ACAM Dialogues Cohort – Application Form
— Application deadline: Fri. Sept. 12, 2025 @ 12:00 PM (PT) —
Fall 2024 – Summer 2025 cohort
How to apply
Fill out and submit the application through this Qualtrics form.
Please email all application questions, requests, or concerns to acam.events[@]ubc.ca.
If you have specific accessibility requirements, please email us.
About the ACAM Dialogues cohort
The ACAM Dialogues is a series of workshop-style discussions, facilitated by and for students at University of British Columbia, based out of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) Program. A cohort of selected students meets monthly throughout the year to collectively participate in low-barrier discussion circles, events, resource-sharing, and other activities. The theme for the 2025/26 Dialogues is “In Transit: Locating Asian Canadians in Vancouver.”
The cohort brings together students from various disciplines and degrees of skill or experience around topics related to Asian lifeworlds in Vancouver. Specifically, cohort members are students who are interested in and/or have some experience in generating critical frameworks around race as related to gender, sexuality, disability, class, settler colonialism, and other matrices of power, particularly in (but not limited to) Asian transnational contexts.
In Transit: Locating Asian Canadians in Vancouver
Vancouver is a city with an identity crisis. With most of its urban development prompted by the 1986 World’s Fair and its reputation as Hollywood North, Vancouver has developed into yet another shiny new city that is ever-changing. Blink and you’ll miss it – one neighborhood disappears and a high-rise appears. Amidst this spatial transience, Vancouver’s population is similarly culturally transient. As Canada’s Pacific gateway, Vancouver has historically and continues to house one of Canada’s most diverse populations who, like all diaspora, continue to navigate the meaning of holding these many identities at once. Vancouver is a city of people who are from here and there; a city that is everywhere and no-’where’.
ACAM Dialogues’ ‘In Transit’ reflects on the space we see, the space in between, and all the empty space. Continuing conversations about the Asian Diaspora’s ‘in-between’ identities, this year’s ACAM Dialogues cohort theme invites students to root these conversations directly in the local city. Drawing on epistemological frameworks of placemaking, body as methodology, and kwentuhan, we invite students to reflect on the following questions: What stories are we told about this city? What stories do we tell about the city? Who populates these stories? How does space show and conceal them? In a time where we can virtually be everywhere, why does it matter that we are here? Ultimately – in the context of the Asian Diaspora in Vancouver, how are people and place in dialogue?
FAQs
What are the goals of this project?
This series is meant to create low-barrier and non-judgemental spaces to share resources and learn together, while enabling robust and critical conversations outside the classroom. We also want to build a space where students can offer peer support in the form of varying skills, vocabularies, and experiences related that may be specific yet interrelated under the project’s theme. While ACAM Dialogues organizers will facilitate meetings, cohort members will also share responsibilities around selecting particular topics of interest for monthly discussion. We hope this will help us build a practice of intentionality around conversations that may arise.
What are potential topics for cohort meetings?
- Anti-racist community organizing, activism, and community-building
- Critical topics in race, gender, sexuality, disability, class
- Settler colonialism, imperialism and colonialism, Asian-Indigenous relations
- Critical refugee studies, global migrations
- Aesthetics, art and cultural productions, media industries
- Mental health, wellness, medicine
- Climate justice, food and food security, housing
- and other topics of participants’ interests
Who can join the ACAM Dialogues cohort?
- All UBC students (undergraduate, graduate, unclassified) of any program or academic standing
- You do not have to be an ACAM or Arts student. We welcome all interested in collective dialogue around race and intricacies of power, regardless of your familiarity with these and related concepts
- While we are open to all, we invite all interested applicants to be mindful of the project’s focus on contexts and experiences that resonate with BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of colour)
Learn more
- Meet the organizers
- Meet previous cohort members
- Learn about previous Dialogues series
- Visit UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) program
Contact
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Email us at acam.events[@]ubc.ca.