"Responding to the Jim Wong-Chu fonds and the Chinese Canadian Research Collection, Rina Garcia Chua performed three visual and aural poems from her upcoming poetry chapbook, “A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards”. The Word Festival program describes her work as “counter-narratives of migrant labour, migration, and environmental extraction that resist and negate Canadian ‘multiculturalism.’” The effect of simultaneously hearing (both regular and whispered tones were used) and seeing these visually arranged words and phrases made for a haunting and electrifying experience."

"We also want to think about what “sustainability” is for the Editorial Team at The Goose: How can we create a new infrastructure that honours and respects each and everyone’s labour without unnecessarily burdening one another as part of sustainability? How can we continue being a part of the journal without compromising who we are as individuals outside of academe? How can we confront the messy work of pausing and recalibrating ourselves and our work so that we keep the journal going for future environmental humanists? Importantly, one part of this grant is to also think about our communities—how do we sustain our relationships with ourselves and our communities, those we want to mentor and be mentored by, without compromising our energies?"

"I create from the liminal environment that I occupy as a migrant in North America. My poems are of the juxtapositions among disparate time-space compressions that I have experienced and observed as someone who moved across an ocean. Mostly, I create from grief—I process emotions through the words in my poems, and allow these feelings to take shape through the maps I base my poems on ..."

In celebration of open education at SFU, meet these three scholars who have taken their own approach to crafting and using Open Educational Resources at SFU.  Read on to learn about their open education work and their thoughts on open education.

This month Lindsay and Brandon are joined by Rina Garcia Chua and Jeffrey Santa Ana to discuss their recent edited collection Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific. Rina is an incoming Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University and she completed her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Jeffrey is an Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in Asian and Asian American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Among other things, the group discusses cigar-smoking monsters, the recent edited collection, and problems with the word “anthropocene.” Co-editors of the collection, Heidi Amin-Hong and Zhou Xiaojing, were unable to join the episode due to scheduling conflicts.

On May 13, 2022, the FEELeb Lab and friends gathered at Woodhaven for a one-day symposium of workshops, storytelling, talks, performances, and other forms of sharing creative and critical perspectives on water ecologies and fire practices in the Okanagan watershed and beyond. Juan Sotelo and team filmed the day for us so we can continue our conversations and reflections on fire and water. Their film has captured the wondrous moments and energy of the day, so we can share it again and again.

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On World Water Day 2023, we premiered the film in the Sawchuk Family Theatre. Creator Juan Sotelo will joined us to introduce the film and re-begin our conversations on fire and water in the Okanagan watershed. If you missed it, you can now watch the film whenever you like on YouTube!

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ArtsEquator chats with five writers about their favourite horror characters and monsters from Southeast Asian lore and mythology. We then asked two Singapore artists, Natalie Christian Tan and Divyalakshmi, to respond with a custom illustration based on the replies.

Singapore Writers Festival 2021 runs from 5 to 14 November 2021 with the theme “Guilty Pleasures” – with plenty of offerings on horror, mythology and many more.

"What appears to bring Chua comfort through all of these challenges is teaching others and being within a community that she can serve, and that serves her, as well. Chua says that, while many of her friends pursued nursing as a career path, she decided to pursue teaching. She not only “loves teaching” but asserts “that’s really what energizes me to do the research that I want to do.”

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Written by Kohlbey Ozipko, MA

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Visit the blog: https://littlefeministmovement.com

"Nasaan kayo nung Ondoy?" In this episode, Rina Garcia Chua discusses the collective experience of the Filipino in relation to nature and crises, and how these are best brought out through literature.

Visit Forest Foundation Philippines' website:

https://gubatbp.forestfoundation.ph

"Typhoon Ondoy (Ketsana) quickly inundated our streets and swallowed the whole metro within hours. Unfortunately, I was still in the university at that time and had to walk, swim, wade, run through and into the floods for five hours so I could get home. I remember distinctly thinking – exhausted and functioning on adrenaline – as I walked through traffic lights blinking blue, What else can I do? I can survive, yes, but after this, what else? I needed my scholarship to be my activism – for my research to be the remembrance of that evening wading in the flood, and for the remembrance of those who were lost and continued to be lost to these calamities. I also desired my scholarship to marry the “north” and “south” places with me: the memories of my childhood and the flashes of my city in ruins."

