Congress 2021 edition
By Anurika Onyenso, Third Year General Management Major, University of Alberta, Augustana Campus.
Intersections in Arts provides a broad, interdisciplinary framework to bring researchers together to allow voices, conversations, exhibits, and performances to resonate through a flexible format on issues that raise urgent calls for tackling social inequities, injustices, and violences.
The University of Alberta’s Faculty of Arts segment provided a space to present research on the material conditions of culture and their intersecting conditions of race, gender and identity.
After a brief introduction of the speakers by Marie Carriere, Xiaoting Li offered an in-depth view into her research on how human interaction is inherently multimodal.
She briefly narrated the story of Andras Toma, a soldier in the Hungarian war, who was taken as a war prisoner in Russia. Unable to speak Russian, he was sent to a psychiatric home as his language was mistaken for gibberish. After being repatriated, observations would reveal that his long imprisonment had affected his ability to understand the norms of conversation.
Li adopted the case of Toma to provide evidence to the audience that engaging in conversation, does in fact, require special competency in the patterns and rules of social interactions.
Xiaoting Li also shed light on her enlightening research into forward torso lean and interpersonal touch in Mandarin conversations. Her findings proved that people lean forward and intrude into others’ personal space when asking interrupting questions.
Elena Nicoladis, a specialist and professor at the University of Alberta, presented graphs supporting research on how frequently people gesture. Her research findings suggested that there are cross-cultural differences in how frequently people gesture even after they acquire a second language later in life.
The session also highlighted the importance of how and what we say, face-to-face interaction, verbal expressions and body movements.
The next part of the segment focused on Materialities and Meaning of Past, Present and Future. All panelists here spoke eloquently while examining how the past is constructed and shaped by interconnected social groups. The intersections of gender, identity, race and ethnicity and other forms of material culture were also addressed and explored in length.
Panel members included Margriet Haagsma, Pamela Willoughby, Xiaoting Li, Elena Nicoladis, Li Cheng and Marie Carriere from the University of Alberta.
Special thanks to the Faculty of Arts Signature Research Area, The Future of the Past, University of Alberta for hosting this Intersections of Arts session at Congress 2021.