Robin Alex McDonald

Robin has published on the role of “love” in feminist and queer artist collectives; the ethics of performance art and/as an “ethics of care”; feminist negativity and queer anti-sociality; trans embodiment and notions of body plasticity; and the “queer phenomenology” of depression. Through their academic scholarship, they aim to utilize critical theory as a tool to deconstruct otherwise-invisible systems of oppression, make space for “public feelings” and identify strategies of survival for marginalized people and communities. In recent years, Robin’s primary area of focus has been what contemporary psychiatric discourses call “depression”—a word bound up with sadness, slowness, the pathological, and the medical, as well as the subject of Robin’s 2021 anthology ‘Re/Imagining Depression: Creative Approaches to “Feeling Bad”’ (co-edited with Julie Hollenbach, NSCAD University.) | Art history, visual culture studies, contemporary art, modern art, activist art and art-as-activism, queer theory, affect theory, critical theories, discourses of “madness” and “mental health”

Robin Alex McDonald is Assistant Professor | Program Coordinator (Art History) at MacEwan University. Their stated interests include Robin has published on the role of “love” in feminist and queer artist collectives; the ethics of performance art and/as an “ethics of care”; feminist negativity and queer anti-sociality; trans embodiment and notions of body plasticity; and the “queer phenomenology” of depression. Through their academic scholarship, they aim to utilize critical theory as a tool to deconstruct otherwise-invisible systems of oppression, make space for “public feelings” and identify strategies of survival for marginalized people and communities. In recent years, Robin’s primary area of focus has been what contemporary psychiatric discourses call “depression”—a word bound up with sadness, slowness, the pathologi. This summary considered all 2 collected sources.