Xiaojing Yan's Heaven and Earth is a mixed media installation that features a mountain made of thousands of pine needles embedded in a silk organza and presents a different approach to traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Xiaojing Yan is a Chinese-Canadian artist based in Markham, Ontario. Her art highlights sculptural installations that combine the cultural and natural world and integrates both Western and Eastern elements, paralleling her own cultural identity a a Chinese-Canadian.

Steadying the Hands That Rock the Cradle: Exploring the Roles of African Grandmothers in the Stability and Sustenance of Diasporic African Families

Dr. Buster Ogbuagu

Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work, University of St. Francis, Joliet, Illinois

The presentation explores how the nuclearization, therefore atomization of the family system in North America, as an off-shoot of individualism presents as a serious attenuation of support systems ordinarily. This finding portends even more challenges for Diasporic families, especially those from Africa, which social carpets have been ripped from under their feet owing to migration. Migration conveys stress-laden concomitants for Diasporic entities, which must, among other integration rites of passage, enter the labor force, adjust to the norms and mores of the new culture, balance their socialization and parenting repertoire with the conflicting types decreed by their host country, including endure revision of gender roles. Pertinently, it explores how African grandmothers as an often gender discountenanced social capital and support system, paradoxically attenuates spousal conflicts, including violence, impart culture relevant socialization to the grandchildren and assist to forge and maintain family homeostasis.

Join us for a brief pause hosted by faculty, staff and students of Martin Luther University College. Reflections and readings from various cultures and faith traditions.