Meet the 2022-23 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellows in the Humanities
The Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies is honoured to host Mercedes Eng, with the Department of English, as one of this year's Shadbolt Fellows.
Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) is pleased to announce the scholars selected for the 2022-23 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellowship in the Humanities. This program increases the visibility of the contributions and critical power of the humanities and arts to the university community. It also engages the wider community through publicly involved scholarship and creativity.
Please join us in welcoming the 2022-23 Shadbolt Fellows to SFU at an evening of conversation moderated by SFU English professor and poet Clint Burnham, followed by a Q&A session and catered reception.
The Shadbolt Fellows are renowned writers, artists and scholars, all publicly engaged in championing the arts and pushing disciplinary boundaries through the dynamics of agitation and resilience.
Agitation and Resilience: The Critical Power of the Arts and Humanities
Date: January 27, 2023 (Friday)
Time: 7:00 - 9:00pm
Venue: 1400 - 1430 Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre, SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver
Register now at: https://shadbolt-2023.eventbrite.ca/
Mercedes Eng, 2022-23 Shadbolt Fellow
Host department: Department of English and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies
Mercedes Eng is an author and award-winning poet writing about sex work, the prison-industrial complex, and resistance. She also teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and recently completed her term as SFU Department of English's Ellen and Warren Tallman writer-in-residence.
During her fellowship at SFU, Mercedes will be working a women’s prison anthology constellating the knowledges of people with experience of women’s prisons in Canada, allowing readers to access information produced by those most affected by the prison system. To activate the public’s imagination towards a world without prisons, her hope is that it contributes to ongoing and new conversations on transformative justice and abolition, particularly around racialized carcerality, carceral feminism, and the interrelation of systems working together in service of the carceral state, such as psychiatric institutions and foster care.
As part of this project, Mercedes will host a public event on defunding the police and decarceration, which will include an imaginative element asking attendees to contribute their thoughts on what is necessary to reform or abolish prisons. Attendees will be encouraged to dream big, be practical and be artistic in their responses, and what is generated will form the basis of an anonymous anti-carceral community poem for the prison anthology.
Mercedes' term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from January to August 2023.