“Arts-based and creative research are iterative – based on lived experience, community relations and relationality,” she says. “There is a real beauty in the way that people can interact with arts, culture and heritage … to understand the world as it is and how we can be different together.”
The assistant professor of Arts and Cultural Management, in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications, recently spoke to Office of Research Services’ Research Recast(ed) podcast host Kelsie Johnston about how art, culture and heritage can provide spaces for social inclusion, well-being and community engagement – and even address systemic oppression to drive fundamental societal change.
But, she says, while Canada focuses on multiculturalism, many systems and policies don’t adhere to that ideal.
“When we look through a social justice, rights-based lens, which is what my research does, I think that people don’t recognize the kind of racism that still exists in society.”
Because mainstream systems don’t always allow these conversations, she uses her research to create space for people to talk about issues that might not feel safe.
“We can create spaces for inclusion,” says Dasmohapatra.
Art forms provide what she calls an embodied practice, offering ways to come together and heal. Her recent project, looking at Edmonton’s South Asian Archives, is a perfect example.
“All of the stories are very Eurocentric – there were limited to no traces of Filipino, Chinese or South Asian people in the archives,” she says. “That was shocking and fascinating. It made me think, ‘How could we raise those voices?’”
Together with the City of Edmonton’s first community archivist and musician Jia Jia Yong and Filipino dancer Jeannine Naboye Kroening, Dasmohapatra began creating – dance, music, ceramics and more – to animate what was missing from the archives.
“We were exploring what we did not find, and what we wanted to know,” she says.
Watch the full episode
Dasmohapatra dives into this and other topics of her work – including her SSHRC-funded research developing arts impact tools and her doctorate of social sciences research focusing on a comparative analysis of Indigenous worldviews from Turtle Island and South Asia to create spaces for dialogue on decolonization.
