Desirée de Jesús, assistant professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies, has been awarded funding for the digital media community-engaged project, From Archive to Imagination: Building Canada’s Future with Black Histories, through the Black Research Seed Fund.
This project partners with the arts and cultural organization the Black Arts Centre, along with Black memory workers, sound designers, filmmakers and youth, to co-create educational guides for use in community workshops in Ontario and British Columbia. These resources will focus on the radical imaginations of early Black settlers who envisioned lives in Canada while confronting racial violence and Indigenous displacement, and they will include digital media production exercises that encourage Black youth to reflect on their roles as stakeholders in the nation’s future. This initiative builds on research findings from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded Mapping Black Girl Geographies and Belonging in Canada community-based project, co-led by Professors Kisha McPherson (Toronto Metropolitan University) and Crystal Webster (University of British Columbia).
de Jesús is a video essayist and moving images curator. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of race, gender, aesthetics and technology in narrative film and media through traditional, creative/curatorial and maker methodologies. Her research interests include communications, children and youth, Black cultural and feminist studies, videographic criticism, community-based research and decolonial approaches to cinema and media.