BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018

Phanuel Antwi is assistant professor of English at University of British Columbia. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He has published articles in Small Axe, Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled “Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.”

Nadine Attewell, born in Richmond, BC, is currently an Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her first book, Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2014. She is at work on a second book entitled Archives of Intimacy that traces early-twentieth-century histories of interracial intimacy and multiracial community-formation in Hong Kong, Liverpool, and London through readings of photography, fiction, scholarship, life writing, newspapers, and state and other institutional records.

Janice Cantieri is a journalist who writes about Indigenous and environmental issues. As a Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow, she spent a year living in the Central Pacific island nation of Kiribati where she covered the ways communities are adapting to extreme sea level rise. She is a graduate of Medill Graduate School of Journalism at Northwestern University and is passionate about sharing stories from under-represented communities, especially those affected by environmental issues.

Chua Beng Huat is currently Head, Urban Studies, Yale-NUS Liberal Arts College and Professor, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. He is founding co-executive editor of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. His most recent book is Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press and Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

Dion Curry is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy at Swansea University, UK. He completed his PhD in 2011 from the University of Sheffield, and previously studied in Hungary, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. Prior to his appointment in Swansea, Dion worked as a policy consultant for the European Commission with the Public Policy and Management Institute (Vilnius, Lithuania) and as a Research Fellow in Public Management Reform at Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands). His latest book, Network Approaches to Multi-level Governance: Structures, Relations and Understanding Power between Levels, is available from Palgrave Macmillan, and he is currently working on issues of multi-level governance and legitimacy based off a recently-completed European Union Marie Skłodowska Curie-funded project.

John Nguyet Erni is Fung Hon Chu Endowed Chair Professor of Humanics and Head of the Department of Humanities & Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2017, he was elected President of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. A former recipient of the Gustafson, Rockefeller, and Annenberg research fellowships, and many other awards and grants, Erni’s wide-ranging work traverses international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth consumption culture in Hong Kong and Asia, and critical public health. He is the author or editor of ten books, most recently Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture: Feeling Ethnic (Springer, 2017); (In)visible Colors: Images of Non-Chinese in Hong Kong Cinema – A Filmography, 1970s-2010s (with Louis Ho, Cinezin Press, 2016); Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong (with Lisa Leung, HKUP, 2014). Currently, he is completing a book entitled Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights.

Spencer Greening is a member of the Gitga’at First Nation, and has worked professionally with his nation for several years. He has regularly engaged in government to government relations as an elected government representative and community spokesperson for the Gitga’at. He has also acted as a research coordinator where he managed several legal and cultural research projects for the Gitga’at working with Indigenous knowledge systems, Indigenous rights and title, and language revitalization. Spencer holds a bachelor’s degree in First Nations/Indigenous Studies and an MA in Anthropology at the University of Northern British Columbia. He is currently a PhD student at Simon Fraser University. His research interests are Indigenous knowledge systems, language, identity, and traditional Gitga’at law and politics. All of his research revolves around his deep connection to his home community, elders, territories, and the self-determination and decolonization of Indigenous peoples.

Dawn Hoogeveen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Her background is in geography, having completed BA (Hons) with a minor in music at Carleton University, an MA at Simon Fraser University, and PhD at UBC. Dawn’s research traverses environmental, social and economic geography, political ecology, political economy, Indigenous studies, and feminism. She is a collaborative thinker who continues to work closely with First Nations and NGOs in the realms of resource policy and conservation planning.

Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He received his BA from the University of Northern Colorado and his MA and PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Before coming to UBC, he spent ten years as a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where he was also an affiliate of the Aboriginal Studies Program.

Hussein Keshani is an Art Historian who researches and teaches South Asian visual cultures at the UBC Okanagan campus in Kelowna, BC, Canada. He focuses on the art and architecture of the Delhi Sultanate, Mughal and Late-Mughal periods.

Christine Kim is an Associate Professor in the English department at Simon Fraser University. Her teaching and research focus on Asian North American literature and theory, diaspora studies, and cultural studies. She is the author of The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012). She has contributed chapters to essay collections on Asian Canadian literature and theatre and published articles in Interventions, Mosaic, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Journal of Intercultural Studies. Christine is co-director of SFU’s Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research. Currently she is working on a SSHRC funded book-length project on representations of North Korea, cultural fantasies, and Cold War legacies.

Joanne Leow is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. She has published research on Southeast Asian literature and film, and diasporic North American literature. She is currently completing a book manuscript on urban planning, authoritarianism, and contemporary cultural production in Singapore.

