Arts & Science Students Thrilled to Receive the Renaissance Award!

For the ninth consecutive year, Arts & Science students have been awarded the Drs. Jolie Ringash and Glen Bandiera Renaissance Award. The Renaissance Award emphasizes experiential learning and provides recipients with the opportunity to explore a project outside of their field of study. This year’s Arts & Science recipients are Level IV student Anna Buhrmann and Level II students Vikita Mehta and Inaya Yousaf.

Anna is looking forward to creating a piece of verbatim theatre that explores long-term care from the perspectives of staff, residents, and family members. Her experience as a care assistant in a nursing home last summer sparked the desire to hear more of the stories of those living and working in long-term care. After interviewing a range of people involved in long-term care, she will use participants’ own words to write the script. With the help of a production team, the play will be produced virtually in the Fall of 2021.

The purpose of Inaya and Vikita’s project is to understand how written and spoken word poetry is a tool for sociopolitical resistance within dissenting communities around the world. Inspired by their love of poetry and a strong desire to engage with diverse perspectives, they will explore countries troubled by political conflict and unrest, whose peoples are enduring human rights violations and larger humanitarian crises. The project entails travelling (virtually) this summer to China, Yemen, Nigeria, and within Canada to interview poets, citizens, politicians, and professors about resistance poetry. The two students plan also to write an anthology and film a short documentary to raise awareness about the humanitarian issues as well as the powerful effects of these accessible forms of resistance.

Congratulations to Anna, Vikita, and Inaya!