Abstract

In this talk, Erin Spring will reflect on her transition from being a PhD student at Cambridge to being a Postdoctoral Fellow in Lethbridge, a small city on the Canadian prairies. She will begin by sharing her new project, a reader response study with Blackfoot Indigenous adolescents. The youth are reading a series of Indigenous texts, including one set on their reserve, and are responding through discussion groups and journalling. She and Kristine Alexander, her collaborator and supervisor, will then discuss the Opokaa’sin Digital Storytelling Project, an interdisciplinary, collaborative project between university researchers and a local NGO for urban Blackfoot children and families. They are creating a digital library of stories told by Blackfoot children, youth, adults, and Elders. Blackfoot high school and undergraduate students are being trained as ethnographers and curators of the digital library, ensuring that they are active participants in the retention of their culture, history, and language. As settler scholars, Erin and Kristine will explore themes such as reconciliation, decolonization, and indigenization in the Canadian university context.

Dr. Kristine Alexander is an Assistant Professor of History and a Canada Research Chair in Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta. Kristine directs the University of Lethbridge Institute for Child and Youth studies, and is a co-editor of the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. Her research investigates how children and adolescents in Canada and elsewhere understood, and were affected by, imperialism, colonialism and the First World War.

Dr. Erin Spring completed her PhD in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge in 2014. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, where she is conducting a reader response project with Blackfoot adolescents who live on a reserve.