Global Humanities Welcomes Adrian Ivakhiv as the incoming J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities

The Department of Global Humanities welcomes Adrian Ivakhiv as the new J.S Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities in June 2024. Adrian's presence not only signifies a significant addition to SFU's intellectual landscape but also heralds a renewed commitment to the values of social and environmental justice within the realm of Global Humanities. We had the pleasure of interviewing Adrian regarding his appointment as the  J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities. Read more for an in-depth insight into his new role.

Can you share what inspired you to apply for the J.S. Woodsworth Chair of the Humanities?

The figure of J. S. Woodsworth, and the Chair itself, was long familiar to me. I had taken a course at the University of Toronto’s Woodsworth College, named after J. S. Woodsworth, when I was an undergraduate at York University, and had learned about the history of the NDP, the CCF, and key figures in Canada’s social democratic tradition (including the late Ed Broadbent, who held the chair in the late 1990s). I was familiar with the University as well from its reputation as a “radical campus”—the title of a book by historian Hugh Johnston—and from its being the location of the World Soundscape Project, which had interested me greatly during my transition from being an undergraduate music major and budding composer (I’m still budding) to my humanistic studies of the environment at York’s highly interdisciplinary Faculty of Environmental Studies. Over the years, I’ve been happy to hear about the work of other Woodsworth appointees, including (previous chair) Eleanor Stebner and (resident scholar) Svend Robinson.  

An invited visit to SFU for an event sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities in 2019, called “Stalking the Chernobyl Zone,” deepened my interest in the University. So when a position announcement came across my in-box a few years later, I was keen to respond. My own desire, and my family’s, to return to Canada had waxed and waned over the years, as I enjoyed living and teaching in Vermont, ninety-minute drive from Montreal. But while my university is the state’s largest and especially known for its environmental offerings, the University of Vermont has no doctoral and only two master’s programs in the humanities. At the time I heard about the position, my interdisciplinary work had taken me abroad—to the tremendously rich environment of a research fellowship (in cinema/media studies) and Fulbright project (on Ukraine) based at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. Simon Fraser and the Vancouver area seemed to me a good Canadian equivalent to the global and transdisciplinary intellectual environment I was finding in Europe. At the same time, Canada was and remains home to me, and multiple shorter and longer visits to the west coast have left me with a deep and abiding attraction to it.

How do you see your background aligning with the values and legacy of J.S. Woodsworth?

My interest in social justice, coupled with the ethico-aesthetic-political orientation that underpins it, align very strongly with the best parts of Woodsworth’s legacy, as I understand them. Woodsworth believed in building a society that was more fair, more just, and more humane than the ones that dominated his time. He sought to do this through political action, even as he sought philosophical grounds that would support it through his theological studies and his Christian ministry. When he didn’t find them in one place (as in the Methodist Church or the Communist Party of Canada), he sought them elsewhere. Several decades later, my path also led me to a search for philosophical grounds both within and far beyond the Eastern Rite Christianity that my parents brought with them as war-displaced refugees to Canada. (I found those grounds in a mix of traditions including process philosophy, Buddhism, the cross-cultural study of spirituality, and, frankly, in what we could call the “global humanities”!)

My studies of the relationships between religion, culture, ecology, and politics, and my work in fostering creative collaborations across disciplines and between academe and the broader public—which I did in my capacity as Rubenstein Professor and coordinator of the EcoCultureLab “collaboratory”—have all been rooted in the commitment to building a society that is more just, more humane, and much more ecologically viable than the present one. I see my experience in instigating transdisciplinary collaboration as a special asset that I bring with me to the Vancouver area, and look forward to connecting across its campuses and communities.

What are your views on and how do you plan to address J.S. Woodsworth’s contentious legacy?

Woodsworth was no more nor less of his time than anyone else. Many social progressives on the political left, in the early 1900s, supported causes we would reject today. One such cause was eugenics—the idea that society could be improved through genetic selection applied at the level of individuals and that of ethnic and racial groups. Most of us find that idea repulsive today. When Woodsworth wrote Strangers Within Our Gates in 1909—in an Anglo-dominated Canada that looked to Britain for its model of uprightness, even as it strove to build a just, mutually supportive, and welcoming society—it was not seen the same way. But that doesn’t excuse its inadequacy, which was colonial and racist. After the rise to power of Hitler, and especially after the Holocaust, that legacy has rightfully become indefensible.

