Join Samir Gandesha and Kate Bird in conversation as they discuss the histories, complexities and nuances that exist in the images Stan Douglas presents in his exhibition through Samir’s essay titled We Live In The Residue of Such Moments, and Kate’s book, City On Edge: A Rebellious Century of Vancouver Protests, Riots, and Strikes.

Admission is by donation, and includes entry to Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848.

Samir Gandesha
Samir Gandesha is a Professor in the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and immigrated with his parents as an infant to Canada in the mid-1960s. Members of his extended family were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 and entered Britain as refugees. There, they were confronted by an ascendant xenophobic, racist far-right in the form of the National Front and British Movement. This traumatic period had a profound impact on how he viewed questions of hospitality, refuge, exile, identity, and politics more generally. After spending some time in the interior of B.C., his family moved to Vancouver, where he grew up.

As an undergraduate, he studied at SFU, UBC, and the London School of Economics. He did his MA and PhD at York University in Toronto, where he worked with Ato Sekyi-Otu, Christian Lenhardt, and Asher Horowitz. He spent two years on a SSHRCC post-doctoral fellowship in history at the University of California at Berkeley, working with Martin Jay. Upon returning, he started teaching at Centennial College in Toronto before spending two years as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at Universität Potsdam, working with Christoph Menke in 2001–2002. He has been teaching at SFU since 2003 and has been on the Steering Committee of the Institute for the Humanities since 2004 and its director since 2010.

He is the author of numerous refereed articles in top-tier journals, chapters in edited volumes, and encyclopedia entries. He is also co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, 2012) and co-editor (with Johan Hartle) of Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017) and Aesthetic Marx (Bloomsbury Press, 2017), also with Johan Hartle.

More recently, he has edited Spectres of Fascism: Historical, Theoretical and International Perspectives (Pluto, 2020), and co-edited (with Peyman Vahabzadeh) Crossing Borders: Essays in Honour of Ian H. Angus, Beyond Phenomenology and Critique (Arbeiter Ring, 2020). He writes regularly for popular audiences in publications such as openDemocracy, Art Papers, Canadian Dimension, Espace Art Actuel, Truthout, the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

In the Spring of 2017, he was the Liu Boming Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at the University of Nanjing and Visiting Lecturer at Suzhou University of Science and Technology in the People's Republic of China. In January 2019, he was the Visiting Fellow at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and, in February of the same year, Visiting Lecturer at Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas - FFLCH-USP (Universidade de São Paulo) and has delivered some 100 lectures and presentations at universities and public venues around the world.

About Kate Bird
Kate Bird is the author of Vancouver in the Seventies: Photos From a Decade That Changed the City, which was nominated for the 2016 British Columbia Historical Writing Award, City On Edge: A Rebellious Century of Vancouver Protests, Riots, and Strikes, and Magic Moments in BC Sports: A Century in Photos. A graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, Kate’s creative nonfiction work has been published in The Sun Magazine, The Phare, Tangled Locks Journal, The Walrus, Emerge, Hurricane in the Basement, and the Vancouver Sun.

Kate, who is a professional librarian with a Masters of Library & Information Science from the University of Western Ontario, a B.A. in Art History from the University of British Columbia, and a diploma in photography from Emily Carr College of Art, worked as a news research librarian at the Vancouver Sun and The Province for 25 years. She has been the researcher for numerous books, including Making Headlines: 100 Years at the Vancouver Sun by Shelley Fralic, which won the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award at the 2013 BC Book Prizes, Stephen Hume’s Lilies, and Fireweed: Frontier Women of British Columbia, The Way We Were: B.C.’s Amazing Journey to the Millennium, and Shelley Fralic’s The Age of Walter Gage.

Photo by Alison Boulier