (The Land, 1969) addresses the politicization of agricultural land during the presidency of Gamal Abdul Nasser (1954-1970) and the British colonial occupation of Egypt (1882-1956). Because histories of colonialism and nationalism in the Arab world are rooted in the economic and political exploitation of material resources (including land, water, and people), I turn to ecocriticism as a method of critical reading to analyze the film’s depictions of these configurations of political power and resource management. I argue that al-Ard roots its depictions of the Egyptian peasantry’s resistance in environmental concerns, namely restrictions to resource access and peasants’ affective relationships to land. By tracing these imbrications, I relocate environmental concerns within scholarship on political resistance in Nasser-era cinema.
Book Chapters by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
Cold Water Oil: Imagining Offshore Petroleum Cultures
Forthcoming in Cold Water Oil: Imagining Offshore Petroleum Cultures, edited by Fiona Polack and ... more Forthcoming in Cold Water Oil: Imagining Offshore Petroleum Cultures, edited by Fiona Polack and Danine Farquharson (Routledge)
This chapter examines historical associations between offshore oil and future imaginaries through a collection of sponsored films produced by Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Extension Service and the National Film Board of Canada during the 1970s and 1980s. Jekanowski analyses how these media forms help produce the then nascent oil fields in the Grand Banks as an offshore, an extractive zone and new form of nature. She also examines how the gendered and racialized dynamics of the futures the films imagine frame social relations among people, but also in conjunction with oceans, energy, and more-than-human life. From these specific analyses, the chapter moves beyond the local and poses the wider cold water oil-related question: “what future are we planning for?”
Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures, 2021
Chapter in "Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures," edited by Masha Salazkin... more Chapter in "Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures," edited by Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez (Indiana University Press, 2021), 314-332.
Journal Issues by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
The archive, as a concept and a physical repository of historical traces, holds a central place w... more The archive, as a concept and a physical repository of historical traces, holds a central place within contemporary film and media studies. The archive is not only a location for historical research; it also functions as a source of images and materials to be mined by filmmakers and media artists. After the archival turn in Anglo-American film and cultural studies scholarship in the 1990s, however, film and media scholars increasingly approach the archive as an object of critical study in its own right. As such, the archive becomes as much a site of hermeneutical struggle, privileged access, contested histories, and loss as it is a site of creative inspiration and cultural preservation.
This journal issue is dedicated to exploring both the sites of moving image archival preservation and display (such as art galleries, institutional archives, private collections, and the World Wide Web), and the socio-political, historical, and creative circulatory networks that connect them. Guest edited by Sophie Cook, Rachel Webb Jekanowski and Papagena Robbins, this issue seeks to inquire into the myriad ways in which archive studies have transitioned away from the traditional library stacks and institutional repositories, in favor of exploring different technologies and spaces of material preservation and knowledge exchange.
Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, 2016
Introduction to special issue on "Humorous Disruptions"
Considering the rise of feminist humou... more Introduction to special issue on "Humorous Disruptions"
Considering the rise of feminist humour studies and the contemporary popularity of comedic feminist web series which have crossed over to television—such as that of Issa Rae, whose current HBO show Insecure (2016 -) follows in the wake of her popular web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011-2013), as well as Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s Broad City (2009-2011) (2014 -) —this specially themed issue enters into an important conversation about the historical humorous interventions of women and feminists in film and visual media, and contextualizes more recent projects in contemporary cultural debates. Following Jo Anna Isaak’s declaration that women’s laughter can indeed be revolutionary (Isaak 1996), the field of feminist humour studies has defended humour’s status as an often overlooked form of feminist intervention, with all of its complex manifestations through irony, parody, play, and the carnivalesque. We would extend this one step further, to argue for feminist humour’s potential as a disruptive technology, transforming the ways in which scholars and practitioners communicate feminist ideas and disrupt cultural economies of humour. Such scholarship draws attention to the ways in which understandings of the term “feminist” can be complicated and change over time, between bodies of theory, and through different forms of media and comedy. Thus, for film and moving image studies, this question of the “usefulness” or “timeliness” of feminist humour provides avenues for considering how the determination of who and what can be funny, as well as the construction of alternate networks for the development and circulation of creative content, are inherently political.
Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 2020
This special issue of Imaginations will concentrate on media engaging with petroleum and its atte... more This special issue of Imaginations will concentrate on media engaging with petroleum and its attendant socio-political and economic structures. Drawing on technology and media studies, energy humanities scholarship, and a range of methods in visual and cultural studies, contributions will theorize contemporary and historical uses of media to resist and facilitate petroleum infrastructures. Our issue seeks to mobilize critiques of corporate petro-media with decolonial methods from a range of disciplines, focusing on the interlacing of oil, settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and media production. We are soliciting peer-reviewed essays from scholars and practitioners, artist interviews and contributions, and essays for a review section. We are particularly invested in featuring research-creation and media-rich scholarship.
Submission deadline: December 10th, 2020
Imaginations : Revue d'études interculturelles de l'image, 2020
Ce numéro spécial d'Imaginations sera consacré aux média s'intéressant au pétrole ainsi qu'aux st... more Ce numéro spécial d'Imaginations sera consacré aux média s'intéressant au pétrole ainsi qu'aux structures socio-politiques et économiques qui l'entourent. S'inspirant des études sur la technologie et les médias, sur les sciences humaines consacrées à l'énergie, ainsi que sur un éventail de méthodes d'approche des études visuelles et culturelles, les contribuants examineront de façon théorique l'emploi historique et contemporain des médias pour combattre ou aider les infrastructures pétrolières. Mettant à profit le long engagement d'Imaginations dans les études sur les pétrocultures, dont le numéro spécial de 2012 « Sighting Oil » (édité par Sheena Wilson et Andrew Pendakis), ce numéro rassemblera les critiques des média de l'industrie pétrolière par les méthodes décoloniales issues d'un éventail de disciplines, se concentrant sur l'interdépendance entre le pétrole, le colonialisme des immigrants, la résurgence autochtone et la production médiatique. Ce numéro rassemblera des articles académiques revus de chercheurs et de praticiens, des interviews et des contributions d'artistes (incluant des échantillons d'oeuvres multimédiatiques accompagnés de déclarations d'artistes), ainsi qu'une section de revues critiques (comprenant un essai comparatif de revue de livre, des revues culturelles et des réactions à des expositions digitales à l'âge du COVID-19, etc.). Nous nous intéressons particulièrement à des articles qui reflètent la recherche-création ainsi que l'étude des média. Nous invitons des soumissions qui présentent différents aspects de production médiatique par des artistes, des activistes, autochtones et immigrants, ainsi que par des représentants des compagnies pétrolières, afin d'examiner la complexité du système qui englobe la production culturelle, le colonialisme de peuplement et l'extraction des combustibles fossiles. Étant donnée notre situation géographique sur des territoires autochtones occupés où nous travaillons en tant que chercheurs et enseignants, nous suggérons que les développements énergétiques sont déjà une partie intégrante de l'histoire du colonialisme et de l'implantation des blancs en Amérique du nord. Dans une perspective critique, nous invitons les articles qui incluent et présentent les média visuels dans leurs analyses, incluant des vidéos originales, des photographies, des instantanés de film et des photos des installations artistiques des auteurs.
Papers (Non Peer-Reviewed) by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
Them Days, 2019
In July 1934, Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and his wife Kathl... more In July 1934, Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and his wife Kathleen, set sail for the eastern Canadian Arctic aboard the Nascopie. Departing from the port of Montreal amidst much fanfare, the couple would accompany the ship on its annual supply run to HBC trading posts in northern Quebec, Labrador, modern-day Nunavut, and Hudson Bay. As the Nascopie steamed down the St. Lawrence River, cameramen quickly recorded the scene—the ship, the procession of bagpipers, the cheering crowds. This footage of the Governor’s official tour would be used by the Hudson’s Bay Company in two 16mm films later that year: Trading into Hudson’s Bay and Governor’s Trip to Eastern Canadian Arctic.
Sir Ashley Cooper was far from the first Company representative to make this journey northward, however. Photographers, cinematographers, tourists, and other Company officers became frequent guests on the Nascopie. Fifteen years prior, for instance, American cinematographers Harold M. Wyckoff and Bill Derr of The Educational Films Corporation started out on a similar route, hired by the HBC to on what would become known as the “Moving Picture Exhibition.” Hired to shoot a film to commemorate the HBC’s 250th anniversary, Wyckoff and Derr would produce about 18 hours of footage, of landscapes, fauna, newly-erected HBC department stores, and Indigenous-settler relations across the country. From this footage, Educational Films cut what would become one of the world’s earliest feature-length documentaries: The Romance of the Far Fur Country (1920).
