The Mary McEwan Memorial Award – Named in Honour of Dr. Mary McEwan, a feminist psychiatrist, this annual award of $1000.00 is awarded to one PhD dissertation produced each academic year at York University in the area of feminist scholarship.
Congratulations to our 2022-2023 winner, Dr. Shaunasea Brown!
Dr. Shaunasea Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Studies program at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON. Her research collaborates with Black women artists of Caribbean descent and uses music, photography, visual and performance art to unpack second-generation understandings of “home.” This work provides Black feminist art critique to illuminate not only the artwork of the artists she studies, but also to amplify their wider communities as key contributors to our Canadian landscape who reshape how we understand place, care, and relationality. She teaches courses such as Toward Freedom, Being Black in Diaspora and Beyond Multiculturalism. Her current playlist includes Mortimer, Bob Marley, and Shenseea. Brown is also a co-founder of a new network, Black Researchers of Southwestern Ontario (BRSO).
Dr. Brown’s dissertation Art Routes: Locating Second-Generation Black Caribbean Canadian Women’s Perspectives won the 2022-2023 Mary McEwan Memorial Dissertation Award from the Centre for Feminist Research.
Art Routes: Locating Second-Generation Black Caribbean Canadian Women’s Perspectives centres a second-generation discourse using the artwork and lived experiences of second-generation Black women artists—Kamilah Apong, Sandra Brewster, Shaunasea Brown, Anique Jordan, Brianna Roye, Camille Turner and Shi Wisdom. By attending to the contours of Black life in the complex geographies of Toronto and beyond, Art Routes acknowledges and articulates how Black women artists provide blueprints for how Black people can create their own kinds of freedom. Through the nuanced position of second-generation be(long)ing, Art Routes captures how Black women artists engage in new forms of world-making that reevaluate ideas about gender, sexuality, and citizenship, posit new radical strategies of care, and re/define how Black people live within and despite contexts of death and dying. With the understanding that the ability to create is a matter of life and death for Black people, Art Routes offers creative ways to think about Black being in Canada while identifying how Black Canadian women artists imagine and construct more inhabitable environments for themselves and their communities.