Curator, writer, and educator Moroti George joins our host Am Johal on this episode of Below the Radar. Moroti is the curator at The Black Arts Centre in Surrey, BC and the Director/Curator of Gallery Gachet in downtown Vancouver. Together, they chat about how Moroti became interested in the arts, their experience working in two different art spaces, and their approach to curating in Greater Vancouver.
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Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/237-moroti-george.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/237-moroti-george.html

Resources:
Gallery Gachet: https://gachet.org/
Gallery Gachet’s instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gallerygachet/
The Black Arts Centre: https://theblackartscentre.ca/
The Black Arts Centre’s instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theblackartscentre/ 
See How We Run! Art as Agency, Autonomy and Community — with Demi London and Moroti George: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/series/see-how-we-run/229-art-as-agency-autonomy-and-community.html

Bio:
Olumoroti (MorotiI) Soji-George (he/they) is a curator, writer and educator based in Vancouver, BC. He is the curator at the Black Arts Centre in Surrey, BC and the Director/Curator of Gallery Gachet in downtown Vancouver. 

Olumoroti's curatorial practice primarily involves unravelling and demystifying the ways Blackness is embodied and codified in our shared milieu and conceptualizing the works of Black Contemporary artists and their contributions to the Black cultural lexicon and our understanding of the state of  Blackness.  His research and curatorial practice also involve envisioning accessible and community-centred art spaces and highlighting the stories of individuals and communities who construct new ways of being that challenge the Western status quo. At the core of his practice is the belief that space could be used to reflect the agency and lived experiences of individuals whose bodies and identities are not typically valued, respected and represented in traditional art and academic settings.

Through an exploration of language, the archive, lens-based works, history and cultural theory, Olumoroti's curatorial practice is grounded in a passion for non-hierarchical epistemological production that could contribute to the creation of a pathway where new approaches to cultural production and the politics that fuel the ways different bodies perceive and understand the world could emerge.


Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “Community-Centred Curating — with Moroti George .” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, March 12, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/237-moroti-george.html.

Community-Centred Curating — with Moroti George

On this episode of Below the Radar, we’re joined by Ania Malinowska, hypnotherapist, cultural theorist and Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. We discuss Ania’s scholarly practice, love, and how Ania found herself being trained in hypnosis.

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/238-ania-malinowska.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/238-ania-malinowska.html

Resources:
Ania Malinowska: https://aniamalinowska.com/
The Unhappy Ending Project: https://unhappyendingproject.com/
Hypnotic AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhptkULpzkk
Data Dating: https://www.datadating.online/
Love in Contemporary Technoculture: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/love-in-contemporary-technoculture/074FE883A89E836B494D581E7C74A3AB?fbclid=IwAR1Kw7BqgQ8sdCZRMmz80YHApzetCqdjg6h43Zoq3wT8Yt0SmB3GJcNH00A
The Materiality of Love: https://www.routledge.com/The-Materiality-of-Love-Essays-on-Affection-and-Cultural-Practice/Malinowska-Gratzke/p/book/9780367886639

Bio:
Ania Malinowska is a cultural theorist, poet and author. She is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Institute of Culture Studies and Centre for Critical Technology Studies), and a former Senior Fulbright Fellow at The New School in New York. Malinowska’s work is associated with critical posthumanism and cultural semiotics, gathering approaches from media and cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy of technology, and digital humanities. Her critical writing focuses on technologically shaped love practices and emotional traditions under digitalism. A licensed hypnotist and an author of fiction and poetry, Malinowska is a proponent of textrapolation, a method of poetic experimentation based on intuitive assemblage she employs for her cutout and stamp poems.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “The Art of Love, Hypnosis, and AI.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, March 26, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/238-ania-malinowska.html.

The Art of Love, Hypnosis, and AI — with Ania Malinowska

This week on Below the Radar, we’re joined by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, co-creators of the participatory videogame performance asses.masses. The show recently wrapped up a run at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Patrick and Milton discuss the show’s development, videogames as performance, and what they’ve discovered as they’ve toured the piece.

