Kadi Purru
Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction
University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, B.C.
email: kadip_joseR@telus.net

At the moment I am in the process of writing a Ph.D. thesis entitled "Journeying Homewards: Poetics, Politics and Pedagogies of Belonging." As an immigrant myself, I am particularly interested in the im/migrants' experiences of home. Thus, my work has evolved around such notions as 'home,' 'border,' 'diaspora,' and 'belonging.' For me, an academic space is not only an intellectual but creative space where I can explore contact-zones between cultures, languages, identities and disciplines. My academic work co-emerges with my community theatre work. Currently, I am involved in the collective creation project based on the life-stories of im/migration of the Canadian-Estonians in Vancouver. I have described my earlier work with this group in the article "From Theatre to Community" published in Popular Theatre in Political Culture: Britain and Canada in Focus, Oxford: Intellect, 2000. My latest work, an article, co-written with Warren Linds and Alejandra Medellin, "Resonating Testimonies from/in the Space of Death: Performing Buenaventura's La Maestra in Vancouver, Canada" will be published in Poetics of Memory: Vision, Voice, and Performance (a forthcoming volume in Routledge's Memory and Narrative series, September, 2002)