Category Archives: Speakers

Zool Suleman, Editor, Rungh

Critical Reflections on Asian/South Asian Culture Making (1990s -2020s) through a Rungh lens

Zool Suleman is the Editor of Rungh and the Executive Director of the Rungh Cultural Society. He co-founded Rungh in 1991. He has been involved in a variety of capacities with the Canada Council for the Arts, Heritage Canada, Province of BC (arts and culture), and the City of Vancouver (immigration and arts/culture). His writing has been published in Ankur, Fuse, Parallelogram, the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Observer, and the National Observer. He has been a member of various arts Boards in Vancouver including the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, and the Pacific Music Industry Association.

Enakshi Dua, Professor. Chair of the Race Equity Committee, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University.

AsianCrit or Critical Race Theory? Thinking How to Theorize anti-Asian racism in relation to anti-Black racism and Indigeneity

Enakshi Dua is a Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She teaches critical race theory, anti-racist feminist theory, post colonial studies and feminist theory. She has published extensively on theorizing racism and anti-racism, racism in Canadian Universities, equity policies and anti-racism policies. Her notable publications include Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist Thought, The Hindu Woman’s Question, From Subjects To Aliens: Indian Migrants, The Racialisation of Canadian Citizenship, Decolonising Anti-Racism, Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories and The Equity Myth: Race, Racialization and Indigeneity in Canadian Universities.

Rita Wong, Poet-Scholar, Emily Carr University of Art and Design

Decolonizasian Revisited: Centring Relations with Indigenous Communities and Lands

Rita Wong is a poet-scholar who attends to the relationships between water justice, ecology, and decolonization. She has co-edited an anthology with Dorothy Christian entitled Downstream: Reimagining Water, based on a gathering that brought together elders, artists, scientists, writers, scholars, students and activists around the urgent need to care for the waters that give us life.  A recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop Emerging Writer Award, Wong is the author of several books of poetry, including most recently current, climate (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2021).

Morning Keynote 

Ryan Shin, Professor, University of Arizona

AsianCrit and Counter-Narratives in Art Education

Ryan Shin is a professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona, Editor, Convergence of Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Global Civic Engagement (IGI Global), Co-editor, Pedagogical Globalization: Traditions, Contemporary Art, and Popular Culture of Korea (International Society for Education through Art). He was inducted as 2021 USSEA Kenneth Marantz Distinguished Fellow. His research interests include Asian popular media and visual culture, critical discourse on Asian identity and teacher decolonization, global civic engagement, and application of new media and technologies to school and other educational settings. He is the Media Review Editor of Studies in Art Education and served as co-editor of Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education (2016-2018). His articles have appeared in Studies in Art Education, Art Education, Visual Arts Research, Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, and International Journal of Education through Art. He also has authored numerous book chapters, and has given presentations at national and international levels.

Afternoon Keynote

Roland Sintos Coloma, Professor, Wayne State University

Critical Race, Anticolonial, and Asian Canadian Theorizing

Roland Sintos Coloma is a professor of Teacher Education at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Previously he was a faculty member in the Department of Social Justice Education at OISE University of Toronto (2008-2014). A scholar of history, cultural studies, and education, his research addresses critical questions of race, gender, and sexuality from transnational and intersectional perspectives. His publications include Asian Canadian Studies Reader (2017), Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility (2012), and Postcolonial Challenges in Education (2009). He has successfully garnered over $2 million of external funding from federal, education, philanthropic, and non-profit agencies, including SSHRC in Canada. Roland served as president of the American Educational Studies Association (2018-19) and editor of the Educational Studies journal (2014-17). In 2017, he received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Research on the Education of Asian Pacific Americans special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. In 2020, he was appointed to the Governor of Michigan’s statewide Asian Pacific American Affairs Commission.

Sunera Thobani, Professor, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia

Asian Canadian Studies: Challenges in an Age of Catastrophes

Sunera Thobani is Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship focuses on critical race, postcolonial and transnational feminist theory; intersectionality and social movements; colonialism, indigeneity and racial violence; globalization, citizenship and migration; representations of Islam and Muslims in South Asian and Western media; and Muslim Women, Islamophobia and the war on terror.

Dr. Thobani is the author of Contesting Islam, Constructing Race and Sexuality (2020) Exalted Subjects; Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada, (2007); and co-editor of Coloniality and Racial (In)Justice in the University (2022); Asian Women: Interconnections, (2005) and States of Race: Critical Race Feminist Theory for the 21^st Century, (2010).  Her research is also published in numerous edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including Borderlands, Atlantis, Feminist Theory, The Supreme Court Review, International Journal of Communication, Hypatia and Race & Class.

Nicole Y. S. Lee, independent researcher

Resisting Erasure: Art Education Stories from a Chinese Canadian Perspective

Nicole Y. S. Lee completed her PhD in Curriculum Studies, specializing in Art Education, at The University of British Columbia. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts (studio), BEd, and MEd from York University. Layering concept, making, and embodied practices, her a/r/tographic, curricular, and philosophical research develops curricula for artful, purposeful, and meaningful living. Nicole edits anthologies in the fields of a/r/tography, arts-based educational research, and curriculum studies.

Yi Meng, PhD Candidate, Simon Fraser University | Lecturer, Zhengzhou University

Beyond In-Outsiders: Fostering a Creative Third Space in Art Education

Yi Meng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Arts Education program at Simon Fraser University and a lecturer in the School of Fine Arts at Zhengzhou University, China. She maintains a BA and MA in Visual Communication from Northwest University and an MEd from Queensland University of Technology. Since 2016, she has been teaching art and design courses at LaSalle College Vancouver. Her research interests include art and design, visual culture, multimodality, social semiotics, virtual worlds, Asian art and identity, and multicultural art education. Yi’s articles have been published in Chinese and English journals.

Kevin T. Day, Sessional Lecturer, UBC School of Information

Playing the Race Card: “Asian Art” within Discussions of Contemporary Art

Kevin T. Day is a Taiwanese-Canadian media artist, art educator, and media theorist. His practice and research, encompassing sound, video, graph, web, and interactive installations, examine contemporary art’s pedagogical capacity in response to the current socio-political issues of digital culture. Day received his PhD in Curriculum Studies from the University of British Columbia. He has presented at numerous conferences such as InSEA, ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art), and UAAC (Universities Arts Association of Canada). He has published in the top international journals for art and technology such as PACMCGIT and Leonardo. His work had been generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and SSHRC. Currently, he teaches digital art in the UBC Bachelor of Media Studies program and the politics of media and information at the UBC School of Information.