This Panel is Co-sponsored by the Tyee.ca and SFU's Institute for the Humanities
The Canadian political landscape has undergone several tectonic shifts in the past few decades, from "Trudeaumania," the historic in-roads made by Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives into Quebec under the aegis of a continent-wide Free Trade Agreement, to the rise of the Alberta-based, populist Reform Party under Preston Manning culminating in the phoenix-like rise of the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper. Canada is once again poised on the brink of another shift with a Harper Majority--a shift that, according to some commentators, promises a break in a consensus that has largely held since the Second World War based on a commitment, domestically, to a basic framework of social expenditure, particularly on a publically-funded and universally accessible healthcare system as well as post-secondary education, and to a foreign policy based on leadership role on the environment and international development as well as peace-keeping rather than war-making. This panel seeks to reflect on the myriad implications of a Conservative Government led by Stephen Harper for the future of Canada.
This Panel is Co-sponsored by the Tyee.ca and SFU's Institute for the Humanities
Panelists Include:
Dr. Michael Byers, Political Science, UBC
Mr. David Beers, Editor, The Tyee.ca
Dr. Samir Gandesha, Director, SFU's Institute for the Humanities
This lecture is free and open to the public, but please register if you would like to attend, at www.sfu.ca/reserve
The question of sorrow lies at the very heart of Indian religious and philosophical tradition. No single word satisfactorily translates the meaning of original Pali word dukkha, roughly translated as sorrow. In Buddhism dukkha is described as a state of unsatisfactoriness or inward emptiness, but the word can include whole array of human emotions like insecurity, anxiety, despair, loneliness, boredom, frustration, and so on. The word can be expanded to include not only the psychological state of human beings but also the outer problems of the world like human conflicts, environmental problems, social and economic problems, and so on. It reflects a state of general disorder.
In this lecture Dr. Kalsi examines the root cause of sorrow. He tries to suggest that the resolution of our problems lie not through the social, political, economic, environmental reforms but through the deeper understanding of the root cause.
About the Speaker
Dr. Ashutosh Kalsi, a graduate from the premier Indian Institute of Technology, was head of Engineering of a U.S. based software multinational. He later quit his lucrative job to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. Awakened by a deep concern for the problems facing the world, Dr. Kalsi spent many years inquiring into the problem of human sorrow. He travelled extensively in India and sought company of many scholars, sages and pundits. He studied in Varanasi close to Sarnath, a place where Buddha gave his first sermon. He later moved to United States where he did his Ph.D. from State University of New York. A serious student of Buddha and the 20th century thinker J. Krishnamurti, Dr. Kalsi himself belongs to no particular tradition. He believes that the answers to the human problems lie not within but outside all traditional thinking, Eastern or Western. What is required today is not another philosophy or ‘ism’ but a very clear understanding of the root cause of our problems. It is only this clarity that could free human beings of sorrow. Dr. Kalsi now spends most of his time teaching and writing on this subject. His first book ‘The Root of Sorrow’ is due to be released this year.
Admission is free, but seats need to be reserved. To reserve a seat for this event please go to www.sfu.ca/reserve
Lecture Abstract:
“The language in which photography deals,” writes the novelist and critic John Berger “is the language of events.” But what exactly is an “event?” Drawing on the answers given by recent French theorists, including Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Badiou, this lecture will explore the ways in which photographs capture and preserve events. In so doing, it will suggest a new way of understanding Roland Barthes’ celebrated distinction between “stadium” and “punctum” and add a temporal dimension to the larger argument I have been developing about the importance of nominalism in making sense of photographs. Examples will be drawn from the French photojournalist Serge Hambourg’s images of the “events” of l968 in Paris.
Professor Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a renowned Intellectual Historian and his research interests have been groundbreaking in connecting history with other academic and intellectual activities, such as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, other figures and methods in continental Social Theory, Cultural Criticism, and Historiography among many others.
He received his B.A from Union College in 1965. In 1971, he completed his Ph.D. in History at Harvard under the tutelage of H. Stuart Hughes. His dissertation was later revised into the book The Dialectical Imagination, which covers the history of the Frankfurt School from 1923-1950. While he was conducting research for his dissertation, he established a correspondence and friendship with many of the members of the Frankfurt School. He was closest to Leo Löwenthal who had provided him access to personal letters and documents that were crucial to Jay's research. His book is considered one of the most influential works in exposing the American Academy to the theoretical insight of the Frankfurt School. His work since then continued to explore the many nuances of Marxism/Socialism, as well as exploring new territory in Historiography and Cultural Criticism, Visual Culture, and the place of Post-Structuralism/Post-Modernism in European Intellectual History. His current research is nominalism and photography. He is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.
Neal Ascherson has reported on Scottish and global issues for the Manchester Guardian (1956-58); The Scotsman (1958-59); The Observer (1960-75); The Scotsman (1975-79); The Observer (1980-89); and The Independent on Sunday (1990-98) and is the author of six books: The King Incorporated (1963/2001); The Polish August (1981); The Struggles for Poland (1987); Games with Shadows (1988); Black Sea (1995); and Stone Voices (2002). He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, and Marxism Today and is the editor of Public Archaeology (2001-10).
Neal will be in Vancouver April 5-13, 2011, a visit sponsored by SFU’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, the Institute for the Humanities, and the Centre for Scottish Studies.
6 April Tartan Day Lecture - On the future of Scotland - admission free
- SFU Harbour Centre – 7:00-8:30 PM
7 April - Seminar on Heritage – The first question is: To what extent is an ‘identity’ (ethnic, community) necessarily connected with the claim to a common past? And why? Are there groups with confident senses of identity which have little or no interest in their own past?
The second question: how many of these ‘heritages’ are constructed to suit an ‘identity’ which may re-interpret itself in each generation? Especially in 19th-century Europe, in the high age of nationalism, forgery was often used to construct the illusion of continuity with a mythic past. But as political and social circumstances change, one ‘heritage’ may be junked and a quite different one adopted.
Third, the sudden adoption of the ‘heritage’ concept by nation-states in the late 20th century. When the state dictates what relics of the past its citizens must revere and preserve, we are looking at the nationalization of public memory. The state appoints itself as the curator of national identity. In this way the heritage boom, a hugely successful industry now employing millions, is highly authoritarian. Do we have a democratic answer to the question: Who owns the past?
Registration fee $25.00
To register contact Wendy Sjolin in Graduate Liberal Studies (wendy_sjolin@sfu.ca) or 778-782-5152
Best reading is still David Lowenthal: ‘The Past Is A Foreign Country’ (1985). Good, too, though somewhat anglocentric, is Chapter 2 (‘Trafficking in History’) in Patrick Wright’s ‘On Living In An Old Country’ (paperback edition, Oxford 2009).
8 April - Seminar on The New Europe - ‘New Europe’ can mean at least two things. One is Donald Rumsfeld’s claim, back in 2003, that there was a ‘New Europe’ (good, pro-American) and an ‘Old Europe’ (bad, obstructive to US policies). The second is the idea that the European Union (or project, if you like) has been transformed out of recognition by the end of the Cold War and the 1989 revolutions. Neither is true. The post-89 EU is much like the pre-89 one, but far larger and more diffuse. In spite of many disagreements, the nerve-centre of Europe remains the 1963 Franco-German alliance. Its basic philosophy remains a diluted faith in the ‘social market economy’ as opposed to Anglo-American neo-liberalism. The dynamic towards further political integration is still quietly at work. This points towards the eventual division of the EU into an integrated ‘core’ and a semi-detached periphery, a development much feared and much prophesied.
