Chasing Encounters ChasingEncounters

Today marks the end of an era but the beginning of another one. Chasing Encounters was my personal/academic project to highlight the work of others, learn from them and showcase it as a form to level the playing field in knowledge production and mobilization. Thanks to all of you who listened and supported me throughout these years.

In this final episode, Alonso Mateo, a highly experienced educator and researcher in Spain, shares with us his work through an intercultural project with the Erasmus project in Europe.

I hope you enjoy it.

We are on pause and we will be coming up with more content as soon as we can. This hiatus is helping us to re-charge, re-evaluate and re-invigorate ourselves so we can come stronger.

Thanks for following us this far.

Three parents came to Chasing Encounters podcast to share their experiences about being graduate students and how their families supported them throughout their journey. We discussed how rewarding is when they feel the support of their children in difficult times.

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Biography:
Meng Xiao is a scholar on international student engagement and the founder of Dream X Education Inc., an educational agency supporting international students engaging in North America.
Latifa Soliman is a faculty of English communication at Durham College and is proud to be teaching a diverse group of adult students who decided to re-join school after years of abandoning it, aiming to fulfill their goals and invest in their education.
Yi Liu is a spiritual teacher who helps to elevate awareness, happiness & parenting skills. Her insight on spirituality stems from both Chinese and western wisdom.

Cite this podcast (APA):
Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, October 20). CES6E1 – parenting while being a graduate student. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces6e1-parenting-while-being-a-graduate-student


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Sources:
Xiao, M., Liu, Y., Soliman, L., & Chudaeva, E. (2021). Being a Parent—Rethinking Parenting Philosophy from Global Perspectives (X. Qian, Ed.). Dream X Education.

Dr. Katie Entigar joined us to have a conversation about their first experiences in Toronto as a new assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Katie enlightened us about what is meant by adult education. Dr. Entigar discussed how education, learning and meaning-making need to go beyond the school years as these take place in different contexts formal, informal and non-formal. In our conversation, we talked about various forms of adult education that fall into the concepts of communities of practice in which people learn from each other. Also, we considered how adult education is conceptualized depending on different contexts as different meaningful approaches to engage communities are enacted in what is called Diacultural Pedagogies.
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Biography:
Dr. Katie Entigar’s agenda focuses on nonprofit education with.of.by.for adult immigrants. As a scholar, they draw upon sociocultural theory, critical applied linguistics, women of color feminist philosophy and praxis, intersectional analyses, queer theory and thinking, and poststructuralist and decolonizing approaches to unearth and work creatively with concepts of contribution, silence, inclusion, and coalition in educational research and practice. They seek dialogue and coalitional practice to collectively radically imagine alternatives to our current violent and dehumanizing reality, which is not a given but always in the making. They take an ethically engaged, restless posture of radical unknowing in my work, seeking to center and uplift Black, Brown, and immigrant perspectives while recommitting daily to a praxis of accountability as an ally, accomplice, and educator
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Cite this podcast (APA):
Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, June 1). CES5ESSE – 2021 Summer Special Episode
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Sources:
Entigar, K. E. (2020). Unintelligible Silence: Challenging Academic Authority in a New Socio-dialogic Politics of the Real for Collective Justice and Transformation. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 21(1), 06–18.
Entigar, K. E. (2020). From Support to Solidarity: Writing Tutors as Advocates for Multilingual Writers in College Composition Courses. NYS TESOL Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 35-37.

Born in Peru, Fernando Calderón-Figueroa accompanies us to learn about how cities have been designed to welcome or not their citizens. His research focuses on geography and territoriality with a focus on different international cities. He describes his fascination for how amazing humans have developed technology to adapt to their needs and create shelter. However, he questions the impact of built environments in urban design, and the concept of trust among people in relation to those contexts. He posits that there is a history of displacement, gentrification and social mobility that responds to how cities evolve and change over time. Listen to know more about our favourite spaces in the city of Toronto and our relationships with them.

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Biography:
Fernando Calderón Figueroa is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. Fernando’s main interests are urban and political sociology, social policy, and quantitative and computational methods. His dissertation addresses the relationship between the built infrastructure of cities and social capital in three different contexts: Canada, Peru, and Colombia. Fernando is a member of the Urban Genome Project, where he conducts interdisciplinary research on urban social policy and neighbourhood change.
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Cite this podcast (APA):
Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, June 29). CES5E8 – geography territoriality and land. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e8-geography-territoriality-and-land

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Sources:
Olson, A. W., Calderón-Figueroa, F., Bidian, O., Silver, D., & Sanner, S. (2021). Reading the city through its neighbourhoods: Deep text embeddings of Yelp reviews as a basis for determining similarity and change. Cities, 110, 103045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.103045

Colombian born and educated in Europe, Dr. Diana García shares her thoughts about her experiences being a woman in different contexts and how these have shaped her work with youth communities in urban and rural areas in her home country. She discusses how youth have been excluded from the Colombian sociopolitical conversations at local and larger levels. She questions her own privilege and positionality as she reflects on what she can do to support marginalized communities to challenge corruption and inequality. She asks how the national identity is constructed and what citizenship means for young students and how they can be empowered to fight essentialist views of what it means to e Colombian. We finished our discussion by questioning the role of elite private schools and organizations to help Colombia build a prosperous future for all.

Biography:
Diana C. García Gómez is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Childhood Studies Department at Rutgers University—Camden. Drawing from the fields of childhood studies, memory studies, and employing qualitative and ethnographic methods, Diana’s research focuses on children’s and youth’s political participation in peacebuilding, collective memory, and social movements in post-accord Colombia. Her dissertation - Cultivating Hope - centers children’s and youth’s participation in transitional contexts by examining their engagement with collective memory processes in urban and rural settings. Diana holds a BA in Political Science from Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, and a MA in Cognition and Communication from the University of Copenhagen. Diana has also written on children’s representation by the Colombia’s truth commission’s social media in “’I have the right’: examining the role of children in the #DimeLaVerdad campaign” (forthcoming).

Cite this podcast (APA):
Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, June 17). CES5E7 –Youth as peacebuilders. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e7-youth-as-peacebuilders

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Sources:
García Gómez, D. C. (2018). The Perfect Computer? Children’s Experiences with ICT in Rural Colombia. In A. Mandrona & C. Mitchell (Eds.), Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods (pp. 218–232). Rutgers University Press.