2024-2025 Speakers' Series

2024 - 2025

Matt Hern and Am Johal, "How can we be together?" 

The SASAH Speakers' Series welcomes authors, advocates and collaborators Matt Hern and Am Johal to discuss Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (with Joe Sacco), and O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology.
 
This interactive conversation is guided by questions that Matt and Am have posed and anchored in their collaborative work. How can we think through the present political moment with its hard edges and populisms - what might friendship offer us in this moment?
 
We invite participants to read chapters 1, 5, 8, 9, 10 and 12 of O My Friends, There is No Friend (open access) in advance of this event.
 
Matt Hern lives in Richmond, BC on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) waters. He is the co-founder and co-director of Solid State Community Industries, which is building a network of worker cooperatives with migrant communities in Canada. He continues to lecture globally and his articles and books, including What a City Is For and Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life (with Am Johal and Joe Sacco), have been translated into nineteen languages.
 
Am Johal was, until February 2025, Director of SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Co-Director of SFU's Community Engaged Research Initiative and is host of the podcast, Below the Radar. He has additional affiliations at SFU with Graduate Liberal Studies, Labour Studies and the Institute for the Humanities. Presented 18 March 2025.

Wanda Nanibush, "Performing Sovereignty"

Robert and Patricia Duncanson Lecture

The Faculty of Arts & Humanities is honoured to host Wanda Nanibush for the second Robert and Patricia Duncanson Lecture of 2025, held on March 4, 2025. 
 
From protest to ceremony to performance art, Indigenous artists are breaking the Eurocentric boundaries between art/culture, tradition/contemporary, humor/ethics, fiction/history, and resistance/creation. In "Performing Sovereignty," Wanda Nanibush reveals how, in the process, new histories of protest and performance are sought, and both become the site of Indigenous sovereignty enacted. This shift is Indigenous and artist-led.
 
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation, Canada. Based in Toronto, Nanibush is the founding director of aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators, writers and artists for talks and performances that last took place at Venice Biennale and was in Toronto, December 5-7, 2024. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book Moving the Museum, which chronicles some of her groundbreaking work at the Art Gallery of Ontario as the Inaugural curator of Indigenous Art. She has curated survey, group, and retrospective exhibitions, including: Robert Houle Red is Beautiful (NMAI, Smithsonian, Washington); Rebecca Belmore, Facing the Monumental (2019), (Canada and the U.S) and Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 (AGO). She will be the Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY in the Graduate Department of Art History in 2025. She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, St. Louis’ Triennial. In 2024, Nanibush was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence.
 
She received her M.A. in Visual Studies from University of Toronto where she has also taught graduate courses. She is Adjunct Faculty at York University. Nanibush has published widely on Indigenous art, politics, history, feminism and sexuality.

Racquel Rowe and Jessica Karuhanga in Conversation

In partnership with Forest City Gallery, and to celebrate Racquel Rowe's current solo exhibition, The Centre of the World was the Beach, the SASAH Speakers' Series hosts a conversation between Rowe and artist Jessica Karuhanga (Western's Department of Visual Arts). The artists will be discussing their multi-faceted practices in a discussion moderated by SASAH student Kira McCallum.

Racquel Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist from the island of Barbados currently residing in Canada and pursuing a PhD in Western's Department of Visual Arts. Her practice is continuously influenced by many aspects of history, matrilineal family structures, diasporic communities, and her upbringing in Barbados.

Jessica Karuhanga is a first-generation Canadian artist of British-Ugandan heritage who addresses politics of identity and Black diasporic concerns through lens-based technologies, sculpture, writing, drawing, and performance.

Kira McCallum is an undergraduate student at Western University, currently pursuing a double major in the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts & Humanities and Museum & Curatorial Studies. Her status as both a Jamaican and Canadian citizen informs her perspective, and her writing reflects a desire to foster a global appreciation for the Caribbean region’s unique culture. Presented 28 February 2025.

Bruce Holsinger, "Taste, Tincture, Temptation: A Medieval Poetics of Wine"

Bruce Holsinger teaches in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the literature and culture of the medieval world, with additional interests in historical fiction, modern and contemporary theory, the history of the book, and premodern religious cultures. His most recent nonfiction book is On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (Yale University Press). Holsinger also serves as editor of the quarterly journal, New Literary History.

In addition to his academic work, Holsinger is a celebrated fiction author, with works including The Displacements and The Gifted School (both from Riverhead). His books have been recognized with the Colorado Book Award, the John Hurt Fisher Prize, the Philip Brett Award, the John Nicholas Brown Prize, the Modern Language Association's Prize for a First Book, and others. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications and he has been profiled on NPR's Weekend Edition, Here & Now, and Marketplace. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Presented in partnership with Classical Studies on 24 February 2025.

Carlo Rovelli, "Come with me Inside a Black Hole"

Robert and Patricia Duncanson Lecture

This lecture is about white holes, black holes, and what we do when we do science. New York Times bestselling author Carlo Rovelli will guide attendees on a trip towards and into a Black Hole, illustrating what we know and what we do not know about these strange objects. He will show how we might then get out of a black hole, via a white hole, assuming the theory on which he works, Loop Quantum Gravity, is correct. This trip will illustrate what it is to do science, using imagination, visualization, and creativity, besides ‘cold’ math and logic.

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist, known for his work on quantum gravity and the nature of time. Among his recognitions are the 1996 Xanthopoulos Award and the 2024 Lewis Thomas Prize. He is affiliated to the University of Aix-Marseille, the philosophy department and the Rotman Institute of the Western University, the Perimeter Institute and the Santa Fe Institute for Complexity. He is member of the Institute Universitaire de France, honorary professor of the Beijing Normal University, Honoris Causa Laureate of the Universidad de San Martin, Buenos Aires, member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. He promoted the Peace Dividend Initiative, involving 60 Nobel Laureates in asking for a worldwide collaborative military expenses reduction. He has written global best sellers translated in more than 40 languages. He has been included in the 2019 list of the 100 most influential “Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine and in the 2021 list of The World’s 50 Top Thinkers by Prospect magazine. Presented 30 January 2025.

 

Click here for past Speakers' Series.