Paul Tai Yip Ng Memorial Award 2025: Shangrila Plaza

Congratulations to Ms. Shangrila Plaza whose paper was selected as the 2025 Best Graduate Student Paper, awarding her this year’s Paul Tai Yip Ng Memorial Award.

We are also pleased to recognize two additional graduate students as Finalists:

• Yaqi Wei (GSWS)
• Lawson Jiahao Chen (URB)

About the Winner

Shangrila Plaza is currently a second year Master’s student in English at Simon Fraser University. Under the supervision of Dr. Joanne Leow and Dr. May Farrales, their SSHRC-funded MA research-creation project combines critical analysis, creative writing, and multimedia to explore Metro Manila as an auditory space shaped by U.S. imperial governance and its afterlives, specifically examining how urban sounds function as material instruments of power.

The graduate paper submitted for this award emerged from a directed studies course supervised by Dr. Nadine Attewell in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Department where we learned about how Indigenous, Black, Asian, and other racialized thinkers construct “genealogies of resistance.”

Plaza says, "The course engaged with scholarship, memoir, film, photography, visual art, and archival research, which shaped my final paper on my own family photographs of balikbayan boxes and the gendered labor of care that this practice holds together. My paper is deeply personal, incorporating family photographs and an interview with my mother––which are relations that ground my paper. While I remain attentive to the ethical stakes of bringing my own personal life into academic work, I chose to do so in order to model a form of scholarship grounded in lived experience and embodied knowledge, and that treats maternal and intergenerational knowledge as central sites of theory and relation."

Abstract:

This article examines my own family archive of balikbayan box photographs spanning from 2011 to 2019 to explore the gendered labor and limits of diasporic care. This work is grounded and held together by my mother’s labor of assembling and sending balikbayan boxes from Canada to relatives in the Philippines. While I read family images depicting box openings as staged acts of intimacy that produce a sense of familial co-presence across distance, I also foreground the precarity behind these intimate performances and the limits of transnational family life under global labor economies. I explore how the gradual disappearance of participants and goods across the 2011 to 2019 photo series reveals the capitalist structures that sustain—but cannot indefinitely uphold—diasporic belonging. Drawing on scholarship on photography by Tina Campt, Roland Barthes, Marianne Hirsch, and scholarship on diaspora and affect by Clement Camposano, Thy Phu and Elspeth H. Brown, I argue that these photographs register both diasporic care and its exhaustion.