Global Goals Talks - Friday and I-Week Closing Reception

Poornima Travelling Sukumar is a wall muralist, community artist, amateur anthropologist, story keeper, traveller and designer. Her primary area of interest is visual storytelling through multiple interventions. She mostly works on painting walls, travelling around in rural areas with children, women and transgender people, working largely in the informal sector, her work largely is a process of creating opportunities for conversations and social participation through the arts. She has also been actively involved in setting up socially relevant community art projects, that get people to appreciate and create street art in their surroundings as well as use art and design to bring about a sense of expression and hope. Her recent projects include painting 2 entire villages in Uttarakhand, painting in rural schools in Tanzania, working along with the Maasai people in painting the community centre and founded her collective called  Aravani Art Project in 2016. Her work largely works in co- creation with various people from the informal sector, people from the Transgender community, sex workers and sometimes people from scheduled castes and tribes.

Marina is a PhD student in Epidemiology at the University of Alberta. She completed a bachelor's in microbiology and a master's in Biological Sciences in Mexico. Her research has focused on the health effects of environmental variations. She is particularly interested in how climate change influences health-disease dynamics in populations that are inequitably impacted by climate change. As a partner with local organizations and fishing communities in the Mexican Northern Pacific, she is exploring the impact of climate change on nutrition and immunity. By integrating fishers' local knowledge with scientific knowledge, Marina’s research will generate critical insight into climate change risks in Mexican fishing communities, providing a more complete view of climate-health risks.

Kelsey Friesen (she/her) is a second-year Master of Science in Occupational Therapy student at the University of Alberta. She is conducting research exploring how occupational therapists in Canada engage in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, specifically #18-24. Kelsey also explores the influence of social  movements, such as Orange Shirt Day, on OT practice. This work is conducted under funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s (CGS-M).

In June 2022, Kelsey received the Government of Alberta’s Inspiration Award – Emerging Excellence in Sexual Violence for her commitment to anti-violence advocacy and research. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Honours Sociology at MacEwan University in 2019. Her Honours thesis examined how post-secondary sexual violence policies add or contribute to the legislative and policy context through examining campus stakeholders’ knowledge and perceptions of these policies, for which she won MacEwan University’s Ending Sexual Violence Research Award in 2020. In 2021, Kelsey began serving Students for Consent Culture (SFCC) Canada as their Outreach Lead, in which they initiate, develop, and maintain relationships with external stakeholders through event collaborations and consultations. Most recently, she created and implemented a 12-month speaker series, Beyond Consent, in which SFCC hosts grassroots activists and allies in the anti-violence movement, aiming to train, educate, and inspire a new generation of leaders, communities, and organizations in the fight to end violence.