Katy Fulfer

Philosophy in the world

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Home grounds belonging

Imagine the following scenarios: -You return to your parents’ home for the holidays, your family greets you with smiles and warm words. You enter your childhood room, ah, at home at last. -You’ve been swamped at work; projects, meetings, and emails consuming your time. You finally catch a break one Sunday afternoon and meet with a good friend. It feels so relieving, you feel like you’re home. -You’re somewhere new and foreign, you don’t know the language, you’re trying to get … [Read more...]

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Home is where the food is

Last month I attended a "Decolonized Feast," an event organized by Emilio Rojos, the Live Arts Bard Biennial Artist in Residence, and Rebecca Yoshino, the Bard Farm Coordinator. The Feast was an opportunity to enjoy food harvested from the Bard Farm; we shared tamales, various salsas and hot sauces, roasted butternut squash with a maple syrup glaze, cranberry-mushroom wild rice, and hibiscus tea. Attendees also explored Rojos' land-art installation, Naturalized Borders (to Gloria). Rojos and … [Read more...]

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More sabbatical downtime

Over a cozy dinner at Lucoli Pizza in Red Hook, my former colleague Amy remarked that if she were ever alone in a new city, she might need to bring me along. What a compliment! Even without a car during my sabbatical, I manage to get around. Of course, dinner and drinks with some colleagues from my Hood College days, passing through the area on their sabbatical, was a highlight! Blithewood Garden In late September I toured the traditional walled Italiante garden  of the historic … [Read more...]

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Addiction, isolation, and the fate of one city

The city of Cambridge, ON Cambridge, ON is a small city. I have mistakenly referred to it as a town, only to be reprimanded by those who were born and raised here (I have only lived in Cambridge a few years).  In fact, the city of Cambridge is Waterloo Region’s second largest community and home to just under 130,000 people. Despite the unanimous belief that Cambridge is indeed a city and not a town, however, Cambridge is internally quite divided. There are three distinct neighbourhoods: … [Read more...]

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Private sponsorship and community solidarity

The most recent issue of Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees is devoted to private sponsorship. Reading it encouraged me to return to themes I raised in a previous post about Canada's Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program. And good news--Refuge is open access, so anyone can read these articles! I find private sponsorship for refugee resettlement to be an opportunity to think through Hannah Arendt's claims about the blurring of private and public concerns. For Arendt, the private, the realm … [Read more...]