Show, Don’t Tell: Displaying Decolonial Practice Through Research-Creation

Abstract

This transdisciplinary, research-creational project critically interrogates how colonial logics are continually reproduced and reinforced through institutional sites of knowledge-making, particularly museums, art galleries, and universities. Framed through the theme of display, this dissertation proposes a different mode of knowledge production rooted in liberatory storytelling, embodiment, and Indigenous epistemologies. At the heart of the project is a collaborative, process-based engagement with Indigenous visual artist Melanie de la Morandiere (Henvey Inlet First Nation). Through storytelling and artistic experimentation, we created an interactive digital output that reflects the substance of our exchanges, affirms artistic and creative practices, as well as embraces Indigenous legal orders as vital epistemological frameworks. Drawing on Cultural Legal Studies (CLS), critical pedagogy, in addition to Indigenous legal theory and informed by a deeply reflexive and embodied autoethnographic practice, this work insists on thinking outside the glass box—both literally and metaphorically—as a gesture toward decolonizing how we understand law, knowledge, justice, and the possibilities of being otherwise.