Find out more and get tickets for their upcoming performances at https://www.assesmasses.work/performances

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/239-patrick-blenkarn-milton-lim.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/239-patrick-blenkarn-milton-lim.html

Resources:
asses.masses: https://www.assesmasses.work/
Patrick Blenkarn: https://patrickblenkarn.com/
Milton Lim: https://www.miltonlim.com/
culturecapital: https://www.culturecapital.cards/

Bio:
Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim are conceptual artists exploring urgent questions around the social value of art, digital labour, and the political potential of games. Mixing their backgrounds in performance, philosophy, psychology, and digital media, their collaborations have manifested in video games, participatory installations, digital archives, and card games. In addition to asses.masses, Patrick and Milton are also the co-founders of the Canadian national video archive of performance (videocan) and the co-creators behind a performing arts economy trading card game (culturecapital). Their projects have been presented across Canada, as well as in Argentina, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, in English, French, and Spanish.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Walters, Samantha. “Ass Power — with Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, April 9, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/239-patrick-blenkarn-milton-lim.html.

Ass Power — with Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim

On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Srećko Horvat, a philosopher, author, and co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025. Am and Srećko discuss the journey behind launching the Island School of Social Autonomy on the Adriatic island of Vis. ISSA is a place for imagining, experimenting with and cultivating forms of knowledge-production and knowledge-sharing for the “age of extinction”..

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/242-srecko-horvat.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/242-srecko-horvat.html

Resources:
Srećko Horvat: https://sreckohorvat.org/
Island School of Social Autonomy: https://issa-school.org/
Subversive Festival: https://subversivefestival.com/
Democracy in Europe Movement 2025: https://diem25.org/en/
The Radicality of Love: https://sreckohorvat.org/the-radicality-of-love/
After the Apocalypse: https://sreckohorvat.org/after-the-apocalypse/

Bio:
A Croatian philosopher and author who produced a blizzard of political works – with several books published when he was barely into his thirties. Nowadays he is known as a fiery voice of dissent in the Post-Yugoslav landscape. If you aren’t familiar with Horvat’s work, you can probably recognise a lot of people who are. He is friends with the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis; had regular visits with Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, an organisation that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. He is also a staunch friend of Slavoj Žižek, the maverick Slovenian celebrity academic with whom Horvat co-wrote a book in 2013 entitled “What Does Europe Want?”. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. Aside from co-founding DiEM25, which campaigns to reform the EU into a “realm of shared prosperity, peace and solidarity”, he is a founder of the Subversive festival, an annual jamboree in Zagreb of radical thought that has featured the likes of Oliver Stone and Antonio Negri.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “Island School of Social Autonomy — with Srećko Horvat.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, May 21, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/242-srecko-horvat.html.

Island School of Social Autonomy — with Srećko Horvat

Our host Am Johal is joined by Ian Angus, Professor Emeritus from the Department of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Together, they chat about Ian’s academic career, his engagement with the work of Husserl, and his most recent book, Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World (Lexington Books, 2021).

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/244-ian-angus.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/244-ian-angus.html

Resources:
Ian Angus: https://www.sfu.ca/globalhumanities/human-dir/emeritus/i-angus.html 
Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793640918/Groundwork-of-Phenomenological-Marxism-Crisis-Body-World 
Ian’s work: https://sfu.academia.edu/IanAngus/ 

Bio:
Ian Angus is Professor Emeritus from the Department of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He has published in the areas of contemporary philosophy, Canadian Studies, and communication theory. A Festschrift on his work has been edited by Samir Gandesha and Peyman Vahabzadeh: "Crossing Borders: Essays in Honour of Ian H. Angus, "Beyond Phenomenology and Critique" (Arbeiter Ring, 2020). His most recent book is "Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World" (Lexington Books, 2021).

