Amber Dean, Director

Amber Dean’s interest in the power of storytelling and narrative arts began in grad school. She returned to the university after several years working in the public/non-profit sector as an advocate for women experiencing violence, and she wanted her research and writing to have an impact on the social factors that allow violence – and imprisonment as a response to violence – to proliferate. Aware of how affected she was by the stories women told her about their lives and experiences with violence, she wanted a wider public to be similarly moved. She started writing for magazines like Herizons; Kinesis: Canada’s National Feminist Newspaper; Fireweed; and Fuse Magazine. She partnered with non-profits like Justice for Girls in Vancouver to publish a report of stories from young women who were incarcerated. She wrote for Rabble’s popular blog about her doctoral research on writing, art, and activism that memorialized the women disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (recently republished in a Between the Lines Press book). She has given many public talks on and off university campuses, including for Sexual Assault Awareness Weeks, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, Prison Justice Day events, at LGBTQ+ community centres, public libraries, Idle No More teach-ins, and at the Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where she launched her first (award-winning) book in conversation with local organizers of the Valentine’s Day Missing Women’s Memorial March.

Amber’s recent work in the public humanities involves working in (and sometimes building) archives of difficult histories and communicating about the importance of these archives in order to increase their accessibility and use. For example, she contributes to the development of the Hamilton 2SLGBTQ+ Community Archives and leads related creative projects on Hamilton’s queer histories. She is also leading streams on “Archival Resistance” and “Art as a Practice of Belonging and Commemoration” for a SSHRC-National Truth and Reconciliation Centre-funded research project led by Dr. Vanessa Watts in partnership with key Haudenosaunee and Inuit organizations to gain access to archives of the Mohawk Institute residential school and the Hamilton Mountain TB Sanatorium, and to develop creative commemorative projects from these archives. Dr. Dean also collaborates with Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty on a number of projects that will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1985 Air India bombing, the commemoration of which they have also addressed together in an edited book that combines scholarly essays with visual art, poetry, and fiction.

Amber is excited to bring her passion for the power of arts-based storytelling to create social change to the directorship of CCENA.