Arts Multilingual Week 2022 (October 31st to November 4th, 2022) is organized in collaboration with over a dozen units across campus. The week’s events will feature students, scholars, and community members reflecting on multilingualism as a practice, discussing career opportunities for multilingual graduates, and performing multilingualism through artistic means.
The week of events will open with a roundtable on “Why we study languages” with Associate Dean Stefania Burk in conversation with faculty members from across the language disciplines. Then Arts Multilingual Week programming explodes with five days of programming that include three exciting student-centred events: an exhibition of untranslatable words and idioms, a Speech Contest on “What Multilingualism means to me…” and a Multilingual Poetry Slam.
In addition to Lightning Talks on Multilingual Pedagogies and various events on Multilingualism in teaching, research, and community practice, Arts Multilingual Week will also feature conversations on Indigenous languages and the Indigenous Atlas of Canada, Indigenizing language programs, a virtual American Sign Language (ASL) workshop, an introduction to DeafBlind Protactile Communication, and a presentation on the Deaf community and the marginalization of signed languages by local celebrity and UBC instructor Nigel Howard as well as a Bollywood Film Night with Popcorn and Pakora.
Finally, Dr. Guofang Li, UBC Professor and Canada Research Chair in Transnational/Global Perspectives of Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth from the Department of Language and Literacy Education will give a keynote entitled “Multilingualism as a Gift: Changing Mindsets, Changing Worlds”; Indigenous comics artist Cole Pauls will present his work on Indigenous language revitalization and his newest comic book Kwändǖr; and comics scholar Katherine Kelp-Stebbins will present research from her new book How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies (2022) in a talk entitled “Multilingualism in Comics from Haida Gwaii to Beirut.”
For more information on programming, please see our program schedule.
Events will take place in Dodson (room 302) in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (IKBLC) or in the Asian Studies Auditorium.
A light lunch will be served daily at 12 PM in Dodson (room 302) in the IKBLC.