Camille-Mary Sharp

Postdoctoral Fellow

Research Interests / Specializations: Museum studies; visual culture; energy humanities; political economy; environmental communication. Working with the Centre for Sustainable Curating at Western, my postdoctoral project documents the practices of oil museums and explores how the contemporary preservation of petroleum heritage can enrich discussions of sustainable museology.
Biography: Dr. Camille-Mary Sharp holds a Ph.D. in Information Studies and a Master of Museum Studies from the University of Toronto. She was a 2022-2024 Faculty Fellow in the Program in Museum Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on the relation between museums and resource extraction, including sponsorship by oil and mining industries and growing protests around these partnerships. Her writing can be found in peer-reviewed journals such as Museum & Society, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, and SSAC Journal. Camille-Mary is also a core member of the scholar-activist collective Beyond Extraction and co-led their 2022 intervention "Mining at the Museum" at the Royal Ontario Museum. Her teaching interests include museum history, museum theory, and museum activism.

Micheal Ziegler

Postdoctoral Fellow

Research Interests / Specializations: History of political thought; de-colonization; artificial intelligence; media and communication; technology; ethics.
Biography: Micheal Ziegler is an Abundant Intelligences Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Post-Doctoral Associate at Western University in the Visual Arts department. He is Canadian with mixed ancestry: French, English, German and Hungarian. Micheal received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Victoria in 2024. In his research, Micheal aims to understand how technology impacts socio-political realities. Currently, he is interested in understanding artificial intelligence (AI) and politics through harm reduction, decolonial epistemologies and respecting Indigenous Knowledge systems. He is the co-director the Otekh Lab at Western University with Jackson 2bears. He is the assistant director of the Haudenosaunee Pod, part of Abundant Intelligences (AbINT). AbINT is a 6-year, multi-million dollar global research programme aimed at fostering Indigneous and ally AI research networks, and is aimed on integrating Indigenous Knowledge and AI. Micheal is a co-investigator with Jackson 2bears on a SSHRC Insight Development grant titled Otekhnòtshera, a project focused on landbased AI research practices. His book manuscript entitled: Vectors of Artificial Life: The Politics of Artificial Intelligence in a Nonhuman Indifferent Universe, is under review at University of Toronto Press. Select publications: Ziegler, Micheal. 2022. “Moving Between Hope and Pessimism: Failure, Death and ‘Fuck-It.’” New PoliticalScience 44 (3): 396–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2022.2028124 Ziegler, Micheal. 2021. “Representation in Politics: Transcendental Dreaming and Existential Crisis.” VoegelinView. https://voegelinview.com/representation-in-politics-transcendental-dreaming-and-existential-crisis/