As visual records of Company operations across vast stretches of Canada, these films also include rare footage of Labrador and Inuit, Innu, and Naskapi communities residing in the East Arctic.
[Excerpt]
The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, 2017
Faced with the threat of a “post-truth” world and a widening chasm of exchange between climate ch... more Faced with the threat of a “post-truth” world and a widening chasm of exchange between climate change deniers and environmentalists, I argue that future-orientated literary and media speculative fictions—which I term “speculative futures”—offer a means of building lines of communication across social and political divisions. This thought piece on “The Environmental Humanities in a Post-Truth World” mediates upon the potentiality of speculative futures as theory, social bridge-building, and pedagogical tool. Speculative fictions (especially those that address environmental justice, and anti-colonial and feminist politics) use storytelling and future imaginaries to challenge political falsehoods and imagine more ecological, de-colonized futures.
Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, Oct 2013
The use of found footage in cinema inescapably draws attention to the images’ recycled status and... more The use of found footage in cinema inescapably draws attention to the images’ recycled status and to the filmmaking process. Despite the various aesthetic and ideological approaches directors adopt towards found footage in their films, the imageness and archival nature of the found footage fragment are consistently present. In conventional documentary, as well as in a host of fiction films, found footage is used to signify the historical past through the archival image’s indexical authority. Similarly, experimental essayist filmmakers often endorse cinema’s indexical nature within their historiographic discourse. In this paper, I will address the relationship between the found footage artifact and the archive through an analysis two experimental documentaries: Edgardo Cozarinsky’s One Man’s War (1982) and Andrei Ujica’s The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010). In One Man’s War, Cozarinsky selects, manipulates, and juxtaposes archival images to reconstruct (and deconstruct) the historical traumas in Nazi-occupied
France during World War II, as well as the act of filmmaking itself. Drawing on previous archival studies, notably Paula Amad’s exploration of the counter-archival properties of film, I will discuss how Cozarinsky, through his manipulation of found footage images, challenges the indexical authority of the cinematic image and therefore the authority of the archive. In contrast, Ujica reasserts the concept of historical truth beneath the traumatic spectacle of the image by capitalizing on the counter-archival properties of film.
Playlist Society, 2016
Part 1 of a 3-part series about "Oil and Genre" in popular film and television.
Translated into F... more Part 1 of a 3-part series about "Oil and Genre" in popular film and television.
Translated into French by Isabelle Chelley with English original text below.
Pétrole et cinéma de genre : Politique et avenir du pétrole dans les séries télévisées et le cinéma norvégiens contemporains
Première partie d'une série de trois articles qui s'attardent sur la place et la représentation du pétrole, de son industrie et de ses implications dans le cinéma et les séries. Traduits avec grâce et précision par Isabelle Chelley.
Playlist Society, 2016
Part 2 of a 3-part series about "Oil and Genre" in popular film and television.
Translated into F... more Part 2 of a 3-part series about "Oil and Genre" in popular film and television.
Translated into French by Isabelle Chelley with English original text below.
Pétrole et cinéma de genre : Hollywood, catastrophes et Deepwater Horizon
Deuxième partie d'une série de trois articles qui s'attardent sur la place et la représentation du pétrole, de son industrie et de ses implications dans le cinéma et les séries. Traduits avec grâce et précision par Isabelle Chelley.
Playlist Society, 2016
Part 3 of a 3-part series about "Oil and Genre" in popular film and television.
Translated into F... more Part 3 of a 3-part series about "Oil and Genre" in popular film and television.
Translated into French by Isabelle Chelley with English original text below.
Pétrole et cinéma de genre : l'odyssée du financement des films ou, qui sponsorise la culture cinématographique ?
Troisième et dernière partie d'une série d'articles qui s'attardent sur la place et la représentation du pétrole, de son industrie et de ses implications dans le cinéma et les séries. Traduits avec grâce et précision par Isabelle Chelley.
Teaching Documents by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
Classroom Ecologies | Correspondences: A forum for the environment, 2021
In Summer 2021, three researchers co-taught a remote course on "North American Petrocultures" at ... more In Summer 2021, three researchers co-taught a remote course on "North American Petrocultures" at TU Dresden (Technische Universität Dresden) in Germany. Brent Ryan Bellamy (Trent University, Ontario), Moritz Ingwersen (TU Dresden), and Rachel Webb Jekanowski (Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador) present an introduction to and discussion of their collaborative experience in teaching an environmental humanities course.
