How do we reclaim voice, identity, belonging, and agency in a world that tries to define and contain us? FREE Writing Workshop + Essay Contest Entry Inside...

Dear Friends,

On June 4th, our team hosted Beyond Words in partnership with Harmony Movement, University of Toronto Schools, and Unsinkable. It was a profoundly thoughtful and insightful evening—please stay tuned for the full event recording, photo gallery, and a written recap:

WE CAN’T WAIT TO SHARE THESE WITH YOU

ALL CONTEST DETAILS HERE

How do we reclaim voice, identity, belonging, and agency in a world that tries to define and contain us?

For our second annual youth essay contest, The 44 North invites young writers to explore questions of power, personhood, culture, identity, and self-definition for a chance to win up to $1000!

What we’re looking for: We welcome essays that are personal, thoughtful, and engaged with the world around you. Strong submissions may draw on lived experience, family or cultural history, community life, social issues, or research where relevant. We’re seeking original writing that connects personal experience to larger social, political, or cultural realities, responding to 1 of these 2 prompts:

1. Reclaiming Power: What does it mean to reclaim power in your own life, community, or culture? Write an essay exploring how you (or others) have or hope to reclaim voice, agency, belonging, identity, or dignity in the face of forces that try to limit, define, erase, or silence them.

2. Who Gets to Define Who You Are: And what happens when that power is taken back? Write an essay exploring identity, personhood, culture, ancestry, language, or belonging, and the tension between how people are seen by others and how they define themselves.

REGISTER HERE

Did you know that poems and essays share a root? Free to attend with a world-class teacher, what you learn and write in this workshop may become the seeds of a winning essay…

Poems live in social worlds. So do we. How do these social worlds reveal, erase, disrupt, or erupt understandings? How can anthropology help unveil these social worlds? And more, how can anthropology + poetry help us witness and communicate these worlds in terms of power, agency, identity, culture, belonging, kinship, history, and more?

In this 2-hour workshop, participants will explore a brief history of anthropology and its contemporary manifestations. They will also pick up a few anthropological tools for understanding broader social worlds and the possibilities of poetry within those. Participants will craft their own poems as knowledge-makers in particular “fieldsites” to wrestle with power, negotiate self-identities, unveil taboos, and unseat “spells,” or taken-for-granted assumptions.