Production Team

Mavis Reimer

Team Leader

Mavis Reimer is Project Director of the SSHRC Partnership Project, Six Seasons of the Asiniskaw Īthiniwak: Reclamation, Regeneration, and Reconciliation. She is Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg. She was the Canada Research Chair in Young People’s Texts and Cultures between 2005 and 2015, lead editor of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures between 2009 and 2015, and President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature between 2011 and 2015. She is the founding director of the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures (CRYTC) at the University of Winnipeg and founding President of the Association for Research in Young People’s Cultures.

Jason Lewis

Co-applicant

Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media poet, artist, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he leads research/creation projects exploring computation as a creative and cultural material. He co-directs the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network, and the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design. He is a Trudeau Fellow, and University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well as Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal.

Before joining academia, Lewis spent a decade in Silicon Valley exploring early digital and networked media at the Institute for Research on Learning, Fitch Design, and Interval Research. In 2009 he founded Arts Alliance Laboratory, the research and development arm of London-based venture capital firm Arts Alliance

Lewis' creative work has been featured at Ars Electronica, Mobilefest, Urban Screens, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and FILE, among other venues, and has been recognized with the inaugural Robert Coover Award for Best Work of Electronic Literature, a Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mention, several imagineNATIVE Best New Media awards and five solo exhibitions. He's the author of chapters in collected editions covering mobile media, video game design, machinima and experimental pedagogy with Indigenous communities. He is Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Samoan, born and raised in northern California.

Eric Meyers

Co-applicant

Eric M. Meyers is Associate Professor and past Chair of the uniquely interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Children’s Literature program at the University of British Columbia. Eric’s research, at the intersection of information science and the learning sciences, explores how young people engage socially with digital information systems as they work, learn, and play. This research has included work on collaborative search, social reading environments, digital literacies in YouTube, and the affordances of tablet-based learning. Recent work has focused on how crafting and prototyping activities in informal learning settings, specifically Maker Camps and library-based coding and crafting programs, support the development of design literacies and computational thinking, the skills and attitudes that facilitate understanding of today's complex information and communication technologies. He also has a complementary research stream in children’s digital media and textual cultures, which explores how human values (e.g., privacy, autonomy, agency, and sustainability) are reflected and instantiated in children’s immersive technologies and their related textual ecosystems.

Naomi Hamer

Collaborator

Dr. Naomi Hamer is an Assistant Professor in child and youth studies at Ryerson University. Her current research and publications examine the cross-media adaptation of children's literature with a focus on picture books, mobile apps, and children’s museums. She is the co-editor of More Words About Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People (eds. Hamer, Nodelman and Reimer, 2017), and The Routledge Companion of Fairy-tale Cultures and Media (eds. Greenhill, Rudy, Hamer, and Bosc, 2018). Dr. Hamer received the David Almond Fellowship for Research in Children’s Literature (2013) for research at Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books (Newcastle, UK). She has expanded this project to examine how media is used to negotiate the cultural discourses of childhood, nationalism, gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability within children’s museum exhibits. Framed by "queering the museum" and "the participatory museum" movements, the next phase of this research will invite young people to engage as collaborative-curators. Dr. Hamer serves on the editorial board for the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. She is also the President of the Association for Research in the Cultures of Young People (ARCYP).

Margaret Mackey

Collaborator

Margaret Mackey is a Professor Emerita in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She researches and teaches in the overlapping areas of print, media, and digital literacies for young people. Her most recent book, One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography (University of Alberta Press, 2016) was acknowledged as the Scholarly and Academic Book of the Year for 2017 by the Book Publishers' Association of Alberta.

Deborah Schnitzer

Collaborator

Deborah Schnitzer is Professor Emerita at the University of Winnipeg, interested in inter-art relationships and experiential learning as educator, writer, editor, and filmmaker. Her participation in the Six Season of the Asiniskaw Īthiniwak project began through her involvement with the Pisim Finds Her Miskanow picture book and curriculum guide project. Her most recent publications include the novel jane dying again, the feature film, before anything you say, and a novella trilogy, Side by Side, currently under construction.

Ben Roloff

Production Team

Ben Roloff is of Red River Métis descent, and was born and raised in Dauphin, MB. Completing his Bachelor of Music at Brandon University in 2018, Ben now lives in Winnipeg and is enrolled in the Faculty of Education's After-Degree Program at the University of Winnipeg. Ben's areas of research interest include music analysis and composition, English literature, and Indigenous history, governance, and traditional knowledge systems. His interest is intensified when these particular subject areas interact with one another, such as the analysis of Indigenous texts, literature, or music. Ben's interest in interdisciplinary research was sparked after being invited to present an analytical comparison of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Duke Ellington's 1957 jazz composition "Up and Down, Up and Down, I Will Lead Them Up and Down" at the 2018 Northern Plains Conference for Early British Literature.

In addition to joining the Six Seasons Production Team by way of the Indigenous Summer Scholars Program (ISSP), Ben is also working with University of Winnipeg professor Dr. Gabriel Nemogá Soto on developing an English translation of ¿Qué pasarí si la escuela...?, a document detailing the history and development of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) and the Bilingual and Intercultural Education Program (PEBI) in Colombia.

Mathieu Godin

Student

To come.

Michelle Queskekapow

Student

Michelle Queskekapow is a proud Dene/Cree woman from Norway House Cree Nation. She is the first in her immediate family to graduate with a high school diploma (Maples Collegiate, 2008) and the first to receive a Bachelors Degree (University of Winnipeg, 2013). In the Spring of 2019, Michelle will be graduating from the Four-Year Bachelor of Arts program, specializing in Young People’s Texts and Cultures. During the 2018-19 academic year, Michelle acted as a Student Ambassador at the UW’s Aboriginal Student Services Centre, a position that reaffirmed their beliefs in encouraging Indigenous youths to not only value their education but to also pursue post-secondary in the future. In the future, Michelle will be pursuing a Master of Arts in Children’s Literature at University of British Columbia and furthering their love for children’s literature! Michelle is particularly interested in studying texts that challenge dominant, colonial perspectives and the use of the children’s literature genre to voice historical Indigenous atrocities, and more importantly, indigenous resistance and resilience.

Miriam Sainnawap

Student

Miriam Sainnawap is Anishinini and originally from a community called Kingfisher Lake in northwestern Ontario. She has grown very fond of the prairies, and made Winnipeg home for number of years now. In 2018, Miriam joined the Six Seasons of the Asiniskaw ĪthiniwakProject working under the guidance of Dr. Doris Wolf, which helped contribute to her understandings and perspective as an Anishinini ikwe. She is a recent graduate of the Young People’s Texts and Cultures stream at the University of Winnipeg.

Waylon Wilson

Student

To come.