Summer 2021: Semester in New Times

We are living through extraordinary times. A global pandemic, climate collapse, and a tremendous civil rights movement are transforming life as we know it. Change is all around us. We are curious about how we may likewise shape, and be shaped by, change. Semester in New Times imagines new frameworks for social transformation. The course is an invitation for students to consider the parallel journey of personal inner work and large-scale social change, to connect meaningfully in a time of isolation, and to think and plan together as a new era emerges.

Semester in New Times is a multidisciplinary offering for students curious about navigating life in multitudes and bridging seemingly disparate worlds in the service of ethical social transformation. 

We will focus our thinking, engagement, and research about social transformation in the following three domains of research practice and community mobilization:

• Making infrastructures (communities)
• Building care structures for mental health 
• Forging social and environmental justice 

These pools of activity will set the context through which students will engage in dialogue-archive and mount projects to form horizons for social transformation in new times.

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Am Johal is excitedly returning to the Semester in Dialogue for the third time! Am works as Director of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Co-Director of the Community Engaged Research Initiative and the host of the Below the Radar podcast. He is author of 'Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene' (2015) and co-author with Matt Hern and Joe Sacco of 'Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale' (2018). He is a board member with 221A, the Indian Summer Festival and the Bloom Group.

Stuart Poyntz is tremendously excited to join the Semester in Dialogue program. Stuart has been involved in media democracy projects and youth arts organizations for more than two decades and is currently, Co-Director of the Community Engaged Research Centre (CERi) at Simon Fraser University and an Associate Professor in the School of Communication. He writes regularly on children’s media cultures, public scholarship and urban youth arts cultures, and he has published four books and written many articles and book chapters for national and international publications. He is also a Dialogue Associate with the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue.

Jackie Wong is thrilled to teach in the Semester in Dialogue's summer session for the second time. She loves working with students and learning alongside them. She started teaching journalism and writing in post-secondary contexts in 2012 while she was working in journalism and non-profit organizations in the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown communities, through which she has written about housing, drug policy, and racial equity issues. Jackie has spent recent years specializing in delivering facilitation, program design, and editorial services for community organizations, and she now works with SFU's Community Engaged Research Initiative as its Community Strategic Initiatives Associate. She is a dialogue-archive associate with the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and a board member of SWAN Vancouver.