Navigating the Planetary Crisis through the Arts: The University and the Polycrisis

Dr. Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist working with public art, site-specific intervention, wearable art and social practice. Her solo and collaborative work engages questions of personal and cultural identity and its relationship to space. Susan is co-founder of Ogimaa Mikana, an artist collective working to reclaim the roads and landmarks of Anishinaabeg territory with Anishinaabemowin and has recently co-founded AKI|ACKEE with Yuseph Jackman, a collective focused on the convergence of art, fashion and social justice. She earned a PhD in Social Justice Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Susan is the former Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture at OCAD University. She was an Associate Editor at The Capilano Review for the publication's Indigenous Places and Names series. Susan is currently Assistant Professor in Indigenous Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design at York University. Most recently, Susan is the recipient of a Governor General’s Meritorious Service Award (Civil Division), one of the highest distinctions a civilian can receive, for her work with Ogimaa Mikana.

Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her compositional strategies and epistemic disobedience to multi-year curatorial projects including "Take Care" (2016–2019), an exhibition series with over 250 contributors critically engaging the crisis of care, and "The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea" (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force to foster a more intimate awareness of the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice. Currently, she is developing "GROUP PROBLEMS: Learning to Live Together at Scale" (2021–2031), a major research project exploring the composition of a heterogeneous series of groups and their respective formation and resolution of problems.

Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware is Assistant Professor at the School of the Arts, McMaster University, exploring social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. He is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, and educator, with works presented across Canada and internationally. Ware is part of the Black August Arts Residency Collective, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter–Canada, curator of the That’s So Gay show, and author of numerous papers, articles, and books. He is co-editor of the best-selling “Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada” (URP, 2020).

Kate J. Neville is an associate professor in Political Science and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto, where she studies global resource politics, energy transitions and technologies, and community resistance. She is the author of Fueling Resistance: The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels and Fracking (2021) and Going to Seed: Essays on Idleness, Nature, and Sustainable Work (2024).