Notice Board

Imagining Research/Research Imaginings
Dr. Yoke-Sum Wong, Associate Professor, School of Critical & Creative Studies, Alberta University of the Arts
Keynote Presentation at Crossing Boundaries Graduate Symposium
1:00 PM | March 14
Room M1090, Markin Hall

This talk takes as its starting point Sociologist C Wright Mills ‘s writing on the sociological imagination. “The Sociological Imagination”, Mills writes in 1959, “enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society”. He further adds, “That is its task and its promise.” What does this “promise” mean today – as we take on research in a world so overwhelmed by turbulent events and the tangled crises of communication? How can we broaden our methodological practices to enfold multitudes of imaginings? How can we approach imagination or the act of imagining in our research that seeks to find possibilities and potentials towards a generous and just society?

About the keynote
Yoke-Sum Wong is Associate Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly ACAD). She was previously in Lancaster University, UK, where she taught in the departments of History and Sociology, and returned to Canada in 2016. She considers herself an interdisciplinary academic, and has written/presented on various subject matter including post-colonial architecture, material culture, Japanese popular culture, modernism and its racism. She has also been the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Historical Sociology/Sociology Lens and has steered the journal through digitalization and Open Access changes. Her latest research focuses on the cultural productions in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. She also organized and co-organized international research creation multidisciplinary workshops that brought together academics, artists, creative practitioners in order to build new methodologies and provoke different ways of knowing. She likes cooking.

Crossing Boundaries Graduate Symposium is a celebration of graduate student research in the fine arts, humanities and social sciences at the University of Lethbridge.

Featuring a full-day of presentations and a keynote lecture, Crossing Boundaries showcases the innovative research and creative work of MA, MFA, MMus and PhD students at ULethbridge. A community-building event, the symposium fosters collegial conversations across multiple disciplines and areas of inquiry.

Register for the symposium here

Symposium Schedule