The ACAM Dialogues is a project consisting of discussion-based event series organized for and by students.
Our events range from dialogue circles, interactive workshops, panels, symposiums, multimedia projects, and social drop-in sessions. Event formats include public and semi-public events, alongside cohorts consisting of selected undergraduate and graduate students who meet regularly to engage in peer learning around the current theme.
Yearly themes are chosen based on topics that emerge in student discussions towards collective learning and community-building, especially in relation to the Asian diaspora, and the complexities around the many forms of community this can take.
History and Masthead
In 2017, Stephanie Fung (Community Engagement and Events Coordinator at the time) conceptualized the first ACAM Dialogues series as a critical space where students, staff, and faculty could respond to conversations around sexual violence happening on campus and beyond. While events were public and open to all, and has included collaboration or support from various campus units, the project was facilitated to centre student experiences and organizing. The aim was to create spaces for student engagement on campus, where they could share experiences and resources; build critical analyses; and discuss strategies for organizing against sexual, and other forms of, violence, with attention to race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and other dimensions of experience. The series produced a number of student-centered, discussion-based events; panel talks; film screenings; a student zine; and a public symposium responding to the intersections of race, gender, and sexual violence, particularly as they impact Asian student communities.
Since then, the Dialogues has continued to take place through discussion-based events, while extending to event formats like: interactive art and art therapy workshops; cohort member circles consisting of select undergraduate and graduate students; panel events; poetry and art showcases; film screenings; and published media such as podcast episodes or student forums.
Through peer learning, the project continues to create spaces where students across varying disciplines and fields can ask critical, nuanced questions about what it means to relate our experiences to the idea of “Asian diasporic” or “Asian/Asian Canadian” communities, including all the unresolved complications these ideas can involve.
ACAM Dialogues and its organizers are committed to nurturing creative and critical spaces for engagement towards anti-racist community-building and solidarities, responsive to simultaneous complexities of race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and the conditions of global imperialism that continue to shape these concepts.
This is inseparable from the fact of many in the Asian diaspora being settlers on unceded Indigenous territories—particularly the ancestral, occupied, and unceded territory of the Musqueam Nation on which UBC and the ACAM program are located. As such, the organizers are also committed to continually and critically unpacking the role of Asian diasporic peoples as participants within settler colonialism, whether in or outside of the nation-state boundaries of Canada.
Past Series & Events
2021 – Ongoing
Building Anti-Racism on Campus (Cohort member circle)
Current Organizers: Olivia Lim, Vanessa Lee and Emily Law
Past Organizers: amanda wan, Samhita Shanker
2021 – Ongoing
Flow of Thoughts: ACAM Podcast Series
Current Organizers: Isa You
Past Organizers: Moses Caliboso (2021); Jackie Sarvini (2020)
2017 – 2019
Mental Health in Asian Canadian Communities
Organizers: Jackie Sarvini and amanda wan
2017
Extending the Conversation on Sexual Violence in Asian Communities on Campus and Beyond
Organizers: Stephanie Fung