The twentieth century has been called the American century and the American century was built on ... more The twentieth century has been called the American century and the American century was built on oil. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, we are confronted with the ecological repercussions of a modernity that was based on carbon energy and it has become imperative to envision a future beyond oil and fossil fuels. With a focus on North American literature (U.S., Canada, and Indigenous Nations), this course will introduce students to the cultural traces of petromodernity. More often than not, oil hides in plain sight. From road movies to plastic bags, oil products are ubiquitous in North American consumer culture. Yet, oil usually only enters public consciousness when it stops flowing or when it spills. Oil may be understood as the life blood of capitalist industry, the lubricant of the American way of life, and the fuel of ongoing settler-colonial land policies in Canada and the United States. It has also produced some of the most iconic and painful images of ecological devastation, imperialism, and environmental injustice. Petrocultures produce their own aesthetics-from burning oil fields, to gleaming chrome fenders, landscapes of extraction, and Indigenous pipeline protests. Against the backdrop of the global climate emergency and the dire need to imagine alternative energy futures, this course enables students to reflect on the impact of oil on their own life and to develop an awareness of how to look for the "energy unconscious" in art, culture, and politics. With an emphasis on works of literary fiction, we will engage with a wide variety of cultural texts, from science fiction, to graphic narratives, nonfiction film, and photography. Key theoretical readings will come from the emerging fields of the Energy Humanities and highlight themes such as environmental justice, petromodernity, petro-horror, slow violence, the post-apocalypse, Indigenous activism, and ecotopia. This course will take place online. Attendance at synchronous weekly discussion sessions is optional but recommended. All mandatory credits can be fulfilled asynchronously. This is a reading-intensive seminar and students will be required to submit regular reading responses. This course will be co-facilitated with Dr. Rachel Webb Jekanowski and Dr. Brent Ryan Bellamy, two international experts in the field of petrocultures from Canada.
The Shore Line, 2017
In the form of an interactive storybook, The Shore Line (written, produced, and directed by Eliza... more In the form of an interactive storybook, The Shore Line (written, produced, and directed by Elizabeth Miller) offers a dynamic learning environment with videos, visualizations and soundscapes for educators across a range of disciplines and ages. As educators we have a role to play in helping students understand how individuals, societies and the environment are interconnected – locally, nationally and globally. By offering students models of local resilience, we can inspire them to get involved and contribute to a more sustainable future.
Through videos, visualizations and soundscapes, students can see how communities and the environment are inter-connected, and how they might contribute to a more just and sustainable future. This interactive storybook is designed for high-school to university-level students.
Modes of Learning: solution based learning, media literacy and production, and comparative learning.
Collaborative curriculum development for The Shore Line, with study guides authored by:
Elizabeth Miller, Simone Lucas, MJ Thompson, Michele Luchs, Adriana de Oliveira, Ines Lopez, Katherine Garvin, Eva Brownstein, Shirley Roburn, Trish Audette Longo, and Rachel Webb Jekanowski.
Conference Papers by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
As early as the 1940s, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) produced industrial, scientific, a... more As early as the 1940s, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) produced industrial, scientific, and educational films about natural resource management, mining, and exploratory drilling. Many of these films were co-sponsored by government ministries with an interest in promoting the profitable development of Canada's natural resources. In this talk, I focus on a collection of popular science films produced by the NFB between the 1950s and the 1970s about geology, deep time, and the mining industry. Films like Know Your Resources (dir. David A. Smith, 1950), The Face of the High Arctic (dir. Dalton Muir, 1958), Riches of the Earth (Revised) (dir. Colin Low, 1966), and The North Has Changed (director uncredited, produced by David Bairstow, 1967) focused on the social dimensions of mining, alongside scientific narratives about Canada's physical geography and geological history. They were also created with different contexts and audiences in mind, from high school classrooms to Canada's centennial celebration in 1967. Turning to discourse analysis and archival research, I show how these films, as cultural responses to industrial development, express ideas of sustainability and extraction as economic and ecological practices. For contemporary viewers, these films also offer fertile grounds for reexamining the ways that science have been used to frame changing social attitudes towards environmental conservation and consultation with communities facing mining development.
