Danielle Taschereau Mamers

I study how images and documents mediate the lives, lands, and relations they depict. To theorize the visual politics of documents, I use a pair of analytical frames: art and media theory. As situated reflections on political worlds, artworks demonstrate the logics and effects of bureaucratic rationalities that circulate through documents, images, and archives. Through media theory, I trace the contours of colonial visibilities, examining the circuits of authority that imbue the recording, circulation, and archiving of paperwork with political power. Bringing art and media theory together, my research identifies critical and creative strategies for destabilizing authority structures reproduced by documents, images, and their archives.

I’ve explored these questions across three major projects, including a book-length study of Indigenous artists' engagements with settler documentation of Indian status in Canada, a manifesto that argues for art as a method of political theorizing, and an archival and field-based analysis of the decolonial potential of bison reintroduction.

I am currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. I have held two previous postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto's Jackman Humanities Institute and the University of Pennsylvania's Wolf Humanities Center. I hold a PhD in Media Studies from Western University. My research has been published in Settler Colonial Studies, Humanimalia, the Journal of Narrative Politics, Public: Art | Culture | Ideas, and elsewhere.