Daniel Keyes, PhD

(He, Him, His)

Associate Professor

English and Cultural Studies

Other Titles: Coordinator Digital Humanities
Office: CCS 344
Phone: 250.807.9320
Email: daniel.keyes@ubc.ca

Research Summary

Whiteness, Anglo-Settler Identity, Okanagan, Digital Ephemerality.

Courses & Teaching

Cultural Studies, Digital Humanities, and English with a focus on digital screen studies.

Biography

Dr. Keyes served as the founding chair of UBC Okanagan’s Cultural Studies program from 2007-2010 and again from 2015-2018.  Additionally, he served as the interim Director of Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program (2009-2011). From 2020 to 2022, he served as the secretary for the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada. In 2023 he began and continues to serve as the coordinator for the Digital Humanities course code.

His doctoral research focused on how testimonial performance inflected itself in 1990s daytime talkshows on American and Canadian television. His current research focus on 1. place studies with a focus on the Okanagan as occupied settler space, 2. archival media studies relating to digital ephemerality in English speaking Canada.

Much of Dr. Keyes teaching focuses on the analysis of visual culture. In most of his courses, he offers students choices in assignments that blend creative and critical approaches that aims to have students grasp and appreciate complexity.

Degrees

B.A. (Hons), Trent University; M.A. English, York University; Ph.D. English, York University

Selected Publications & Presentations

Anthology

White Space: Race, Privilege, and the Cultural Economies of the Okanagan Valley. UBC Press. 2021. Co-edited with Luis Aguiar.

• Introduction pp. 3-11.
• Chapters 2 N-Toe Mountain: Colouring Hinterland Fantasies pp. 55-77.
• Chapter 3 Nkwala: Colouring Hinterland Fantasies with the Indigenous pp. 79-90.
• Chapter 10 Okanagan in Print: Exalting Typographical Heimlich Fantasies of Entrepreneurial Whiteness pp. 219-244.

Articles

“Green and White Space Invaders: New Urbanism in the Okanagan, British Columbia.” Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic, vol. 21, no. 1, 2015, pp. 83-110.

“Whites Singing “Indian” in British Columbia in the 1950s”. THEATRE RESEARCH IN CANADA-RECHERCHES THEATRALES AU CANADA, vol. 31, no. 1, 2011. pp. 30 – 63.

Book chapters

“Fubar II: Just Give’r Again and the Limits of White Privilege in the Oil/Tar Sands. Energy in Literature: Essays on Energy and Its Social and Environmental Implications in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literary Texts. Edited by Paula Farca, TrueHeart Press, 2015. pp. 145-160.

With Mike Robbins. “Chapter 3: Fort McMoney: The Challenge of Maintaining Interactive Documentary.” The Interactive Documentary in Canada. Edited by Mike Baker and Jessica Mulvogue. McGill Queen’s UP. 2024.

“Encore+: Orphaned Canadian Content in the Age of Digital Abundance.” Television by Stream: Essays on Marketing, Content and Audience Worldwide. Edited by Christina Adamou and Sotiris Petridis, McFarland, 2023, pp. 77-94.

Professional Services/Affiliations/Committees

Associate with Centre for Culture, Identity & Education, UBC Vancouver.

Chair, Inner Fish Theatre Society

UBC Okanagan AMP Lab

Jury Member Okanagan Student Film Festival

Media

Review of Cosmopolitics of the Camera: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet by Trond Erik Bjorli and Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen (rfd). Visual Studies, vol. 36,  no. 4-5, October 2021, pp. 577-579. DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2021.1950047.

Review of Patricia R. Zimmerman, and Helen De Michiel’s Open Space New Media Documentary: a Toolkit for Theory and Practice. Routledge, 2018 for Visual Studies 12 November 2020. Vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 72-74

Review of The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame by Eyal Peretz.  Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. vol. 46, no 4, 2019,

Review of Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action by Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria and Pilar Garcės-Conejos Blitvich (eds). Discourse & Society, vol. 29, no. 1, 19 January 2018, pp. 111-113.