The Union is a political creature of a quite new kind. Unlike conventional states or federations, its texture is rich and varied, but also spongy and indeterminate. |It will never be capable of rapid, radical decisions in time of crisis. It cannot do aggression, but neither can it effectively defend itself. In other words, it will never become a ‘superstate’. Whether this structure will survive the demands of the ‘New World Disorder’ which emerged after the Cold War remains to be seen.
Seminar is on Bowen Island from 5:00 PM Friday to 11:00 AM Saturday. Cost for dinner, breakfast, accommodation and seminar $160 shared/$200 single room.
To register contact Wendy Sjolin in Graduate Liberal Studies (wendy_sjolin@sfu.ca) or 778-782-5152
Suggested reading:
· ‘The Old Europe – and the New’. Chapter 22 of ‘Postwar’, by Tony Judt (Heinemann 2005).
9 April – Seminar on Stone Voices – The book offers reflections on Scottish history, geology and politics, each of which Neal will discuss during this seminar. Of particular interest will be bringing the story of Scottish ‘independence’ up to date from where the book leaves off in 2002
Seminar is on Bowen Island from 5:00 PM Saturday to 11:00 AM Sunday. Cost for dinner, breakfast, accommodation and seminar $160 shared/$200 single room. To register contact Wendy Sjolin in Graduate Liberal Studies (wendy_sjolin@sfu.ca) or 778-782-5152
10 April – Seminar on Devolution - Next month brings elections to the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood- the fourth since the devolved government was installed in 1999. The outcome of the 2011 election will decisively affect the options for Scotland's constitutional future: no change to the devolution settlement, greater powers for the Scottish Parliament including - crucially - control over taxation , or full independence.
The election will also be a judgment on the performance of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and its charismatic leader Alex Salmond. The SNP won a tiny relative majority in the 2007 elections, and have governed alone as a minority administration, their proposals frequently voted down by the combined Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory opposition.
But everything is now under the shadow of the financial collapse of 2008-9. Massive budget cuts are being imposed by the new Tory-led Cameron government in London. Will traditional Scottish hatred of the Tories produce a swing back to Labour? Or will London's cuts to the Scottish block grant provoke a swing towards the SNP and its demand: full fiscal independence for Scotland?
Registration fee $25.00
To register contact Wendy Sjolin in Graduate Liberal Studies (wendy_sjolin@sfu.ca) or 778-782-5152
Admission is free, but seats need to be reserved. To reserve a seat for this event please go to www.sfu.ca/reserve
Together with Michael Bell, former Canadian ambassador to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and John Bell, former Canadian and UN diplomat, Michael Molloy is co-founder and Co-Director of JOCI, the Jerusalem Old City Initiative, which is housed in the Department of Political Science of the University of Windsor
Among the many issues that make up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the status of the city of Jerusalem holds a special place. Israel speaks of it as its eternal and undivided capital. The Palestinians see it as the future capital of a Palestinian state. For the three Abrahamic religions, it is the holy city—the city of David, of Jesus and of Mohammed’s ascension. The walled Old City of Jerusalem, with its overlapping holy sites, sits at the centre of the conflict.
If progress can be made on the thorny issue of Jerusalem’s future, the prospects for a resolution of the larger conflict become much brighter; and it is to this end that the JOCI has been established as a Canadian contribution.
Co-sponsors: Building Bridges Vancouver, The Institute for the Humanities, SFU, JS Woodsworth Chair for the Humanities
Reservations are requested:
To reserve a seat for this event please go to www.sfu.ca/reserve
Analogous to Kant’s three prime questions for Philosophy generally – What can I know?, What should I do?, and For what may I hope? -- urban philosophy might ask: What is a city?, What is a good city?, and What is an ideal city? Philosophers of the past who addressed things urban (beginning with Plato) were Utopians, who addressed the ideal city question. The more modest, good city, question occupies most of the few contemporary philosophers concerned with cities. This paper starts with the remaining, what is a city, question to prompt ideas about what a good city is and about how a prevalent utopian/anti-utopian divide in urban theory can be superseded. Thought material for this effort is largely drawn from the views of Walter Benjamin and John Dewey.
Frank Cunningham, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Political Science, University of Toronto and a founding member of its Cities Centre. His research has been in the areas of social and political philosophy with a current emphasis on urban theory. Recent and forthcoming publications in this area are: “Cities: A Philosophical Inquiry,” “The ‘Gruing’ of Cities,” “Urban Aboriginal Sovereignty and Homefulness,” “Citizenship and the City,” “Public Spaces and Subversion,” and “Triangulating Utopia.” Educated at Indiana University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Toronto, Professor Cunningham has served as Chair of the University’s Philosophy Department, President of the Canadian Philosophical Association, and Principal of Innis College at the University of Toronto.
Hosted by the Institute for the Humanities
This event is by invitation only – if you are interested in attending
Please contact Dr. Samir Gandesha at: gandesha@sfu.ca
This seminar will shift attention away from the legal and political focus of pleas for aboriginal sovereignty tout court to a moral criterion for determining what kinds or degrees of sovereignty are merited in which circumstances. The core of the criterion is located in the originating wrong inflicted on all aboriginal peoples by the European conquerors and their descendants, namely to deny the aboriginal peoples their “homes.”
Nations, regions, villages, cities, and individual or family residences are “homeful” places to the extent: that relations among their inhabitants are motivated by an ethics of care; that they constitute communities of ongoing friendship; and that they provide inhabitants with “life bearings” in virtue of which people see themselves as participating with others in satisfying collective lives. The erosion of homefulness in the case of aboriginal peoples is especially pronounced, and it is nowhere more destructively than in the cities.
While governments and charitable organizations can help to remove obstacles for the retrieval of aboriginal homefulness and provide some of the preconditions for it, major progress in this endeavor cannot be made paternalistically. The retrieval of homefulness must finally be collectively undertaken by aboriginal people themselves. In turn, this requires that they have appropriate control over those aspects of their actual homes to pursue the goal of making them homeful, that is, they require measures of sovereignty in this sense.
At a regional and national level this has been partially realized in aboriginal sovereignty within reserves, by the creation of Nunavut, and the treaty with the Nisga’a in British Columbia. Virtually no progress has been made in the case of city-dwelling aboriginal people. This will require changes in the relations of the city dwelling aboriginal peoples to their on-reserve counterparts and empowerment within cities themselves. This paper focuses on the second mandate and asks what changes are needed in city governance, structures, and practices with respect to the main components of homefulness to achieve urban aboriginal sovereignty.
Frank Cunningham, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Political Science, University of Toronto and a founding member of its Cities Centre. His research has been in the areas of social and political philosophy with a current emphasis on urban theory. Recent and forthcoming publications in this area are: “Cities: A Philosophical Inquiry,” “The ‘Gruing’ of Cities,” “Urban Aboriginal Sovereignty and Homefulness,” “Citizenship and the City,” “Public Spaces and Subversion,” and “Triangulating Utopia.” Educated at Indiana University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Toronto, Professor Cunningham has served as Chair of the University’s Philosophy Department, President of the Canadian Philosophical Association, and Principal of Innis College at the University of Toronto.
Gordon Christie:
Professor Christie has a LL.B. from the University of Victoria, and a Ph.D. (in philosophy) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught in universities in Canada and the United States, in Faculties of Law, and Departments of Philosophy and Indigenous Studies. Most recently he was an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School (1998 - 2004), where he also acted as Director of the Intensive Program in Aboriginal Lands, Resources and Governments
Presented by Counter Culture
Counterculture is a monthly discussion and screening series aimed at animating critical public debate on contemporary issues relating to art, media and politics. Counterculture aims to promote the democratic ideals of dissent, debate and discussion, constituting a point of contact between the university and local communities with free, public events.
