Twice a year, the UW Office of Research awards Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grants to faculty who have submitted proposals for research-related projects. Two of our faculty received such grants in January 2019. Another faculty member, 3D4M Assistant Professor Michael Swaine, received an RRF Scholar award in June 2018. We will write about that later.
Aaron Flint Jamison
Assistant Professor, Photo/Media
Jamison's RRF proposal is titled "Adapted Private and Limited-Access Sites as Vehicle for Capital Manipulation in the Arts." In the proposal, he describes himself as "an artist with a research-based practice. Inquiry is the primary point of departure for making my artworks." He will use his award to support research into "a set of contemporary relationships between cultural production and capital within private infrastructures in the arts." Jamison plans to look at "additions to the cultural arts ecosystem such as private collector viewing rooms in commercial galleries and at art fairs, hi-tech insured art storage facilities designated trade-free economic Freeports in global cultural/economic centers, and provincial museums that are utilized as Freeports in states without sales tax."
Jamison's RRF Scholar award provides travel funds for the research and a release from teaching during autumn quarter 2019. He will develop a new body of artwork based on this research.
Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse
Assistant Professor, Art History
In addition to being half-time faculty in the School, Bunn-Marcuse has two roles at the Burke Museum: Curator of Northwest Native Art and Director of the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Native Art. Her research project — Ka̱ns Hiłile (Making it Right): A Collaborative Reframing of Kwakiutl Film and Audio Recordings with Franz Boas, 1930 — will become the first volume in a Digital Publishing in Indigenous Studies Initiative that is a partnership between University of Washington Press and UBC Press. As Bunn-Marcuse says in her RRF proposal:
This publication will reunite existing archival media (16mm films, wax-cylinder audio recordings, material collections, and unpublished manuscripts and fieldnotes) from far-flung institutions forged into a new digital whole, shaped by and integrated with active cultural knowledge contributed by Kwagu'ł First Nation members. The platform allows these essays to take various forms with text illuminated by video and audio, as well as interviews with contemporary contributors. By reconnecting intangible heritage, including songs and dances, to material objects such as regalia, this project re-centers the ownership of these materials within the communities and underlines the continuing cultural practice of the current generation of Kwagu'ł people.
Bunn-Marcuse's RRF grant is supporting a research assistant who will organize and catalog the digital media as well as start building the digital structure for the book. It also allows her to pay consulting fees. Bunn-Marcuse has additionaly received a Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship from the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities. This will allow her to take the digital draft of the publication to Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw community members for review and further input. The goal is final publication in 2020.