Review of Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age by David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord. PsycCRITIQUES, vol. 62, no. 50, article 16. (18 December 2017).

“Joy: Neoliberal Phallic Fantasies in the Postfeminist Biopic.” Review of Joy (2015) by David O. Russell (Director). PsycCRITIQUES, vol. 61, no. 51, article 3. (19 December 2016).

“Post, Mine, and Be Disturbed: Social Media Data Mining.” Review of Post, Mine, Repeat: Social Media Data Mining Becomes Ordinary by Helen Kennedy. PsycCRITIQUES, vol. 61, no. 51, article 3. (19 December 2016).

Courses

CULT 315/ENGL 376: Television Studies (Thursdays Fall 2024)

This course blends creative and critical making focussing on “television” as this flexible term that 40 years ago referred to a static box in most middle-class living rooms. Today television can refer to not just a box but a complex set of possibilities and practices. This course studies how broadcast regimes whether regular linear broadcasters like CBC and CTV in Canada or streaming video broadcaster like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, etc.  shape and are shaped by genre, viewers’ habits, regulators, transglobal economics, and the affordances of media platforms. You will write and post autoethnographic [a.k.a. short essays] reflecting on your experiences with screen culture and the readings in the course that will be shared with the class and form much of the course’s exploratory learning. Additionally, this course has a substantive team assignment where you working with three or four other students will produce a 30-second public broadcast announcement for Student Services around the theme of harm reduction. Students will pitch, storyboard, shoot, edit, broadcast this content, and reflect on the process of being a maker/broadcaster. This production will involve hands on training provided by UBC O Studios. See a sample ad produced in 2022 when our theme was about returning the campus after COVID-19.

CULT 401: Topics in Media Studies (Monday and Wednesday Spring 2025)

This version of CULT 401 has the bespoke title Digital Afterlives: Archival Media Theories and Practices. You will engage with archival media theory and the practice of using and supporting digital archives.  This course surveys the access and preservation challenges facing born-digital screen culture in an age of digital abundance with a particular focus on Canadian-made screen materials. With the support of the instructor, students will pursue hands on research with analogue (e.g. migrating VHS to MP4 format) and digital objects exploring official archival databases (e.g., National Film Board of Canada, Library and Archives Canada, UBC Okanagan’s archive), Academic databases (e.g., Canadian Women Film Directors Database, Archive Counter Archive, LOCKSS Archive, Corona Haikus), Activists databases (e.g., Filmsincolour.ca [now defunct], Hoovie.movies [abandoned URL now offering ads in Thai), commercial databases (e.g., Canadian Media Fund’s YouTube channel Encore+ [now defunct],  Made-nous.ca, northernstars.ca [now defunct], TIFF.net) and counter (e.g., VUCAVU, Vtape.org or rogue archives (e.g., Internet.org’s Wayback machine, Pirates Bay, Torrents). You will generate a substantive independent research project.

Cultural Studies 210: 001 and 101 cross listed with English 215: 001 and 101: Reading Screens

Winter 2024 Terms 1 Wednesday and Friday: 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM; Winter 2024 Terms 1 Friday 11 AM – 12:20 PM

Today the combination of moving images with sound as narrative are variably reflected in categories like film, cinema, movies, television, videogames, social media, and more broadly as “screen” culture. These flickering images whether reflected on a big screen in long form narrative in a theatre or on a “smart” phone in short bursts to scroll through are not only a source for aesthetic appreciation but operate as mass and micro forms of entertainment that arguably shapes the collective imagination. Toward the goal of analysing the wide cultural role played by screen texts students will be acquainted with both the production, distribution and reception. The first five weeks of the course introduce the early history of film and the technical terms necessary to discuss critically the construction of synchronized sound and images. The second half of the course explores the critical discourse on film in relation to genres and screen theories that articulate with issues like race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. This latter part of the course will focus on a couple feature films and will involve reading both popular and scholarly analysis of these features to help students develop their research writing skills by learning to paraphrase screen theory and criticism to build their own argument.