Sponsored by SFU Institute for the Humanities, School of Communication, School for the Contemporary Arts, Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology.
Dirt (2008)
What is it about feeling dirty that shames us into silence and disgust?" asks director Meghna Haldar in the feature documentary Dirt. From the slums of Kolkata to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to a barbeque joint in Central Texas - everyone has a different story. Dirt isn't just a four letter word, it contains a world of meaning spanning the divine to the profane. A quixotic odyssey into all things unclean, featuring animation to make Hieronymus Bosch blush, tracks from Godspeed You! Black Emperor and an experimental soundscape by Clinker, Dirt digs deep to illuminate the positively filthy experience of being human.
MEGHNA HALDAR
Meghna Haldar is a Vancouver based writer-filmmaker. Her first feature documentary Dirt garnered three Leos in 2009 and the Best Documentary Award at the Female Eye Festival. It was recently broadcast on DOC Channel and is featured in the British Wellcome Trust Museum's Summer Exhibit 2011. Her short drama "Revival" won numerous awards and was screened at festivals across the US. She is presently in post-production on a short dramatic triptych on violence "Bol" and completing a second draft of a feature script. Of her work, the German director Thomas Reidelsheimer (Touch the Sound) has said "personal and courageous filmmaker with a very unique voice". She has taught film at the undergraduate level and to children, worked at a film co-op, sat on juries (DOXA, OOS, Reel to Real, Cineworks). Her essay on Dirt: A Social Mirror presented at the Global Conference for Multiculturalism, Conflict and Belonging at Oxford University is due to be published in a book in 2011.
Please join us for a seminar with Sherry Simon, French Department, Concordia University
Hosted by the Institute for the Humanities and the World Literature Program at Simon Fraser University
To reserve a seat please go to www.sfu.ca/reserve
CITIES IN TRANSLATION
Recent urban theory has been strikingly unconcerned with language. Since the 1980s, writing about the city has increased exponentially, making the city the focus of issues of democracy and justice. Central to much of this work is the premise that cities are a privileged arena for the expression of citizenship, that they offer strong forms of cohesion and collective identity, engagement and belonging. Yet language, as the medium through which public discussion takes place, is simply taken for granted. Translation is the key to citizenship, to the incorporation of languages into the public sphere. This means seeing urban space as a translation space, where the focus is not on multiplicity but on interaction. A city of transactions comes into view, a place of conflicting memories. And the translator emerges as a full participant in the stories of modernity that are enacted across urban space. This thesis will be illustrated in relation to a category of cities which I call dual cities.
Sherry Simon teaches in the French Department at Concordia University. She is the author of TRANSLATING MONTREAL (2006) translated into French as TRAVERSER MONTREAL: UNE HISTOIRE CULTURELLE PAR LA TRADUCTION (2008) and her recent work is on translation in linguistically divided cities, Barcelona, Trieste, colonial Calcutta, Montreal. She is a Killam Fellow (2009-2111) and a member of the Royal Society and was recently awarded the Prix Andre Laurendeau by ACFAS.
Girlfriend Experience is an innovative and provocative look at the sex trade from the perspective of the usually invisible customer: the john. Using mockumentary style to parallel the john’s desire for fantasy to become reality, the film addresses the question of the sex-trade on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and explores some of the reasons men pay for sex, their fantasies and how they eroticize themselves in the role of the client.
Ileana Pietrobruno is an independent Canadian filmmaker who has written, directed, edited and produced several short films and the following features: the erotic drama Girlfriend Experience, the pirate adventure Girl King, and the surreal Cat Swallows Parakeet and Speaks! Pietrobruno’s films have won awards and screened at hundreds of festivals, including the Berlin International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.
Counterculture is a monthly discussion and screening series aimed at animating critical public debate on contemporary issues relating to art, media and politics. Counterculture aims to promote the democratic ideals of dissent, debate and discussion, constituting a point of contact between the university and local communities with free, public events.
Laura U. Marks
Public Lecture
Abstract: Contemporary art-making can be inspired by the aniconism, or the liberty from figuration, of classical Islamic art. Free from the requirement to represent figures, Islamic art anticipates artificial life by carrying out algorithmic processes, such as recursion and self-organization. Examples include the infinite generativity of ‘Abbasid geometric art to the unruly plant-animal hybrids of Caucasian carpets. Interestingly, non-figurative art inspires responses in the body, as we will see in a brief history of Islamic patterns that confound figure and ground and in turn disrupt the certainty of embodied subjectivity.
Laura U. Marks is a scholar, theorist, and curator of independent and experimental media arts. Her current research interests are the media arts of the Arab and Muslim world, intercultural perspectives on new media art, and philosophical approaches to materiality and information culture. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002), Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art ( MIT Press, 2010), and many essays. She has curated programs of experimental media for festivals and art spaces worldwide. Dr. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. www.sfu.ca/~lmarks
Sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities, and the School of Contemporary Arts. This lecture is open to everyone, but space is limited. Reservations are required. To reserve a seat please visit: www.sfu.ca/reserve.
Ms. Helena Reckitt
Public Lecture
Over the past five decades, feminist artists have created powerful art that both engages in and critiques social relations. Yet this rich body of work is barely acknowledged in recent accounts of relational aesthetics. Helena Reckitt asks why such foundational projects have been largely dismissed. How might the humanist basis of relational aesthetics - in which the unmarked artist is biased towards the male - fuel this critical and curatorial neglect? Reckitt considers key precedents from the era of Fluxus, Happenings and Neo Concrete art alongside polemical feminist projects of the 1960s and 1970s that catalyzed public interaction. She also looks at how contemporary artists are inflecting their socially-based work with a strong gender-consciousness - and why this still matters.
Helena Reckitt was Senior Curator of Programs at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. Her previous positions include Senior Director of Exhibitions and Education at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, GA, Head of Talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and Associate Commissioning Editor at Routledge publishers. She has curated solo exhibitions with artists including Yael Bartana, Prema Murthy, Paul P, Hew Locke (with Julie Joyce), and Paul Shambroom (with Diane Mullin and Chris Scoates). Her group exhibitions for The Power Plant include Not Quite How I Remember It, on forms of re-enactment and reconstruction, The Power Plant, June - September 2008 and Auto Emotion: Autobiography, Emotion and Self-Fashioning (co-curated with Gregory Burke), May - August, 2007. Other group shows she has organized include What Business Are You In? on artists and institutional culture and Found Wanting on the aesthetics of the awkward and in-between. Reckitt has taught contemporary art history at Emory University and the Atlanta College of Art and has contribution to magazines and journals including C magazine, Art Papers, The Guardian and n.paradoxa. She is co-editor with Joshua Oppenheimer of Acting on AIDS: Sex, drugs and politics (Serpent’s Tail, 1997) and editor of Art and Feminism (Phaidon Press, 2001).
Sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities, the School of Contemporary Arts and the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. This lecture is free and open to everyone, but space is limited. Reservations are required. To reserve a seat please visit: www.sfu.ca/reserve.
Scientific Literacy and ‘The Genomics Revolution’: multivalency and reciprocity in short supply Cancelled
5:00 pm – 6:45 pm
Brian Wynne is Professor of Science Studies at the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change and at the ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen) at Lancaster University, UK. His work has covered technology and risk assessment, public risk perceptions, and public understanding of science, focusing on the relations between expert and lay knowledge and policy decision-making. Professor Wynne was recently awarded the prestigious JD Bernal Prize.
Sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities at SFU, Science and Technology Studies at UBC, Situating Science Cluster and Genome British Columbia, this lecture is free to attend and open to everyone. To reserve a seat please visit: www.sfu.ca/reserve.
The Literacy Myth Now Thirty Years Old Revisited
7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Harvey Graff, author of The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City, created controversies when his study appeared in 1979. Graff will discuss the fate of “the literacy myth” and a panel will discuss whether the concept of literacy has any staying power in an age of the internet and mass education.
The Literacy Myth refers to the belief, articulated in educational, civic, religious, and other settings, contemporary and historical, that the acquisition of literacy is a necessary precursor to and invariably results in economic development, democratic practice, cognitive enhancement, and upward social mobility.
Panelists include: Harvey Graff, David Wallace, Humber College, Zoe Druick, Communication, SFU, Stuart Poyntz, Communication, SFU, Annette DeFaveri, Vancouver Public Library, Jerry Zaslove, Graduate Liberal Studies, SFU.
Harvey Graff is Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies, and Professor of English and History at the Ohio State University.
Sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities and the departments of Communication, History, and English at SFU, this talk is free to attend and open to everyone. To reserve a seat please visit: www.sfu.ca/reserve.
Both in the writings of Marx as in those of Freud there are references to the motif of "free association". Superficially regarded, however, there does not seem to be any connection between them. They stem from two traditions that are quite easy to distinguish: the tradition of political associationists on the one hand and the psychology of association (as association of ideas) on the other.
In spite of these differences the concept fulfills similar functions in Marx' and Freud's writings and has a similar structure, too. The "association" of free and intrinsically connected elements enables the critique of 'abstract' forms of representation, which impede the articulation of the repressed but constitutive forces of the mental, respectively societal order.
According to Freud the forms of articulation controlled by the superego conceal the dynamics of libidinous desire by which they are secretly determined. Freud was, thus, interested in "free association" as a form of expression that would avoid such repressive forms of articulation.
Marx speaks of the "association" of "free producers" to sketch a form of social organization that could do without repressive governmental machineries. And these repressive apparatuses, too, conceal their inner productive ground, the relations of production under capitalism.
Both Marx and Freud quite similarly refer to normative systems that tend to veil their factual ground. Furthermore both emphasize the free conjunction of productive elements that would allow to (at least punctually) avoid the distorting mirror of representation. On the level of the structure of theory affinities become visible that do not only transgress the scope of classical Freudomarxism but that also seem to be closely connected with contemporary debates on political ontology.
Johan Hartle is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He studied Philosophy and Political Sciences at the University of Marburg and Frankfurt and obtained his PhD from the University of Münster in 2005. His general field of research is the connection between aesthetics and politics in current political ontological and post-Marxist debates.
Sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, this lecture is free and open to everyone, but space is limited. To reserve a seat please visit: www.sfu.ca/reserve.
This event is sponsored jointly by the Thakore Charitable Foundation, the India Club of Vancouver, the Institute for the Humanities and the J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University.
Mahatma Gandhi and his legacy have been honoured at Simon Fraser University since the unveiling of his memorial bust in the Simon Fraser Peace Square in l970. Each year the Gandhi Jayanti celebration brings members of the local Indo-Canadian community together with others who wish to salute his memory and honour his ideals. For more information on the annual Gandhi Jayanti celebration and past Thakore Visiting Scholar Award recipients please visit http://gandhijayanti.com/
Along with its local focus, this celebration also has a national and international orientation. Simon Fraser University, since l99l, has presented the Thakore Visiting Scholar Award to outstanding persons who have made the welfare of society their lifetime work. Recipients to date include Edward Broadbent, Douglas Roche, Ovide Mercredi, Ursula Franklin, Aung San Suu Kyi, George McRobie, Mary-Wynne Ashford, Marta de la Vega Torres, Thomas Berger, Medha Patkar, Lloyd Axworthy, Reverend James Lawson, War Child Canada, Operation Eyesight Universal and Marilyn Gullison, Michael Clague, Roy Miki, James Pau, Free the Children and Elaben Bhatt.
This year, we are proud to present the award to Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, distinguished authors and teachers whose books on peacemaking and non-violent change in South Africa and in divided societies have brought them many honours.
They will give a lecture on the subject of: Gandhi and Mandela: Reconciliation in Deeply Divided Societies.
The talk will compare Gandhi and Mandela who have been elevated to global icons of non-violent change. They stand for a secular, universalist and cosmopolitan vision. Linked by their struggles to dislodge exploitative external colonialism in the case of India, and internal colonialism in South Africa, they soared above the extremists of their times to seek out alternatives to restore dignity to the human condition regardless of caste, class, color or creed. Yet these noble ideals often founder on a contrary reality. The ‘burden of history’ shapes collective memory.
By comparing Gandhi’s and Mandela’s successes and failures we can draw lessons for post-conflict reconstruction. How do societies deal with the crimes of their past? How can perpetrators and victims of gross human rights violations be reconciled and justice as well as peaceful co-existence secured?
The two-part lecture demystifies Gandhi and Mandela by referring to India, ‘rainbow’ South Africa and the elusive peace in Israel/Palestine. By asking, ‘How can Gandhi and Mandela’s visions of reconciliation be revived in a violence-prone world’, the talk will add to our understanding of the cultural and political roots of violence and peacemaking.
Kogila Moodley is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Education at UBC and was the first holder of the David Lam Chair. Raised in the Indian community of apartheid South Africa, her research is focused on critical multiculturalism and anti-racism education. She has served as President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Ethnic, Minority and Race Relations (1998-2002).
Heribert Adam, FRSC, is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at SFU and also holds an annual appointment at the University of Cape Town. Educated at the Frankfurt School of critical theory with Adorno and Habermas as mentors, his most recent books, co-authored with Kogila Moodley, are: Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians (Temple University Press, 2006) and, as editor, Hushed Voices: Unacknowledged Atrocities of the 20th Century (Berkshire Academic Press, 2010).
This event is free and open to everyone, but space is limited. To reserve a seat please visit: www.sfu.ca/reserve
Sept. 20, 7:30 p.m. Screening
“From Aniconism to Bliss: Media art shows its Islamic roots”
Screening sponsored by DIM Cinema, www.dimcinema.ca
Pacific Cinematheque, 1131 Howe St.
$9.50/$8 students + $3 membership; 18+
Sept. 21, 5-7 p.m. Book launch
Djavad Mowafagian World Art Centre, SFU Woodward's, 149 Hastings St.
Free. Refreshments, cash bar, book signing, web viewing; brief slide lecture at 5:30
Sponsored by SFU Contemporary Arts with support from the Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures, SFU
The Book:
Enfoldment and Infinity establishes points of contact between classical Islamic art and contemporary computer-based art. For example, both are often aniconic, both are performative, both unfold from an invisible source. Demonstrating and inventing Islamic “roots” for new media art, the book argues that specific moments of classical Islamic thought give us new and fruitful ways to think about contemporary art. The book also traces what I call “the haptic transfer and the travels of the abstract line”: how Islamic aesthetics journeyed westward from medieval times on, drawing out powers of abstraction and embodiment, ultimately to inform modernism and contemporary new media art. It demonstrates meeting points between Islamic thought and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and it proposes an enfolding-unfolding aesthetics to explain how artworks (and other things) unfold from the universe through a filter of information.
