Wednesday, September 3, 2025, 4 pm
This Presidential Plenary features Dian Million and Candis Callison on generative dis/connections between Indigenous Studies and STS. Attuned both to overlaps between these domains and to divergences, this conversation will bring to the fore Indigenous perspectives situated in the specific region of the Pacific Northwest in its richness and diversity, and be a chance to explore some focal themes that would be of great interest to the conference attendees. These include race, gender, and class; mental and physical health; embodied knowing; and more, while foregrounding the poetic and the experiential.
Candis Callison is the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous journalism, media, and public discourse and an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. A former journalist, Candis completed her Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society, and a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke U Press, 2014) and the co-author of Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (Oxford U Press, 2020). Candis is currently working on a long-term research project about the role of journalism and media in Arctic and northern regions. She is a regular contributor to the podcast, Media Indigena, and a member of the Tahltan Nation, centered in and extending out from the Stikine River watershed and Mount Edziza. A longtime 4Ser, Candis is grateful to be part of this gathering on Coast Salish territories and the ancestral lands of the Duwamish Nation.
Dian Million is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Indian Studies and Affiliate faculty in Canadian Studies and the Comparative History of Ideas Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She holds a Masters and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (University of Arizona Press, 2013), along with several articles: “There Is A River in Me: Theory From Life,” “Intense Dreaming: Theories, Narratives and Our Search for Home,” and “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History.” Her recent chapter “Spirit as Matter: Resurgence as rising and (re)creation as ethos" appears in the collection Indigenous Resurgence in the Age of Reconciliation edited by Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, Aimée Craft, and Hoku Aikau (2023). This chapter is key to a theme she continues to consider in more depth in her current book project entitled In The Spirit of Our Renegade Care. She centers her work on understanding the effect/affect racial capitalism/settler colonialism has on Indigenous family and community health in North America. Informed by two generations of Indigenous feminist scholarship, she seeks to illuminate the ways in which Indigenous life reorganizes and resurges in the face of colonial violence. Dian Million is Tanana Athabascan.