The 7th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference was held on May 5th to 7th. This conference brought together a diverse community of researchers, artists and experimenters from across North America. In its seventh year, the conference focused on “bumping zones,” liminal spaces of intersection where unique and differentiated regions of thought and discipline meet and thrive.
Conference sessions on campus
The conference was successful in accommodating over eighty attendees including graduate students, faculty, and artists from UBC Okanagan, Okanagan College, SFU, UVIC, Emily Carr, University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of Waterloo, , and UNAM (Mexico).
As well as attending conference presentations on campus, attendees were invited to a number of events around Kelowna including visual art installations, poetry readings, and a mix-and-mingle dinner. Session presentations were scheduled in such a way as to resist the traditional approach to conference scheduling: similarity. Instead, the conference focused on putting together seemingly disparate research presentations in an effort to reveal the interwoven threads that link work across disciplines. Presentations included subjects such as reimagining the role of doctors, to feminism in puck subcultures, indigenizing the institution, and decolonization. A poetry event was held down by the shores of Lake Okanagan, featuring keynote speaker and poet Rita Wong. Rita read poetry about the responsibilities that we carry towards activist intervention in environmental degradation, our relationships to land and water, and how we are all responsible for recognizing our connection to the spaces and lands we occupy.
“A number of the conference attendees let us know how successful they felt the conference was,” says one of the organizers, Mark Buchannan, “People were impressed with the possibility of the work that happens at this campus, as well as with the interdisciplinarity between programs and researchers.”
Many attendees were happy to discover the intersections between their work and other scholars’. The conference created a space for conversations between the attendees in which to share their knowledge that may not otherwise be possible within specific disciplines. For the twenty graduate students from UBC Okanagan, this was the first time for many to be able to hear each other’s work and share their research interests.
“This was a very rewarding experience for all involved. We engaged with the UBCO community and are extremely grateful for this opportunity and to everyone who attended and presented at the conference. Recognizing the common threads that motivate us to do the work we do is critical to re-imagining a new institutional approach to changing social and environmental conditions,” noted one of the conference organizers, Karolina Bialkowska.
In addition to the presentations, there were a few exhibitions that attendees were able to attend at the Alternator as well as in the FINA gallery on campus. Attendees were able to engage with art of UBCO graduate student Krista Arias, UBCO alumni Amy Modahl, and UBCO MFA candidate Jenifer LaFrance.
Event held at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
The organizers of this year’s conference included graduate students Karolina Bialkowska (MA English), Mark Buchannan (MA English), Tomas Jonsson (MFA), John Harrison (MA English), and Mike Unrau (PhD IGS), with faculty advising from Ashok Mathur.