CDHI Lightning Lunch: Indigenous Data Practices: How to Centre Life?

Please join us for this exciting lightning lunch event in our new Indigenous Digital Praxis initiative!

Event Format

Speaker #1: Maria Hupfield, “Indigenous Living Archive, Indigenous Creation Studio, UTM.”  

Speaker #2: M Murphy, “Towards Indigenous Environmental Data Justice” 

Respondent: Jennifer Wemigwans respondent to presentations and discussion facilitator  

This event will be held virtually. Please register on Zoom.

Our Speakers Bios

Maria Hupfield, English & Drama and Visual Studies (UTM)  

Maria Hupfield (b.1975) she/her, is a Toronto based artist and transdisciplinary maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture. Hupfield is the Assistant Professor, Indigenous Digital Arts and Performance, and the Canadian Research Chair, Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts, with a cross appointment in Visual Studies / English and Drama, with a grad appointment in the Master of Visual Studies, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto. She is the inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residency with the City of Toronto, Ravines, and a Mellon Fellow, Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University, USA, 2022. A recipient of the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada (2018) she has exhibited extensively including recent projects at: Art Gallery of Ontario; National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; and in New York at CARA (Center for Art Research and Alliance), Abrons Art Center, the New York Museum of Art and Design; amongst others. Hupfield is Martin clan and an urban off-rez member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. 

M Murphy, History (FAS)  

Dr. M Murphy is a professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. They are a technoscience studies scholar whose research concerns anticolonial approaches to environmental justice; reproductive justice; Indigenous science and technology studies; infrastructures and data studies; race and science; and finance and economic practices. Murphy’s current research focuses on the relationships between pollution, colonialism, and technoscience on the lower Great Lakes. Murphy is a tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science & Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice, as well as Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit, which hosts an Indigenous Environmental Data Justice lab and is home for social justice and anti-colonial approaches to Science and Technology Studies. They are Red River Métis from Winnipeg.  

Jennifer Wemigwans, OISE  

Dr. Jennifer Wemigwans is the director of Indigenous Digital Practice from May 2023–April 2024. Dr. Wemigwans, is from Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. She is an Assistant Professor in the Adult Education and Community Development Program at OISE, is a new media producer, writer and scholar specializing in the convergence between education, Indigenous knowledge and new media technologies. Her book A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online (2018) explores the prospects of Indigenous Knowledge education and digital projects in a networked world. Dr. Wemigwans practices cultural ethics of care and Indigenous protocols of creation in her work, which signify Digital Bundles as new spaces for sharing Indigenous Knowledge and challenge non-Indigenous audiences to step outside of their codified systems and learn a new way of being and perceiving the world.