FASS presents the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellows

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) is pleased to introduce the scholars selected as the 2019-20 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellows in the Humanities.

WHERE: SFU Harbour Centre, Room 1400-1420, Segal Centre, 515 W. Hastings St., Vancouver, B.C.
WHEN: 7:00–9:00 pm, January 31, 2020.

Please register for the reception on Eventbrite.

The Shadbolt Fellows will engage with Metro Vancouver communities through exhibits, performances, artworks, workshops and events that realize our values of advancing reconciliation; equity, diversity and inclusion; and communication, coordination, and collaboration.

“The diverse talents and contributions of the Shadbolt Fellows showcase how the arts and humanities can help us both in making sense of today’s world and making it what we think it should be,” says Lisa Shapiro, Acting Dean of FASS. “They exemplify Jack and Doris Shadbolt’s vision of attending to our natural and social environments and harnessing the power of imagination to, quite simply, make the world a better place.”

Commencing in 2019, the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellowships in the Humanities Program supports up to five resident Fellows a year. Fellows will be engaged academic scholars, artists, knowledge keepers, practitioners or writers in the humanities and arts.

The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellowship in the Humanities Program exists to promote the practices of, and approaches to, the humanities and arts—broadly conceived—as important sites of creative and critical engagement with the major concerns of our times.

Shadbolt Fellows

Carleigh Baker is a Métis/Icelandic writer based in Vancouver. As an organizer, mentor and advocate, she has made valuable contributions to the Indigenous literature community. During her time at SFU, Baker is writing a new novel about environmentalists facing the Canadian wilderness and surviving only due to the generosity of the local Indigenous community. She also working with community collaborators on representation and space claiming. With SFU Galleries, Baker is organizing workshops, talks, reading groups, film screenings, and other events that engage students, faculty and the public in questions around art and culture’s role in cultural representation, Indigenous methodologies, and other ways of defining and acquiring knowledge.

Denielle Elliott is an Associate Professor at York University, and the co-founder and co-curator of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography. While at SFU, Elliott proposes to work on how experiments in ethnographic writing, creative arts and multimedia can shift our understanding of what it is like to be diagnosed and live with acquired traumatic brain injuries. She will hold an exhibition as well as a series of public conversations with artists who have created films, performances, literary works, animations, and paintings as part of their recovery.

Lucia Lorenzi is an emerging scholar and artist who has made numerous contributions to public dialogues about sexual violence, regularly engaging with this issue through social, mainstream and alternative media channels. She has been awarded for her public service with a prestigious Governor General’s award in Commemoration of the Persons Case, which is awarded to Canadians who have made significant contributions to advancing gender equality. Lorenzi’s project at SFU involves researching her book about the Robert Pickton case, focusing on how city design, planning, and funding relate to questions of memory and violence. She also plans to work with community collaborators to host a public symposium on the issue of public memory and gendered and sexualized violence, as well as other activities with students and faculty.

Susan Mertens has forged a successful career as an arts critic and cultural commentator, and is currently working on an edited collection of the poems, letters and journals of Jack Leonard Shadbolt. During her fellowship, Mertens proposes to re-invigorate Jack Shadbolt’s spirit of engagement with a performative piece of life writing that choreographs Shadbolt’s words spoken against projections of his art, images from his sketchbooks and photographs from his personal collection and beyond.

Dylan Robinson is a xwélméxw artist and scholar of Stó:lō descent. He is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. While at SFU, Robinson will work on the sensory politics of Indigenous Public Art and Indigenous Song-life. In collaboration with Dr. Keren Zaiontz, another Fellow, he plans to chart the ways in which public art in Vancouver has shifted in relation to public discourses of accessibility, recognition and the right to the city as experienced by Indigenous people and the disabled/deaf community in Vancouver over the past decade. He will also collaborate on the creation of new walking tours and an experimental documentary short on “walking the Indigenous city.”

Keren Zaiontz is Assistant Professor and Queen’s National Scholar of Creative Industries in the Global City in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. She is co-editor of Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas and author of Theatre and Festivals. For her project Zaiontz will develop a research-creation program to show how disability art and performance in a global city like Vancouver takes us beyond accommodation to disabled-led advocacy and self-determined futures. She aims to form a working group of disability artists, art-activists and scholars to examine the challenges of the disabled participating fully in city life; facilitate a series of intersectional walking tours for the PuSH performing arts festival, create an open access audio piece by walking with local writers invested in activist urban poetics, describing what they see for those who are blind while conversing about art practices.