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Articles by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
Published in a special issue of CJC on "Materials and Media of Infrastructure," edited by Aleksandra Kaminska and Rafico Ruiz
Part of Special Issue "Communicating Power: Energy, Canada, and the Field(s) of Communication"
Book Chapters by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
This chapter examines historical associations between offshore oil and future imaginaries through a collection of sponsored films produced by Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Extension Service and the National Film Board of Canada during the 1970s and 1980s. Jekanowski analyses how these media forms help produce the then nascent oil fields in the Grand Banks as an offshore, an extractive zone and new form of nature. She also examines how the gendered and racialized dynamics of the futures the films imagine frame social relations among people, but also in conjunction with oceans, energy, and more-than-human life. From these specific analyses, the chapter moves beyond the local and poses the wider cold water oil-related question: “what future are we planning for?”
Journal Issues by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
This journal issue is dedicated to exploring both the sites of moving image archival preservation and display (such as art galleries, institutional archives, private collections, and the World Wide Web), and the socio-political, historical, and creative circulatory networks that connect them. Guest edited by Sophie Cook, Rachel Webb Jekanowski and Papagena Robbins, this issue seeks to inquire into the myriad ways in which archive studies have transitioned away from the traditional library stacks and institutional repositories, in favor of exploring different technologies and spaces of material preservation and knowledge exchange.
Considering the rise of feminist humour studies and the contemporary popularity of comedic feminist web series which have crossed over to television—such as that of Issa Rae, whose current HBO show Insecure (2016 -) follows in the wake of her popular web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011-2013), as well as Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s Broad City (2009-2011) (2014 -) —this specially themed issue enters into an important conversation about the historical humorous interventions of women and feminists in film and visual media, and contextualizes more recent projects in contemporary cultural debates. Following Jo Anna Isaak’s declaration that women’s laughter can indeed be revolutionary (Isaak 1996), the field of feminist humour studies has defended humour’s status as an often overlooked form of feminist intervention, with all of its complex manifestations through irony, parody, play, and the carnivalesque. We would extend this one step further, to argue for feminist humour’s potential as a disruptive technology, transforming the ways in which scholars and practitioners communicate feminist ideas and disrupt cultural economies of humour. Such scholarship draws attention to the ways in which understandings of the term “feminist” can be complicated and change over time, between bodies of theory, and through different forms of media and comedy. Thus, for film and moving image studies, this question of the “usefulness” or “timeliness” of feminist humour provides avenues for considering how the determination of who and what can be funny, as well as the construction of alternate networks for the development and circulation of creative content, are inherently political.
Submission deadline: December 10th, 2020
Papers (Non Peer-Reviewed) by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
Sir Ashley Cooper was far from the first Company representative to make this journey northward, however. Photographers, cinematographers, tourists, and other Company officers became frequent guests on the Nascopie. Fifteen years prior, for instance, American cinematographers Harold M. Wyckoff and Bill Derr of The Educational Films Corporation started out on a similar route, hired by the HBC to on what would become known as the “Moving Picture Exhibition.” Hired to shoot a film to commemorate the HBC’s 250th anniversary, Wyckoff and Derr would produce about 18 hours of footage, of landscapes, fauna, newly-erected HBC department stores, and Indigenous-settler relations across the country. From this footage, Educational Films cut what would become one of the world’s earliest feature-length documentaries: The Romance of the Far Fur Country (1920).
As visual records of Company operations across vast stretches of Canada, these films also include rare footage of Labrador and Inuit, Innu, and Naskapi communities residing in the East Arctic.
[Excerpt]
France during World War II, as well as the act of filmmaking itself. Drawing on previous archival studies, notably Paula Amad’s exploration of the counter-archival properties of film, I will discuss how Cozarinsky, through his manipulation of found footage images, challenges the indexical authority of the cinematic image and therefore the authority of the archive. In contrast, Ujica reasserts the concept of historical truth beneath the traumatic spectacle of the image by capitalizing on the counter-archival properties of film.
Translated into French by Isabelle Chelley with English original text below.
Pétrole et cinéma de genre : Politique et avenir du pétrole dans les séries télévisées et le cinéma norvégiens contemporains
Première partie d'une série de trois articles qui s'attardent sur la place et la représentation du pétrole, de son industrie et de ses implications dans le cinéma et les séries. Traduits avec grâce et précision par Isabelle Chelley.
