In celebration of Mother Language Day and International Women’s Day, Spanish for Community and the Spanish 302 classes present guest speaker Ashli Akins, founder of our partner organization Mosqoy.org. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A.
Language: English (with some Spanish)
Location: Buchanan Tower, Room 726 (masks required)
About the presenter:
Ashli Akins is a non-profit director, social entrepreneur, artist, and scholar from British Columbia, Canada. She currently splits her time between Canada’s Pacific Northwest and Peru’s Sacred Valley. She is the founder and president of Mosqoy, an international charitable organization that works with remote communities of the Peruvian Andes to mitigate adverse effects of unsustainable tourism and development by providing economic opportunities while nurturing their threatened indigenous culture. She founded Mosqoy when she was 21 years old and has since dedicated her life to it. (www.mosqoy.org)
She specializes in issues related to cultural revitalization, community resilience, and socioeconomic justice. Akins’ research project, supported by National Geographic, critically examines the shifting relationship between cultural and economic values, specifically related to safeguarding the Quechua textile tradition in an era of rapid economic change. Akins is a recipient of the competitive Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and is a Ph.D. candidate at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia.
She graduated from the University of Oxford with a master’s degree in international human rights law and received a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies, Latin American studies, and professional writing from the University of Victoria. Akins was honored as one of UVic’s top 50 alumni in history who have made a difference in the world, and in 2019, she received their Emerging Humanist of the Year award.
If you have questions, contact Dr. Maria Carbonetti (maria.carbonetti@ubc.ca).
