Queen's University, Public Lectures (2009-2010)

Deborah Barndt is a popular educator, photographer, and professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. For over 35 years, she has been involved in social movements in Latin America, the U.S., and Canada and has published and exhibited widely. For the past decade she has coordinated collaborative transnational research on the food system (Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail) and on popular education and community arts (Wild Fire: Art as Activism). Most recently, The VIVA Project has involved participatory action research with popular educators on eight community arts projects in Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, the U.S. And Canada. At York, she teaches a graduate course in Popular Education for Social Change and coordinates the Community Arts Practice Program.

A Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at UBC where she also held the McLean Chair in Canadian Studies, 2001-2003. For more than a decade, she lived in the Yukon Territory where she worked with the Yukon Native Language Centre recording oral traditions and life stories with Athapaskan and Tlingit elders. Working closely with those elders, she prepared booklets under their authorship documenting family history, place names, land use, social history and other subjects largely absent from history books. Julie's books include Life Lived Like a Story (1990) written in collaboration with three Yukon elders, Angela Sidney, Annie Ned and Kitty Smith, and The Social Life of Stories (1998). Her recent book, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination (2005) received two book prizes from the American Anthropological Association - the Victor Turner Prize and the Julian Steward Book Award, and also a 2007 Clio Award from the CHA.