Notice Board

The Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs (SACPA) presents a session with recent University of Lethbridge graduate Kathleen Mahg as she examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues of colonialism as it relates to public health.

Colonialism and COVID-19: The Effect of Public Health and Anti-maskers on Vulnerable Populations

Thursday, June 9, 2022 – 12 to 1 p.m. MDT 

YouTube Live link: https://youtu.be/YmgaLvQVNuw

Speaker Kathleen Mah hopes to illuminate the ongoing colonial agenda and its extension into COVID-19 and public health relations. Particularly, she will focus on how anti-mask groups — who refer to themselves as Freedom Fighters — have interacted with formal institutions like public health, and vice versa, to create expendable populations during the COVID-19 pandemic. She hopes to demonstrate how Freedom Fighters and public health alike perpetuate colonialism through a new arena of the COVID-19 pandemic. This will provide a perspective critical of both public health and groups like Freedom Fighters’ role in the erasure of lives and ways of knowing. Most importantly, this presentation will ask viewers to reflect upon their positions in society and locate how they may contribute to colonialism knowingly or unknowingly.

Speaker:   Kathleen Mah

Kathleen Mah is a recent graduate of the University of Lethbridge with her BA in anthropology and a minor in women and gender studies. She originally comes from Calgary, Alberta, but has made a home in Lethbridge for the past five years. Her research is based around drawing attention to, and fostering conversations around, structural violence. Her focus is on critical public health and anti-masking groups, known as Freedom Fighters. Kathleen plans on continuing her work within medical anthropology at Carleton University in the fall as she enters the master of arts program. Kathleen locates herself as a settler on Treaty 7 territory, Métis Nation Region III, and Blackfoot Confederacy. She wishes to pay respect to these peoples, past, present, and future and hopes to continue to learn from these peoples.

To ask questions of our speaker in the chat feature of YouTube, you must have a YouTube account and be signed in. Please do so well ahead of the scheduled start time, so you’ll be ready. Go the YouTube Live link provided in this session flyer and on the top right of your browser click the “sign in” button. If you have Google or Gmail accounts, they can be used to sign in. If you don’t, click “Create Account” and follow along. Once you are signed in, you can return to the live stream and use the chat feature to ask your questions of the speaker. Remember you can only participate in the chat feature while we are livestreaming.

Link to SACPA’s YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/SouthernAlbertaCouncilonPublicAffairs

For further information on the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs, visit the SACPA website.