Next Up

Kim loves both art and anthropology, so she is a creative mix of creativity and intellect herself. She loves art & design and seeing people commit their emotional and physical energy to creative expression. Anthropology introduced a way to examine society and the world, but it was her community experiences that got her hooked on developing her skills as an active social agent. She sees art and anthropology as always connected; two lenses shaping her worldview (like one left eye and one right eye). Two Community Service Learning courses had a significant impact on her. The first was a course on artistic representations of the energy economy in Alberta, where she worked in collaboration with an advocacy group called Friends of the Lubicon. Here she became committed to learning about how the energy economy affects First Nations. In the second course, she worked with the Office of Sustainability at the University of Alberta, where she developed a research project outlining why and how sustainability and design education go hand in hand. Kim has travelled extensively and her recent adventure was a student exchange in Brazil. She was attracted to Brazil’s thriving art culture which is strongly connected to social movements and community development. While Brazil is very different from Canada, there are parallels between resource development issues in Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest and Canada’s tar sands. Her experiences in Brazil confirmed that she wants to continue to engage with social movements and explore what making a better world looks like to her. She sees Next Up as a great opportunity to explore action projects and organizations to continue growing and developing her role as an active citizen.