There are many parts of Woodsworth’s legacy that I wish to actively preserve and build on, and others that I would leave in the past, not quietly but with clear critical analysis. The educated elites in his time were Eurocentric, and in Canada anglocentric. Today’s Canada is a much different place: racially diverse and culturally much more colorful, my Canada, and even “my” Vancouver (a city to which I’ll be a newcomer), are deeply connected to countries across the Pacific and in fact around the world. At the same time, Indigenous communities have become and should remain much more central players in social and political processes.

In this sense, I see Woodsworth’s social justice legacy through a much more expansive and global lens, and still as deeply relevant today as it was in the last century. Many of his concerns—for workers’ rights, social security, accessible healthcare, alternatives to war, and so on—remain vital. Others, from women’s and LGBTQ rights to restorative and ecological justice, have become much more central. Defining social justice within our global situation of climate challenges, gross economic inequities, and deep cultural divides, remains an open and evolving imperative.

Starting in June 2024, what immediate goals or initiatives do you plan to pursue as the J.S. Woodsworth Chair?

I see the role of a Chair in the Humanities, connected to a Department of Global Humanities, as being on the one hand a celebration of humanity’s creative accomplishments—not just those represented by creative individuals such as the Homers, Du Fus, and Shakespeares of the world, but also by oral traditions and their poetic epics (the Mahabharata, the Epic of Sundiata), by those cultural ensembles UNESCO calls “intangible heritage,” and by the accumulated wisdom of living in particular places. On the other hand, the humanities contain a normative dimension by which each generation revisits the criteria for judging how we are to live, how we may be failing and succeeding, and how we ought to fulfill our best potentials for creativity, for beauty, for justice, and for a broader-than-human conviviality.

I am completing two books, each of which I hope will be published within the first year or two of my tenure as Woodsworth Chair. One, entitled The New Lives of Images, is a study of the role of images, in a digitally mediated society, in helping us grapple with what I call the “Anthropocene predicament”—the deeply fraught relationship between humans, in our many challenging political configurations, and the ecological and geoclimatic systems on which we depend. The second, Terra Invicta, is a curated anthology of wartime writing by Ukrainian scholars and artists articulating “what in the world is worth fighting for.” The wartime they write from is the present—a war between the fossil fuel, neo-imperialist superpower that is Putinist Russia and a country that wants to rule itself, democratically, and to pursue its own vision of a future for itself and the land that makes it. The insights they provide are insights we think will be valuable to many others who will also face conflicts, and even wars, in a “feverish” world in which climate change is poised to exacerbate existing conflicts over land, resources, identity, borders, and so much more. “Feverish World” was, incidentally, the name of a symposium and arts festival I organized with my colleagues in EcoCultureLab in Burlington, Vermont, a few years ago, and this theme remains very close to me.

Each of these projects is connected to a conceptual trajectory I intend to pursue as Woodsworth Chair. I see three key trajectories. The first is ecological: I take the humanities to be necessarily evolving into “eco-humanities” as we contend, collectively, with our ecological and climatological predicaments. The second is decolonial: the humanities can no longer afford to remain mired with the Eurocentric lenses that have so often contributed to misperceiving the “others” encountered through the colonialisms and imperialisms of the past. The world we live in is global and planetary; its humanistic traditions are multiple and varied, and require a genuinely decolonized understanding and appreciation. The third is what I call “mediological”: for good or ill, the literary, visual, and performative arts, and communication in general, are being thoroughly reconfigured by globally connective yet untransparent and “algorithmic” digital media. For this to become a good thing rather than a debilitating process—one that drains all creativity into an AI purée of cognitive plastiglomerate (which is a mix of rock, natural débris, and plastic, that is considered a signature of the Anthropocene)—we need to make digital media fully accountable to the goals of human dignity, collective creativity, and relational beauty.

Each of these is a task in which the humanities must play a central role. I hope to work toward these ends by supporting and initiating efforts to think (and feel) through the challenges they embody. I’m excited for the position and the opportunities it represents, and look forward to working with colleagues at SFU and in the greater Vancouver area.