Curating & Creating Memory Symposium
When: May 7
Location: Museum of Vancouver
Time: 10am – 4pm
Tickets: FREE, Pre-Registration Required
Centered around this year’s landmark bhangra.me Exhibition, this year’s symposium entitled Curating/Creating Memory creatively explores the ways to represent history. The morning panel deals with new endeavours by local museums to reach out to diverse community groups to curate resonant and reflective exhibits. Topics will include recent exhibitions at the Museum of Anthropology, the creation of the bhangra.me exhibit and memorializing 1984. The second half of the day will feature frontline academics, researchers and community activists who are intimately engaged with creating and interpreting historical records and will feature talks ranging from the Komagata Maru to issues in the Downtown Eastside. The afternoon concludes with the premiere of a series of short docs created by the University of British Columbia’s Punjabi 300 Literature class. The overall goal of the event is to share dynamic ideas and discussion to foster learning, understanding and navigate the shaky ground of truth and reconciliation.
10:00-12:30pm Curating Panel: With Yoshi Miki, independent curator/educator and currently Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Japanese History, Chiba, Japan; Charlene Mano Shen, Education Director at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle; Susan Rowley, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and a Curator at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC; and Naveen Girn, co-curator of the Museum of Vancouver’s Bhangra.Me exhibition. Chaired by Anne Murphy, Assistant Professor and Chair of Punjabi Language, Literature and Sikh Studies at UBC.
12:30-1:30 Light Lunch and Discussion
1:30-4:00pm Creating Panel: With Carol Martin, community activist and victim service worker at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre; Renisa Mawani, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UBC; Larissa Lai, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at UBC; and Teresa Macias, Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Victoria. Chaired by Sunera Thobani, Director of the Centre for RAGA (Race, Autobiography, Gender, Aging) at UBC.
Register via email to rsvp@museumofvancouver.ca by May 5
Curating Panel
“Japanese and Japanese American History in the Museum Setting”
Yoshi Miki is currently Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Japanese History, Chiba, Japan and lecturer in Museum Studies at Konan University, Kobe. He is also working on major curatorial projects at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the National Museum of Singapore. He has extensive experience as a curator, museum educator, and museum consultant in Japan, North America, and Europe, and has served as Director of Education at the Japanese American National Museum and Interim Museum Educator at the Seattle Art Museum/Seattle Asian Art Museum.
“Community Based Exhibits at the Wing Luke Museum”
Charlene Mano Shen, Education Director at the Wing Luke Museum, started at the Museum in 1991 as Education Coordinator and now oversees a team of 3 full-time and 8 part-time Education staff. Over the years at the Museum and as different needs emerged, her job titles also included Director of Education and Public Programs, Program Director, and Capital Campaign Manager. Charlene’s education background includes a Master of Education from the University of Washington, Teacher Certification in K-8 with Special Education and Art Endorsements and a B.A. from the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Washington. She has volunteered on various community projects, mostly focusing on teaching about the Japanese American incarceration during WWII, which impacted many of her family members, as well as work within her faith community.
“To Wash Away the tears: A conversation about love and loss”
Susan Rowley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and a Curator at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia. She first travelled north in 1974 as a field assistant on an archaeological excavation in northern Baffin Island and was captivated by the people and the land. Sue has worked with Inuit elders on historical research and with Inuit youth on archaeology projects. She is currently working with First Nations communities in British Columbia. Sue is a member of the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) Steering Group. This committee is tasked with overseeing the RRN. Recently she worked on installation of the new Multiversity Galleries – Ways of Knowing at MOA. She also acted as Lab of Archaeology Lead on the “A Partnership of Peoples” project. Her personal research interests include public archaeology, material culture studies, representation, repatriation, intellectual property rights and access to information on cultural heritage.
“City of Bhangra(s): A Museum’s Bhangra Story”
Documentary filmmaker, researcher and freelance writer Naveen Girn is a Master of Arts student in Geography at York University and co-curator of the Museum of Vancouver’s Bhangra.Me exhibition. He holds degrees from Simon Fraser University in History, Political Science and English, and is currently researching a re-imagining of sacred space, the architecture of Arthur Erickson and South Asian history in British Columbia. Engaging with first ever oral history interviews and archival research, Naveen’s paper will discuss Bhangra.me and the unique soundscape of Vancouver’s Bhangra scene in relation to local and transnational events. Naveen is also currently working on a documentary film that records the stories of first generation South Asian immigrants to Vancouver.
Panel Chair:
Anne Murphy is Assistant Professor and Chair of Punjabi Language, Literature, and Sikh Studies at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Religion and previously taught in the Religious Studies and Historical Studies Concentrations at The New School in New York City. Her research interests focus on the historical formation of religious communities in Punjab and northern South Asia, with particular but not exclusive attention to the Sikh tradition. Her edited volume Time, History, and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia (Routledge) is due out this month. Other research interests concern modern Punjabi literature and the historical formations of social service or “seva” within Sikh tradition. She conducted research on the latter topic as a Senior Fellow with the American Institute of Indian Studies in 2009-2010, and recently received a grant for the project from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Creating Panel
“Respect, Remember, Return: Actively Imagining Asian/Indigenous Relation”
Larissa Lai is an Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature at the University of British Columbia, and has just finished as stint as writer-in-residence at the University of Guelph. Her first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand (Press Gang 1995) was shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, Salt Fish Girl (Thomas Allen Publishers 2002) was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, the Tiptree Award and the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Award. In 2009, she published a book-length collaborative long poem with Rita Wong called sybil unrest (Line Books). That year she also published a chapbook called Eggs in the Basement (Nomados), which was shortlisted for the bp nichol Poetry Award, and her first full-length solo poetry book Automaton Biographies (Arsenal Pulp), which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award. She has recently sent her critical book Slanting “I”, Imagining “We”: Asian Canadian Formations, Relations and Strategies in the 80s and 90s to a Canadian academic press.
“Indigeneity, Migration, and the Komagata Maru, 1914.”
Renisa Mawani is Associate Professor of Sociology and Founding Chair of the Law and Society Minor Program at the University of British Columbia (2009-2010). She is a socio-legal historian who works on the conjoined histories of Asian migration and settler colonialism. She has published widely on law and coloniality and legal geography, and her articles have appeared in journals including, Law/Text/Culture, Social and Legal Studies, Social Identities, Theory, Culture, and Society, and Cultural Geographies. Her first book, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Contacts and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (UBC Press: 2009) details the dynamic encounters between aboriginal peoples, Chinese migrants, mixed-race populations, and Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the epistemic truths and modes of governance these contacts produced. Her second book (in progress) is a transnational history of the Komagata Maru, its place in anti-colonial struggles in India and across the British Empire. Other interests include cosmopolitanism, affect, and posthumanism.