Translated into French by Isabelle Chelley with English original text below.
Pétrole et cinéma de genre : Hollywood, catastrophes et Deepwater Horizon
Deuxième partie d'une série de trois articles qui s'attardent sur la place et la représentation du pétrole, de son industrie et de ses implications dans le cinéma et les séries. Traduits avec grâce et précision par Isabelle Chelley.
Translated into French by Isabelle Chelley with English original text below.
Pétrole et cinéma de genre : l'odyssée du financement des films ou, qui sponsorise la culture cinématographique ?
Troisième et dernière partie d'une série d'articles qui s'attardent sur la place et la représentation du pétrole, de son industrie et de ses implications dans le cinéma et les séries. Traduits avec grâce et précision par Isabelle Chelley.
Teaching Documents by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
Through videos, visualizations and soundscapes, students can see how communities and the environment are inter-connected, and how they might contribute to a more just and sustainable future. This interactive storybook is designed for high-school to university-level students.
Modes of Learning: solution based learning, media literacy and production, and comparative learning.
Collaborative curriculum development for The Shore Line, with study guides authored by:
Elizabeth Miller, Simone Lucas, MJ Thompson, Michele Luchs, Adriana de Oliveira, Ines Lopez, Katherine Garvin, Eva Brownstein, Shirley Roburn, Trish Audette Longo, and Rachel Webb Jekanowski.
Conference Papers by Rachel Webb Jekanowski
Published in a special issue of CJC on "Materials and Media of Infrastructure," edited by Aleksandra Kaminska and Rafico Ruiz
Part of Special Issue "Communicating Power: Energy, Canada, and the Field(s) of Communication"
This chapter examines historical associations between offshore oil and future imaginaries through a collection of sponsored films produced by Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Extension Service and the National Film Board of Canada during the 1970s and 1980s. Jekanowski analyses how these media forms help produce the then nascent oil fields in the Grand Banks as an offshore, an extractive zone and new form of nature. She also examines how the gendered and racialized dynamics of the futures the films imagine frame social relations among people, but also in conjunction with oceans, energy, and more-than-human life. From these specific analyses, the chapter moves beyond the local and poses the wider cold water oil-related question: “what future are we planning for?”
This journal issue is dedicated to exploring both the sites of moving image archival preservation and display (such as art galleries, institutional archives, private collections, and the World Wide Web), and the socio-political, historical, and creative circulatory networks that connect them. Guest edited by Sophie Cook, Rachel Webb Jekanowski and Papagena Robbins, this issue seeks to inquire into the myriad ways in which archive studies have transitioned away from the traditional library stacks and institutional repositories, in favor of exploring different technologies and spaces of material preservation and knowledge exchange.
Considering the rise of feminist humour studies and the contemporary popularity of comedic feminist web series which have crossed over to television—such as that of Issa Rae, whose current HBO show Insecure (2016 -) follows in the wake of her popular web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011-2013), as well as Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s Broad City (2009-2011) (2014 -) —this specially themed issue enters into an important conversation about the historical humorous interventions of women and feminists in film and visual media, and contextualizes more recent projects in contemporary cultural debates. Following Jo Anna Isaak’s declaration that women’s laughter can indeed be revolutionary (Isaak 1996), the field of feminist humour studies has defended humour’s status as an often overlooked form of feminist intervention, with all of its complex manifestations through irony, parody, play, and the carnivalesque. We would extend this one step further, to argue for feminist humour’s potential as a disruptive technology, transforming the ways in which scholars and practitioners communicate feminist ideas and disrupt cultural economies of humour. Such scholarship draws attention to the ways in which understandings of the term “feminist” can be complicated and change over time, between bodies of theory, and through different forms of media and comedy. Thus, for film and moving image studies, this question of the “usefulness” or “timeliness” of feminist humour provides avenues for considering how the determination of who and what can be funny, as well as the construction of alternate networks for the development and circulation of creative content, are inherently political.
