About:

hannah is a PhD candidate in the School of Communications as well as a Mellon-SFU fellow to the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University—on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

hannah’s doctoral research probes the intersection of communication studies, decolonial or depth education, and embodied and imaginative methods. Drawing on movement, performance, and arts and play based practices, their  dissertation project explores communal educational environments for moving through the psycho-social challenges and somatic complexities of communication and social change in our contemporary moment.

Their MA thesis—hosted on and emergent from the freewrite stream on this site—utilized fiction-and-poetics-as-method to explore what arts and embodied creative practices reveal about the complex co-production of cultural legacies such as colonialism, and algorithmically mediated sociality and identity. This work concretized hannah’s interest in embodied ways of knowing that exceed or evade existing academic research and educational learning paradigms, as well as the need for communal explorations in relational justice.

At the Digital Democracies Institute they have examined the interplay between socio-technic systems and complex cultural conflict, and supported in the research and development of responsible machine learning approaches for online publics. They currently operate as a fellow to the DDI’s Data Fluencies Project where they trace the relationship between algorithmic technologies and the affective and relational economies, attachments, and habits that underwrite these systems and their harms. As a part of their fellowship, they work on developing community-engaged and critically embodied techniques for recognizing  and responding to these problems.

Contact:

hannah_holtzclaw@sfu.ca