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Fall 2022 Colloquium

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

If I were his Mother: Kinship, Race and Redemption in Brazilian Mens Prisons

Guest speaker: Dr. David C. Thompson

Tuesday, November 15, 2022, 1:00 - 2:30 pm

Join us for a free in-person public lecture

間眅埶AV, Burnaby Campus, Academic Quadrangle, Ellen Gee Room, 5067

Abstract
Why are mens prisons saturated with anxieties about motherhood? This presentation follows invocations of the motherson relationship, as incarcerated cisgender men, their families, and prison workers each grapple with the meaning, weight, and redemptive potential of a mothers love. I argue that within this problemspace, mothers emerge as both the root cause of mens failings and as the solution to their ungovernability. Social workers, evangelical missionaries and others who offer themselves up as maternal figures for a disproportionately Black prison population also bring into relief the racism that drives the question of who is a worthy mother. I draw on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Rios prisons to chart the gestures and discourses of motherhood that give form to the care, violence and infantilisation running through these institutions. In doing so, I offer an engagement with the antiBlack and un/gendering foundations of incarceration, and consider social sciences complicity with this project.

Bio
David C. Thompson is a cultural anthropologist and the current WennerGren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow within the School for International Studies at 間眅埶AV. His work engages with prisons and incarceration in Brazil, with an attention to the individual and collective futures that contemporary regimes of punishment anticipate, call forth, or foreclose. He is currently preparing a booklength manuscript entitled Resocialise to Conquer the Future: Incarceration and Reform in Rio de Janeiro.

Light refreshments served

Transgressing White Academic Entitlement: Creating Transformational Learning and Relations

Guest speaker: Dr. Benita Bunjun

Sponsored by 間眅埶AV's Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Tuesday, October 11, 2022, 1:00 - 2:30 pm

Join us for a free in-person public lecture
間眅埶AV, Burnaby Campus, Academic Quadrangle, Ellen Gee Room, 5067

Abstract
By engaging with critical race/whiteness theories, academia in colonial Canada can be understood as a site of colonial encounters of differently positioned subjects within simultaneous contact zones (Senate, Board of Directors, student/campus services, departments, classrooms) in a white settler society. University spaces are powerful sites of colonial settlements re/producing white entitlement while managing the socio-geo-political local and global intermixing of a diversity of students, faculty, and staff across racialization, class, gender, trans/non-binary, citizenship, and ability.

Feminist critical race and anti-racist scholars have consistently demonstrated the pervasiveness of coloniality within the academy resulting not only in the erasure and marginality but also the management of critical race and Indigenous scholarship. This presentation interrogates the intersectional deployments and effects of "bodies out of place" within Western, Eurocentric, and white academia while also providing key interventions for the creation of transformational learning and relations.

Bio
Dr. Benita Bunjun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Justice and Community Studies, and Women and Gender Studies in Kjipuktuk, Mikmaki (colonial Halifax, Nova Scotia). She is currently a Visiting Faculty at 間眅埶AV in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology. Her research examines organizational and institutional power relations with a focus on colonial encounters and nation building within academic spaces and workplaces.  She is the past President of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) and contributed significantly to the Centre for Race, Autobiography, Gender and Age (RAGA) at UBC.

Dr. Bunjun has published book chapters, and in various journals including Journal of Management Education, Education as Change, and International Journal of Organizational Diversity. She is the editor of Academic Well-Being of Racialized Students (2021 Fernwood Publishing) centering transnational kinship relations and well-being. Dr. Bunjun is deeply committed to the academic well-being of Indigenous, Black and students of colour - who are often seen as "bodies out of place" - and to her responsibilities and responsiveness regarding the complexity of Indigenous-settler (of colour) relations.

She is currently the Faculty Coordinator for The Racialized Students Academic Network (RSAN) and works with racialized students and international students at various universities to promote their scholarship, well-being, and self-advocacy in the areas of academia, tenancy, and mental health. 

Explosions of Culture: Ukrainian Creativity and Resilience in the Face of War

Guest Speaker: Laada Bilaniuk, Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington

September 21, 2022, 6:30 - 9:00 PM

Sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Department of History

Event Recording (pending)
 

Abstract
The full-scale invasion launched by Russia on February 24, 2022 brought terror, death, and destruction to Ukraine. But against the odds, Ukrainians have resisted not only militarily, but also on the cultural front, with an explosion of creativity. Social media have made this burgeoning cultural resistance a powerful force in Ukrainian society. This lecture delves into wartime songs, sayings, art, jokes, and memes, unpacking what they tell us about contemporary Ukrainian identity.

Bio
Laada Bilaniuk is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1998. Her book Contested Tongues: Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine (2005, Cornell) examines the sociolinguistic situation in Ukraine, and she has also published articles on linguistic purism, surzhyk (mixed Ukrainian-Russian language), critical discourse analysis of code-switching on television, gender and language, and race in Ukrainian popular culture. She is currently working on a book on the politics of popular culture in Ukraine.

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