Dr. Karen Wilson Baptist
Acting Head and Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture
307A Russell Building
t 204.474.7289
f 204.474.7532
kbaptst@cc.umanitoba.ca
Education
BFA (Hons.), University of Manitoba
MED, University of Manitoba
Ph.D., Edinburgh College of Art, Department of Landscape Architecture
Research
Karen Wilson Baptist completed her first degree at the University of Manitoba in Fine Arts, majoring in drawing. Wilson Baptist’s large scale allegorical drawings were exhibited at the First Degree show at the Millennium Centre. She was a participant in the Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and received a Manitoba Arts Council grant to support her practice.
Fascinated by the relationship between creative practices and pedagogy, Wilson Baptist went on to study education in the department of Curriculum: Teaching and Learning at the University of Manitoba. Her master thesis, Vision, Body, and Spirit in Curriculum Inquiry, critically examined the construct of curriculum and its implications in stimulating greater human awareness through language and experiences that touch the mind, the body and the spiritual dimensions of being. Notions of the garden ground the inquiry, providing a physical site for growth, a place for the imagination, and a locus for reflection on the awakening that knowledge brings into being.
The generativity of the garden metaphor spurred further curiosity regarding the relationship between humanity and landscape and led Wilson Baptist to pursue a Ph.D. in landscape architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art. Dr. Wilson Baptist's recently completed dissertation focused on the relationship between death, grief, and landscape in memorial settings. The emerging trend of the roadside memorial forms the heart of the inquiry, as spontaneous memorials exist as the smallest scale commemorative gesture in the ordinary landscape. Methodologically grounded in the hermeneutic phenomenological approach of Dr. Max van Manen, themes emerging from this research evolve into a series of experiential strategies of utility to landscape architects interested in expressing the lived experience of grief, death, and landscape in commemorative sites.
307A Russell Building
t 204.474.7289
f 204.474.7532
kbaptst@cc.umanitoba.ca
Education
BFA (Hons.), University of Manitoba
MED, University of Manitoba
Ph.D., Edinburgh College of Art, Department of Landscape Architecture
Research
Karen Wilson Baptist completed her first degree at the University of Manitoba in Fine Arts, majoring in drawing. Wilson Baptist’s large scale allegorical drawings were exhibited at the First Degree show at the Millennium Centre. She was a participant in the Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and received a Manitoba Arts Council grant to support her practice.
Fascinated by the relationship between creative practices and pedagogy, Wilson Baptist went on to study education in the department of Curriculum: Teaching and Learning at the University of Manitoba. Her master thesis, Vision, Body, and Spirit in Curriculum Inquiry, critically examined the construct of curriculum and its implications in stimulating greater human awareness through language and experiences that touch the mind, the body and the spiritual dimensions of being. Notions of the garden ground the inquiry, providing a physical site for growth, a place for the imagination, and a locus for reflection on the awakening that knowledge brings into being.
The generativity of the garden metaphor spurred further curiosity regarding the relationship between humanity and landscape and led Wilson Baptist to pursue a Ph.D. in landscape architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art. Dr. Wilson Baptist's recently completed dissertation focused on the relationship between death, grief, and landscape in memorial settings. The emerging trend of the roadside memorial forms the heart of the inquiry, as spontaneous memorials exist as the smallest scale commemorative gesture in the ordinary landscape. Methodologically grounded in the hermeneutic phenomenological approach of Dr. Max van Manen, themes emerging from this research evolve into a series of experiential strategies of utility to landscape architects interested in expressing the lived experience of grief, death, and landscape in commemorative sites.