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism — with Ian Angus.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, June 18, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/244-ian-angus.html.

Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism — with Ian Angus

On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Ellie Anderson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pomona College, and co-host of the Overthink podcast. Ellie joins us to discuss how she got into philosophy and contemporary readings of Simone de Beauvoir’s work.

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/245-ellie-anderson.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/245-ellie-anderson.html

Resources:

Ellie Anderson: https://www.ellieandersonphd.com/
Ellie Anderson’s work: https://pomona.academia.edu/EllieAnderson
Overthink podcast: https://overthinkpodcast.com/

Bio:
Ellie Anderson is a philosopher with expertise in feminist theory, existentialism, phenomenology, and philosophy of race. She is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pomona College and co-host of Overthink podcast. An internationally recognized specialist on love, dating, sexual consent, ethical non-monogamy (including open relationships and polyamory), and selfhood, Ellie is published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Hypatia, Continental Philosophy Review, Forge Magazine, and more. She is currently working on a book.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “Reading Simone de Beauvoir — with Ellie Anderson.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, July 9, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/245-ellie-anderson.html.

Reading Simone de Beauvoir — with Ellie Anderson

This week on Below the Radar, we’re joined by Zool Suleman, co-founder and editor of Rungh Magazine. Zool discusses Rungh’s founding as a national South Asian focused cultural initiative in the 90s, and how the magazine has since evolved into a platform for Indigenous, Black and racialized artist conversations.

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/246-zool-suleman.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/246-zool-suleman.html

Resources:
Rungh Magazine: www.rungh.org
Stop Racial Profiling: www.stopracialprofiling.ca
Zool Suleman: www.sulemanco.com

Bio:
Zool Suleman is a lawyer, writer, journalist, and cultural collaborator. He is the Editor of Rungh Magazine. He co-founded Rungh (1991), as a national South Asian focused arts initiative and relaunched Rungh in 2017 as a creative platform for Indigenous, Black and racialized artist conversations. In addition to his engagements as a cultural connector, he advocates for immigrants and refugees and has been active in national and local civil society initiatives against racism, racial profiling and Islamophobia, as the Executive Director of MARU since 2004. His work has been recognized by the City of Vancouver, the Attorney General of British Columbia, the BC Museum Association, and the Canadian Association of Journalists.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “Archiving Counter-Histories — with Zool Suleman.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, July 23, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/246-zool-suleman.html.

Archiving Counter-Histories — with Zool Suleman

This week on Below the Radar we’re joined by Michael Hardt, political theorist and Professor at Duke University. Am and Michael discuss the political concept of love, Michael’s research on revolutionary movements in the 1970s, as well as his past writing with the late Tony Negri, and how they continue to think together.

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/248-michael-hardt

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/248-michael-hardt

Resources:
Michael Hardt: https://scholars.duke.edu/person/hardt

The Subversive Seventies: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-subversive-seventies-9780197674659

Michael’s Talk at SFU: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/library/2023/michael-hardt-the-subversive-seventies.html

Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674006713

Bio:
Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is co-director with Sandro Mezzadra of The Social Movements Lab.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “The Politics of Love — with Michael Hardt.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, August 27th, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/248-michael-hardt.html.

The Politics of Love — with Michael Hardt

On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Hank Bull, an artist and curator whose administration and advocacy work has greatly contributed to artist-run culture in Canada. Hank discusses his work with the Western Front and Centre A, and he also brought along some props to give us a taste of what his past radio art sounded like!

