​SELFLESSLY EXTRAORDINARY

My name is Bérangère Maïa Natasha Parizeau. I am a French-Canadian scholar, filmmaker, inter-disciplinary artist, photographer, published researcher, poet, vegan, yogini (elf), psychonaut, meditator, eco-feminist, environmental advocate and consciousness activist. I am the director of the cutting-edge animated documentary “Dragon Tears;” this film is currently in production. “Dragon Tears” is a feature film on the political ecology of planetary survival.  In May 2006, I graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA), majoring in film, video, and performance art from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. In 2006, I left California for China, where I lived and travelled for a few years. During this time, I had the opportunity to study Mandarin at Fudan University in Shanghai, China.  I am currently working diligently to become perfectly fluent in Chinese. In 2007, I began researching China’s water crisis. I recently graduated with a Master of Arts in Asia Pacific Policy Studies (M.A.A.P.P.S.) from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. My M.A.A.P.P.S. thesis “Dragon Tears: a critical analysis of the political ecology of planetary survival” was intentionally effectuated as core research for the film.  In 2015, I was appointed as a research assistant in China by my supervisor Dr. Pitman B. Potter.  Dr. Potter is a highly respected human rights lawyer, a People’s Republic of China/Taiwan law, policy, foreign trade, and investment scholar, a distinguished professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at UBC, as well as HSBC Chair in Asian Research at UBC's Institute of Asian Research (IAR), the department under which my program of study was offered.  Dr. Potter is one of the scholars who has introduced the concept of human rights in China in academic circles over the last decade.  My position as a research assistant consisted of gathering materials in Mandarin on environmental policy and law in China, including interviews with officials, experts, and scholars.   During this time, I was expected to work on the production of “Dragon Tears,” which I did.  This appointment was offered under the umbrella research project for the Asia Pacific Dispute Resolution Research (APDR) program awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada under its Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) Program.  As part of this project my 30-page article “Policy-oriented Macro-analysis: China’s Freshwater & Health Crisis an Essay on the Techno-industrial Puppetry of Oligarchic Dictatorship” has been successfully published on the APDR website, UBC's Institutional Repository (cIRcle), and the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN). On October 27th, 2017, I was invited to present my research at the UBC Allard School of Law as part of the “Coordinating Performance in International Trade and Human Rights Asia Pacific Dispute Resolution Program Summary Conference” supported by the MCRI at SSHRC.


cIRcle permanent address: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/64568
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3118538