By Mary Giles
Stéfy McKnight is a queer, white settler artist-scholar based in Katarokwi/Kingston. She recently defended her PhD in cultural studies at Queen’s University. The SSHRC-funded doctoral project — Colder Now: Surveillance as Contemporary Colonialism in Canada — demonstrates how surveillance maintains white-settler and western ideas of governing and being.
McKnight is currently teaching undergraduate courses in the context of storytelling, as well as civic engagement and public institutions, which incorporates a design project in the winter semester. Her research examines surveillance and policing as contemporary forms of colonialism in Canada. She uses research-creation as the main methodology for knowledge production.
“My scholarly work takes the form of performance, multi-media interventions, online curatorial projects, 3D printing, installation and experimental video and photography,” she says. “My SSHRC-funded MA project, Organic Surveillance: Security & Myth in the Rural, revealed the ways that landowners in northern Ontario use hidden cameras and surveillance technologies to protect their properties from human and non-human animal interlopers.”
Stéfy and her Boston Terrier Tux. Photo courtesy of Stéfy McKnight.
McKnight is a member of the Q4F collective and co-founded Potpourri: art gallery at Queen’s University. She also works collaboratively on the project Cam Hunters, a satirical performance that exposes the use of surveillance cameras and voyeurism in Airbnb’s internationally.
Teaching students new technologies and creative methodologies is her passion. McKnight’s favourite activity is hanging out in her garden with her Boston Terrier Tux.
Tuesday, October 27, 2020 in Faculty, FPA Voices
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