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/254-hank-bull.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/254-hank-bull.html

Resources:
Hank Bull: https://hankbull.ca/
The HP Show: https://wavefarm.org/ta/archive/works/vae2da
Western Front: https://westernfront.ca/
Centre A: https://centrea.org/
Vancouver Art Gallery: https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/

Bio:
Hank Bull was born in 1949 in Moh’kins’tsis/Calgary and grew up in Toronto and small towns in southern Ontario. He became interested in art and music at an early age, mentored by a librarian, Graham Barnett, and encouraged by high school instructors Paavo Airola and David Blackwood. After travels in Europe in 1968, he studied drawing and photography in Toronto under Robert Markle and Nobuo Kuobota. In 1973, he moved to xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam)/Vancouver to join the newly formed artist-run centre Western Front. In this interdisciplinary setting, he was exposed to mail art, poetry, ceramics, improvised music and video. He produced a weekly radio broadcast, cabaret performances, shadow theatre and telecommunications projects. During the 1980s he travelled in Asia, Africa and Europe, organized international exchanges and helped to develop a Canadian network of artist-run centres. 

He has worked in collaboration with a wide range of artists, including Kate Craig, Glenn Lewis, General Idea, Robert Filliou, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michael Snow, Mona Hatoum, Antoni Muntadas, Steve Lacy, Tari Ito, Rebecca Belmore, Germaine Koh, Khan Lee, Cornelia Wyngaarden and many others. He has filled a variety of roles as artist, curator, writer, organizer and administrator. Throughout his career, he has continued an individual practice of painting, music, photography, video, sound and sculpture. He lives at the Western Front and spends a fair amount of time in swiya, territory of shíshálh Nation, as a member of the Storm Bay Art and Conservation Society.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “The World Accordion To Hank — with Hank Bull.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, October 22, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/254-hank-bull.html.

The World Accordion To Hank — with Hank Bull

In this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Véronique Sioufi, the Researcher for Racial & Socio-economic Equity at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC Office, and a doctoral candidate in geography at Simon Fraser University.

Am and Véronique discuss what brought her to her doctoral work and her interest in issues of labour inequality, as well as how her position at the CCPA was created in order to look at structural racism in BC and fill in major data gaps. They also talk about how she and her colleagues in the CCPA approach questions of decolonisation in their work.

Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/259-veronique-sioufi.html

Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/259-veronique-sioufi.html

Resources:
Véronique Sioufi: https://www.policyalternatives.ca/people/veronique-sioufi/
Véronique's Doctoral Research: https://www.sfu.ca/geography/about/our-people/profiles/veronique-emond-sioufi.html
CCPA BC: https://www.ccpabc.ca/

Bio:
Véronique is the CCPA-BCs Researcher for Racial & Socio-economic Equity, a data-driven, intersectional initiative that investigates structural racism and socio-economic inequalities in BC. An interdisciplinary researcher, Véronique critically examines the social and political structures affecting the ability of the working class to thrive. She brings a rich blend of expertise and work experience in labour, economic geography, critical data studies, critical race theory and communication. Currently a doctoral candidate in geography at Simon Fraser University, her SSHRC-funded study delves into crowdwork in Canada and Tunisia, particularly how platforms rely on and reproduce precarity and the uneven distribution of that precarity across gender, race, class and geography. 

Véronique also holds an MA in Communication from SFU, where she explored the tensions in Canadian unions' use of privately owned social media platforms for collective organizing. Véronique is proud of her Palestinian roots, which make her particularly sensitive to the geographies of politics and power. She is passionate about community-driven, collaborative and hopeful research.

Cite this episode:
Chicago Style

Johal, Am. “Racial Equity in Policy Making — with Véronique Sioufi.” Below the Radar, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, January 14, 2025. 
https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/259-veronique-sioufi.html.

Racial Equity in Policy Making — with Véronique Sioufi

Amplifying ideas that fly below the radar. We talk environmental and social justice, arts, culture, community-building and urban issues with featured guests.

This podcast is produced by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement as a part of our Knowledge Democracy Project @ 312 Main — encouraging the meaningful exchange of ideas and information across communities.

Hosted and currently produced by:
Am Johal
Joey Malbon
Julia Aoki
Kathy Feng
Samantha Walters

Visit our website for archived audio and video recordings of our public events: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/library.html

New tracks tagged #Am Johal