Who gets to tell stories, and how should they be told? Dr. Keefer explores historical game development and why Indigenous community consultation is key to creating a wholistic historical meta-reality.

Dinner and Drinks provided! Please bring a smart phone to participate in the live 3D Modeling activity.

Dr. Katrina Keefer is an Adjunct professor of History and Cultural Studies at Trent University who specializes in West Africa and the Atlantic world. She is also a game developer who has built innovative digital approaches to allow people to immersively explore and understand the past. Much of her work focuses on methods to connect better with the biographies, societies, and identities of enslaved persons. Her current project Bunce Island – Through the Mirror uses photogrammetry of the Bunce Island slave fort in Sierra Leone and an anticolonial methodology of community co-authorship to bring precolonial Sierra Leonean narratives and the complicated worlds of the coastal slave trade to a broader global audience.

Rachel Taunton is the former graduate student of Dr. Katrina Keefer, and an ongoing contributor to projects like Bunce Island – Through the Mirror. Rachel holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropological Archaeology and a master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Trent University. Her research explored the frequency of recorded disease and traumatic injury in the Registers of Liberated Africans housed in the Sierra Leone public archives. She has also been published alongside Dr. Keefer in Atlantic Studies Global Currents for her work on accurate historical representation in game development. Throughout her work and her research, Rachel’s goal is to give a voice to historically erased communities and to challenge Eurocentric academia.