Melissa Johnson

Melissa is a first year MA student in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at UNBC. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature at The University of Western Ontario. During the course of her undergraduate degree, Melissa became interested in the role of language and its inextricable ties to power and knowledge production. Combining this interest in language with a passion for social justice and social change resulted in focusing her research interests on the politics of representation of Indigeneity: specifically, she will be analyzing the contemporary cultural representations of the “pathologized” Indigenous subject and how that discourse shapes and perpetuates one-dimensional understandings of Indigeneity and contributes to health inequalities. She is also interested in how health inequalities can be ameliorated through storytelling by offering diversified narratives of representation. In her spare time, Melissa loves to write and create art, experiment with cooking and baking a wide variety of food, and spend time with her fur-child (cat).