Jennie Zhou
Student Fellow
Jennie is a third-year undergraduate student currently pursuing a BSc degree in Environmental Sciences with a minor in Political Science at the University of British Columbia, located on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Growing up in Beijing, China, her involvement in climate organizing started in high school, for which she was awarded the Roots & Shoots China National Achievement Award by Dr. Jane Goodall. Jennie is currently the Creative Communications Lead of the UBC Climate Hub and an Artist in Residence at Rootbound, where her combined interests in the natural sciences, art, and policy inspires her to explore creative and accessible means to climate science communications.
Primary Recipient Awards
The Wall Catalyst Student Fellow cohort will first come together to engage in the online, interdisciplinary Facing Human Wrongs course and subsequently work together on a number of public-facing projects.
The course content touches upon systemic, historical and ongoing violence, unsustainability, our complicities in social and ecological harm, and our tendency to address complex problems, such as biodiversity loss, food insecurity, economic and political crises, and the potential for social and environmental collapse, with simplistic solutions. The course requires students to be willing to be uncomfortable and to have their perspective challenged.
asha ; a transnational arts, education, research, & community organizing collective
Asha is a transnational arts and research collective developing local, global embodied knowledges based interventions through community organizing and multimedia social justice educational programming by, for, and with peoples who have experienced racialized and gendered oppression. We aim to be an open source multidisciplinary network of ecosystem of documentation around marginalized histories and futures that aim to uplift, celebrate, and mourn the urgent intersections of land, memory, climate crisis, and collective storytelling to foster senses of agency and belonging through community. Our multibranched structure addresses intersections between lived experiences of historical, ongoing structural violences, and cultural heritages threatened by ongoing colonial legacies.