Rehearsals for Living: Shared Reading and Responses from Green College Leading Scholars

Please join a panel of Green College Leading Scholars for a reading discussion of the book Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Event organizers will conduct the moderated discussion as a roundtable, with comments on research by Leading Scholars and discussion with the attendees.

Copies of this book are available for borrowing from the Green College Office. To request a copy for loan, contact gc.reception@ubc.ca. Electronic copies are available at the UBC Library and the Vancouver Public Library.

James Connolly is an Assistant Professor in Community and Regional Planning at UBC. He is an urban planner specialized in the intersection between environmental planning and social justice. Broadly, his work asks how cities can be made greener and more socially just at the same time, without forcing one goal to be traded off for the other. His published works thus far explore this topic through a highly interdisciplinary and decidedly mixed methods approach with a focus on contemporary cities. He examines the issues at stake within several topics including urban climate planning; green gentrification; urban environmental stewardship; urban social-ecological justice; urban greening policies; and critical urban sustainability and resilience politics.

Igor Drljaca is an Assistant Professor in Theatre and Film, UBC. His work deals with memory, diaspora, trauma, ideology and dystopias. His award-winning films have screened at hundreds of festivals including Berlinale, Locarno, Toronto, Telluride and Rotterdam. His recent work includes the feature documentary The Stone Speakers (2018), which examines the intersection of ideology and post-war tourism in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the short The Archivists (2020), a sci-fi dystopian musical. The White Fortress (Tabija, 2021), his most recent feature, is the first co-production between Canada and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and had its world premiere at the 71st Berlinale. It is also Bosnia-Herzegovina’s selection in the 2022 International Feature Film Oscar race. He is also developing a VR project about the Canadian citizenship ceremony, The Oath, and a docufiction film, Park Europa, about Bosnia-Herzegovina’s future admission into the European Union.

Ayasha Guerin is an Assistant Professor in English Language and Literatures at UBC. She researches Black social life and ecology in New York City’s floodplain and she writes about how abolitionist activism on urban waterfronts has been shaped by diasporic relationships and inter-species entanglements. As an artist, she is invested in art practices that are also forms of activism and believes a responsibility of the research profession is to make knowledge accessible through public actions and exhibitions. Her second research project is focused on transnational Black feminism and arts activism in Berlin, Germany, where she has ongoing collective work with CCC (Curating through Conflict with Care) and Black Art Action Berlin.

Bronwen Tate is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in Creative Writing, UBC. Her areas of interest and accomplishment include poetry, literary criticism, creative nonfiction and scholarship on the teaching and learning of creative writing. She is currently at work on a book of creative nonfiction that explores the power and traps of stories and storytelling against the backdrop of the final years of an experimental college in crisis. As faculty in UBC’s Educational Leadership stream, she is also investigating teaching strategies that invite students to experience the deep process and sustained attention necessary for art-making, which are often in tension with social pressures towards efficiency and distraction.

Hannah Turner is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UBC. She researches the connection between cultural heritage and technology. She examines systems of classification and categorization in museum ethnographic collections, and experiments with how emerging technologies are used to represent cultural heritage.  

The city of Vancouver is often celebrated for its environmentalism and high quality of life for residents, but sitting with the harm of settler colonial influences on this land reveals deep-seated problems of cultural exclusion, environmental extraction and animal exploitation, real estate speculation and housing unaffordability, and social resistance to engage with antiracist critique. The series spotlights local activists and cultural practitioners who are creating counter-institutional mechanisms that confront the violence of settler colonialism and the unfettered extraction of environmental resources that has accompanied it. We invoke the term reparative justice to connote a range of activist practices that approach reparations, restitution and healing through cultural work and planning. This series features conversations that explore how the crumbling of social and material infrastructures can make space to build new systems and relationships with more ethical structures that address harms instead of ignoring them.

Series Conveners: Kimberly Bain, English Language and Literatures; James Connolly, Community and Regional Planning; Igor Drljaca, Theatre and Film; Ayasha Guerin, English Language and Literatures; Chris Patterson, Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice; Bronwen Tate, Creative Writing; and Hannah Turner, Information.