Dolleen Manning

My research interests include Anishinaabe ontology, studio visual arts, phenomenology, critical theory, indigenous imaging practices, mnidoo interrelationality, epistemological sovereignty, and the debilitating impact of settler colonial logics. 

By tracing the fragile undulating threads of Anishinaabe ontologies found in everyday practices, I seeks to better understand the ways that Anishinaabe knowledge systems resist canonical academic values and textual dependent modes of address. I am particularly interested in the subtle, persistent challenge posed by the taken for granted orality of these thought systems. Such customary knowledges are often implicitly conveyed in gesture, speech, and everyday ways of being. Using various methodologies, including storytelling, textual analysis, and community-engaged research creation, I bring these ways of knowing into rigorous debate with contemporary discourses in continental philosophy and critical theory. This research takes up what I term Mnidoo-Worlding; along with Anishinaabe philosophies and cultural practices related to imaging, dreams, visions and their pathologization as hallucination in settler cultures.