Contributor
Dr. Aynur Kadir earned her Ph.D. in 2018 from Making Culture Lab, School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Aynur Kadir’s research focuses on practices and theories of design and the study of interactive multimedia in the humanities, ethnographic practice and museum curation. She works with local communities in northwest China, in the Pacific Northwest and in the Six Nation Territories to develop digital media that document, manage, safeguard, and represent Indigenous cultural heritage. She is exploring how different new media such as interactive documentaries, virtual museums, digital archive databases, interactive museum guides, video games and artificial intelligence systems can be designed using collaborative participatory methodologies in order to preserve and revitalize cultural heritage and heal collective trauma. She is currently the principal investigator for Robert Harding and Lois Claxton Humanities and Social Sciences Endowment awarded project “Alternative Narratives: Dialogue with the History of Waterloo County Murals” in collaboration with the Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum.
Dr. Kadir’s research interests and applied and pedagogical practice center around larger academic objectives: producing greater multimedia for social justice and decolonizing digital technologies. In her interdisciplinary research program teaching and creative work, she highlights community-based methodologies in curatorial and interactive design practice and the use of technology. She is an advocate for challenging the knowledge hierarchy and facilitate the accessibility of traditional or academic knowledge to the wider public. The ultimate goal of her research is to conceptualize the poetics and politics of interactive media in the representation of traditional knowledge, memory and cultural heritage, and contribute to the ethical use of new media through collaboration with originating communities. Dr. Kadir previous collaborative research includes The Contest of the Fruits, Landscapes of Injustice, Sq’éwlets: A Stó:lo-Coast Salish community in the Fraser River Valley project, AI-generated Anonymity project, Ethnographic Terminalia multimedia and multi-sited exhibitions, and The Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project.