Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) is pleased to showcase the scholars selected for the 2024-25 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellowship in the Humanities. This program increases the visibility of the contributions and critical power of the humanities and arts to the university community. It also engages the wider community through publicly involved scholarship and creativity.

This year’s Shadbolt Fellows:

Fiana Kawane is an interdisciplinary scholar, educator, dance artist, and choreographer. Her research focuses on global Anglophone literature, environmental humanities, and Asian migration. Her dance practice rooted in Kathak spans the Lower Mainland and beyond, and has been supported by the Dance Centre, Dance Victoria, New Works, BC Culture Days, Vines Art Society, Dance West Network, and the AIRS program.

At SFU, her fellowship centres the intersection of sound, performance, poetry, migration, and waterways. Drawing on her embodied and intergenerational knowledge as a heritage speaker of Japanese and Punjabi, she will be immersing herself in sonic, poetic, and embodied archives of migration, and leading public engaged, art-research inquiries of waterways.

Justin Neal writes offbeat stories that weave comedy with high-stakes drama, creating tales that aspire to uplift and transform. While in San Francisco then New York City (in the late 90s into the 2010s), Justin juggled addiction and subsequent sobriety with day jobs and amateur theatre at night. He moved to his family’s traditional Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw territory to earn a Joint MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre from UBC in 2015. He is a 2022 alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre’s Norman Jewison Film Program Writers’ Lab.

As a Shadbolt Fellow, Justin will share space for academic and practicum exploration during the premiere of Keepers of the Salish Sea, a play that celebrates self-discovery whilst honouring a phenomenal cultural practice. He’ll continue developing other projects, including Aunties, based on rarely told stories of families, like his own, descended from Coast Salish women who migrated to Washington State and married Filipino farm managers, many of whom took care of the farms of interred Japanese families during WWII.

Nadine (King) Chambers could be described as a wave bound in a gyre first sighted c.1656 in the sea surrounding 17°55’59.99″ N -76°50’59.99″ W. Raised by librarians and light engineers; her work tracks the coordination of a double dispossession of rural lands and waters within Indigenous and Black geographies in a ‘networked isolation’ spanning 10,000 km. Her life in unceded Indigenous territories directs Nadine’s examination of Black and Indigenous struggles in the afterlife of an introduction through settler-colonialism and enslavement.

Her time as a Shadbolt scholar will be anchored in the SFU History Department and SFU Library to articulate her project Dèyè Mòn, Gen Mòn (Beyond Mountains, More Mountains) querying what constitutes ethical guidelines between racialized communities who are thinking across space, and race before and after the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Tania Willard is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. Her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities.

In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. In 2023 BUSH Gallery was named as a Future Studies recipient from Ruth Foundation for the Arts. Willard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan in syilx territories.

The even will take place on January 30th, at the Morris J Wosk Centre for Dialogue. For more details or to reserve your spot, click here.