Tag: Poster 149

Mental Health in Indigenous Inuit Communities and Canadian Climate Change Legislation: Conceptualizing the Link Between Research and Policy

Presenter(s): Eleanor Estreich − Economics, English

Faculty Mentor(s): Mark Carey

Poster 149

Research Area: Humanities

An emergent literature emphasizing community-based research examines the relationship between climate change and mental health in Inuit communities in Canada, which is driven in part by the fact that Inuit communities are “particularly vulnerable to health-related climate change impacts” (Harper et al. 2015: 1)*. While this academic research has identified approaches toward conceptualizing the link between climate change and mental health, national legislation in Canada about climate and health does not sufficiently reflect the lessons of these community-based efforts. By using methodological, theoretical, and rhetorical criticism, this paper will attempt to provide an answer for how the relationship between climate change and mental health is conceptualized for indigenous Inuit communities in the academic literature, and by comparison, how Canadian national laws dealing with climate change currently address this relationship. This paper will compare academic and legal approaches with the overall aim of judging to what extent national legislation has addressed the important link between climate change and mental health in indigenous Inuit communities. This comparative task is needed, because national climate change legislation shapes priorities and may help determine the extent of the human impacts of climate change in the future. The preliminary research seems to suggest that Canadian legislation primarily focuses on adaptive policies that target the general health of indigenous Inuit peoples as a result of a globally framed climate change issue; as a result, national legislation is currently poorly set-up to incorporate the insights from community-based participatory research. *Harper, S. L., Edge, V. L., Ford, J., Willox, A. C., Wood, M., & McEwen, S. A. (2015). Climate-sensitive health priorities in Nunatsiavut, Canada. BMC Public Health, 1–18. http://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-015-1874-3

“The Perfect Hybrid”: Art, Architecture, and Advertising in Solange’s Metatronia (Metatron’s Cube)

Presenter(s): Claren Walker

Faculty Mentor(s): Emily Scott & Gretchen Soderlund

Poster 149

Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

In April 2018, multidisciplinary artist and musician Solange Ferguson (neé Knowles) debuted a collaborative performance piece titled Metatronia (Metatron’s Cube) at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Although the piece centers around a choreographed dance performance within a sculptural white cube structure, Metatronia’s ultimate manifestation is the short video that has been widely circulated on the internet and social media. While Solange’s sculptural white cube both relies upon and disrupts the canons of modern architecture and minimalist art, it also occupies a place in the landscape of brand advertising. Critically, the video was executed “in partnership” with the Japanese fast fashion corporation Uniqlo (whose clothes the dancers wear) and produced by their advertising agency of record, Droga5 UK. By critically examining media coverage of the project and bringing it into dialogue with historical and contemporary art, architectural, and media scholarship, this research explores the tension in Metatronia (and other branded cultural phenomena like it) between its status as a work of art for public benefit and its function as a media vehicle to generate capital for corporate interest. Metatronia’s effectiveness as an advertisement depends on the veiling of its very function as one: with brand involvement masked under smooth rhetorics of “partnership,” the piece can exist comfortably in high art contexts while still elevating a fast fashion company. Metatronia exists at a nebulous–but commercially successful–intersection of art, architecture, and advertisement. More broadly, this case study reveals the complex dynamics and contradictions of contemporary cultural production under late neoliberal capitalism.