The Screening:
Particle bursts, mystical abstraction, and an intelligent suspicion of figurative images – qualities of some of the most thrilling media art works have deep origins in the great arts of Islam. Mounir Fatmi and Peggy Ahwesh propose a sober aniconism in response to a contemporary image-world of pornography and murder. In works by Takeshi Murata and Cory Arcangel a giddy iconoclasm takes over. Doug Richardson's analog vector experiments, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries' insistent jazzy textualism, and Usama Alshaibi's shimmying geometrics celebrate the liberation from image-making. The pixelline universe twinkles in the works of Walid Ra'ad, Paul Sharits, and Ghieth al-Amine, and finally Eric Siegel's analog abstractions take us into the blissful beyond of the image.
A beautiful web site by Finn Brunton, with nine original works by artist-programmers, demonstrates several of the “manners of unfolding” the book describes. www.enfoldment.net.
The past is a central issue for the future of Quebec. In a society marked by social diversity, cultural pluralism, multiple identities, and influenced by global processes, what grand narrative could be proposed to Québécois to pass on to the future?
Jocelyn Létourneau is currently the Canada Research Chair in the History of Contemporary Quebec at Laval University. A member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., he has recently been a Fulbright fellow at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. His research focuses on the problems of interpretation in Québécois historiography and the role of intellectuals in contemporary society. His book A History for the Future: Rewriting Memory and Identity in Quebec (2004) was awarded the Prix Spirale de l'essai. He was elected as member of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004 and received the Trudeau Foundation Research Prize in 2006.
Sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities at SFU, this event is free and open to the public but space is limited. To reserve a seat, please visit: www.sfu.ca/reserve.
This is the first lecture in a two-part series. The second lecture, Michael Cromer Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness at the University of British Columbia will take place at UBC, Faculty of Education, Scarfe 310, on September 22, 2010 at 1:00 p.m.
How can we change things in an age in which governments are fixated on the bottom line and conventional protest rallies have lost their punch? Coalitions can be important tools for social change and community revitalization. What makes them successful? What causes them to fail? Come and hear Amanda Tattersall, community organizer and author of Power in Coalition, discuss how community coalitions can be a powerful strategy for social change, organizational development, and community renewal. Amanda Tattersall is a community organizer, researcher and union activist with Unions New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She is currently a Director of the Sydney Alliance, a broad based coalition of unions, community organizations and faith groups. Sponsored by the Metro Vancouver Alliance and J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, the event is free and open to everyone, but seats are limited. To reserve a seat please visit: www.sfu.ca/reserve |
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Brought to you with support from Vancity Theatre, the Institute for the Humanities at SFU, Centre for the Study of Gender, Social Inequities, and Mental Health at SFU, and the West Coast Mental Health Network.
In celebration of International Mad Pride Day on July 14th, 2010, Gallery Gachet continues its bi-annual tradition of honouring, by way of a month-long arts and education festival, this historic but little-known social change movement founded by psychiatric activists in the 1970s. As an arts collective whose mandate advances art and healing as a path to social and economic justice, Gallery Gachet embraces Mad Pride as a unique vantage point from which to address current world issues in an alternative framework: that of cultural and global mental health.
This year's biennale, "ECO Madness!!! Or... Humans Are Killing the Planet and I Feel Fine," engages the concept of ecopsychology: an emerging field of study that criticizes mainstream psychology for ignoring social, and especially ecological, determinants of mental health. There is, according to the online International Community of Ecopsychology, a "synergistic relation between planetary and personal well-being" that is absurdly and resoundingly ignored in common therapeutic practice.
Through art, film, theatre, music and educational events throughout the month of July, Gallery Gachet aims to create a safe and radical (literal meaning: "root") space for a total creative FREAK OUT over what humans are doing to the Earth and to ourselves.
eco art exhibition, radical films, mad poets' cabaret, indie bands, DJ dance party, eco-psych free skool, panel madness: 'Deep Aesthetics,' psycho-geography bike ride, Ecocide Recovery Support Group... and more!!
Highlights:
July 2: Opening Night Reception Gallery Gachet 7-10pm
July 7: Vancouver Premier! Crooked Beauty and END:CIV
Vancity Cinema door 6:30 // show 7pm (www.viff.org )
July 8: Encore presentation: Crooked Beauty @ Gallery Gachet, 7pm, sliding scale
July 14: Mad Poets’ Cabaret @ Gallery Gachet 7pm
July 24: Rock for Rivers: "Salmon Insanity!" Gallery Gachet door 7:30 pm
July 29: Theatre of the Insane: The Heart is an endangered Species @ Gallery Gachet, 7.30pm
July 31: Stop the Madness!!! closing night dance party featuring Gateway Sucks
Gallery Gachet 8pm till late
For complete festival line-up and details please visit www.gachet.org.
Keynote speeches by: Ramin Jahanbegloo (University of Toronto) and Wendy Brown (Berkeley), and presentations by:
Len Findlay
Lisa Robertson
Sherilyn MacGregor
Sourayan Mookerjea
Douglas Moggach
Shelagh Day
Dave Diewert
Frank Cunningham
The program also includes a performance by Ali&Ali 7: Hey Brother (or Sister) Can You Spare Some Hope & Change? and a series of video installations created as part of a community-engaged art project at the Purple Thistle Arts and Activist Centre in east Vancouver: Finding Home.
NOTE: The Institute is limiting the number of participants, to make in-dept discussion possible, so please reserve early. We look forward to your participation! This event is free, but registration is required. Please go to www.sfu.ca/reserve and http://websurvey.sfu.ca/survey/55848256.
Conference Format and Schedule May 5 – May 8, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010:
Keynote address at 7:30 p.m. by Ramin Jahanbegloo
Thursday, May 6
Session 1
09:00 – 10:30: Len Findlay, Citizenship and the University
Session 2
1:00 – 12:30: Sourayan Mookerjea, Citizenship and the Media
02:30 – 4:00: Ali and Ali 7: Performance: Hey Brother (or Sister) Can You Spare Some Hope & Change?
04:30 – 5:00: Discussion of the Performance
Evening:
06:30 – 7:30: Keynote address by Wendy Brown
07:30: Reception
Friday, May 7
Session 3
10:00 – 11:30: Lisa Robertson, Citizenship and Domestic Space
11:30 – 1:00: Lunch
Session 4
01:00 – 2:30: Doug Moggach, Citizenship and Modernity
Session 5
03:00 – 4:30: Sherilyn MacGregor, Citizenship and the Environment
Saturday, May 8
Session 6
09:00 – 10:30: Shelagh Day, Citizenship and Social Justice
Session 7
11:00 – 12:3:0 Dave Diewert, Citizenship and Religion
01:30 – 5:00: City and Cosmopolitanism
Session 8
1:30 – 2:30: Frank Cunningham, Citizenship and the City
2:45 – 4:30: Roundtable: The Right to the City
4:45 – 5:15: Installations: Finding Home; discussion
Please address enquiries to: Karen Meijer Karen_meijer_2@sfu.ca
Background for the Conference
Now in its 28th year, the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University explores critical perspectives relating social concerns to the cultural and historical legacy of the humanities. The Institute is committed to the idea of studying pressing contemporary problems; one of these concerns is the notion of citizenship in a globalized world where the nation and the state have changed fundamentally as they are dominated by transnational corporations.
The conference will conclude the project called Imagining Citizenship that has focused on these issues in the last few years. Study groups comprising academics and members of the wider community have been meeting to discuss the idea of citizenship in relation to the environment, culture, social justice, religion, modernity and the university from the perspective of the humanities.
