Working Dissertation
Title
Supervisors
Biography
Kanika Lawton is a PhD student at the Cinema Studies Institute and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies as part of the Collaborative Specialization. They hold an MA from the Cinema Studies Institute and a BA in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia.
Their SSHRC-funded dissertation foregrounds an aesthetic and political critique of surveillance that moves against a “neutral,” ubiquitous framework, arguing that rather than merely capturing violence on video, surveillance produces the conditions of violence itself, mapping unevenly onto marginalized communities yet can be evaded through collective acts of resistance to transparency, disclosure, and visibility. Their research interests include surveillance studies, digital humanities, critical theory, Black studies, queer theory, and trans studies.
They are a 2023-2024 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellow with the Evasion Lab at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, a research collective committed to thinking the underside of surveillance. They are a 2023 David Rayside Graduate Student Award recipient, a 2022-2023 Queer and Trans Research Lab Research Assistant Award recipient, and the 2021 Atom Egoyan Cinema Studies Scholarship recipient. They have also received writing fellowships from Pink Door, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and the Sundress Academy of the Arts. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Spectator and Media Fields.
Publications
Awards
- 2023-2026 SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship
- 2023-2024 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellowship
- 2023 David Rayside Graduate Student Award
- 2022-2023 Queer and Trans Research Lab Research Assistant Award
- 2022 Sundress Academy for the Arts Writing Residency Fellowship
- 2021 Atom Egoyan Cinema Studies Scholarship
- 2020 BOAAT Writer’s Retreat Poetry Fellowship
- 2018 Pink Door Fellowship
Education
Cohort
- 2021-2022