¶¡ÏãÔ°AV

Performer

Juliane Okot Bitek is a Liu Scholar alumna and PhD candidate (Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Program) with her home department at the Liu Insitute for Global Issues. Her research around identity, citizenship and forgetting has led her to do fieldwork in Arusha, Kigwa, Tabora, Gulu, Musoma, Tarime, Butiaba, Bukoba, Kampala, Lira, London and Mwanza. Her latest publication, 100 Days (U of Alberta Press 2016), is a collection of poetry that negotiates ways to remember the 1994 Rwanda Genocide.100 Days has been shortlisted for the 2017 Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry and won a gold prize for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Award for Poetry.

Her essays, reviews, interviews and other writing can be widely found online and on her website at 

Panelists

Yasin Kiraga Misago is the Founder and Executive Director of African Descent Society BC and founder of African Descent Festival BC and the Creative Director for Hogan’s Alley Historic Memory traveling Exhibition and History research for people of African descent in Canada and BC. He is an urban historian and heritage walking tour guide in Vancouver with Black Strathcona Heritage Walking tour in Vancouver Eastside and other historical places for people of African Descent in BC where he has worked tirelessly mobilising the community advocating for the City of Vancouver to remove the Georgia St. Viaduct and build a Centre for African descent heritage. Yasin is also the coordinator for UNESCO General History of Africa Project within Vancouver.

Carla Hilario is a PhD candidate in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia and a research associate in the Faculty of Health Sciences at ¶¡ÏãÔ°AV. Her work focuses on community-engaged research aimed at improving mental health outcomes for immigrant, refugee, and visible minority populations at the intersections of gender and race. 

Minah Lee is a world citizen who was born and raised in South Korea. She is currently one of the unlanded on this land todayand also a proud member of a secret army called ESL poetrees planted in the soil. She wants to use her privilege of standing in academia as a researcher/artist to delve deeper into the issues of being and belonging against the commodification of citizenship; human security; identities of migrants, located in the state-driven paradigms. Minah takes pleasure in excavating personal narratives and creative practices in all forms that subvert and/or challenge the up-to-date grand narratives such as War on Terror, Economic Security, and Public Safety. What do privacy and freedom of expression mean to individuals, especially artists, in the state of surveillance?

Minah wants to inspire new ways of becoming and longing by re-imagining Home and borders. She believes that securing more places to summon and share personal/social traumas and memories is essential. If new technology and devices are an extension of our body/mind and its dwelling spaces, how do we draw boundaries from governing machines that are programmed to perpetuate cycles of exploitation by controlling our physical/psychological agencies?

Host