In the framework of the humanities, the city, with its citizenship correlate, is a key site for thinking through the new conditions for a cosmopolitan citizenship. Citizenship is not the narrow and often violent and exclusionary horizon of the nation state; rather, the citizen is the subject of possibility, a subject alive with the search for meaning, rich in new directions and new urgencies. This conference seeks to address the following question:
How can the humanities reinvigorate and participate in a new cosmopolitan citizenship in the age of neo-liberal crisis and decline?
Keynote Speakers
Ramin Jahanbegloo; a well-known Iranian-Canadian philosopher. He taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto from 1997-2001. He later served as the head of the Department of Contemporary Studies of the Cultural Research Centre in Tehran. Presently he is a Professor of Political Science and a Research Fellow in the Centre for Ethics at University of Toronto. Professor Jahanbegloo regularly addresses both scholarly and general public audiences through his lectures and essays on tolerance and difference, democracy and modernity, and the dynamics of Iranian intellectual life.
Wendy Brown; professor of Gender &Women’s studies and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. Brown's current research focuses on the relationship of theories of political sovereignty to global capital and other transnational forces.
Session Speakers
Len Findlay is known for working at the intersection of literary studies, cultural studies and the humanities. He specializes in cultural studies and critical theory, critical pedagogy and collaborative research, at the University of Saskatchewan. Currently, he is endeavouring to establish in a number of different settings how critical theory, combined with critical pedagogy and collaborative research, can help decolonize Canadian universities while repoliticizing them in ways more receptive to the needs and knowledge of different communities.
Sourayan Mookerjea is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Alberta. He teaches cultural studies and writes on racism, empires, migration, and class in Canada. He was a member of the artists' collective Basic Research, which constructed the public space The Spectacular State: Fascism and the Modern Imagination held in Vancouver in 1995. His research interests also include postcolonial studies, contemporary social theory, language, dialectic image, communication, global flows, and built space and identity.
Lisa Robertson is the author of several books of poetry, including The Weather, Debbie: An Epic, and The Men, along with numerous reviews of poetry, art, and architecture, which have been published widely. Her poetry brings freshness and vehemence to what are often formal examinations. Her work interrogates the changing shape of feminism, the idea of a lyric lineage, the canonization of a male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse around which we organize our lives, and the formative and plastic possibilities of language itself.
Doug Moggach holds the Research Chair in Political Thought at the University of Ottawa. He is the recipient of a Canada Council Killam Research Fellowship, and is a member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. His research interests include contemporary political philosophy and political thought, German philosophy, and the history of ancient and modern political thought.
Sherilyn MacGregor teaches environmental politics in the School of Politics, International Relations & Philosophy at Keele University, UK. Her research is rooted in feminist and green political theory and explores a range of themes relating to citizenship, social justice and ecological sustainability. She is author of Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), has recently published articles on gender justice and the politics of climate change, and is currently co-editing (with Timothy Doyle) a two-volume series titled Global Perspectives on Environmentalism.
Shelagh Day is a founding president of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), editor of the Canadian Human Rights Reporter (Canada’s reporter of record on anti-discrimination law) and has co-written two books and numerous articles on women’s equality rights. She is also the director (along with Gwen Brodsky) of the Poverty and Human Rights Centre at the University of British Columbia. In 2008 she received a Governor-General’s Award for her outstanding contributions to the advancement of women in Canada.
David Diewert is a former professor of Biblical Languages at Regent College. He is now a sessional lecturer at Regent College where he teaches Biblical Greek and Hebrew as well as courses on Amos and other Old Testament book studies. He is the founder of Streams of Justice.org, a Vancouver network of several faith communities, chiefly Christian, who engage in social justice reflections, forums, and actions. He is also a community activist in East Vancouver.
Frank Cunningham is professor emeritus of Philosophy and Political Science, University of Toronto. His main teaching is in the area of urban philosophy, and contemporary political philosophy with a focus on democratic theory. He has also taught environmental ethics and engineering philosophy. His recent publications include ‘Cities - a Philosophical Inquiry.’ in the Research Bulletin of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies: University of Toronto, 2007.
What are universities good for? This question has generated intense debate, particularly since the culture wars and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Where radicals once critiqued universities' elitism, that argument has recently been turned on is head: many academic administrators and business leaders now see a university education as little more than job training for the information economy. Such pressures threaten universities' ability to play the critical social role that justifies them. Ian Angus’s latest book, Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment, is a provocative look at the central questions facing university education today. Drawing on decades of experience in the scholarly trenches, Ian Angus considers the future of academic freedom in an increasingly corporate university setting, the role of technology, interdisciplinary study, and the possibilities for critical enlightenment and solidarity.
Join us for a panel discussion of Angus’s book, with Darin Barney, Adrienne Burk and Claire Polster, on Friday March 19th, 2010.
Darin Barney is Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship and Associate Professor of Communication Studies at McGill University. He is a native of Vancouver and studied at Simon Fraser University and the University of Toronto, where he trained in political theory and received a Ph.D. in 1999. He is the author of Communication Technology: The Canadian Democratic Audit; The Network Society; and Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology which was awarded the 2001 Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Research by the McGannon Center for Communication Research at Fordham University, selected as an Outstanding Title in political theory for 2001 by the American Library Association’s Choice Reviews and a Finalist for the 2002 Harold Adams Innis book prize.
Adrienne Burk is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at SFU. Her research interests include public spaces, critical pedagogy, and social justice (see http://www.sfu.ca/sociology/faculty/faculty.html). For several years Adrienne has been exploring innovations in classrooms at SFU by working directly with faculty members from many disciplines to enhance critical thinking/reading/and writing. This positioning has allowed her to witness first hand a variety of results that illuminate some key contradictions in how universities undertake, and sustain, educational mandates.
Claire Polster is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina. Her research focuses on the ongoing transformation of Canadian higher education and its implications for the public interest. She has published widely on various higher education issues including government policy and policy-making related to universities, the commodification of academic research, and the erosion of university autonomy, democracy, and collegialism. She is also co-editor of Academic Callings: The University We Have Had, Now Have, and Could Have and co-founder and Board member of the University of Regina Faculty of Arts Community Research Unit.
For more information see: http://www.sfu.ca/humanities-institute/events.htm
Please join an exciting gathering of activists and scholars who are drawing on ancient teachings to inform how we can holistically address the radical challenges of our times.
http://interfaithjustpeace.org/program_2010_specific.php
As part of his cross country tour, Marc H. Ellis, one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of his generation, will speak on the subject “Does Judaism Equal Israel?” at Harbour Centre, Vancouver on November 21st.
This Vancouver event is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities Religion and Citizenship working group, Jews for a Just Peace and CanPalNet. The lecture is free and open to all but seating is very limited: please e-mail jkidd@sfu.ca if you would like to reserve a seat.
The author of 15 books, Ellis, has just published Judaism Does Not Equal Israel: the Rebirth of the Jewish Prophetic. Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies, and Full Professor of Jewish Studies at Baylor University in Texas, Ellis will be promoting the book on a cross-Canada speaking tour. In this poignant, powerful volume, Ellis takes on the hard moral questions about Jewish support for the state of Israel. Reviewing the historical record of the past sixty years and envisioning the prospects for a just and lasting peace, Ellis makes an unyielding case – based on the most cherished Jewish values – that the present policies of the Israeli state cannot reasonably be defended.
