Alumni Profile: Shazlin Rahman (ComCult MA '15)
I was already passionate about pursuing social justice and creating social change, and I had a number of the key skills needed in this role but a lot of what I’m doing now, I learned along the way.
Current Work
My day to day role as a stakeholder engagement specialist at the Inspirit Foundation (external link, opens in new window) entails a lot of relationship building and communication activities to help us nurture a healthy relationship within the centre, and with our current and potential grantees. I also have my own art practice where I am currently retracing my grandmother’s roots. Her Sarong (external link, opens in new window) is inspired by a collection of sarongs that my grandmother left behind, and in digging through her story, I found out that her work as a batik sarong maker when she was younger helped break the cycle of poverty. I’m retracing her life and recording her story and the stories of women like her to look at how we can broaden the conversation and representation of women of colour, especially around the issue of labour. I share my research and writing through stories and artwork (external link, opens in new window) .
I fell into non-profit work almost by accident, because I looked at the skills that I had at the time and what I was passionate about—storytelling—and the work at the Inspirit Foundation matched those qualities. Along the way, my work involved looking at media representations and expanding narratives in ways that naturally fed into my personal interest in my own stories, so the work is not entirely separate; it all falls under the same umbrella. I practice certain things like corporate communications in my day job, and then more creative, abstract storytelling in my own personal projects.
Reflections on ComCult
I loved ComCult because it’s so robust and dynamic. People can do really interesting things and use different methodologies to explore their topics, and that’s something that I have taken with me in my practice today where the topics that I am interested in are complex, and storytelling requires multiple mediums. For my own project, I work with tactile mediums like fabric and canvas, and I also work with photography and film, and different forms of narrative prose. Her Sarong is partly inspired by my thesis defense, where my committee and I had a conversation about my work over the past three years to explore the potential of where it could go. While I don’t think I’ll do my PhD right now, I took away a lot of ideas that we talked about through my defense.
From what I have observed, there isn’t a traditional path into non-profit work. It’s not like medicine or engineering where you need specific credentials to get into the field, and from what I’ve observed of my colleagues, they all came from different backgrounds and gravitated or grew into the role that they are in now based on what they are passionate about. For myself, I was already passionate about pursuing social justice and creating social change, and I had a number of the key skills needed in this role but a lot of what I’m doing now, I learned along the way. My background in journalism and my MA in ComCult have definitely helped in my work in communications, but non-profit work also requires understanding the current context and the appetite for storytelling, and adjusting your skills along the way.
Recommended Reading
I am currently reading Alex Wagner’s Futureface (external link, opens in new window) . She is an incredible journalist, and I picked it up because it’s very similar to what I’m working on with my grandmother. Wagner embarked on this project to trace out her roots and along the way, she found fascinating things that disrupt the neat narratives we tell ourselves. Whether we are immigrants, or third or fourth generation settlers in Canada, we have narratives we tell ourselves about how we came to be where we are today, and when Wagner looked into her family’s story, she found that things are not always neat—there are things that we might have buried or chosen to ignore because they aren’t pleasant, or they’re tied up in something unpleasant in history. In Futureface, she managed to trace how things that happened over a century ago in Vietnam with her mother’s family were linked to what was happening in Prussia over a hundred years ago on her dad’s side, and how her parents came to be in the same place in the United States. So, within the microcosm of a single person, you can trace the movements of people throughout history and they’re all tied together. I find that really fascinating.
