Category: 2022

These are some of the pieces of multimedia submitted by the 2022 cohort, with contributions from:

Simi Di Paula and Davin Kim
Miranda Tsuyuki

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Disney, WTF!?

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, it is extremely racist!

Creator:
Simi Di Paula
Davin Kim 김다빈

Who would have guessed that Disney would have a history of racist portrayals of Asian characters? (spoilers: me) Follow Simi and Davin’s eye-catching presentation about the numerous examples of Disney’s terrible portrayals of Asian characters, from something as explicit as caricatured speech of some unseen Japanese character in the 40s, to something more subtle like who does and doesn’t have accents in the 90s. They go through the psychology of why representation is important, and how representation (and the lack thereof) affects people’s health. In watching their presentation, I invite you to think – are things better now? If so, in what ways are they better? And if not, what needs to change?

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Lost in Language

Growing up in Canada my whole life, I didn’t know [the Japanese language or Japanese traditions], and I felt a sense of shame.

Creator:
Miranda (Kimiko) Tsuyuki (she/her)

Trauma isn’t something that just one person experiences – it’s something that a whole community can experience. This kind of trauma can even have intergenerational effects that ripple through time. The Canadian government is no stranger to inflicting this kind of pain given its historical and ongoing genocidal actions against Indigenous people. While on a much smaller scale, Japanese Canadian communities along the west coast were forced to reckon with its own collective trauma. The Japanese internment during World War 2 ripped families apart, forcibly extricated citizens from their homes, confiscated citizens’ property, and even forcefully repatriated Japanese Canadians back to Japan despite it being a completely foreign land to many affected people. This led many Japanese Canadians to make the difficult choice of eschewing their own culture in hopes that future descendants would not be subject to such painful and humiliating discrimination. So how does one living amidst all of this find their way back?

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