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Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg musician, writer and academic, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the boundaries between story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. Leanne has performed in venues and festivals across Canada with her sister singer songwriter Ansley Simpson and guitarist Nick Ferrio. Leanne’s second album, f(l)light, was released in 2016 and is a haunting collection of story-songs that effortlessly interweave Simpson’s complex poetics and multi-layered stories of the land, spirit, and body with lush acoustic and electronic arrangements. Her EP Noopiming Sessions combines readings from her novel Noopiming with soundscapes composed and performed by Ansley Simpson and James Bunton with a gorgeous video by Sammy Chien and the Chimerik Collective. It was produced during the on-going social isolation of COVID-19 and was released on Gizhiiwe Music in the Fall of 2020. Leanne is the author of seven books, including This Accident of Being Lost, which won the MacEwan University Book of the Year; was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award; was long listed for CBC Canada Reads; and was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Quill & Quire. Her new novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies was released by the House of Anansi Press in the fall of 2020 and in the US by the University of Minnesota Press in 2021 and was named one of the Globe and Mail’s best books of the year and was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. A Short History of the Blockade was released by the University of Alberta Press in early 2021. Her new project with Robyn Maynard,Rehearsals for Living will be released in 2022 by Knopf Canada. Her newest record, Theory Of Ice was released by You’ve Changed Records in the winter of 2021, and features the artistic brilliance of Ansley Simpson, Nick Ferrio, Jim Bryson, John K. Samson, Jonas Bonnetta and Sandra Brewster.

Am Johal is joined by Eris Nyx, an artist and community organizer in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside who advocates for tenants' rights and an end to the war on drugs. She and Am discuss the impact of COVID-19 on drug users and residents of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels, and how restricting visitors in SROs and reducing access to services during the pandemic has heightened safety concerns around a volatile supply of drugs. Eris shares how the Downtown Eastside community has been organizing to respond to the several and intersecting systems of oppression they are facing. Eris Nyx is a queer multidisciplinary artist and community organizer living on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish people. Currently working with the Coalition of Peers Dismantling the Drug War, the Downtown Eastside SRO-Collaborative, and the Black Lab Arts Society, Nyx advocates for police and prison abolition; new models of antipsychiatry to replace the current regime of psychiatric theory and practice; ending the war on drug, and fighting against the intersectional harms wrought by colonization, capitalism, and other system of oppression. Most recently she helped to produce and publish a record of Downtown Eastside musicians entitled 100 Block Rock – which showcases a compilation of Vancouver BC's most marginalized community of artists.

This is the second edition of our Below the Radar Conversations. In this episode, Am Johal speaks with Paul Rogers on COVID-19 and how it impacts geopolitics and climate change. Paul Rogers is professor emeritus in the department of peace studies at Bradford University in the UK. He is openDemocracy's international security adviser, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. You can read more of his work and writing on openDemocracy here: www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/paul-rogers/.

On this episode of our Below the Radar Conversations Series we talk with Garth Mullins, documentarian, community organizer, and host and executive producer of the podcast CRACKDOWN. Garth and our host Am Johal talk about how the overdose crisis in Vancouver has been affected by COVID-19, and the positive affects that listening to drug user activists can have on the safety of the community.

On this episode of our Below the Radar Conversations Series, our host Am Johal chats with Kimberley Wong. Kimberley currently sits as the Chair of the City of Vancouver's Chinatown Legacy Stewardship Group, the co-chair of Vancouver Just Recovery Coalition, and is the Community Development Coordinator for the Hua Foundation. Kimberley talks with Am about her current work in Chinatown and how its been affected due to COVID-19.

In this episode we talk with Dr. Ethan Taylor, professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of North Carolina. With our host Am Johal, he discusses the current research on selenium as an anti-pathogenic factor in emerging zoonotic viral infections, such as COVID-19.

