A collage of greetings in many different languages, in the shape of a speech bubble.

Arts Multilingual Week

October 31 - November 4, 2022

UBC Point Grey

Image credit:  Gordon Johnson from Pixabay.

Over one dozen units at UBC Vancouver are organizing Arts Multilingual Week 2022!  The week’s events will feature students, scholars, and community members reflecting on multilingualism as a practice, discussing career opportunities for multilingual graduates, and performing multilingualism through artistic means.

Featured events

The week of events will open with a roundtable on “Why we study languages" with Associate Dean Stefania Burk in conversation with faculty members from across the language disciplines. Then Arts Multilingual Week programming explodes with five days of programming that includes three exciting student-centered events: a Speech Contest on “What Multilingualism means to me...”, an exhibition of untranslatable words and idioms, and a Multilingual Poetry Slam.

In addition to Lightning Talks on Multilingual Pedagogies and various roundtables on Multilingualism in teaching and research, Arts Multilingual Week will also feature conversations on Indigenous languages, Indigenization, and the Indigenous Atlas of Canada, a virtual American Sign Language (ASL) workshop, an introduction to DeafBlind Protactile Communication, and a presentation on the Deaf community and the marginalization of signed languages by local celebrity and UBC instructor Nigel Howard as well as a catered Bollywood film screening and presentations from student groups.

Moreover, Dr. Guofang Li, UBC Professor and Canada Research Chair in Transnational/Global Perspectives of Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth from the Department of Language and Literacy Education will give a keynote entitled "Multilingualism as a Gift: Changing Mindsets, Changing Worlds"; Indigenous comics artist Cole Pauls will present his work on Indigenous language revitalization and his newest comic book Kwändǖr; and comics scholar Katherine Kelp-Stebbins will present research from her new book How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies (2022) in a talk entitled "Multilingualism in Comics from Haida Gwaii to Beirut."

Events will take place in Dodson (room 302) in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (IKBLC) or in the Asian Studies Auditorium.

A light lunch will be served daily at 12 PM in Dodson (room 302) in the IKBLC

Learn more here, or contact Biz Nijdam.


First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that UBC’s campuses are situated within the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, and in the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation and their peoples.


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