Marc H. Ellis is a leading authority on contemporary Judaism and is widely recognized as one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of his generation. A University Professor of American and Jewish Studies and the founding director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University, he is the author of fifteen books and has written articles published in the International Herald Tribune, Christian Century, and Ha’aretz. Ellis regularly provides commentary and analysis on NPR and the BBC and has been inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College. He lives in Waco, Texas.
The event is a reading from a novel Gina Ochsner has just completed called The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight. After the reading there will be a short discussion and question-answer time.
Gina Ochsner lives in Keizer, Oregon and divides her time between writing and teaching with the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program. Her stories have appeared in Glimmertrain, The New Yorker, Tin House, and the St. Petersburg Review.
She is the author of the short story collections The Necessary Grace to Fall (University of Georgia Press 2002, 2009) and People I Wanted to Be. A novel entitled The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight is forthcoming from Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt in 2010.
The event is being sponsored by the Literature and Citizenship working group with the Institute for the Humanities at SFU.
The Digital Literacies Symposium is a week-long series of keynote talks and workshops designed for youth media producers and peer-to-peer production mentors who help other youth to create new media. The symposium, co-sponsored by the SFU Institute for the Humanities and SFU School of Communication, will consider how ideas of citizenship and social justice can be explored throughout the digital media production process.
The Digital Literacies Symposium is part of the National Media Education week and held at SFU Harbour Centre from Nov. 2-6. Beyond inspirational and critically engaging keynote talks by noted local and international writers, educators and activists, the symposium will provide participants with resources, ideas and networks to help further the way issues of social justice and citizenship are taken up when youth produce videos, craft web spaces, or develop new mobile media projects.
To register, contact SFU School of Communication Outreach Coordinator Adam Brayford at abrayfor@sfu.ca.
Monday, November 2 – 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Keynote Address
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Dr. Matt Hern, Director, Purple Thistle
UBC Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy.
WORKSHOP 1
8:15 pm – 10:00 pm
Creativity, Media Production & Storying the World (Patti Fraser & Stuart Poyntz)
Tuesday, November 3 – 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
WORKSHOP 2
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Playful Spaces of Knowing & Citizenship – Storying the Self Through Performance & Technology (Kathryn Ricketts & M. Simon Levin)
Wednesday, November 4 – 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Keynote Address
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Marcus Youssef, MFA
Co-Director, Neworld Theatre
WORKSHIP 3
8:15 pm – 10:00 pm
Public Service Announcements & the Construction of Publicness (Lori McIntosh and Brian Ganter)
Thursday, November 5 – 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
WORKSHOP 4
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Citizenship, Intellectual Property & Using the Creative Commons (Kate Milberry & Jean Hebert)
Friday, November 6 – 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Keynote Address
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Dr. Elizabeth Soep, Research Director, Youth Radio (San Francisco)
WORKSHOP 5
8:15 pm – 10:00 pm
Network Thinking, Boundary Objects & Collective Intelligence (Neil Thomas & Stuart Poyntz)
Western media have largely presented distorted views of the recent events in Iran. In this multimedia public lecture, sponsored by the SFU Institute for the Humanities , Peyman Vahabzadeh provides in depth reflections on the Green Movement in Iran by situating it in the country's recent history, constitutional dilemma, and non-violent social movements for human and civil rights.
Peyman Vahabzadeh received his PhD in Sociology from Simon Fraser University (2000) and completed a two-year SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Studies at the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. He has taught sociology, political science, CSPT, and humanities at SFU, UVic and Brock University (Ontario). Aside from five books of poetry, fiction, and memoir in Persian, he is the author of Articulated Experiences: Toward A Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements (SUNY Press, 2003), and A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and the Fadai Discourse of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979 (Syrcuse University Press, 2010).
He has been the guest editor of the special issue of West Coast Line on "Writing Rupture: Iranian Emigration Literature" (2003) and the co-guest editor of the special issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory on "Democracy, Religion, and the Politics of Fright" (2007). His contributions have appeared in the Canadian Journal of Sociology, West Coast Line, The European Legacy, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Philosophy and Social Criticism, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and Iranian Studies. His essays, poems, short stories, and interviews have appeared in English, Persian, Kurdish, and German.
Join us for a reading and dialogue with Edmundo Paz Soldán. From the author of critically acclaimed Turing's Delirium comes a new book, The Living and the Dead.
Synopsis from amazon.com: In a small town in the United States a random series of teenage deaths occur in a brief period of time. Using these real events as the starting point for this story, Paz Soldán builds a highly-emotional novel where he examines the values of our Western society, technology and well-being.
Paz Soldán is the author of eight novels and three short story collections. He has won the National Book Award in Bolivia, the prestigious Juan Rulfo Award, and was a finalist for the Romulo Gallegos Award. He is an associate professor at Cornell University. He has received the Guggenheim fellowship (2006), and recently has been named one of the top 50 Ibero-American intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine. One of the few McOndo writers who live in the United States, he is frequently called upon as the movement’s spokesperson by the American media.
RSVP at: http://websurvey.sfu.ca/survey/43533812
In honor of Grace MacInnis and her outstanding social and political service as a member of Parliament for the New Democratic Party, the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser established a Grace MacInnis Visiting Scholar Program in 1993. The visiting scholar is invited to Simon Fraser University to meet with faculty and students.
This year’s Grace MacInnis visiting scholar is Jean Barman. She will be speaking on
“Taking everyday people seriously:
How French Canadians saved British Columbia for Canada”
Grace MacInnis, who this talk honours, valued everyday people. Her conviction that they effect change alongside those nominally in charge is the central point of this talk. Jean Barman’s canvas is British Columbia of the late 18th to mid-19th centuries and how, during these years, everyday French Canadians saved the future province for Canada. Were it not for French Canadians’ hard work and capacity in sustaining the fur trade, it is very likely, she argues, the United States would extend in an unbroken line along the Pacific Ocean from California to Alaska, and British Columbia would not exist.
Jean Barman has written extensively on British Columbian, Canadian, and indigenous history. As well as a general history of British Columbia, The West beyond the West, now in a 3rd edition, she is the author, among other books, of Stanley Park’s Secret and, most recently, British Columbia: Spirit of the People. The winner of numerous national and international awards for her publications, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
In its simplest form, witnessing involves observing and reporting by a single person of a single act, but on a broader level it can involve documenting human rights abuses or discussing civic issues in popular media. Witnessing is a fundamental part of social justice and citizenship.
With the rise new social media, the ubiquity of cameras and the explosion of visual monitoring devices (from temperature scans to iris-recognition machines), the dynamics of watching have dramatically altered how we engage as actors, as viewers, as bystanders, and as witnesses in social life. In a series of sessions comprised of journalists, academics, artists, and activists, this conference — one in a series of events sponsored by the SFU Institute for the Humanities as part of its Imagining Citizenship initiative — features four interactive sessions to explore aspects of new relations between witnessing, social justice, and citizenship.
Keynote Address
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE
Journalists Dying for Justice in the World’s Most Dangerous places
TERRY GOULD - INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
Introduced by CHARLIE SMITH - EDITOR, GEORGIA STRAIGHT
Terry Gould’s bestselling books and articles on organized crime and social issues have earned 48 awards and honors from numerous foundations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, and National Magazine Awards. Gould is the author of four books. His most recent is the acclaimed Murder Without Borders: Dying for the Story in the World’s Most Dangerous Places (2009). Joel Simon, Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, states that “through his meticulous reporting and his compassionate storytelling, Gould performs a small miracle, a literary resurrection, allowing journalists so cruelly killed to tell their own stories completely and honestly.”