Co-Director of the Climate Justice Project at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and senior economist, Marc Lee, joins Am Johal to discuss the successes and failures of Canadian climate policies across the political spectrum. Marc speaks about the origins of the Climate Justice Project, and conceptualizes how reaching a net-zero carbon economy can be achieved — through a fundamental restructuring of Canadian and BC systems, and the implementation of decolonizing practices. Am and Marc also discuss how approaches like carbon pricing and carbon capture systems do little to counteract climate change, and instead offer “escape hatches” for the fossil fuel industry. They explore how other government-based responses like subsidizing pipelines, or setting climate goals for the distant future, do not adequately address the imminent threat of climate change. Marc ends by discussing how we need to deal with this climate emergency with the same level of urgency that was enacted in BC’s COVID-19 response.

“What I see that's hopeful coming out of this pandemic is that I think we've revitalized our ability to work in solidarity.” Lama Mugabo joins Below the Radar to speak to building community and solidarity, from Rwanda to Hogan’s Alley. Lama is a Rwandan-born community organizer and planner with deep roots in the Downtown Eastside and the Black community in Vancouver. In this episode, Lama joins host Am Johal to speak to his work around reconstruction and community building Rwanda, following the genocide of 1994. A co-founder of Building Bridges with Rwanda, Lama talks about fostering awareness and international solidarity with Rwandans, Canadians, and the diaspora community. Having worked for decades in the Downtown Eastside community, Lama draws connections between his work internationally and locally. He shares his experiences of engaging community with Hogan’s Alley Society around housing, discriminatory street checks, and rebuilding the once-thriving Black community that was displaced for the construction of the viaducts. Lama also speaks to how the COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the importance of the human right to housing, a need for increased welfare rates, and how growing food in community promotes health and connection.

Namiko Kunimoto’s work focuses on race, gender, and urbanization through art and visual culture. She has written on family photography during the Japanese-Canadian incarceration in “Intimate Archives: Japanese-Canadian Family Photography, 1939-1945,” on displacement and labour in “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games,” and on the depiction of blackness in Japanese art in The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art. As Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University, she has organized community discussions on bystander training, panels on the incarceration of Japanese-American, Latino/a people & First Nations peoples at Fort Sil, and workshops on how to take action against racism during COVID-19. Kunimoto’s awards include a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowships (2007 and 2016), a College Art Association Millard/Meiss Author Award, and the Ratner Award for Distinguished Teaching (2019). She has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and was the Vice-President of the Japanese Art History Forum for three years. Her next project, Transpacific Erasures: Contemporary Art, Gender, Race and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism, considers the Pacific War and its traumatic afterlives through the lens of contemporary artists in Japan and North America.

In this first episode of our Below the Radar conversations series, we hear from Dr. Kelley Lee, Canada Research Chair in Global Health Governance at Simon Fraser University. In this conversation, she chats with Am Johal about the World Health Organization and COVID-19. Dr. Lee is trained in International Relations and Public Administration with a focus on international political economy. She spent over twenty years at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, initially analyzing the role of the UN in health. She was a core member of two major donor-led studies on WHO reform during the 1990s. She co-established the WHO Collaborating Centre on Global Change and Health, and chaired the WHO Resource Group on Globalization, Trade and Health. Dr Lee also co-led a major international initiative to secure public access to tobacco industry documents, and analyze their contents in relation to the globalization of the tobacco industry. She has authored over 100 peer reviewed papers, 50 book chapters and 13 books including Globalization and Health, An introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), The World Health Organization (Routledge, 2008), Global Health and International Relations (Polity Press with Colin McInnes, 2012), and Case Studies on Corporations and Global Health Governance (Rowman and Littlefield International with Nora Kenworthy and Ross MacKenzie, 2016). She joined the SFU Faculty of Health Sciences in 2011 as Associate Dean, Research and Director of Global Health. She is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, Royal College of Physicians and Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Dr. Kelley Lee was featured in a Rolling Stone article entitled "Why the World Health Organization’s Response to COVID-19 Is Crucial to the Future of Public Health" :www.rollingstone.com/politics/polit…sponse-975543/ Note: This interview was recorded prior to the United States cutting funding to the WHO.