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Sara Matthews

Associate Professor, Communication Studies
smatthews@wlu.ca
Waterloo, Ontario
Faculty of Arts
Sara Matthews is an expert in critical military studies, Canadian Cold War propaganda, Cold War infrastructures, public safety, emergency preparedness, new technologies of war, artificial intelligence, human-machine intimacies, visual culture, war museums, aesthetics methods and research creation.

Areas of Expertise

  • Media and Communication Theory
  • Memory and Learning

Biography

I received my PhD in Language, Culture and Teaching from York University in 2009 and my MA in Sociology and Equity Studies from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto in 1998. My areas of study during my graduate training were critical anti-racism practices in higher education, and studies of learning from histories of racialized conflict. Collaborative work for my dissertation "A Pedagogy of Implication: Witnessing Historical Trauma as a Question of Learning" was conducted at the Centre For the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, South Africa.

My research and teaching are interdisciplinary and consider the dynamics of conflict and social change. Working primarily in the field of research-creation, my projects explore the relations between visual culture and martial politics as well as how communities craft creative modes of relationality and survival in response to practices of state securitization.

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