Four Royal Roads University students and alumni are the recipients of $2,000 grants for projects that blend ethnography, media, and the arts to tell a story that shows both the nature and culture of wildness.
Amber-Leigh Polowich and Ian Cooper’s multimedia-based ethnographic research explores tourist perspectives of wildness in Central and South American World Heritage sites.
Cheryl Heykoop will create an autoethnographic short video that shares her journey with cancer over the last 1.5 years through an exploration of wild landscapes within and around her.
Samantha Estoesta’s interactive website centers on the use of language as it relates to understanding the concept of “wild”. Based in digital storytelling and Ktunaxa, Estoesta will explore the western tendency to define wild in colonial terms, and ways to decolonize the concept of wild by re-centering the concept in Indigenous knowledge.
These projects contribute to societal understanding of the meanings of wild, and are funded in association with current research on the “nature of wild” conducted by Phillip Vannini, Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Public Ethnography at Royal Roads.
Photo credit: Shawn Morris
