UBC’s Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Program presents “Sexual Violence in Asian Communities in Canada.”
Join Dr. Nora Angeles, Dr. JP Catungal, and K.Ho as they discuss sexual violence in Asian communities in Canada. The audience will engage in a facilitated dialogue with the panelists as we explore how sexual violence impacts Asian communities in Canada through the context of colonization and racism. How might certain cultural codes inform sexual violence against women and LGBTQ people in Asian communities in Canada? What can these communities do to address sexual violence, keeping in mind particular histories of violence and oppression? We invite you to explore these questions and more in this engaging panel discussion with ACAM faculty, students, and friends. As well, Dr. CJ Rowe will be present to talk about support services available at UBC and in the larger Vancouver community.
This event took place on the traditional, unceded, ancestral homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nation on March 18, 2016.
Speaker Bios
LEONORA ANGELES
Leonora (Nora) C Angeles is Associate Professor at the School of Community and Regional Planning and the Women’s and Gender Studies Undergraduate Program at the University of British Columbia. She is currently the Graduate Program Advisor of the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies. She is also faculty research associate at the UBC Centre for Human Settlements where she has been involved in a number of applied research and capacity-building research projects in Brazil, Vietnam and Southeast Asian countries. Her continuing research and interests are on community and international development studies and social policy, participatory planning and governance, participatory action research, and the politics of transnational feminist networks, women’s movements and agrarian issues, particularly in the Southeast Asian region.
JP CATUNGAL
Dr. JP Catungal is Instructor I (Tenure-Track) in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies in the GRSJ Institute. His teaching interests include anti-racist feminisms, queer-of-colour critique, the politics of knowledge production, and migration and diaspora studies. JP’s research develops queer-of-colour and anti-racist feminist interventions in the scholarship of teaching and learning. He is also engaged in ongoing work on racial geographies of sexual health, alignments between homonationalism and straight allyship, and queer-of-colour theorizing in Filipinx-Canadian studies.
K.HO
K is a queer, non-binary Chinese settler raised in unceded Coast Salish territories. They put energy into QTIPOC communities, representations, and activisms. Currently, they are facilitating a student directed seminar titled “Voices from the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Race, Sexuality, and Settler Colonialism,” focusing on women of colour and Indigenous feminisms, queer of colour critiques, and community- and art-based resistance movements. K is an editor for The Talon and a portrait photographer whose work is framed in community representation and radical visibility.
CJ ROWE
CJ Rowe is a Diversity Advisor, Sexual Assault Intervention & Prevention in Student Development and Services at UBC and received a Ph.D. in Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education in 2014. CJ’s work as a Diversity Advisor, uses a feminist intersectional approach to provide leadership in the development and implementation of the University’s Sexual Assault Intervention and Prevention Education plan. CJ’s research interests include queer theory, postfeminism, embodied pedagogy, performance studies, and women’s music.
Select Articles and Books Available at UBC Library
Basanti-Sidhu, H. (. (2013). Sexual Abuse in the South Asian Diaspora Community of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. [Link]
Hodgson, J. F., & Kelley, D. S. (2002;2001;). Sexual violence: Policies, practices, and challenges in the united states and canada. Westport, Conn: Praeger. [Link]
Postmus, J. L., & Gale (Firm). (2013;2012;). Sexual violence and abuse: An encyclopedia of prevention, impacts, and recovery. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO. [Link]
Thiara, R. K., Gill, A. K., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (2009;2010;). Violence against women in south asian communities: Issues for policy and practice. London;Philadelphia, PA;: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides



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Valerie Casselton is the Associate Editor, Integrated Projects for PNG, with responsibilities for both The Vancouver Sun and The Province. She is responsible for special series, publications and projects that promote audience engagement on all of the four platforms on which the newsrooms publish, both online and in-paper.
Farhan Mohamed is the Editor-in-Chief and a partner of Vancity Buzz, holding a BBA from CapU. He was brought on during Vancity Buzz’s grassroots stage, controlling day-to-day operations of the company and creating content. For most of his life, Farhan has volunteered and taken leadership roles with a number of different organizations that contribute to society on both a local and global scale. He has a strong passion for building relationships and creating communities through the use of technology. Before joining Vancity Buzz in 2012, Farhan got a taste of media by working at The Vancouver Sun & Province. Since then, his passion has been to change the way people consume news, harnessing the expanse of Vancity Buzz’s unfulfilled potential and turning the site into the dynamic, informative, multifaceted digital news source it has become. Today, Farhan leads the Editorial arm of Vancity Buzz, which has skyrocketed readership by over 15 times since he began, along with Calgary Buzz, the company’s 2015 expansion.
Paul Watson is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of two books, including the best-selling memoir Where War Lives. He spent most of more than a quarter century in journalism as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the Toronto Star. Paul resigned as The Star’s multi-media Arctic Correspondent after the newspaper tried to kill a story detailing how the Conservative government used the search for Sir John Franklin’s missing 19th century ships to push a political agenda. He is currently writing Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition to be published by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and W.W. Norton internationally. Paul is also the subject of an award-winning two-man play, The Body of an American, staged at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater from February 10 to March 20.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Woodward has joined the UBC Graduate School of Journalism for the academic year 2015-2016. Woodward brings to the school more than three decades of experience as an editor and reporter for major metropolitan daily newspapers in the U.S., with a track record in pioneering new approaches to journalism. He comes to the University of British Columbia from Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, where he taught journalism, transmedia, communication ethics, and media and culture for two years.

Andrew Chang joined CBC News Vancouver as host in the summer of 2014, shortly after returning from Sochi as part of CBC’s broadcast team. He has also spent time in the host chair for other network shows such as CBC Radio One’s The Current, CBC News’ The National and CBC News Now.
Shayne Ramsay was recently listed in Vancouver Magazine’s 50 most powerful people in Vancouver; the magazine stated “When you’re CEO of the provincial agency responsible for creating social housing in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets, you’re in the thick of one of the thorniest public-policy issues in the province.”
Bob Rennie is founder of Rennie Marketing Systems, whose recognized leadership for envisioning new and innovative strategies in development risk management and marketing real estate has led to landmark projects such as restructuring the Olympic Village and Woodward’s – in Canada’s poorest postal code. Also known for having built a world renowned collection of contemporary art, Bob chairs the North American Acquisitions Committee at Tate Modern, is a member of the Tate International Council, serves as trustee for the Art Institute of Chicago and is the recipient of the Queen’s Diamond and Golden Jubilee awards, the Order of BC and a doctorate from Emily Carr University. He renovated and restored Wing Sang, the oldest structure in Chinatown, to include a privately funded museum space with regular exhibitions of works from Rennie Collection. All exhibitions are open to the public with free admission two days a week.
Having started her career in television working for an MMA fight show and other various creative agencies as an editor, Lisa von Sturmer realized that she wanted to spend her life doing something positive that had a tangible impact on the community. In 2010, she quit her successful editing career, founded Growing City and never looked back.
Barbra A. Meek is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Native American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a Comanche citizen. Her research focuses on representations and performances of American Indian languages and speech, practically and theoretically. Much of her scholarship has focused on language endangerment and revitalization, having worked with First Nations in the Yukon Territory, Canada, on various aboriginal language projects since 1998. Her book, We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community (2010, University of Arizona Press) details this research and offers a socially grounded model for language revitalization. She continues to work with Kaska language teachers and advocates in their efforts to envision a future for the Kaska language. Her current book project is an edited volume with Paul Kroskrity on Native American publics and linguistic futures under contract with Routledge.