Submission deadline: December 10th, 2020
Sir Ashley Cooper was far from the first Company representative to make this journey northward, however. Photographers, cinematographers, tourists, and other Company officers became frequent guests on the Nascopie. Fifteen years prior, for instance, American cinematographers Harold M. Wyckoff and Bill Derr of The Educational Films Corporation started out on a similar route, hired by the HBC to on what would become known as the “Moving Picture Exhibition.” Hired to shoot a film to commemorate the HBC’s 250th anniversary, Wyckoff and Derr would produce about 18 hours of footage, of landscapes, fauna, newly-erected HBC department stores, and Indigenous-settler relations across the country. From this footage, Educational Films cut what would become one of the world’s earliest feature-length documentaries: The Romance of the Far Fur Country (1920).
As visual records of Company operations across vast stretches of Canada, these films also include rare footage of Labrador and Inuit, Innu, and Naskapi communities residing in the East Arctic.
[Excerpt]
France during World War II, as well as the act of filmmaking itself. Drawing on previous archival studies, notably Paula Amad’s exploration of the counter-archival properties of film, I will discuss how Cozarinsky, through his manipulation of found footage images, challenges the indexical authority of the cinematic image and therefore the authority of the archive. In contrast, Ujica reasserts the concept of historical truth beneath the traumatic spectacle of the image by capitalizing on the counter-archival properties of film.
Translated into French by Isabelle Chelley with English original text below.
Pétrole et cinéma de genre : Politique et avenir du pétrole dans les séries télévisées et le cinéma norvégiens contemporains
Première partie d'une série de trois articles qui s'attardent sur la place et la représentation du pétrole, de son industrie et de ses implications dans le cinéma et les séries. Traduits avec grâce et précision par Isabelle Chelley.
Translated into French by Isabelle Chelley with English original text below.
Pétrole et cinéma de genre : Hollywood, catastrophes et Deepwater Horizon
Deuxième partie d'une série de trois articles qui s'attardent sur la place et la représentation du pétrole, de son industrie et de ses implications dans le cinéma et les séries. Traduits avec grâce et précision par Isabelle Chelley.
Translated into French by Isabelle Chelley with English original text below.
Pétrole et cinéma de genre : l'odyssée du financement des films ou, qui sponsorise la culture cinématographique ?
Troisième et dernière partie d'une série d'articles qui s'attardent sur la place et la représentation du pétrole, de son industrie et de ses implications dans le cinéma et les séries. Traduits avec grâce et précision par Isabelle Chelley.
Through videos, visualizations and soundscapes, students can see how communities and the environment are inter-connected, and how they might contribute to a more just and sustainable future. This interactive storybook is designed for high-school to university-level students.
Modes of Learning: solution based learning, media literacy and production, and comparative learning.
Collaborative curriculum development for The Shore Line, with study guides authored by:
Elizabeth Miller, Simone Lucas, MJ Thompson, Michele Luchs, Adriana de Oliveira, Ines Lopez, Katherine Garvin, Eva Brownstein, Shirley Roburn, Trish Audette Longo, and Rachel Webb Jekanowski.
Science Fiction Research Association (Virtual) Annual Conference 2021. Hosted by Seneca College. June 2021
Visible Evidence XXVII, hosted by Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Germany)
Abstract:
As early as the 1940s, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) produced industrial, scientific, and educational films about natural resource management, mining, and exploratory drilling. Many of these films were co-sponsored by government ministries with an interest in promoting the profitable development of Canada's natural resources. In this talk, I focus on a collection of popular science films produced by the NFB between the 1950s and the 1970s about geology, deep time, and the mining industry. Films like Know Your Resources (dir. David A. Smith, 1950), The Face of the High Arctic (dir. Dalton Muir, 1958), Riches of the Earth (Revised) (dir. Colin Low, 1966), and The North Has Changed (director uncredited, produced by David Bairstow, 1967) focused on the social dimensions of mining, alongside scientific narratives about Canada's physical geography and geological history. They were also created with different contexts and audiences in mind, from high school classrooms to Canada's centennial celebration in 1967. Turning to discourse analysis and archival research, I show how these films, as cultural responses to industrial development, express ideas of sustainability and extraction as economic and ecological practices. For contemporary viewers, these films also offer fertile grounds for reexamining the ways that science have been used to frame changing social attitudes towards environmental conservation and consultation with communities facing mining development.
Sponsored by the LU Research Chair in Environmental Humanities and the Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Mining and Exploration.
Biannual Conference of the University of Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC), 29-30 April 2019
Humanities Research Institute, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) 12th Biannual Conference “Rust and Resistance”
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada
UCLA, Los Angeles, United States