A  conference and concert series at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto

Worlds Apart will be a two-day conference and recital series that explores how refugees and displaced peoples in Canada have used music to “fill” cultural absences, create diasporic communities, and build intercultural bridges since 1945. After the Allied victory at the end of the Second World War, the four largest waves of refugees entering Canada have been directly connected to East-West geopolitical tensions (e.g. the 250,000 Central and Eastern Europeans who fled Communism between 1947-1952; the 60,000 Vietnamese and Cambodians who fled communism between 1979-1980 [Molloy et al., 2016]; the 60,795 [and counting] Syrians who fled civil war since 2011 prior to the recent natural disaster; and the 137,797 [and counting] Ukrainian citizens who have arrived since 24 February 2022 as emergency three-year temporary residents [Government of Canada, 2023]). Consequently, this period in Canada’s migration history is distinguished by the profound impact of (post-)Cold War conflicts. These same events have informed Canada’s divergent approaches to nation-building at home and its exertion of “soft power” abroad.

INTERWOVEN’s co-artistic director, Dr. Sean Wang will appear as a lecturer/performer alongside Yoko Reikano Kimura and Hikaru Tamaki for an educational discussion on intercultural music.