How does this give someone like me, an immigrant mother, comfort? Poetry has always soothed me and has always been the wave of truth I’ve clung to. Yet, a collection like Kathy’s tells me that despite everything else we are going through at the moment in our own collective experience, there is a space for all our emotions – for grieving, for happiness, for love, for anger, and, most importantly, for hope. In the second version of “Basket,” Kathy writes, I fell asleep / dreamt / my words / were / a current / flowing / to greet you. I think about these words a lot as I continue to regroup my plans to reunite with my daughter. I’m not sure when it will be safe enough for me to cross the Pacific Ocean once more, but I take solace in both the certainties and uncertainties of the future. There will be that moment for a reunion and for our lives to once again begin together in this land, but, for now, I allow myself to hope. That is the strongest current that ebbs through me every day, and it keeps me flowing.

Interested in the spaces that people create as migrants. Writer, ecocritic, volunteer, teacher. Loves the ocean, dog kisses, cat rubs and hammy squeaks.

"Each new program created presents a unique opportunity for students to make history. When UBC created the Public Humanities Hub, Rina Garcia Chua was the first research assistant to be hired to support an Okanagan hub, while Mohsen Zardadi and John Perrott count themselves among the first to graduate from the newly-developed Master of Data Science (MDS) and Master of Management programs. In spring 2020, Perrott will also take part in the first graduation ceremony at UBC to be delivered completely online."

"A PhD student at the University of British Columbia Okanagan is asking for summer tuition to be waived for graduate students due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Like many universities across the country, UBC announced in mid-March it would be moving classes online for the rest of the semester and non-essential research would be curtailed until the end of April.

Rina Garcia Chua, an international student from the Phillippines, says the move has disrupted research and project timelines for many graduate students, as well as on-campus employment and child care. 

She says the last few weeks have been stressful.

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"And it's not just me. All my colleagues," Chua told host Sarah Penton on CBC's Radio West."

"A UST Publishing House (USTPH) author said the University must include ecocriticism, or the interdisciplinary study of literature and environment, among electives in the college curriculum.

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“[I]t’s about time… UST has the tools, resources and people to do it.  I feel that students will be interested to read on it,” Rina Garcia Chua said during a book discussion at the UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies (CCWLS) on Friday."

"Chua agrees. She says she’s happy to be shovelling out horse stalls because volunteering gives her a sense of well-being.

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“It’s fun to do because you feel like you are part of a community,” says Chua serenely.

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The fulfillment Chua experiences from volunteering is not just a feeling. It’s a well-researched phenomenon. According to Holli-Anne Passmore, a UBCO psychology instructor and PhD candidate, people who volunteer have higher levels of life satisfaction and meaning in their life.

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“The essence of meaning is connectedness. When you volunteer, you are connecting yourself to something that is bigger than just you,” says Passmore, who teaches courses such as Positive Psychology and Psychology of Meaning in Life."

"Meet Rina Garcia Chua. Rina is originally from the Philippines but has lived in Kelowna for three years now. She loves to hang with her family and work at that Ph.D."

"Co-written by UBC poets Karla Lenina Comanda (UBC Main) and Rina Garcia Chua (UBC Okanagan), the “Padasal” is a reformulation of the prayers recited and performed in the Philippines to honour the departed. But the late dictator is not among our beloved, and the UBC PSS firmly believes that he does not deserve to be laid to rest with the rest of the Philippines’ real heroes. Therefore, in the case of the “Padasal,” the ills and excesses of the Marcoses are recited, while the names and courage of those killed, tortured to death, and disappeared, during the Martial Law period in the Philippines are repeatedly invoked. By remembering the names of the martyrs of Martial Law, we seek to re-inscribe into our memory the sacrficies they have done, so that our will for action may be strengthened and our commitment to continue the struggle be re-affirmed."

"Rina Garcia Chua is the editor of Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry, the first-ever ecopoetics anthology in the Philippines, which will be released later this year by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, a Manila-based university press.

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I recently spoke with Chua, in part because the anthology speaks to many of the same environmental themes as Age of Blight, my short story collection from Unnamed Press that grapples with humanity’s role in the destruction and possible restoration of the natural world, among other things."