Ethnographer and writer, Sultan Somjee will present a talk, “Building Museums of Peace: Decolonizing Material Culture” and students will share progress in their research. The Program for Undergraduate Research Experience (PURE) is aimed at broadening access to, and enhancing, undergraduate research experience as a central priority in UBC’s new strategic plan. Students who are participating in the program are currently researching African history and cultures in order to revise the catalogue descriptions of the museum’s Africa collections.

Kenyan-born, Sultan Somjee is a Canadian-based ethnographer and writer whose publications include Material Culture of Kenya (1994), the novel Bead Bai (2013), and the story collection Home Between Crossings (2016). For over three decades he worked on Indigenous knowledge for education, and during the 1990s—when conflicts plagued eastern Africa, he looked towards Indigenous traditions of conflict resolution. He found here the inspiration to build museums of peace as grassroots civil societies providing spaces for dialogue through performances and displays of Indigenous heritages of peace. Today, there are sixteen community-based Museums of Peace in Kenya managed by curators he has trained. In 2001, the United Nations named him one of twelve global ‘Unsung Heroes of Dialogue Among Civilizations’, and in 2002, he was appointed to the Global Advisory Board of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies.

Free and open to all.