Dr. Luka’s research draws on creative and cultural studies; arts, media and cultural management theory and practice; digital humanities and feminist science and technology studies (STS); collaborative social science and urban development practices; and leading practices in digital data management, including audience, client and community engagement. M.E. is currently working on a manuscript for McGill-Queen’s University Press, provisionally titled Creative Citizenship: Canada breaks ground in digital media production and distribution.
Dr. Luka’s Banting Fellowship, From Creative Citizenship to Globally-Networked Cultural Collaboration, launched a comparative international research project examining state-of-the-art creative hubs and partnerships in Canada, the UK and Australia, which resulted in two commissioned reports for the Department of Canadian Heritage and an ongoing focus for her current research. Dr. Luka was also recently PI on a SSHRC connection grant (2016-2018) that brought together more than 500 people in 14 seminars internationally for an investigation of digital and critical research methods in technoculture ((http://www.thefourchettes.net/). Several members of the network of collaborators brought together by this project are currently working on a book on the same subject, with the working title: Dirty Methods: Feminist Epistemologies and Methodologies for [Digital] Research, for the Transforming Ideas Series at Wilfred Laurier Press. Dr. Luka is co-investigator on Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage, a six-year national partnership (2018-2024) involving several universities and 24 partnering cultural organizations, led by PI Janine Marchessault. M.E. also continues to be a research associate at Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, where she undertook her Banting project (https://sensorium.ampd.yorku.ca/).
During her research in 2017-2018 at the Just Powers iDoc project at the University of Alberta, Dr. Luka applied her digital media production and archives expertise to document and analyse social engagement in the $75 million CRFREF-funded Future Energy Systems initiative (https://www.justpowers.ca/projects/idoc/), including the creation of a nascent digital archive of more than 75 interviews and hundreds of digital assets. She and the Just Powers Principal Investigator, Sheena Wilson, also developed the Just Powers Podcast, building on a practice of feminist citation they established in 2016, (https://www.justpowers.ca/projects/just-powers-podcast/). Dr. Luka continues to be involved in Just Powers through the podcast and through the Speculative Energy Futures research-creation initiative until 2023, which aims to draw “attention to the social and cultural impacts of energy transition…through artistic means.”
Dr. Luka is a Director, Co-creator and Founder of the public art and research group, Narratives in Space + Time Society (http://www.narrativesinspaceandtime.ca), which intervenes in site-specific spaces to generate art and storytelling practices as modes of civic engagement. A recent four-year project, Walking the Debris Field: Public Geographies of the Halifax Explosion, mobilized GIS, augmented reality, digital media and mobile device software applications, as well as exhibitions and public art walks and events. NiS+TS recently launched a free iOS software app called Drifts, in collaboration with the City of Halifax, which can also be experienced on a website (https://intothedebrisfield.ca). Along with colleagues from NiS+TS, Dr. Luka was Co-investigator for the Towards Explosion 2017: Perspectives on the Halifax Explosion symposium, funded by a SSHRC Connection Grant.
