Creators Night with Rina Garcia Chua & Dr Anita Girvan

Join us for our fourth Creators Night on May 26th, from 7-9 pm NL time, for a talk with Rina Garcia Chua and Dr. Anita Girvan!

The current wave of activism for the BLM and Anti-Asian Racism movements have spurred many institutions in North America, including universities and scholarly and creative journals, to call, employ, solicit, and invite IBPOC creators to be a part of a “conversation” against racism; however, as these opportunities emerge, IBPOC creators are also situated in precarity regarding their own embodiments and agency. What does it mean to pause as IBPOC creators and to situate our own creative engagement with the world? What are the promises and limits of doing this work in such institutions?

This talk will engage with these questions through the perspectives of Dr. Anita Girvan and Rina Garcia Chua, both co-editors of the journal, The Goose, and working in the field of the environmental humanities. They will open up a discussion of what it means for IBPOC creators to pause in this time of urgency and change through their work with the “e-Race-sures” issue of The Goose and their own embodied experiences in the environmental humanities as scholars, advocates, and writers. They will also bring some of their own creative work into conversation in this space.

To check out The Goose, go to https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/

This event will be offered remotely through Zoom. Please provide your email in the following form and the invitation will be emailed to you prior to the event.

To register, fill out the form here:

*Registering in the form above does not make you obligated to attend, but it does give us permission to send you a link to the event prior to the start time.

This event is free and open to everyone. If there are any barriers to access this event, please email us at gallery@easternedge.ca so we can help resolve the issue.

We would like to thank the Office of Public Engagement and the Public Engagement Accelerator Fund for funding this event.

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Rina Garcia Chua (she/her/hers) is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She is the editor of Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry (2018), and Empire and Environment: Confronting Ecological Ruination in the Transpacific, co-edited with Heidi Hong, Jeffrey Santa Ana, and Xiaojing Zhou (forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press in 2022). She is also the Diversity Co-Officer for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), Poetry Editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, and is a member of the Anti-Racist and Equity Working Group (AREWG) of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC). Her website is https://www.rinagarciachua.com.

Dr. Anita Girvan (she/they) is an assistant professor of Cultural Studies at Athabasca University. Working in the fields of cultural politics of climate change and ecological metaphors, Anita is interested in exploring how we create worlds through relations of power in terms of, race, ecology, and (de)colonization. Beyond the academic realm of scholarly writing, Anita also experiments with spoken word and musical compositions, tapping into a rich tradition of IBPOC ways of sustaining life in troubled times.