Narratives and Social Justice

Event description

This panel and workshop highlights the importance of story and narratives as means of expression, a form of self-worth, and a mechanism for social change. The presenters work with individuals to add specificity and nuance to the practice of working against, and within, dominant forms of expression and restrictive discourses. Specific projects about story telling are presented to increase the awareness of the importance of local, contextualized story and voice for change.

This event is co-sponsored by the Jack Layton Chair and the Unifor National Chair in Social Justice and Democracy.

This venue is fully wheelchair accessible. Please contact accessibility@torontomu.ca if you require any accessibility accommodations to ensure your full participation.

Speaker bios

Lauren Kirshner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University. She received her PhD from the Joint Program in Communication & Culture at York-Ryerson University and an MA in in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Her novel Where We Have to Go (M&S), was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award and her writing has appeared in popular publications including Hazlitt, THIS, and The Globe and Mail. Her work in the community focuses on arts for social justice. As a community arts educator, Lauren has facilitated hundreds of creative writing workshops, including the Young Authors Project, a finalist for the 2013 Ontario Minister’s Award for Innovation in the Arts. She is the Founding Program Director of Sister Writes, an intersectional creative writing and publishing program for women in Toronto, and the recipient of a 2018 Arts Bridges Award for Remarkable Achievement in Community Arts.

Ekow Stone is an artist, aspiring writer and urban farmer, and a student of Environment and Urban Sustainability at Ryerson University. His art practice focuses primarily on themes of spirituality, ecology, and origins, and he is still exploring how it all coincides with his other pursuits in agriculture, writing and research. Ekow is the creator of “A Constellation in Communion” funded by CUE focused on narratives of Black Indigeneity.

Ken Moffatt is the Jack Layton Chair at Ryerson University. This fall he published Postmodern Social Work: Reflective Education and Practice with Columbia University Press. His research interests include psychic growth in the context of capitalist urban development. He explores how the commercialization of public space and growth of technologies affect how we construct and present ourselves. As an educator, he is interested in a reflective approach to practice that encourages auto-ethnography so that taken-for-granted strategies of power are disrupted.