Danielle Deveau

Extension: 42122
Email: d2deveau@uwaterloo.ca

Biography

I grew up near a little town in Alberta called Hay Lakes. I later moved to Edmonton for my BA, Toronto for my MA, and Vancouver for my PhD. I’ve moved around a lot since then, finally landing in Kitchener with my family over 5 years ago. I teach academic and technical communication, media studies, and cultural studies. I currently research critical cultural mapping, cultural scenes, and urban design. I also have a research background in Canadian popular culture, media, and humour. Outside of the university, I work in the areas of cultural policy, design thinking, and user experience design. 

Selected publications

Editorial Work

With Zoë Drucik, guest editors. Special issue: Cultural Production in Canada. Canadian Journal of Communication 40, no. 2, 2015.

Publications

Deveau, Danielle and Rebecca Yoshizawa. Laughing Apart: Humor and the Reproduction of Exclusionary Workplace Cultures. In Humor in Business and Society Relationships: A Research Anthology, edited by Francois Moan, Adam Lindgreen, Joelle Vanhamme, Robert J. Angell and Juliet Memery. Gower Publishers, 2018.

Deveau, Danielle. ‘We Weren’t Hip, Downtown People’: The Kids in the Hall, the Rivoli and the Nostalgia of the Queen West Scene’. In Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective, edited by Benjamin Woo, Stuart R. Poyntz and Jamie Rennie. Routledge, 2017. INVITED REPRINT.

Deveau, Danielle. What’s so Funny about Canadian Expats? The Comedian as Celebrity Export. In Celebrity Cultures in Canada, edited by Lorraine York and Katja Lee, 167-83. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016.

Deveau, Danielle. Navigating the Boys’ Club: Debra DiGiovanni and the Performative Strategy of Comic Self-deprecation. International Journal of Cultural Studies 19, no. 5 (2016): 535-547.

Deveau, Danielle. Background, Inventory, and Consultation for the Arts and Culture Strategy. Commissioned by the City of Kitchener, ON, Department of Economic Development, 2015.

Deveau, Danielle and Abby Goodrum. Mapping Culture in the Waterloo Region: Exploring Dispersed Cultural Communities and Clustered Cultural Scenes in a Medium-sized City Region. Culture and Local Governance 5, no. 1-2 (2015): 61-82.

Deveau, Danielle. Imagining the Nation with The Royal Canadian Airfarce. In The Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Tim Nieguth, 85-96. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015.   

Chow-White, Peter, Danielle Deveau, and Pippa Adams. Media Encoding in Science Fiction Television: Battlestar Galactica as a Site of Critical Cultural Production. Media Culture & Society 37, no. 8 (2015): 1210-1225.

Deveau, Danielle. ‘We weren’t hip, downtown people’: The Kids in the Hall, the Rivoli, and the Queen West Scene. Cultural Studies 29, no. 3 (2014): 326-344.             

Current research

My current research is a critical analysis of cultural mapping from a user experience design perspective. In particular, I am taking up the cultural mapping work that has been done as part of the Waterloo Region’s labour force planning and economic development strategy. This case study illustrates well the constraints and shortcomings of mapping as a planning and information dissemination tool, the limitations of big data approaches to urban economic development, and the challenges of incorporating multiple-stakeholders into data curation and visualization projects. In short, this research seeks to reconcile the constraints of “big data” planning approaches with the complex, sometimes intangible, and often messy processes of building vibrant and liveable communities and cities. 

Research areas

• User Experience Design
• Content Strategy
• Urban Economic Development
• Cultural Scenes and Creative Cities
• Cultural Mapping