Rachel Webb Jekanowski

I’m an interdisciplinary scholar working between film and media studies, cultural studies, and the environmental and energy humanities. My research explores connections between place, energy, and visual culture in North America, historically and in the times-to-come. I use a variety of methods, including textual analysis, archival research, low-carbon methods, place-based writing, research creation and arts-based inquiry, and speculative imagining. I hold a Ph.D. in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University, supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

I work as an Assistant Professor of English at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus on the west coast of Newfoundland. Previously, I held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of English at Memorial University in St. John’s. I live and work as a visitor of settler descent on the traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq, Beothuk, Innu, and Inuit.

My practice as an educator, researcher, and community organizer is deeply informed by my relationships to place and a commitment to social and environmental justice. I teach courses on critical reading and writing, documentary film, Canadian and Indigenous cinemas, energy cultures, world-building and science fiction, feminist and queer theory, and social justice movements. Before coming to Grenfell, I taught remote courses on North American Petrocultures at TU Dresden, Germany and Media and Environmental Justice Movements at Lakehead University – Orillia. I also collaborated with Reading to Decolonize, a public education series based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). My reflections on collaborative pedagogy and co-teaching about oil online during the COVID-19 pandemic can be found here and here.

I’m currently working on a book manuscript entitled Cinemas of Extraction: Land, Resources, and Settler Imaginaries. The book examines environmental and colonial entanglements of twentieth-century nontheatrical and industrial filmmaking in Canada and the United States. The project expands upon my doctoral dissertation, which received the 2020 Dissertation Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

In past years, I’ve served on the Board of Directors for Eastern Edge Gallery, an artist-run centre in St. John’s, and on the Executive Board of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC). In St. John’s, I did grassroots organizing with the Social Justice Co-operative and Solidarity with the Labrador Land Protectors. I’m invested in using public education and the arts to support energy justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and anti-racist social change.

Follow me on Twitter @stalebreadzine to see my craftwork, links to my recent publications, and other projects.