Helen Hok-Sze Leung is a Professor in the Department of of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies and the co-director of the Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research at Simon Fraser University. She has published widely on Asian cinema and queer cultural productions and is the author of Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (UBC Press, 2008) and Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). She co-edits the Queer Asia book series (Hong Kong UP) and serves on the editorial boards of BC Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas (Routledge), Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke UP), and Asian Visual Cultures (Amsterdam UP). Her current research projects include a SSHRC-funded project on Transpacific Film Cities; a study of film sound and queer cinema; and a co-authored project on queer Asian knowledge production.

Malida Mooken is a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Management and Regional Socio-Economic Institute of Canada, University of British Columbia (UBC). Her primary research interests are in socio-economic development processes and the organization of knowledge. Part of her work focuses on developing inquiry as a method for various actors, including academics to collaborate and address regional development concerns in real-time change processes. She is currently working on a university-led project that supports the British Columbia wine industry in understanding and developing its strategic positioning, especially on the international stage.

Max Ritts is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota. Since 2013, he has worked with the Gitga’at Nation on a number of projects and its presently co-editor of the official community newsletter, Amhaw Gitga’at.
Roger Sugden is Professor and Dean at UBC’s Faculty of Management, and Director of the Regional Socio-Economic Development Institute of Canada (RSEDIC). He has previously worked in the UK at the universities of Birmingham, Edinburgh and Stirling, and in Germany at the Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin. He has also been Visiting Professor at the Università di Ferrara, Italy, and Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research is on economic organization, the interests of publics and regional socio-economic development. He is currently working on the organization of knowledge to support British Columbia’s wine industry; the recent history of occupational structure and economic strategy in the Okanagan; and the organization of contemporary management schools in peripheral regions.

Smokii Sumac is a proud member of the Ktunaxa nation located in what is currently southeastern British Columbia. He is a PhD candidate in Indigenous Studies at Trent University where his research centres on “coming home” stories and reconnection to Indigenous identity/community as an adoptee and a two-spirit person. Over the past four years Smokii has taught Indigenous literature and creative writing at Trent, and he also has recently begun teaching KTUN 100: Intro to the Ktunaxa People at the College of the Rockies. Smokii identifies as queer, transmasculine, two-spirit, a poet, an uncle, an auntie and a cat person. He accepts he/him/his or they/them/theirs pronouns. Smokii’s work has been published in Write Magazine, and under his former name (he is a man of many names) in Canadian Literature, Aanikoobijigan//Waawaashkeshi (a project by Anishinaabe/Métis artist Dylan Miner), and on coffee sleeves in local Peterborough coffee shops as one of the winners of the e-city lit artsweek contest in 2014.

Jia Tan is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her doctoral degree in critical studies of cinema and television from the University of Southern California. Her articles on digital media, feminism, queer culture, and documentary have appeared in Crime, Media, Culture; Critical Studies in Media Communication; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; and Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

Marcela Valania is a Research Associate at UBC’s Faculty of Management, and a contributor to UBC’s Regional Socio-Economic Development Institute of Canada (RSEDIC). She has previously worked at the National University of Mar del Plata, Argentina, in the field of English as a Foreign Language, and as a coordinator of research and teaching projects at the University of Birmingham, England, and University of Stirling, Scotland. She is currently working on a university-led project that supports development of the British Columbia wine industry; understanding and developing creative arenas that stimulate participants to engage and inquire; and the use of the visual in research, teaching and learning.

Chih-ming Wang is visiting research fellow at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, and associate research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Since May 2017, he is the chief editor of Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies published in Taiwan. He is the author of Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013); co-editor of Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017); and guest editor of the “The Chinese Factor: Reorienting Global Imaginaries in American Studies” special issue for American Quarterly (September 2017). His research focuses on Asian American literature and cultural studies in transpacific and inter-Asian contexts. His articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Cultural Studies, positions, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Chinese America: History and Perspectives.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is an internationally acclaimed visual contemporary artist and author. He invites us to explore different perspectives about the world, environment, and ethnicity through his unique blend of abstraction in his self-taught practice, and innovated art form, called Haida Manga. Influenced by classic Haida iconography and contemporary Asian visual culture, he abandons the rigid linear conventions and twists his work in a playful and engaging manner. His pieces can often be inverted and viewed from many angles; each providing another insight into the piece. We are initially drawn into the intriguing imagery and lively shapes of his work, but upon closer analysis, there are often more serious themes being represented.

Audrey Yue is Professor and Head of Communications and New Media, and Convenor of the Cultural Studies in Asia PhD Program, at the National University of Singapore.