WGS: New Chair Dr. Roewan Crowe

Thu. Jan. 26, 2017

The Faculty of Arts is pleased to welcome Dr. Roewan Crowe as Chair of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies as of January 1, 2017 for a three-year term. Dr. Crowe is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Director of the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies, and a recipient of the University of Winnipeg's Marsha Hanen Award for Excellence in Creating Community Awareness (2015). Dr. Fiona Green, Associate Dean of Arts and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, welcomes the appointment, stating that "Dr. Crowe brings her vast experience of combining her passion for teaching, her commitment to community, her many accomplishments in art, and her admirable administrative experience to the position of Department Chair."

A recent Communications feature "Growing art in the greenhouse" highlights the opening of Dr. Crowe's new studio space in the greenhouse on the the fifth floor of the University of Winnipeg's Library, which coincides with the beginning of her term as Chair.

Thank you to Pauline Greenhill of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies for her contribution, serving as Acting Chair of the Department January 1 - December 31, 2016.

Dr. Roewan Crowe

Roewan Crowe (second from right) and (from left) Helene Vosters, Monica Martinez and Christina Hajjar, members of the artist collective CONSTELACIONES
(Photo credit: Nicolle Amyotte, graduate student in the MA in Cultural Studies program)

Multidisciplinary artist and Professor Roewan Crowe is energized by acts of disruption, radical transformation and the tactical deployment of self-reflexivity. Born under the big skies of Saskatchewan and raised in scofflaw Alberta, Crowe left the prairies to deepen her engagements with art and feminism, and to do graduate studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. A return to the prairies inspired art and writing centered on queer feminist reclamation practices to ask questions about the land, whiteness and queer settler identities. In her artistic practice she often enters into fatal wounded landscapes—sometimes violent and xenophobic—to explore possibilities for regeneration. Recent work includes: digShift (ongoing), a decolonizing and environmental reclamation project using site specific performance and multichannel installation to explore the shifting layers of an abandoned gas station; Lifting Stone, a queer femme performance/installation creating intimate stone encounters; and the queer Western text Quivering Land (ARP), a gritty feminist meditation on the possibilities of art to reckon with the ongoing legacies of violence and colonization. Her longstanding community practice is concerned with creating space for and building engaged feminist/queer/artistic communities. Her scholarly work seeks to open meaningful encounters with art through feminist engagement with a particular focus on artistic practitioner knowledges, collaboration, collectivity, and artistic processes. Recently, as part of the artist collective, CONSTELACIONES, she traveled with artists Helene Vosters, Monica Martinez, Christina Hajjar, and Doris Difarnecio to the Atacama Desert in Chile (2016) to perform and create a monument, an unauthorized sound sculpture with ceramic forms created by Martinez. CONSTELACIONES embodies collective healing through art-making, kinship and vulnerability—rejecting isolation, silence, and disconnection in the face of trauma. They are in the process of creating a digital book, Return Atacama, that will be published with HemiPress. Roewan's most recent endeavour is the greenhouse: a feminist artlab for making and thinking. This space is a feminist art experiment, a space that focuses on artistic process and transparency. The greenhouse artlab opens possibilities for: the creation of new artistic works and research; collaboration on art projects with other artists, scholars, and community members; hosting artist residencies and working with students/community members on artistic/creative projects. Roewan Crowe is an Associate Professor and currently the WGS Chair. Sometimes she updates her http://www.roewancrowe.com/blog-2/