The Social Justice Institute
Noted Scholars Series presents:
Dr. Tara Mayer
Associate Professor of Teaching, The Social Justice Institute, UBC
“Things I Learned But Was Not Taught”
WHEN & WHERE
Zoom
January 12th, 12-1 PM
The RSVP’s for this event are now closed.
All events are free and open to the public.
In this talk – a developing disciplinary intervention – I shift the lens of my own training from its longstanding focus on the socio-cultural norms and conventions that underpinned British colonial rule in India to consider the artefacts of colonial rule that shaped my own education as a historian. Born to an Indian mother and German-Jewish father whose lives were each indelibly marked by European conceptions of race, yet irreconcilably different in experience, my curiosity coalesced early around cultural fault lines, sites of hybridity, pluralism, and power. This talk traces that emergent curiosity, its intellectual and geographical meanderings through London, Paris, and India, its distillation into questions and answers that found little resonance in the classrooms of my own higher education. Probing the often intimate, personal, reflective, and emotional pathways the lead us toward our research, this talk invites listeners to think with me about why we ask the questions we do and where our deepest learning takes place.
Dr. Tara Mayer is an Associate Professor of Teaching in The Social Justice Institute at UBC. A historian of colonial South Asia, her scholarship traces material and aesthetic exchanges between India, Britain, and France in ways that blur the boundaries of her discipline. She explores the deeply reciprocal processes of appropriation, assimilation, and influence that took place at the intersections of European and South Asian material culture and the role of racism and colonial power in shaping these exchanges. She has served as a research consultant for international exhibitions on Indian art, Orientalism, and European portraiture and has forged new collaborative partnerships between UBC and the Museum of Vancouver. Her teaching practice is centred on challenging historical norms and values around objectivity, neutrality, and safe-space. Her most recent project is an interview series entitled On Feeling and Knowing: Radical Conversations About Teaching and Learning.
