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Home / News / Celebrate Learning Week 2012

Celebrate Learning Week 2012

October 4, 2012

The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre is pleased to two community events as part of Celebrate Learning Week 2012.

The Cross-Cultural Dialogue, October 27th, Saturday, 2:00-5:00 p.m. Closing Night and Art Sale, October 27, Saturday, 5:00-8:00 p.m. Room 261, Peace River Room, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

The October 27 cross-cultural symposium, pecha-kucha style, brings together artists, community organizers, youth leaders, planners and city residents to address questions about the role of arts, culture and artistic expressions in community capacity-building within and across multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-religious diasporic communities, marked by increased internal diversity and interactions with indigenous and settler communities, both old and new. What role do arts and culture play in citizenship building and community development within multicultural cities such as Vancouver? What can the arts, culture and artistic expressions do to engage multicultural communities in inter-cultural dialogues about social justice and sustainability in our cities that aim for greater social cohesion and inclusivity? How do Vancouver’s multi-cultural communities interpret, interrogate and interact with the City’s “green” and “sustainable city” vision and mandate, given these communities’ existing environmental knowledge and previous experiences with environmental agendas? What can the City of Vancouver and other Canadian cities, as well as the arts and community development community do to respond to these multiple voices and values to make our cities even more sustainable, just, inclusive, innovative, and creative?

Speakers and presenters include:

  • Judith Marcuse, LL.D. (Hon.), Founder and Co-Director, International Centre of Arts for Social Change; Simon Fraser University Faculty of Education
  • Alden Habacon, founder Schema Magazine; UBC Director, Intercultural Diversity and Strategy Development
  • Diana Leung, cultural planner, City of Vancouver, Cedar-Bamboo
  • Kamala Todd, social planner, City of Vancouver, Storyscapes
  • Callista Haggis & Claire Robson of Quirke (Queer Imaging, Riting Kollective of Elders)
  • Melanie Schambach, Emily Carr University
  • Norma-Jean McLaren, facilitator, artist, social planner
  • Raul Gatico, Mexican-Canadian poet and former political prisoner
  • Alejandra Lopez and Youth, La Boussole’s The Illustrated Journey Project
  • Honey Mae Caffin and JR Guerrero, CPSHR, Anti-Mining and Multi-Media experience
  • Metha Brown, film-maker, Peace It Together, Palestinian-Israeli-Canadian dialogues
  • Mutya Macatumpag, dancer, poet, singer, actor, founder of MoonpulsE Productions

This event is organized by Migrante BC, Canada-Philippine Solidarity for Human Rights, Multi-cultural Helping House Society, Tulayan, Kensington Community Office of MLA Mable Elmore and UBC Professor Leonora Angeles, are jointly sponsored by the City of Vancouver’s Community and Neighbourhood Arts and Development Grants Program 2012; University of British Columbia Irving K. Barber Learning Centre; Department of Asian Studies; Institute for Asian Research; Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice; Liu Institute for Global Issues; and the School of Community and Regional Planning.


Weyman Chan author eading and discussion of Chinese Blue, Chilcotin Room (Rm 256), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, October 30, 3.30-4.30 p.m.

On October 30,  the Learning Centre will feature poet Weyman Chan for an author reading and talk.  Drawing on more than two thousand years of ancient Chinese tradition that present diverse philosophical modes of being, whether it be the spiritual teachings of Kong Zi or Lao Tzu, the military dicta of Sun Tzu or the complex sensibilities expressed by poets such as Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, Li Bai, Du Fu and Wang Wei in the wake of a tumultuous imperial government, Weyman Chan restates these concerns of the past while addressing other “first world problems” in our own contemporary era.

In Chinese Blue, the poet “character” sifts through the earth’s long history of geological layering and forgetting, grappling with the perpetual fragmentation of identity. The poet struggles with the prospect of any inky blots that suggest the finished work of a creator, subject to expediencies—ambition, romance, betrayal—that leave us flawed and human, taking the reader on a spiritual quest burdened by an endless sea of flotsam.

In a stoic attempt to reconcile biological drives with a stance of non-presence and to find a place beyond “perpetual worry” where he can accept ancestral mistakes while tentatively channelling the voices of advertising that condition our vernacular and massage our minds—offering a cliché happy ending to what remains of our physical existence—the poet finds himself wading through jazzily visionary delineations of the modern city, numbed and soundly crushed between “the word and the thing.”  To attend this event, please register here.


 

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