Shannon Walsh
Congratulations to Film Production Assistant Professor Shannon Walsh on joining an esteemed group of ten innovative academics as a Peter Wall Institute Wall Scholar for 2017-2018, part of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. The Wall Scholars Research Award is available to UBC Faculty members to spend one year in residence at the Institute in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
The term of the appointment for this year’s awardees will be from August 1, 2017 to July 31, 2018.
During her time as a Wall Scholar, Dr. Walsh is focused on completing research and filming for her fourth feature documentary Illusions of Control. The documentary tells five stories of people creating new and surprising relationships within human damaged landscapes such as clear-cuts, decommissioned mines, deserts and nuclear contamination zones.
Shannon Walsh
PhD, McGill University
Department of Theatre and Film
Dr. Shannon Walsh is a filmmaker who has written and directed three feature documentary films, which have screened in cinemas, museums, and over 60 film festivals around the world. Her films have been broadcast on television in Canada, South Africa and the U.S.
As a theorist, Dr. Walsh is interested in the social construction of power its contestations, largely focused on South Africa, and crossing a range of disciplines and methodologies. Her PhD research at McGill University used an approach she called ethnography-in-motion to trace how women and children living with HIV in Durban’s shack settlements navigated the health care system.
From 2013-2016 she was a faculty member at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong where she taught film production. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg’s Research Chair in Social Change, where she also did her post-doctoral work with support of a SSHRC fellowship.
Recently, Dr. Walsh co-edited the book Ties that Bind: Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa (Wits University Press, 2016) with historian Jon Soske.
