Prison Education Researcher and Symposium Organizer

This practicum will allow the student to participate in a national initiative led by Associate Dean of Social Sciences, Dr. Wade Deisman, called “A Classroom in Every Prison”. This 80-hour experience will involve organizing a 3-day symposium at SFU (October), with a follow-up that includes documentation and creating a publication. You will also receive the opportunity to work on other projects related to this national initiative.

Some info:

Prison Arts: Building a National Coalition

This is a three-day Symposium intended to bring together people with lived experience of incarceration with artists, activists and scholars working in the field of Prison Arts to build a robust national network to initiate knowledge exchange and mobilization.  Across Canada, prison art practitioners collaborate with formerly incarcerated and incarcerated people in multiple contexts to create art as a form of community-building, healing, creative expression, reparative justice, and education. Our Prison Arts Symposium will be the first national convening of this community. Invited participants include formerly incarcerated artists, teaching artists, writers, educators, scholars and activists drawn from a range of institutional affiliations and regions across Canada. All have decades of experience in the field and practice prison arts through a range of modalities that include Indigenous arts, spoken word, poetry, visual art, life writing, theatre, video installation, music and more. While methods and approaches are distinct and varied, this community is united by a core belief in the transformative power of art to reimagine justice and to build bridges of aesthetic and affective connection to wider publics.

Candidate: The role presents an ideal opportunity for students interested in innovative approaches to reparative justice. This would suit an individual with strong research, team-building, and organizational skills. The successful candidate will expand their professional and academic network.

Required student type: Any 3rd or 4th year UFV student can apply for this experience but preference will be given to students interested in reparative justice for incarcerated individuals.