Malcolm Sanger

Malcolm Sanger is a PhD student in Communication Studies at McGill. His research, supervised by Darin Barney, investigates reforestation and its infrastructures in Canada via its intersections with national mythology and settler colonialism and climate change and environmental duress.

Contact: malcolm.sanger@mail.mcgill.ca

PROJECTS

Reforestation in Canada: Infrastructures, politics, and futures

My doctoral research takes reforestation in Canada as an object of inquiry. Reforestation is a century-old industry that operates across Canada, hiring a seasonal, young, urban, white, middle-class workforce to plant thousands of trees in 10-hour workdays paid in piecework. Its infrastructures organize extensive logistics operations involving tree nurseries, stashing frozen stock in remote snow caches, ex-military vehicles, and exposure to toxicities and sabotage. Public and private forest management intersects with existing infrastructures and economies of exploration, resource extraction, and settlement, which, taken together, are implicated in ongoing displacements and jurisdictional conflicts, contrasting but proximate mobilities, and environmental duress, including climate change. In these spaces, tree planting emerges as a temporal practice that links conflicted pasts, contested presents, and projected futures. My project investigates reforestation as a material and discursive form of future-making that exceeds and contradicts national and other myths and imaginaries about “planting a tree.”

Tulum’s tourists and migrants: Gaps and overlaps (funded by SSHRC CGS M)

My MA Anthropology thesis (supervised by Diana Allan) explored the gaps and overlaps between tourists and migrant workers in Tulum, Mexico, through mobility and visuality. The figure of montage was considered a form of “encounter” that is both connection and clash, and an ethics for thinking two things together. Imaging and imagining these overlaps in Tulum occurs despite and because of the gaps formed by rhythms of capitalist expansion that break from and build on the past, leave ruins in the present, and collapse a future. Finally, answering the refrain “how can I make images in and of Tulum,” my film “Tulum, Summer 2019” explored the rhythms found in the encounters between images.

ACTIVITY

BOATS Film Series (Based On A True Story) screens and hosts discussions around experimental and hybrid films between documentary and fiction. Started in Toronto in 2016, it continues to host young and emerging filmmakers and artists in bringing together a diverse community for discussions and collaboration.