Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning

Education

• BFA, University of Windsor
• MFA, Simon Fraser University
• MA, Western University
• PhD, Western University

About & Research Interests

I am an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and member of Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation.

My research interests include Anishinaabe ontology, studio visual arts, phenomenology, critical theory, indigenous imaging practices, mnidoo interrelationality, epistemological sovereignty, and the debilitating impact of settler colonial logics. 

By tracing the fragile undulating threads of Anishinaabe ontologies found in everyday practices, I seeks to better understand the ways that Anishinaabe knowledge systems resist canonical academic values and textual dependent modes of address. I am particularly interested in the subtle, persistent challenge posed by the taken for granted orality of these thought systems. Such customary knowledges are often implicitly conveyed in gesture, speech, and everyday ways of being. Using various methodologies, including storytelling, textual analysis, and community-engaged research creation, I bring these ways of knowing into rigorous debate with contemporary discourses in continental philosophy and critical theory. This research takes up what I term Mnidoo-Worlding; along with Anishinaabe philosophies and cultural practices related to imaging, dreams, visions and their pathologization as hallucination in settler cultures.

Professional Affiliations

• Co-Director, Peripheral Visions Collaboratory, York and Queen’s University
• Research Associate, Revision Centre for Art and Social Justice, Guelph University
• Research Associate, International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), a partnered research institute hosted at the University of Guelph
• Visiting Professor, Institute for Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, McGill U, Montreal QC, 2016-17
• Lecturer, Department of Visual Arts and First Nations Studies, Western University, London ON, 2004-09

Selected Awards and Fellowships

• Postdoctoral Fellowship (SSHRC) Department of Philosophy (Environmental Justice & Ethics), Michigan State University, 2018-20  (Supervisor: Kyle Powys Whyte)
• Postdoctoral Fellowship (SSHRC Partnership Grant), International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), Department of Philosophy, McGill University, 2017-18
• Vanier Canadian Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC) 2010-13

Book Chapters

Manning, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii. “The Murmuration of Birds: An Anishinaabe Ontology of Mnidoo-Worlding.” Feminist Phenomenology Futures, Eds. Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowski. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press (Fall 2017).

Manning, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii. “The Becoming Human of Buffalo Bill.” Intensities and Lines of Flight: Deleuze/ Guattari and the Arts. Eds. Antonio Calcagno, Jim Vernon, and Steve Lofts. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 187-206, 2014.

Teaching

PHIL 812 – Philosophy of Culture: Worlding Possible Worlds: Futurity and Anishinaabe Ontology