Tara Mayer

As a Wall Scholar, Dr. Mayer will advance on a project that lies at the nexus of historical inquiry, critical race and gender theory, and critical pedagogy. New epistemologies, especially around gender, race, and intersectionality, have emerged across the humanities that re-examine how we know what we know. These take into account the historical circumstances that have birthed contemporary academic disciplines and explore how disciplinary ways of knowing, core methodologies and values, as well as metrics of excellence bear traces of—and oftentimes perpetuate—colonial ideologies and assumptions. Her project is currently configured around two axes: the first on Visual Literacy, and the other on Scholarship and Emotion. Displacing the primacy of text in favour of an in-depth and interdisciplinary examination of what it means to be visually literate builds on the understanding that our eyes are instruments of habit, informed by cultural conditioning. This strand will be further developed through a 2019 PWIAS International Research Roundtable on Visual Literacy, convened jointly with Dominic Lopes (2005 PWIAS Distinguished Scholar in Residence). The second axis, on Scholarship and Emotion, expands on an ongoing collaborative SoTL project on how subjectivity, proximity, and embodied experience shape teaching and learning, with the aim of advancing pedagogical practices that do not marginalise or homogenise student experiences.