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Jessica Karuhanga portrait by Gillian Mapp. |
THIS EVENING!SASAH Speakers' Series presents Racquel Rowe and Jessica Karuhanga in ConversationFriday, February 28, 5PM EST, John Labatt Visual Arts Centre's Digital Creativity Lab and on Zoom |
In partnership with Forest City Gallery, and to celebrate Racquel Rowe's current solo exhibition, The Centre of the World was the Beach, SASAH 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. |
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Portrait by Shelley Niro. |
Duncanson Lecture: Wanda Nanibush, "Performing Sovereignty"Tuesday, March 4, 5-6PMConron Hall in University College and on Zoom |
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. This hybrid event can be attended in person at Conron Hall or online via Zoom. There is no cost for this event; please register here. 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. Following Wanda Nanibush's lecture, a reception will be held in rooms adjoining Conron Hall. |
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SASAH Speakers' Series presents Matt Hern and Am Johal in ConversationTuesday, March 18, 2:30PM, in Kresge 203 and on Zoom |
Matt and Am are guests in Teaching Fellow Kate Stanely’s first-year course, “Conversation through Crisis: Tools for Navigating Climate Change.” Join this virtual conversation via Zoom ( register here), or join the class in the Kresge Building, room 203.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?
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, 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. He has been on the boards of the Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancity Community Foundation, Indian Summer Arts Society, Impact on Communities Coalition, 221A, Greenpeace Canada, BC Alliance for Arts and Culture, the Or Gallery, the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Committee and the Vancouver City Planning Commission. In 2020, he was recognized with the Warren Gill Award for Community Impact and in 2024 with the Hari Sharma Community Award. He is the author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (2015), co-author with Matt Hern of Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (2018) and O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology (2024). |
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Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism: Dr. Saree MakdisiWednesday, March 19, 4:30 - 6PMConron Hall, University College |
The Department of English and Writing Studies is honoured to host Dr. Saree Makdisi for the inaugural lecture in the Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism, held on March 19, 2025. This in-person event takes place in Conron Hall, University College. Confirm your spot here. In the 1700s and 1800s a series of Enclosure Acts granted landowners legal rights over areas of common land, thus making public space into private property, and introducing an ethos of capital accumulation. The Romantic poet John Clare, often called England’s greatest labouring-class poet, spent much of his adult life observing the ‘outside’ world from within asylums, at once alienated from ‘common’ life and a witness to displacement in a world blind to its effects. Taking up the prescient pathos of Clare’s work as an allegory of our own damaged and damaging society, Saree Makdisi explores both Clare's response to the economic and social disruptions of his time and its resonance today in the context of continuing colonial enclosures and erasures.
Dr. Saree Makdisi is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of four monographs on Romantic literature: Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge UP, 1998), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago, 2003), Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago, 2014), and Reading William Blake (Cambridge UP, 2015). In addition, Dr. Makdisi is the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2008), and Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022).
He has also written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world, and, in addition to his scholarly articles, has also contributed pieces on current events to a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the London Review of Books.
This talk is co-sponsored with SASAH. |
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Alumna Amber Carroll featured in Western News!
Amber Carroll, SASAH alum and BHSc'24, participated in the RBC Design Thinking Program during her time at Western, later landing two co-op placements and then a full-time job with the bank. “The opportunity to tackle real-world challenges alongside students from different disciplines and with varying perspectives and approaches made the program invaluable,” said Carroll. Read more here!Photo by Nikki Lamb Tudico. |
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Students Getting out to Vote!
We may have incentivized them with a points-based system and a pizza party, but SASAH students showed up to vote in the recent provincial election in a big way! We hear the voter turnout is higher this year... Pictured are Fiona McAllister, Jadyn Smith, Carys Laderoute, Yasmin Hadizad, Khadeejah Abdul Khadir, Rachel Weisberg, Olivia Matheuszik, Shea McDonald, Kenzie Kilmer, Cat Walke, and Maia Ross. |
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Museum London Scholarships The Melanie A. Townsend Scholarship for Museum and Curatorial Studies is specifically geared towards current undergraduate students in the Dept. of Visual Arts program at Western. The Steve Mavers Scholarship for Arts Education supports current, upper-year undergraduate students planning to undertake a Bachelor of Education at Western in the coming year. Full eligibility criteria and additional information can be found here. Applications close on the morning of April 2. |
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Decolonial Conversations Conference March 14-16, Museum London Register hereThis conference aims to host conversations that examine decolonial thought and practices in their historical and contemporary contexts. The conference includes panels on transnational Intimacies; historical and contemporary partitions; the politics of dress, bodies, and activism; racialized histories in national and international contexts; Canadian and global indigenous networks, and global theatre and performance. |
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