Faculty Research
Information for Researchers
Most full-time faculty at Emily Carr, and many sessional faculty members, are pursuing their own creative practices in art and design and in research projects, in addition to careers as educators and leaders. The Research + Industry Office (RIO) supports faculty in their research endeavours. Faculty can approach RIO for information relating to:
- Funding Opportunities
- Applying for grants
- Grant writing support
- Post-award management support
All researchers must be aware of Emily Carr's compliance policies regarding Ethics in Research and related procedures Responsible Conduct of Research, Procedures for Research Involving Humans and Conflict of interest
If you are new to research and don't know where to begin, you might start by checking possible collaborations within existing research areas and projects. Please come to one of our Research Conversations meetings to find out about fellow faculty's research projects. (Schedule of meetings to be confirmed)
Are you interested in finding out about research collaborations with external organizations? Industry partnerships can take different formats and the RIO can help you identify and create agreements for specific projects.
More information about research areas, centres, studios and labs, and their current research projects can be found in the Research page of our main website.
Current Funded Research Projects
We acknowledge the support provided by the Research Support Fund in achieving the research success examples listed below.
Below is a list of faculty with projects currently funded by SSHRC:
Harry Killas
Ingrid Koenig and Dr. Randy Lee Cutler
Currently funded by SSHRC Institutional Grants:
SIG Exchange:
Dr. Julie Andreyev
Funds from the SIG Exchange program will support Dr. Andreyev to prepare an exhibit at Science World related to her research project Wild Empathy.
Haig Armen
Funds from the SIG Exchange program will support Prof. Haig Armen to disseminate outcomes of his research on discourse around how emergent technology informs how we create sound and music and how designers can inform the creative process in this subject a the IRCAM Forum Symposium in Paris.
Daniel Drennan ElAwar
Funds from the SIG Exchange program will support Prof. Drennan ElAwar to disseminate outcomes of his research on displacement, dispossession, and disinheritance as functional to colonization, capitalism, and imperialism, by providing several talks in Lebannon during the 2019 summer months.
Alla Gadassik
Funds from the SIG Exchange program will support Prof. Alla Gadassik to disseminate outcomes of her research at the 31st SAS Annual Conference, Animation is a Place.
Nick Conbere
River Relations uses art to investigate ecological and social impacts of hydroelectric dams on the Columbia. The eight-person team of artists, poets and a geographer researched historical and contemporary images of the dams and river. They synthesized these findings with their own experiences of river sites, to produce art and writing. Their goal is to use the creative work to provide entry points for public engagement around complex issues of the river. Funding from Exchange will support travel and presentation of research findings.
Dr. Garnet Hertz
New Media Art XYZ: Mapping 1990s New Media Art seeks to mobilize non-textual knowledge about the media arts discipline in a durable book format.
This project has significant impact for Hertz, the discipline of media arts, and Emily Carr’s profile. This is part of a larger initiative of Hertz’s work as Canada Research Chair in producing alternatives to standard modes of academic publishing that propose a more ‘research-creation’ path to engaging wider audiences and publics beyond traditional academic disciplines. Funding from Exchange will support a book launch and public conversations.
SIG Explore:
Amory Abbott
Unearthing Magic: Willam Butler Yeats and Irish Folklore in Contemporary Landscape Art will explore ways that contemporary landscape art can access the depictions of places from classic Celtic literature in new and creative ways. It will prompt new discussions about the function of landscape art, not only as a practice of visually translating imagery from historical depictions of places within written sources, but also as a means of bringing the topic of folklore into contemporary discussions of landscape, spirituality, and the experience of place.
Dr. Cameron Cartiere
Beyond "boom and bust": exploring alternative narratives for the extraction industries. The aim of this exploratory research is to examine the possibilities of a more sustainable model for Canada’s resource extraction industry by changing the narrative of the “boom and bust” cycle through research creation, public art, and the practice of community engagement. With a focus on the mining industry, the interdisciplinary team from Emily Carr University, Thompson Rivers University, and UBCO will come together as a research group in Kamloops to look specifically at the New Afton Mine and Highland Valley Copper Mine. The team will engage directly with the Kamloops community, particularly stakeholders who have had direct and/or extended contact with the mines.
Dr. Randy L. Cutler
Mineralogues: An Elemental Typology, a research creation project, is informed by three areas of knowledge – arts based research, designed based research and scientific research, including physics, medicine and geology. It aims to explore how artists and designers might work with scientific information to develop a poetic investigation of how knowledge can be translated across disciplinary communities. This multifaceted research creation project focuses on the importance of hybrid research for considering current investigations into our relationship with mineral extraction, technological innovation and archaic knowledge practices. As a research creation project, Mineralogues: An ElementalTypology aims to generate multiple ways of knowing through innovative design.
Prof. Beth Howe and Prof. Diyan Achjadi
Robots and Rembrandt proposes a two-pronged approach to investigating the relationship of Print Media practices to technology, by simultaneously looking at the past for historical grounding while also preparing for the future through material research and studio-based inquiry. This project integrates both our studio and teaching practices, with an outcome that could potentially benefit students and scholars of printmaking. While these initial gestures are relatively small in scale, we aim towards establishing best practices to lay the groundwork for future research.
Prof. Landon Mackenzie
With Birds Patterns over Europe Prof. Mackenzie aims to explore relationships between cartography and contemporary painting and to find out what will happen, and how to use ‘objective’ methods to achieve affective results; ‘facts’ alternated with intuition. Prof. Mackenzie will employ two graduate students as research assistants for this project.
Prof. Henry Tsang
The 360º Walking Tour Video of the Vancouver Anti-Asian 1907 Riots is a mapping project that addresses a significant moment in Vancouver’s history through the use of an emerging technology that is growing in application at ECU in both research and pedagogy. The video follows the path taken by the rioters as they moved from City Hall to attack Chinatown and Nihonmachi, with an audio voice-over contextualizing the conditions of the time and the events. It will provide an immersive experience that also acts as a document of today’s Chinatown and Nihonmachi, reflecting the changes to the neighbourhood that have happened since, providing a marker to look back upon when viewed in years to come.