Following the talk, books will be available for sale and autographing.
Panel Sessions
1 9:15 – 10:45 am
WITNESSING UP CLOSE
What are the elements of witnessing? What is the relationship of the individual, of society, and of the state to acts of witnessing? What mediates relations of witnessing? Who can be, and who is expected to be engaged in witnessing? How is witnessing differentiated from bystanding?
Witnessing in a proto-Democracy
DAVID MIRHADY - SFU HUMANITIES
Witnessing Apartheid: Reflections on South Africa’s TRC
SARAH WALSHAW - SFU ARCHEOLOGY
Witnessing as Remediated Social Responsibility
CHARMAINE PERKINS - SFU CRIMINOLOGY
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BOB MENZIES – MODERATOR
SFU SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
2 11:00 am – 12:30 pm
WITNESSING CITIES
What kinds of witnessing actions are afoot right now in our city? What modalities are used? What strategies for civic witnessing happen in other cities?
From Witness to Advocate: Personal Stories as Drivers of Social Change in Vancouver’s Poorest Neighbourhood
DARCI BENNETT - RESEARCHER/COORDINATOR, PIVOT LEGAL SOCIETY
Ccreative Action: Becoming the Active Witness
SHARON KRAVITZ - ARTIST/DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER
Saving the World is Serious Fun: How Social Media is Changing Citizenship, Witnessing and the Way We Play
CHANNING RODMAN - SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIST (SOCIAL SIGNAL)
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DOROTHY CHUNN – MODERATOR
SFU SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
3 1:30 – 3:00 pm
SUSTAINING WITNESSING
Within an unjust world, how do we renew and recommit to active engagement? What are the tools we can bring to bear individually and together that make it possible to sustain witnessing and work towards social justice?
The Whole World is Watching: Indymedia and the Rise of Citizen Journalism
KATE MILBERRY - SFU COMMUNICATION
Mindful Activism
JANOS MATE - ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVIST
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MARGARET JACKSON – MODERATOR
SFU CRIMINOLOGY
Register by Monday, October 12, 2009 at www.sfu.ca/reserve
Space will be limited to 50 attendees.
The conference will be held at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre campus in downtown Vancouver.
If you do not intend to attend the event in its entirety please indicate which session(s) you plan to attend.
For more information, please contact Trish Graham
To RSVP, send e-mail to grahama@sfu.ca
Sponsored jointly by the India Club of Vancouver, the Thakore Charitable Foundation and the Institute for the Humanities at SFU.
Mahatma Gandhi and his legacy have been honoured at Simon Fraser University since the unveiling of his memorial bust in the Simon Fraser Peace Square in l970. Each year, on his birthday (October 2), the Gandhi Jayanti celebration brings members of the local Indo-Canadian community together with others who wish to salute his memory and honour his ideals.
Along with its local focus, this celebration also has a national and international orientation. Simon Fraser University, since l99l, has presented the Thakore Visiting Scholar Award to outstanding persons who have made the welfare of society their lifetime work. Recipients to date include Edward Broadbent, Douglas Roche, Ovide Mercredi, Ursula Franklin, Aung San Suu Kyi, George McRobie, Mary-Wynne Ashford, Marta de la Vega Torres, Thomas Berger, Medha Patkar, Lloyd Axworthy, Reverend James Lawson, War Child Canada, Operation Eyesight Universal and Marilyn Gullison, Michael Clague, Roy Miki, James Pau and Free the Children.
This year, we are proud to present the award to Elaben Bhatt.
Ela Bhatt is the founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) that is based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Her work in forming the largest single trade union in India has 1.1 million members. The legacy of Gandhi and the Independence Struggle lives actively and vividly in this alternative cultural-political orientation to the women’s movement, democratic alternatives to large bureaucracies, civil disobedience and working for the welfare and autonomy of the self-employed women of India who work in all walks of life. Her book published by Oxford (2006) is entitled We Are Poor but So Many.
The Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in collaboration with The India Club and the Thakore Charitable Foundation has been honoring public figures, scholars and individuals who, in Gandhi's tradition, have made the welfare of society their lifetime work. We are proud to honour Elaben Bhatt this year as the 19th recipient of the Thakore Foundation Visiting Scholar Award.
Ernest Callenbach speaking on HOPE FOR THE EARTH
A frank assessment of “global heating” and other 21st century environmental issues and the institutional structures that provoke them while acknowledging the human potential to endure hardships and to acquire the knowledge needed to solve extraordinarily difficult problems in order to attain a sustainable future.
Ernest Callenbach is best known for his visionary novel Ecotopia (1975/ 2005) along with Ecotopia Emerging (1981) Ecology: A Pocket Guide (1998), Living Cheaply with Style (1977) Bring Back the Buffalo: A Sustainable Future for America's Great Plains (2000). (See an interview with Callenbach at: http://blip.tv/file/606543).
The Terry Fox Lecture on Hope is supported by an endowment dedicated to keeping alive the memory of Terry Fox and his infusion of hope in the battle against cancer. The lecture is supported by contributions from the SFU Dept. of Humanities, Institute for the Humanities, the Graduate Liberal Studies Program and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
This event is free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the David Lam Centre, SFU. Cosponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Institute for the Humanities, School of Communication, School for International Studies, at SFU
Hosted by the Institute for the Humanities at SFU
THE PANELISTS
Yves Tiberghien (Ph.D Stanford, 2002) is an Assistant Professor in the department of Political Science and is the foremost expert on comparative political economy, Japanese, Chinese, and European political economy at UBC.He has also been doing extensive research on global food and the global governance of genetically-modified organisms, as well as on global institutional reforms led by the EU, Japan, and Canada. His next research project focuses on global governance reforms and on the roles played by China and Japan.
John Chant is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University. He was educated at UBC and Duke University and has taught at the University of Edinburgh, Duke University, University College Dar es Salaam, Queen’s University, and Carleton University. He has written extensively on a variety of topics including monetary policy and theory, financial institutions and their regulation, and issues in higher education. He has been Research Director of the Financial Markets Group at the Economic Council, Research Director of the Task Force on the Future of the Canadian Financial System, and Adviser to the Governor of the Bank of Canada. He has also served as editor of Economic Inquiry and Canadian Public Policy, and as a member of the Monetary Policy Council of the C.D. Howe Institute. Currently, Mr. Chant serves on the Editorial Board of The Fraser Institute and as a ministerial appointee to the Board of the Canadian Payments Association.
Stephen Easton
Steve Easton joined the Department of Economics at SFU in 1975. He received his A.B. (1970) from Oberlin College, and his M.A. (1972) and Ph. D. (1978) from the University of Chicago. He has had visiting appointments at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; the Department of Economics of the University of Rochester; and l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. Professor Easton’s main teaching areas are international trade/finance and economic history. Current research interests include the nature of international debt, the economics of education, and the economics of crime and punishment
Kina Chenard is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University. She is an expert in Governance. Kina Chenard was educated in France, England and Canada. She pursued her doctoral education in two different fields: in Economics, at La Sorbonne in Paris, and in Political Science, at Laval University in Quebec. Kina Chenard's research interests include governance aspects of public Finance (debt and deficits) and institutional determinants of the quality of financial regulation. Prior to joining SFU, she was an intern in the Financial Surveillance Division of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. She also served as a political economist at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Currently, she is taking part in a major research project on the economic and institutional determinants of financial system stability with IMF’s experts in financial surveillance and banking supervision.
Hosted by the Institute for the Humanities at SFU
Further details forthcoming.
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