Ways of Knowing

In this episode of the Peter Wall Institute's Ways of Knowing, 2021 Wall Scholar Annette Henry (Language and Literacy Education & the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, UBC) speaks with educator activist Shelley-Anne Vidal about her experiences as a Black woman growing up in and around Vancouver.

To date, documentation of the experiences of contemporary African Canadians tends to focus for the most part, on Eastern Canada. British Columbia has its own richness in history, culture and intellectual traditions as well as challenges.

As part of her work, Dr. Henry has interviewed a range of Black people who have contributed to civic participation in Metro Vancouver in an attempt to understand both the individual and the broader socio-historical context in which they live. Her interviews are not a “who’s who” but rather an attempt at understanding the lives of everyday Black people who share a passion for equity, justice and a love for their black communities.

2021 Wall Scholars Tom Scholte (Theatre & Film), Khanh Dao Duc (Mathematics) and Hannah Wittman (Land & Food Systems) in conversation about a new collaboration that brings together data analysis and visualization from mathematics and the web-based LiteFarm app to help sustainable and diversified farmers around the world manage and keep track of their data more easily.

Wall Scholar Sheila Teves, a molecular biologist at the University of British Columbia, joins fellow 2020 Wall Scholar Jennifer Black to discuss how her background as a Filipina immigrant has influenced her scientific journey and her advocacy towards increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the sciences.

With near daily calls to build back better after the pandemic, what does this mean for a world in crisis and in particular what does it mean for education? 2020 Wall Scholar Dr. Michelle Stack speaks with Dr. Cilla Ross about what happens when we think beyond education as a public good and the possibilities of a cooperative university. Dr. Cilla Ross. is an educator and a sociologist of work and is an Honorary Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham. She co-authored the groundbreaking book on the possibilities of cooperatives in higher education Reclaiming the University for the Public Good: Experiments and Futures in Co-operative Higher Education.

In this episode, Wall Scholar Hoi Kong invites Jinpa Thupten and Jessica Main to explore the actual and potential adaptions of Buddhist practices and concepts for training in professional disciplines, including medicine and law. They also discuss how Buddhist communities adopt institutional structures and address concerns that would be familiar to legal scholars. Finally, they consider how the concept of justice—a central preoccupation of law—might be shaped by the idea of compassion—a central idea in Buddhism.

Mohammed Rafi Arefin, an urban geographer and 2021 Wall Scholar, joins 2020 Wall Scholars Y-Dang Troeung and M. V. Ramana to take us on a fascinating journey through the often overlooked topic of waste. Their conversation discusses the ethics of waste surveillance and pans out to view waste as a product of a much broader system of power, politics and inequality.

Dr. Arefin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia researching and teaching on urban environmental politics. His current research on the historical development and contemporary politics of Cairo’s solid waste and sewage systems has appeared in the journals Antipode, Progress in Human Geography, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

This episode was produced remotely with Drs. Arefin, Troeung, and Ramana recording from separate locations.

Dr. Carl Hansen, CEO of AbCellera Biologics, a technology company that discovered the world’s first antibody therapy authorized to treat mild to moderate COVID-19 sits down with 2020 Wall Scholars Dr. Purang Abolmaesumi and Dr. Lara Boyd for a conversation about his unique career path and how he transitioned from academic to innovative corporate leader.

Bio: Dr. Hansen works at the interface of engineering, biology and computation. He is the co-founder and CEO of AbCellera Biologics. His significant contributions to society are represented in 90 peer-reviewed manuscripts and abstracts, 75+ patent applications, eight commercial products, two of BC’s fastest-growing biotechnology companies and nearly 300 new jobs in BC.

Welcome to the first episode of our second season of the Ways of Knowing podcast. In this episode Dr. Carla Nappi, a historian of the pre-modern world, joins 2020 Wall Scholar Dr. Carrie Jenkins to discuss what happens when academic scholarship and creative art practice collide, and the experience of collaborating across disciplinary and other boundaries.

Dr. Nappi is Andrew Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, and her most recent book is Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities (OUP 2021). She and Dr. Jenkins are long-standing academic and artistic collaborators. Their co-authored book of poetry, Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato, was published in 2020 by McGill Queens University Press.

Y-Dang Troeung, an expert on critical refugee studies, joins Kalina Christoff to discuss what’s missing from the global refugee narrative – and the more complicated history revealed through combining scholarship and personal experience. Dr. Troeung is a professor of English at UBC and a 2020 Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Her book, Refugee Lifeworlds: Aphasia and the Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, is forthcoming by Temple University Press.