As part of Arts Multilingual Week, UBC is hosting it’s first Symposium on Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference, and the Monolingual University. This symposium is a day-long exploration that will include workshops, discussions, talks and lovely food from Salishan Catering.
Often and inexplicably, there can be a bit of a muffledness in visual art, photography, and graphic narratives when it comes to matters of language(s), translating, multilingualism and other aspects of linguistic life. Either you get clip art of a diverse-looking group of people, communicating with one another with lots of hand gestures, or a one-dimensional depiction, via speech bubbles, of a clash of cultures or a message “lost in translation”. The six artists in this Comics-to-Research project are seeking to expand the visual imagination around these themes, pushing past simple and simplistic answers. The artists are creating critical, conceptual, experiential, personal, and political visual narratives of various kinds that tests the boundaries and critical power of the concepts below.
- Linguaphobia (fear of language(s)
- Linguistic Disobedience
- Linguistic Indifference
- The Monolingual University
- Authoritarian Language
Meet the artists:
Andrea Hoff
Andrea (Andy) Hoff is a multimedia artist, writer, and arts-based researcher. Her work in art and academia is centred in community practice and often engages with speculative world-building and radical ecologies. Her PhD research in Language and Literacy Education focuses on youth empowerment in the context of the climate crisis, explored through the medium of comics. Andrea’s published writing and comics have appeared in The Tyee, Room, Display Canadian Design, and Broken Pencil. In 2022, Andrea and Cree poet and writer Wanda John-Kehewin co-founded Beyond Collective, an Indigenous/settler feminist studio that employs comics, research, installation, and performance to challenge colonial narratives and collaboratively work towards reconciliation. You can find more of Andrea’s work at https://www.andreahoff.com.
Ihomehe Agbebaku
Ihomehe Agbebaku is a first-generation writer, filmmaker, and photographer completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, where she is also the Editor-in-Chief of PRISM international. Their work moves across poetry, prose, film, and visual storytelling, often exploring silence, belonging, and the politics of language in everyday life. You Know What I Mean is a photographic comic set in a shared university housing kitchen. The project explores how linguaphobia is not only experienced in speech but also in its absence, in the silences and coded gestures that emerge when words are policed, mocked, or misunderstood. Through staged and documentary stills, it traces how posture, gaze, and everyday acts of resistance become their own language in a space shaped by cultural difference and institutional norms. By centering these quiet forms of communication, the work reflects on how linguaphobia, indifference, and disobedience live in the body as much as in spoken words.
Raphael Saint K
Raphael Saint K is a Vancouver-based multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and media packrat inspired by the somatic relationships between experience and expression. Attending to the ways in which a medium blocks or accesses aspects of their being, they seek to create work that turns solipsism into communication.
Siming Liao
Siming Liao is a third year media studies student at UBC. She started drawing when she was three and continued education in art and design till today. Siming has participated in various student programs including game designs as the lead artist, and provided commissions for 50+ customers across the internet. Her work will be focused on discussing the additional features and how they are given to accents, as well as how they influence people on terms of linguaphobia. A child learned to hide her accents finds more and more ways to use it… until she realizes accent is just an accent.
Sydney Green
Sydney is an independent comic artist and writer living in New Westminster, BC. Her work seeks to unsettle and terrify with stories about women in historical settings. She has created three independent comics thus far, The Sculptor’s Wife, Oliver, and her longest work The Vows of Beasts, and is currently writing a novel. Her work can currently be found at @syd.sees.monsters as well as Lucky’s Books and Comics on Main.
Stephanie Broder
Stephanie Broder (they/them) is an illustrator, writer, and arts educator with a particular passion for graphic narratives. They are fascinated with comics, video games, and the potential of participatory storytelling through gameplay and multimedia narrative projects. They credit the Japanese interactive multimedia art collective teamLab with their growing obsession with art and stories that you physically engage with. Currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at UBC, their comics and novels lean towards science fiction, with an emphasis on character-driven stories about identity and belonging. You can also find them all over town, teaching workshops and tabling at events, as well as on their website https://www.stephaniebroder.com/ and Instagram @artofstephaniebroder.
This symposium will be held in-person on October 29, 2025 in the Peña Room (room 302), located in Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. This event begins at 9:00am, and ends at 3:30pm.
To learn more and register, please visit visit the official event page linked here.