A Dialogue With Japanese Canadian/American/Transnational Scholars

A Roundtable Discussion with Takashi Fujitani (University of Toronto), Lisa Yoneyama (University of Toronto), Laura Ishiguro (UBC), Ayaka Yoshimizu (UBC), Angela May (McMaster) and Nicole Yakashiro (UBC) and Takara Ketchell (University of Alberta); Chaired by Kirsten Emiko McAllister (SFU).

Tuesday, February 7 at 6:00 p.m. | HC 2270

The production of knowledge has always been a site of power and struggle for critical scholars whose communities have been constituted through the discourses of Empire and the colonial settler state. Many of the methodological approaches in our various fields reinforce heteronormative, racist ethno-national, colonial and imperial discourses and agendas. It can be challenging to find ways to critique these pervasive discourses, which can also widely circulate in our communities. This roundtable includes critical Japanese Canadian, American and transnational scholars who have explored and developed new ways to critique and track power, to generate new practices, narratives and understandings of our worlds to enact and imagine more ethical and accountable (in addition to playful and joyous life-giving) ways of being in our diverse relations to whomever is constituted as “community”, to other peoples, to the lands and waters that sustain human and non-human life across the borders colonialism and Empire assert. Coming from different positionalities and generations, these scholars are based at universities across the Canadian settler nation state. They will discuss their research interests and the challenges they have faced and the methodological approaches they have developed, including creative approaches that defy the objectifying agendas of social scientific frameworks as they attempt to generate multiple circuits and circulations across borders, including bodily, national and discursive borders, that entail self-reflexity, care, respect and criticality.