Political Science Graduate Student, Rissa Reist, wins multiple awards

Political Science Graduate Student, Rissa Reist, has won both the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarships and the Dorothy J Killam Memorial Graduate Prize

The Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarships are the most prestigious graduate awards administered by the University of Alberta. They are awarded to outstanding doctoral students who, at the time of application, have completed at least one year of graduate study. There is no restriction as to citizenship. All fields of study are eligible for funding.

The Dorothy J Killam Memorial Graduate Prizes were created in the fall of 2002 to honor the memory of Dorothy J Killam. These are awarded annually to the most outstanding Killam Memorial Scholarship recipients.

Rissa describes her research in these words; while humour and settler-colonial violence are rarely simultaneously analyzed, I argue that the two are inextricably linked. Humour assists in understanding a nation’s culture and values. According to Schnitzler, “to understand a country, you can study its economic data and demographic statistics. Or you can collect its jokes” (Schnitzler 2016, 141). Barreca (1992) shows how humour can inform a nation’s culture, mythologies, and identity. Moreover, humour can provide a historical critique of violent events, and it acts as a coping strategy, allowing the public to process historical wrongdoings (Sheftel 2012; Ujlaky 2007).

Her PhD dissertation examines how Canadian political humour has responded to settler-colonial violence and how Indigenous political humour offers a new way of thinking about these responses.

She says:
Thus far, I have drawn on content and critical discourse analysis methods to illustrate how political humour continues to frame Indigenous women as the instigators of political unrest in Canadian society and hence as the putatively “deserving” victims of violence (Reist 2022). As well, I show how political humourists from mainstream media sources present Canada’s history of settler-colonial violence within a neoliberal logic of accountability and guilt rather than a as systemic problem in need of ongoing change and reconciliation (Reist forthcoming). Absent from these conversations is the utility of Indigenous humour in responding to settler-colonial violence. Indigenous humour has been praised for its capacity to help individuals heal from historical trauma and fight adversity (Lindquist 2016). Indigenous comedians such as Stephanie Pangowish use humour to bring national awareness to issues such as the Indian Act and the First Nation Trust Fund (Iman 2021). However, it has often been neglected as a powerful and restorative form of political communication.

I seek to remedy this oversight in the final sections of my dissertation by employing Indigenous approaches to humour, knowledge creation, and healing, including critical self-reflexivity and narrative analysis (Chan 2021, Nicholls 2009) to understand the ways that Indigenous humour acts as a means for contesting settler-colonial violence. I also situate humour within the context of wâhkôhtowin, an Indigenous concept that focuses on interconnectivity (O'Reilly-Scanlon et al. 2004). In doing so, humour serves as a form of relationality, bringing groups together. The next two years of my doctoral research will explore how Indigenous humourists are exposing Canada’s culture of violence and reinforcing the humanity of the Indigenous lived experience. During the tenure of the award, I will accomplish three goals. First, I will conduct a narrative analysis of Indigenous humourists’ responses to Canada’s history of settler-colonial violence. This stage will include analyzing the following Indigenous media sources: Walking Eagle News, Alberta Native News, and the Canadian Indigenous comedy series Acting Good. Second, I will offer tobacco and small gifts to ten Indigenous humourists and conduct semi-structured interviews with them to identify how they perceive the relationship between humour, reconciliation, and settler-colonial violence. In the final year of my program, I will host a virtual conference at the University of Alberta on humour, settler-colonial violence, and reconciliation. This conference will bring together Indigenous and settler scholars and content producers to discuss how humour can bring Canada closer to a world without settler-colonial violence.

The promise of Indigenous humour as a response to Canada’s ongoing history of settler-colonial violence will provide new ways for communicating a history of violence that, for decades, has largely been silenced. The dissertation contributes to existing research by understanding how humour reinforces and/or contests hierarchies in settler-colonial Canada by marking some acts of violence as unacceptable and others as normal and sometimes even humorous. The project is critical to understanding how the media challenges and legitimizes settler-colonial violence in Canada and to advancing broader conversations on healing, memory, and reconciliation.

Congratulations Rissa!