Keynote Speakers

 is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Culture and Public Memory at the University of Winnipeg where she also directs the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies. Her research is focused on how practices of culture and public memory are used to grapple with “difficult knowledge” and the reverberations of historical traumas and injustices. Her projects pay special attention to creative, unofficial, and counter-memorial practices of remembrance that challenge official memory and denialist accounts, seeking justice for communities whose losses have been silenced and/or strategically appropriated. She is the Principal Investigator of a long-term study on public memory and the cultural afterlife of the 1985 Air India bombings and is helping to develop a public exhibit on this under-represented yet world-changing event. 

Failler is also a founding member of the  research network and Museum Queeries, a project that prioritizes Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and queer (2S+LGBTTQ) contributions and interventions into museums and museum studies. Most recently, as the grandchild of a Chinese immigrant to Canada, she has begun to explore what it means to inherit and remember histories of Chinese immigration, exclusion, and resistance through archives, museums, and other sites of cultural memory.  

is a museologist working at the intersection of environmental humanities and emotions studies. After working for a few years as Associate Professor in Museology at the University of Oslo, she moved to Switzerland to gain transdisciplinary expertise on the study of emotions at the Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, and has recently moved back to Scandinavia, at the University of Gothenburg (GU), where she is now based. 

Varutti’s current research develops around a few interconnected topics: She has been experimenting with the application of insights from emotion studies into the realm of museums, notably to explore the role of emotions in environmental communication in museums, and to advance the theorization of emotions in museums (with writings on the affective turn in museums; specific emotions such as awe and hope; and museum professionals’ emotion work). This research connects with parallel work in the Environmental Humanities on the significance of the public expression of ecological grief and mourning, and on pathways to more care-full and ethical relationships with the more-than-human. Varutti is also engaged in science-humanities research on the bio-cultural significance of glaciers – which ties back into a side strand of ecocritical work on ecopoetry as a medium to communicate the environmental urgency. 

Bringing all this back to museums, Varutti is drawn to explore how environmental humanities perspectives (theories, concepts, methods...) can be applied to museums, and what happens when we do so: for instance, what would a ‘more-than-human museum’ look and feel like?