pRESENTER

Dr. Christopher B. Patterson is an award-winning author and Associate Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. His first book, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific, received the 2020 Transnational Studies Book Award from the American Studies Association, while his first novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, won the 2020 Fiction Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.

His critical research on video games culminated in his second academic book, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games, the open access anthology Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us, and the free-to-play video game, Stamped: an anti-travel game, an adaptation of his first novel. He is also the author of the queer speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom, which won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best Fiction Novel, and the prose-poetry book, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, published in September 2023 by Duke University Press.

His sixth sole-authored book, Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination, traces the dazzling turns of brownness within transpacific colonial encounter, and is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2025.

Moderator

Dr. John Paul (JP) Catungal (he/him) is Assistant Professor in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, and founding Co-Director of the Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement at the University of British Columbia. A queer first generation scholar of Pangasinense descent, his research broadly concerns the placemaking practices of migrant, racialized and LGBTQ+ communities in Canadian cities. His current projects draw on the methods and ethics of community engaged research and focus on organizing efforts by Filipinx, Asian Canadian and queer of colour communities in Greater Vancouver as modes of vernacular critique and assertions of agency. He has served as co-editor of the book Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility and the journal ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies. Photo by: Danielle Wong.

Community Respondents

Anne Claire Baguio is a Cebuana settler immigrant who grew up in so-called Vancouver. She is a co-founder of Sliced Mango Collective, a youth collective committed to providing a space for Filipinx-Canadian youth to explore their heritage and culture. Claire has great interest in stories—the ones we share and the ones we create. Her own written pieces are informed by her Filipino heritage, folklore and family legends, and her childhood growing up in East Van. Most notably, “The Gifts of the Mango Tree” is a speculative short story taking place in the Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood published in Augur Magazine Issue 4.2.

Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is a migrant poet, editor, performer and facilitator of Pangasinan, Ilokano and Telugu descent who lives, gratefully, on unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and unceded land of the T’uubaa-asatx Nation. Author of The Flayed City (Kaya Press), chapbook Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (Next Page Press) and the upcoming, Tabako on the Windowsill (Brick Books), siya is a recipient of the Vera Manuel Award for Poetry, and has received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, The Capilano Review, Deer Lake, NFB and others. His work appears widely in print and online, and his collaborations are both local and beyond, including recently with Aphotic Theatre, Burnaby Art Gallery, Centre A, Community Building Art Works, Death Rides a Unicorn, The Digital Sala, Massy Arts Society and Vancouver Poetry House.

Photo by Cynthia Dewi Oka.

Dr. Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra (Sharn) is a Historian, faculty in the Department of History at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV), and founder of Belonging Matters Consulting. Sharn worked as Coordinator at the South Asian Studies Institute at UFV for more than 12 years and as co-curator and co-manager of the Sikh Heritage Museum, National Historic Site and Gur Sikh Temple (gurdwara). She currently works as a Senior Program Advisor in the Multiculturalism and AntiRacism Program (MARP) in Canadian Heritage.

Sharn's PhD looks at the affective experiences of museum visitors through a critical race theory lens with the dissertation titled “Museums as Spaces of Belonging: Racialized Power in the Margins.” She is a passionate activist, building bridges between community and academia through museum work and has been featured in the Knowledge Network series B.C: An Untold History, is a published author, and has been featured on local and international podcasts and media.