Fookn Conversation - Talking About “Academicky” Stuff

In this fifteenth episode, Dr. Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Keri Cheechoo, an Assistant Professor specializing in Indigenous Education at the University of Ottawa. During their conversation, Dr. Cheechoo shares her perspectives as an Iskwew, (Cree woman), daughter, mom, kookum, auntie, cousin, poet, and teacher from Long Lake #58 First Nation in relation to living in harmony. They discuss some of the following concepts: grandparenting, living as ceremony, dreaming of ancestral medicines, agency, regulating and sterilizing Indigenous women’s bodies, legacies of the Indian Residential Schooling system, Orange Shirt Day, relearning intergenerational relations, land acknowledgments, treaties, poetic inquiry, art, Pimatisiwin, a Nisgaa research methodology, trauma, healing, respecting dignity, reconciliation, regeneration, relationality, and so much more.

In this fourteenth episode, Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Adrian Downey, an Assistant Professor at Mount Saint Vincent University. During their conversation, Dr. Downey shares his speculations as a Mi'kmaw curriculum theorist and posthumanist scholar in relation to the current 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. They discuss some of the following concepts: writing during and within the COVID-19 Atlantic bubble, distinctions between the necropolitical, zoepolitical and biopolitical, critical feminist posthumanism, Indigenous curriculum theorizing, scholars, and scholarship, affect, compost, settler colonialism, dangers of advanced capitalism and wet markets, ecological education, literacies of the land, attending relationally as humans to becoming-with waste, the more-than-human, non-human worlds and so much more.

In this thirteenth episode, Dr. Dwayne Donald interviews Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, a Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of Ottawa. During their conversation, Dr. Ng-A-Fook shares his perspectives as a curriculum theorist in relation to the 2020 Pandemic. They discuss some of the following concepts: online and distance learning, teacher agility, flexibility, care, and professionalism, currere, experimenting with a podcasting curriculum, the international field of curriculum studies, human migrations, living in rural and urban communities in Canada and the United States, life history research, unlearning, learning, and serving with the United Houma Nation, oral history research, racialized segregations, restorying settler historical consciousness and so much more.

In this twelfth episode, Dr. Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. William F. Pinar, Tetsuo T. Aoki Professor at the University of British Columbia. During their conversation, Dr. Pinar shares his perspectives as a curriculum theorist and lived experiences in relation to the 2020 Pandemic and Anti-Black Racism Protests in the United States. He discusses some of the following concepts: systemic inequities, different temporal dimensions of currere, curriculum policy reform and reorganization, populist movements, instrumentalism, existential philosophy, cautionary notes on the use of technology, social media, and news feeds, reactivation, reconstruction, Black feminist autobiographical research, allegories of an American South, Weimar Republic, and Harlem Renaissance, subjectivity, and so much more.

In this eleventh episode, Dr. Ng-A-Fook interviews Kiera (Kaia’tano:ron) Brant-Birioukov, a Haudenosaunee doctoral candidate studying at the University of British Columbia. During their conversation, Kiera shares her perspectives as an Onkwehón:we curriculum scholar in relation to the 2020 Pandemic. They discuss some of the following concepts: seasonal knowledge, renewal, a returning to Elders’ teachings, land, prophecies, educational estrangement, ethical relational spaces, transformational pops, whose water are we standing on, Haudenosaunee and Kanenstóhare theories, curriculum studies, homecoming, being an uninvited guest, spirit and ceremony in education, a post-TRC educational landscape, Indigenous autobiography, a corn soup research methodology, and so much more.

In this tenth episode, Dr. Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Irwin, former Associate Dean of Teacher Education at the University of British Columbia. During their conversation, Dr. Irwin shares her perspectives as an a/rtist, r/esearcher, t/eacher, and writer in the “Wake” of the COVID-19 Pandemic. She discusses some of the following concepts: slow scholarship, walking as an embodiment “being” and “becoming” in the world beyond the ineffable, gender issues, ongoing evolution of a/r/tography, existential potentials, renderings of living artistic inquiries, practices, processes, and concepts as methods, new materialism, image-making with graduate students, intravention versus intervention, teaching Grade 6, limits of representationalism, her pedagogy, and so much more.

In this ninth episode, Dr. Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Timothy J. Stanley, former Interim Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies @uOttawa. During their conversation, Dr. Stanley shares his perspectives as a historian about the invisibility of everyday racisms in Canada. He discusses some of the following concepts: the rise of anti-Chinese racisms, the tragic death of Colten Boushie, the grammar of settler colonial racializations, racisms, and organized exclusions, the genealogy of Canadian settler property rights, removing monuments, the genealogical privileging certain inclusions and exclusions, living in Montreal as a mixed race youth, banning public expressions of faith in Quebec, the removal of national statues, living in China, and so much more.

In this eighth episode, Dr. Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Theodore Christou, Associate Dean at the Queen’s University. During their conversation, Dr. Christou shares his perspectives as a philosopher, historian, and humanist in relation to the 2020 Pandemic. He discusses some of the following concepts: traditional and progressive education, homelessness, philosophers, empathy, collective public security, living toward democracy, an inadequate social system for Elders, pivoting, limits of 21st Century learning, mental testing, social efficiency, streaming, a fortifying curriculum, studying characters of the humanities and changes within Ontario public schooling, the Great Depression, city states, travel, hybrid identities, legacies of settler colonialism and its faith, hope, and so much more.

In this seventh episode, Dr. Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Jennifer Tupper, Dean at the University of Alberta Faculty Education on Treaty 6. During their conversation, Dr. Tupper shares her perspectives on responding as an educational leader to systemic economic, educational, health crises as a community. She discusses some of the following concepts: living transitions as an educational leader, treaty ethics, education, and relations, ethical relationality, disrupting a settler imaginary, White settler historical consciousness, life writing process, family stories, teacher education, social studies education, collaborating with Elders and teachers, encountering one’s privilege as a white settler educator, citizenship education, restorying to be unsettled, and so much more.

In this sixth episode, Dr. Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Cathryn van Kessel, also known as @DrEvilAcademic in relation to her work at the University of Alberta. During their conversation, Dr. van Kessel shares her perspectives on terror management theory (TMT) in relation to the politics of coping with existential threat during a pandemic. She discusses some of the following concepts: love of history, living in Alberta, our mortality, encountering worldviews, fetishizing fear, genocide, assimilation, derogation, annihilation, tolerance, DJ-ing interdisciplinary studies, existential antiracist theory, ideas on evil and death, species humility, Ernest Becker, Alain Badiou, Hannah Arendt, being a weird academic, feeling gross, a caring classroom, and so much more.