The “Locating Media Archives” course I co-taught through the A/CA Summer Institute has come to an end last week. Video recordings of two guest panels with Karen Knights, Richard Fung, Ian Iqbal Rashid, Darien Taylor, and Alison Duke will be available soon. I also finished up regular Spring 2021 teaching at Concordia and Carleton, and it looks like I will be teaching the same class at Carleton again next year—perhaps even in person!
The COVID-19, Social Safety Nets, and Sex Work in the Capital 2021 Survey that was created in collaboration with folks at POWER is now live and we are collecting responses through the end of June 2021. I’ll be part of a small team analyzing the data later this summer with the intention of producing a bilingual report come the fall. To our knowledge this is the first scholarly research into the economic impact of COVID-19 on sex workers, as well as their ability to access federal income replacement programs for workers who lost their income due to the pandemic, in Canada.
John Greyson, Sarah Flicker, and I have received three years of SSHRC funding for our project, Viral Interventions: Artists, Communities and AIDS Activist Media. We’ll be hosting three one-year residencies for cohorts of five artists all making new video work about HIV/AIDS in the present, cellphilm workshops, and launching an I-doc project. The project has just begun this month, but we’ll be launching a website later this year with lots of exciting content and details about all the artists involved and forthcoming screenings!
Lastly, I’m set to finish my book manuscript on Working Girls for the Queer Film Classics book series on McGill-Queen’s Press by the end of summer. I did a fantastic interview with director Lizzie Borden last March in preparation for writing and it turns out the film will be fully restored and re-released by the Criterion Collection this summer as well!