Faculty of Art
Lawrence Santiago is a second year doctoral student in human geography at the University of British Columbia, specializing in comparative migration policies between developed and less developed countries, co-supervised by geographers David Ley and Merje Kuus. To analyze the role of the modern state in creating, controlling and managing human migration systems, he is doing a transnational case study of the migration flows of health workers (nurses and physicians-turned-nurses) from the Philippines to Canada. His scholarship aims to influence or result in the ethical and sustainable recruitment of healthcare workers from the developing world and responds to a basic ethical question: how do we justly distribute health care across state borders through ethically sound policies? He is the lead organizer of the Transpacific Summer Institute and the initiator of Pacific Worlds in Motion: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Asian Migrations, held at Green and St. John’s College, the University of British Columbia in March 2008 and will take place at the National University of Singapore in March 2009. He currently teaches History 483: Asian Migration to the Americas, and will teach the UBC-NUS summer course on Transpacific Migrations from May-June 2009, both with Prof. Henry Yu.
Alejandro Yoshizawa is a 4th year Physics major/History minor. In the spring of 2008, Al made a film called From Issei to Sansei: The History of my Grandfather’s Life. The film, which made extensive use of oral history, was screened at the Japanese Canadian Redress Anniversary conference later that year. Al’s current work involves researching all aspects of oral history, such as its history, theory, methods, best practices, digitization and community involvement. He hopes to contribute to the development of a structured oral history project at UBC which would stress student participation, community relations, and creatively utilize digitization and modern technology.
Monica Li is a double major in History and Political Science. Under INSTRCC, she helped create a film highlighting the history of accomplished Asian Canadian, Bick Lee. Currently, she is working on the digitization of UBC Perspectives newspaper, a student publication with almost two decades of history that focuses on current Asian Canadian issues.
Laura Madokoro is a 2nd year PhD student in the Department of History. Her research focuses on how the concept of “a refugee” became universalized during the Cold War as humanitarian crises in China and Vietnam led western countries to rethink and broaden the concept of legitimate and deserving refugees while individual migrants negotiated the shifting terrain. She organizes the Migration Studies Group, which meets monthly at Green College, and is an active member of the Graduate Student Migration Network at UBC.
Chelsea Wang is a fourth-year student in History Honours. She has been an INSTRCC student fellow since May 2007, starting her work at the Asian Library, where she created catalogue entries for the Historical Chinese Language Materials in British Columbia database. In August 2007, Chelsea joined an archival project on papers of Ron Bick Lee, founder of the Vancouver Foo Hung Company. Her work has involved digitalization, creating archival entries, translation, and building a family tree database. After graduation in May 2009, Chelsea plans to proceed to graduate studies in Chinese history.
Edith Tam is a 4th year Geography student. She began working for INSTRCC in May of 2008. The project began as a Cartography final project, but her interest in the topic has made her continue to contribute to the project. She uses the Head Tax registry data to create maps. The maps show the origins, destinations, distribution and chain migration of the Chinese migrants. She also works with the head librarian, Eleanor Yuen of UBC Asian library to translate the Head Tax registry data to find the actual location in China.
Angela Wong is a recent graduate from the History Honours Programme at UBC. In her final year of undergraduate studies, she wrote a thesis titled Finding the Sino-Vietnamese: The Historic Process of the Sino-Vietnamese in Vancouver. Angela is also the current President of the Asian Canadian Cultural Organization (ACCO), a student group that promotes greater awareness on issues relevant to all Asian Canadians. She hopes to continue researching on the Sino-Vietnamese and Asian migrations to the Americas at a graduate level.
