About

COVID-19 Anxiety in the Age of the
Anthropocene: Digital Art, Cross-Disciplinary Ventures and Pedagogical Practices

COVID-19 Anxiety in the Age of the Anthropocene is a project stemming from the larger work entitled COVID-19 Anxiety: Location, Refuge and Loss (2020-2021) and is an artistic collaboration with Joanna Black, Professor, University of Manitoba (U of M), Dr. Pam Patterson, Assistant Professor, OCAD University (OCADU), and Daniel Payne, Librarian and artist (OCADU).

Our collaborative creative research teams at UofM and OCADU are committed to working within communities of practice. We are examining the conceivable and imagined possibilities of generative creative research during COVID-19 in which anxiety surrounds and permeates through our lived experiences and is embodied in our creative practice.

Throughout this pandemic we continue to explore creative research and supportive pedagogies individually and communally as artists, as educators with Gallery 1313 (Toronto), the Textile Museum of Canada, (Toronto), Natural Resources Canada, students at our academic institution, the University of Manitoba (U of M),  and learners within the OCADU Art & Design Education Lab.

The speaker series from OCADU can be found here.  

Dedicated to producing creative research, artistic approaches to teaching and learning, and creative research scholarship, Black, Patterson, and Payne with Sarah Paradis (Research Assistant at U of M), Marta Chudolinska (OCADU Learning Zone) and Angie Ma (OCAD U Undergraduate Research Assistant), are producing websites for public access (including the OCAD Library LibGuide).

In our era of the Anthropocene, we explore our current major societal crisis, COVID-19. In response to this global pandemic, a collective of students from two classes in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba (located in Winnipeg, Canada) participated in the development of “COVID-19 Anxiety in the Age of the Anthropocene” along with their professor, Dr. Joanna Black and research assistant, Sarah Paradis, in conjunction with a team of artists and educators from OCADU. This project is comprised of 40 individuals (38 of whom are currently students in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba). The first group is composed of ten students who have undergraduate Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees (and are currently senior years visual arts pre-service educators in the Bachelor of Education Program (B.Ed.); the second group includes twenty-eight B.Ed. students who have undergraduate BA degrees in a variety of subjects (ranging from Mathematics, Physical Education, and Human Ecology, to History, Drama, and Music). 

We are living through two unprecedented crises that our affecting our lives: the erosion of our world and our human rights during COVID-19 and climate change. In discussing human rights, Turner (2006) argues that there are key human rights pillars that are dialectically dependent on each other including human vulnerabilities as embodied agents, interdependencies, and interconnectedness within human social lives, as well as the precariousness of social institutions (p. 25). We address these issues in our digiCOVERS.

Turner, B.S. (2006). Vulnerability and human rights. The Pennsylvania State University Press.