Office: Education
Building 356, Room 248
Phone: (250) 618-1505
Email: Amanda.Wager@viu.ca
Dr. Amanda Wager
(Tier 2) Canada Research Chair in Community Research in Art, Culture & Education with a focus on collaborative, creative and cross-cultural youth-led community research. Amanda is also a Professor in the Faculty of Education.
Research Activities
Dr. Amanda Wager is an interdisciplinary scholar with internationally recognized expertise in community research in education focusing on literacies, languages, and the arts with local youth, families, and communities.
Dr. Wager explores arts-based literacies work on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The objective of her innovative research program is to stimulate culturally responsive learning through youth-led public art projects involving literacies and participatory visual methodologies, such as theatre, mural painting, spoken word poetry, hip-hop music, and wood-carving. The program supports the creation of a Community Action Research Centre for the Arts created and run by, for and among youth—including VIU undergraduate and graduate students—as a method to increase youth leadership and capacity development that facilitates cross-cultural relationships with local Indigenous, non-Indigenous and international communities. Engaging with crucial ethical and methodological questions, surrounding community research, the centre contributes to a more nuanced understanding of what it means to do research with and among young people employing creative practices to explore local issues, make meaning of challenging concepts and provoke social change.