Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Documentary Studies; Radicalism; Political Protest; The Body; Biopolitics; The U.S. War in Vietnam; Historiography; Anti-Imperialism; Collectivism; Conflict Journalism; Film Editing; Propaganda; Pedagogy; Ethics; Disciplinary Institutions; Armed Struggle; Self-Immolation; Ethnography; Social Movements

CURRENT RESEARCH:
My current research examines the relationship between radical documentary films and extreme forms of protest against the U.S. War in Vietnam, both of which, I argue, pursued a collectivist social pedagogy. For example, on November 2nd, 1965, Norman Morrison doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire outside Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office at the Pentagon. While Morrison’s performance has been relegated to the margins of radical history, I give it pride of place in my dissertation on the uses of body as a documentary medium during the 1960’s and 70’s. Although setting oneself on fire may appear an irrational act, I argue to the contrary that such performances were an expression of political knowledge premised on activists’ refusal to engage with state-sanctioned codes of public discourse. In this context, direct action constituted a revolutionary documentary form resistant to the technologies of power Michel Foucault calls biopolitics and discipline, conjointly known as biopower. In the documentary film Far from Vietnam, Morrison’s widow explains that her husband’s final act “made perfect sense.” Inspired by Anne Morrison’s composure in the face of unimaginable loss, my research contends that anti-war protest actions such as self-immolation repudiated biopower’s right “to make live and to let die.”

PUBLICATIONS:
– “Not Enough Raven: Reading Lee Maracle’s Ravensong as Counter-Hegemonic Ethnography” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 45, no. 1, 2020, forthcoming.

CONFERENCES:
– “Working for No Money: Aid Slavery and Debt-Peonage in Renzo Martens’ Enjoy Poverty: Episode III” Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Virtual Conference, March 2021.
– “To Be(head) or Not to Be(head): Decapitation, Community, and Ontological Politics in Richard Coer de Lyon.” English Graduate Students Society (EGSS; conference), Carleton University, Ottawa, ON. April 2019.

AWARDS:
– Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2020)