Chase Joynt

Asper Fellow in Media

January 1, 2024 - April 30, 2024

The Faculty of Information and Media Studies is pleased to announce that Chase Joynt, filmmaker, writer, video artist, actor, and professor, has been appointed as the Asper Fellow for the 2024 winter term. The Canadian filmmaker has directed several documentaries which focus on gender and his films have been recognized globally. His most recent documentary feature, Framing Agnes, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022 where it won two awards and has since been played in over 100 festivals internationally.

Chase JoyntJoynt is also an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Victoria, with research interests in cinema and media, transgender studies, and art and aesthetics. He will use his experiences as a scholar and a filmmaker to teach a graduate-level course titled “The Feminist Art Field School."

“Through a series of discussions and collaborations with artists, curators, scholars, and critical museum practitioners, the Field School aims to bolster understandings of the theoretical and practical roles that art institutions have played – historically and contemporaneously – in providing space for colonial and patriarchal oppressions and inequities to play out.”

Joynt is excited to bring the world of academia and artistic practice together within his course and encourage dynamic conversations with his students. The course will implement art-based teaching styles for exploring academic research and artistic practice. And it will be home to a series of public-facing, conversation-driven lectures that invite featured guests and students to engage with questions of feminism, power, gender, sex, decolonization, anti-racism, and creative institutional critique.

“Feminist Art Field School is an incubator for new ideas, and I’m thrilled to engage the creative minds and energies of students on campus in service of their research projects,” he says.

Joynt hopes he can use his experiences to inspire his students to take risks and explore outside their comfort zones.

“I hope my presence on campus with students can act as a form of permission to take risks, explore innovative ideas, and feel supported trying new ways of researching and creating that too often feel constrained by institutional and disciplinary ways of being. Some of my most memorable experiences as a student – from undergrad through my PhD – were the exceptions to more traditional class rules. These exchanges were often hosted by guest artists and practitioners, and I hope I can pay some of that energy forward to others this semester, by offering models of practice and saying yes/try that/keep going/have fun/and try it again at every turn. “

The Asper Fellowship in Media (formerly the CanWest Global Fellowship) was established in 2006 through a donation from The CanWest Global Foundation. The Asper Fellowship in Media aims to enrich academic programs in media and journalism at Western, expand research on significant topics in Canadian media, and promote public discussion about Canadian media and the media industry within Canada, including the business of media.
Joynt's appointment will run from January 1 to April 30, 2024.