Dear Roundtable Participants,

Welcome to the “Breathing Life into the Ashes: Resilience, Arts and Social Transformation” roundtable group!  The roundtable will be held at the Peter Wall Institute at UBC, Vancouver from October 21st to 26th, 2012. Michelle LeBaron and Cynthia Cohen are the co-convenors of the roundtable, and Megan Coyle will be assisting.

The roundtable will be an exciting opportunity to bring into generative and lively collaboration an intercultural, international group of practitioners and scholars positioned to advance the work of Social Transformation and Arts (STA) with the following three purposes:

to explore and deepen experience and understandings of individual and collective resilience;

to develop an infrastructure to strengthen the resilience and the legitimacy of the STA field; and

to advance understanding of assessment and evaluation in STA fields.

Together, participants will examine how STA fosters positive social change in settings around the world. The roundtable will include performances highlighting arts-based work as a response to systemic and other violence that powerfully illustrate the potency of STA. It will provide a forum for planning ways to advance this work and strengthen existing networks.  Professors LeBaron and Cohen imagine this roundtable as a way to provide artists and scholar/practitioners with a rare and wonderful opportunity to meet and collaborate in ways that refresh and inspire. They will be in touch with you to discuss specific contributions you might make to the gathering.  In preparation for the roundtable the group can use this website to interact and we can assemble and share information about the participants, readings, the schedule, etc.  You can ask me questions at any point, and I will do my best to find the answers if I cannot assist directly.  Specific information about the agenda and activities will be available about a month before the roundtable begins; before that, information about booking flights and other travel arrangements will be circulated. Please check to see if you need a visa to enter Canada, and let us know if you need an official letter to facilitate the application process.  (If you need an official letter of invitation to request a leave from your institution please let us know that as well.) Those coming from continents away can arrive as early as the Friday before, so please let me know if you might like to do so for purposes of booking accommodation.  A list of confirmed participants will also be circulated shortly.