Introducing our 2020-21 Shadbolt Fellows!
We are pleased to welcome Eden Robinson and Fabian Romero to the INDG team as Shadbolt Fellows in the Humanities! The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellowship in the Humanities Program increases the visibility of the contributions of the humanities and arts to the university community. It also engages the wider community through publicly involved scholarship and creativity.
The Shadbolt Fellows will engage with Metro Vancouver communities through exhibits, performances, artworks, workshops and events that realize FASS's values of advancing reconciliation; equity, diversity and inclusion; and collaboration.
Meet out 2020-21 Shadbolt Fellows!
Eden Robinson is a Haisla and Heiltsuk novelist who is currently working on the final stages of the last book in her Trickster trilogy. The spine of all three of these novels is the figure of Wee’git, the Trickster from Eden’s Haisla and Heiltsuk traditions.
While at SFU, Robinson will work on a novel set in current times that explores the dynamics of a band council in the midst of accepting a proposal for a liquefied natural gas pipeline and plant. She is also in the early stages of researching a lyric essay about salmon on the Pacific coast and a novel set after the big Cascadia earthquake that knocks half of Vancouver Island into the ocean.
The terrain and circumstances surrounding Robinson’s fiction, along with the road she walks with her community and its history, gives her much to offer during public lectures while at SFU. She plans to work within SFU and with community collaborators on panel discussions with other Indigenous authors, and other events.
Robinson received an Honorary Degree as a Doctor of Letters from the University of British Columbia in 2018. She also holds an MFA from UBC.
Fabian Romero is an Indigenous community-based artist and filmmaker from Mexico who lives in Washington State. Romero brings a depth to their work formed from their own struggle as a Purepécha non-binary youth activist. Their work is carried out at the juncture of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies and American Indian and Indigenous Studies.
While at SFU, Romero proposes to strengthen Indigenous LGBTQ and their diasporic Purepécha communities at large, building an Indigenous Purepécha Collaborative Praxis. They plan to work on ethnographic fiction stories and poetry around insurgent kinship structures in urban settings based on their observations and their interlocutor’s contributions. Throughout the residency, they also plan to share their current collaborative projects with artist collectives of which they are a part of. Romero will also be available for consults with students and emerging writers.
During their Shadbolt fellowship they are taking leave from their doctoral candidate studies in the Gender, Women & Sexuality Department at the University of Washington.
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Join us online at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 27, 2021 to meet the Shadbolt Fellows in a panel discussion moderated by Stephen Collis (Professor, SFU Department of English) and June Scudeler (Assistant Professor, SFU Indigenous Studies). Register on Eventbrite.
“The Shadbolt Fellows personify the power of the arts and humanities to celebrate life, confront obstacles and envisage a better world,” says Jane Pulkingham, Dean of FASS. “The Fellows will engage with the SFU and wider communities to help us imagine how the arts can make the world we live in better through creative and critical engagement with the major concerns of our times.”