Category: DROKACADEMY

Дві Університети, Один Якір Notes from the first week of Educating for Social Change · Kamloops and Lviv, May 2026 This week I begin teaching Educating for Social Change in two classrooms at once. One classroom is at Thompson Rivers University, where I have the honour of meeting students I have taught before, students whom…

The morning began the way most Thursdays in Westsyde begin this month, with the small, ordinary rituals of taking care of where we live. I rolled the recycling bins to the curb (it is recycling day pick up in the area). There is something quietly hopeful about putting your recycling out on the right day.…

Every Saturday since February 24, 2022, we have gathered. Through snow and heat, through grief and stubborn hope, we stand with Ukraine. But on the second Saturday of May, something tender joins us. The rushnyky come out, strung between us like a quiet alphabet of love. Each one was stitched by hands we knew or…

Eighty-one years ago today, Nazi Germany was defeated. Millions died to make that defeat possible. Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Jews, Poles, Roma, Indigenous soldiers from across the Soviet Union, Allied forces from around the world. Their memory belongs to all of humanity, and it deserves better than what the Kremlin has done with it. Today…

April 25, 2026, 52 years after the Carnation Revolution There is a vase of carnations on our table this week. Pink, peach, soft yellow, deep purple, the white ones streaked with magenta as if someone painted them by hand. I bought them at Costco. They are not heroic flowers. They are not from a Lisbon…

An Invitation to Continue A Call to Shevchenko Voices Around the World What Eleven Days Taught Me Eleven cities. Eleven monuments. Eleven encounters with the same bronze face in eleven different languages, on eleven different pedestals, in eleven different versions of what it means to carry Ukraine into the world. Kranj. Vienna. Washington. Bratislava. Zagreb.…

Day Eleven. The final city. The city that made me Canadian. Before Canada, There Was a Story About an Apartment My Mama told me this story more than once, with the particular pleasure of a detail that turns out to matter. The apartment where I was born in Lviv was previously inhabited by a family…

Every year, near the end of the semester, I ask my students two questions. What was helpful? What do you still remember? I have been asking these questions for over twenty years, across more than seven thousand students, at universities from coast to coast to coast in Canada and beyond, as I teach many international…

Day Ten. The same poet. The city where it all began. Before Everything Else Every other story in this series has been about arriving somewhere. A train station, a bus stop, a tram that carries you through an unfamiliar city toward a bronze face you have read about but not yet seen. The encounter has…

Day Nine. The same poet. In the city that is his. This One Is Different Every other story in this series has been about finding Shevchenko far from Ukraine. In Kranj and Vienna and Washington and Bratislava and Zagreb and Prague and Paris and Lisbon, the encounter has carried the particular quality of diaspora recognition:…

Day Eight. The same poet. At the edge of Europe, above the river that flows to the ocean. Lisbon, and the People Who Made It Home I came to Lisbon twice, in the autumn of 2022 and again in the autumn of 2023, and both times the city gave me more than I had arrived…

A message to my students and social workers everywhere Today is World Social Work Day. I am writing from Kamloops, British Columbia, on the unceded territory of the Secwépemc people, with a full heart and a deep sense of gratitude. Gratitude, first, to the IFSW, IASSW, EASSW, for their inspiring message this year, a reminder…