Storytelling, Movement and Influence in the Arts and Humanities

Joanne Arnott

Joanne Arnott is a dedicated artist and editor with a strong point of view and an impressive history of championing the arts—notably the work of Indigenous artists—among the wider community.

She has been Poetry Editor of EVENT magazine since 2015, curating the poetry section as well as organizing EVENT’s annual Indigenous Voices reading, and she is the founding co-editor of the Salt Chuck City Review of the Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast (2019) and founding member of the collective (2009). Joanne has published several books including A Night for the Lady (2013), Steepy Mountain: Love Poetry (2004) and My Grass Cradle (1992), as well as anthologies and poetry such as Speak Out, For Example (2002) and Watch Your Head (2020). Joanne has received the Mayor’s Arts Award for Literary Arts (2017) in Vancouver and was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award of the League of Canadian Poets in 2015.

While at SFU, Joanne proposes to extend her ongoing research for the book RETURNED: The Writings of Connie Fife, and to create a long-form essay, to bring forth the works of Connie Fife for a new generation. She intends to meet with students of creative writing, Indigenous literature and Canadian literature and to create an “Indigenous writer's salon,” as well as an event around the publication of the book.

Host: SFU Indigenous Studies

Megan J. Davies

Megan J. Davies (Ph.D., McGill) is a tenured associate professor at York University and a community-engaged scholar on the history of health in British Columbia, with research interests in old age, women, rurality, social welfare, health policy, everyday health and madness.  

She has published innovative work in refereed academic journals and edited collections and a book, Into the House of Old: A History of Residential Care in British Columbia (McGill-Queens UP, 2003). Davies is also Principal Investigator on Canada’s first national CIHR-funded project on the history of deinstitutionalization and the shift to community mental health. Her academic work has been oriented toward public-facing scholarship.

Working collaboratively with the mental health community, Davis has been involved in various projects connected to Madness Canada/Folie Canada. This activist site is a unique creation—an exhibit showcase, a research resource and an educational hub. Her collaborative projects connected with the site include producing a documentary, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (2016), coordinating and coediting the After the Asylum/Après l’asile project online exhibit, coordinating the online teaching resources History in Practice/Histoire en tête (relaunched 2019), and collaborating on the 2018 MAD CITY exhibit in Vancouver’s Gallery Gachet, a social justice arts space in the Downtown Eastside.

While at SFU, Megan proposes a public exhibit, Remembering COVID in Long-Term Care, using visual and audio storytelling to consider COVID in long-term care (LTC) facilities in the Lower Mainland, including narratives representing different ethnicities, genders and ages. She plans to work with students to create these representations that honour the lives of elderly people who died of the coronavirus in LTC. The exhibit is designed both as a memorial and as a vehicle to foster dialogue and have participants reflect on ageism and the policy histories of LTC in B.C., with the aim of moving towards better planning for both residents and workers. 

Beyond that, her “Doing Difficult History: Methodologies in Democratizing Storytelling and Display” webinar will be a discussion of how scholars, museums and artists are reordering how we present challenging past-present narratives.

Host: SFU Department of Gerontology

Alana Gerecke

Alana Gerecke is a Canadian emerging scholar and her research on the spatial and social politics of site-based dance performed in public spaces along the west coast of Canada was recognized with a CGS SSHRC award, a SSHRC-allocated Queen’s Fellowship, and a Trudeau Foundation Doctoral Scholarship.  

Alana has presented numerous papers at major national and international conferences and she was awarded the 2019 Robert Lawrence Prize, the Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s top emerging scholar award, for her essay “Choreographies of Exclusion.” She is also co-founder and co-director of Behind Open Doors Arts Collective, a company that has staged several notable performance works. During her Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Theatre at York University, Alana examined colloquial expressions of embodied assembly in public—social choreographies enacted by so-called “untrained” movers.

While at SFU, Alana proposes to extend her ongoing research, Public Intimacy in Pandemic: Social Choreographies for the Kinesphere, to explore the possibilities and limitations of moving together in the era of COVID-19. While her research is acutely specific to this present moment, its relevance also extends beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. She intends to offer a series of movement scores that experiment with models for moving together while maintaining physical distance, that will take shape in a series of public workshops and other public engagement activities. A website that translates these participatory movement scores into digital space, extending the reach of moving together at a distance beyond a shared geography, will also be created; she plans to engage with SFU Urban Studies’ efforts at public outreach in the form of podcasts, public talks and more.

Host: SFU Urban Studies