Patchworks

Kai Cheng Thom revisits the themes from her talk "When Things Fall Apart: Conflict, Crisis and Collective Healing in Activist Moments" in a conversation led by Lindsey Nkem and Patchworks podcast co-host Rodney Stehr live at Green College. She asks how can we do conflict in a better way - and how can we avoid the tempting rush towards solutions or punishment when facing a conflict where so much is at stake?

Cree author and lawyer Michelle Good joins the podcast to talk about her book Five Little Indians which won of Canada Reads 2022, the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award - among many other accolades. She discusses braided narrative, her J.V. Clyne lectures titled "Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Fingerprints in the 21st Century", and her journey through her many accomplishments that span across law and literature.

Join Green College residents Rodney Stehr and Serena Klumpenhouwer (PhD student) as they interview Dr. Xine Yao, a lecturer at University College London and co-host of the podcast "PHDivas", about their recently published book, "Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth Century America". Drawing on the works of Melville, Sui Sin Far, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Dr. Yao talks about disaffection as a form of affective disobedience, how exploring unfeeling can challenge norms around expressivity and whose emotions get acknowledged, and the task of asking ourselves whether we are playing the role of a Judas goat in institutional spaces.

Originally born during the Second World War in the Southern Indian state of Kerala, Patsy George has spent most of her life doing social work in Vancouver, but she is far more than just a social worker. At various times throughout her career, Patsy has represented Canada to the United Nations, was Director of Multiculturalism BC and BC's Immigrant Settlement Services, she was President of Vancouver's United Nations branch, Vice-President of the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women, helped found the Steven Lewis Foundation, Vancouver's Society of Immigrant Women and Pacific Immigrant resources Society, was an honorary witness to the truth and reconciliation Commission, and served on the Federal Refugee Appeal Board. Patsy has received honorary doctorates from UBC and the University of the Fraser Valley, as well as the Order of British Columbia, the Order of Canada and several Queen's Jubilee medals among many other awards for her community work.

In this episode, Patsy talks about her childhood in Kerala, her experiences of racism in the United States, and her career as a social work in in Canada, including what it means to her to do work not in the community, but with the community.

Fashion historian and curator Jason Cyrus joins the podcast to discuss his latest exhibition, History is Rarely Black or White, on view at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. This exhibition traces connections between the cotton industry of the 1800s and the Transatlantic Slave Trade through archival research, conservation, and science. Cyrus also traces the trajectory of his professional career in the fashion industry and his academic and curatorial work. He begins with his visit to Alexander McQueen's "Savage Beauty" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cyrus then discusses his master's thesis on the writing of André Leon Talley and how marginalized identities rise above through style, clothing, and taking up space. Finally, he closes with an overview of History is Rarely Black or White.

Photo credit: Jason Cyrus

Mary Kitagawa discusses the heinous events she experienced during Japanese Canadian incarceration and the fight for justice afterwards. This horrible event occurred between 1941-1949 and led to 22,000 Japanese Canadians being imprisoned, dispossessed, detained, and forced into low-wage labour by the Government of Canada. The trauma from this unspeakable event lives on in the survivors and their descendants. In this PCHC-MoM collaboration episode, Mary discusses her family’s experience of incarceration and the impact it had on her life and on the Japanese Canadian (JC) community, and the advocacy work she did with her husband Tosh Kitagawa. Together, they worked on every project to find justice for the JC community with the Japanese Canadian Citizens Association and Human Rights Committee (JCCAHRC). This work is visible in two important projects, the Landscapes of Injustice and Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre in Burnaby.

University of British Columbia professor Renisa Mawani guides us through the beginning of her career as a critical theorist and legal scholar studying the history of empire and colonialism. She talks about the origins of her focus on Asian migration and Indigenous dispossession as overlapping histories in her first book, Colonial Proximities, and how this focus arose from family histories of migration. She walks us through some of her methodology, how she makes sense of archives and how charting lines on a map led her to consider colonial legal history in oceanic terms, to see 'oceans as method' in her second book, Across Oceans of Law. She talks about interdisciplinary work as learning to speak new languages and broaches what it's like to publish and work in academia, with mentions of her most recent co-edited work in Animalia, and her upcoming book project on colonialism and piracy.

Kalani and Rodney's conversation dives into how her Chamorro heritage and Micronesian upbringing influenced her work as executive producer of the Indigenous podcast Deep Pacific. Deep Pacific is a growing, ground-breaking new podcast series that weaves diverse Pacific Island voices and experiences together to educate and connect emerging voices from across the pacific. Rodney speaks on how this podcast impacted him as a Pasifika living in diaspora and the importance that podcasts like Deep Pacific play in connecting communities and raising awareness.