Rowan Pickard

Rowan Pickard came to UBC Okanagan right out of high school thinking that they would have to focus their studies right away, sacrificing many interests. But they quickly learned that first-year is the best time to explore what the Bachelor of Arts degree has to offer.

Rowan took a first-year course in cultural studies practices, noting that the instructor was so engaging and emphasized a number of things that were important to them.

“When I looked into more cultural studies classes, I realized this area would set me up to learn about things I was interested in,” Pickard notes. “In the intro courses, we touch on so many things, and I became eager to continue learning in this field.”

With an interest in a career in journalism, Pickard wanted to make sure that they would be prepared not only with a broad scope of history and cultural studies, but also learning about different writing styles.

Pickard is now a third-year student doing a combined major in Cultural Studies and English, and says they are able to engage in these classes in a way that allows them to apply what she’s learning to her daily life, and toward her future career in journalism. Engaging and analyzing different forms of media and decolonization practices are key when thinking about journalism.

“Thinking about how we situate ourselves as someone to tell a story or give someone a platform, you have to be aware of who the audience is, who are you speaking to or represent.”

That has been one of the biggest learning curves in the program for Pickard. “Thinking about myself as a white settler, one of the responsibilities I have with my privileges is to try and uphold and amplify voices that are not always given spaces to speak and be heard.”

Cultural Studies allows for more critical thought and engagement, without expectations that there is one answer, you can be critical without having to be right or wrong. It allows you to take all of the things you learned over time and apply them to everyday topics or conversations, she explains.

Many of the projects they have done in cultural studies courses involve taking every-day situations, relationships, interactions, and bits of media and critically examining how it can (re)produce and be embedded with colonial discourse that causes harm and violence.

“I found taking courses in cultural studies, I can apply so many things I learn to my everyday life, which is something I really value. I would rather see things through a critical lens than to take things at face value or take things for granted.”

Pickard is currently working to build the Cultural Studies Course Union with fellow students.

“One of our goals is to engage more students to let them know what Cultural studies is about, not only as a major, but even just to take courses as they can help broaden students’ learning experiences and points of view.”

Students can connect with the course union via email at culturalstudiescu@gmail.com and follow their Instagram @ubco_culturalstudies.

Sara McDonald at the Ponderosa Spinners and Weavers show, November 2019

By Carolyn MacHardy, Professor Emerita (Art History), UBC Okanagan

Sara McDonald, artist and passionate advocate for social justice, died on February 1, 2022.  Sara had a long association with UBC Okanagan, and especially the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, where she completed her BFA in 2000, majoring in printmaking, painting, drawing and mixed-media.  In 2011 she completed her Master of Arts (Interdisciplinary) with a thesis entitled Adults with intellectual disabilities and the visual arts: “It’s Not Art Therapy!”. Her two UBC degrees reflect and knit together two of the driving forces of her life: advocacy for contemporary art and artists, and advocacy for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, a group which has long been marginalized in societies around the world.

Sara grew up in Maple Ridge but moved to the Okanagan thirty years ago and raised her four children, Nathan, Jordan, Rachel and Elisabeth Lige. In 2003, realising that her son Jordan, a talented artist who has a learning disability, would no longer have access to the type of art education he had in  high school, and that there was nothing available in the community, Sara formed Cool Arts, the first supported studio in the B.C. Interior. Over the past nearly two decades it has offered classes to many artists with intellectual disabilities, using professional artists in a professional studio setting. As Sara constantly reminded people, Cool Arts firmly rejects the medical/therapeutic model that suggests people be cured or treated for what are now called neurodiversabilities; rather, each artist is encouraged to develop their own body of work, much as they do in an academic studio setting. Cool Arts burst onto the Kelowna art scene in late 2009 with the exhibition We Are Artists at the Kelowna Art Gallery and since then they have exhibited widely.

Sara was an artist, a gardener, a reader, a maker of beautiful things large and small. She offered sage advice and unflinching honesty, often at the same time. And she made things happen. She fearlessly took on politicians at all levels of government, bluntly pointing out flaws in their policies and then suggesting how those flaws could be remedied. ALS presented her with enormous challenges when she was diagnosed a little over two years ago and she tackled them with her usual candour and energy:  she advocated for increased funding for ALS research in B.C.; she charted her experiences in a blog that offered her many friends a way of emotionally accompanying her through the stages of a relentless disease that stole so much from her; and when it was clear that end of life decisions had to be made, she lobbied the then-Federal Health Minister, Patty Hajdu, to grant her an exemption to use Psilocybin, illegal in Canada since 1974, for therapeutic purposes. She was the first ALS patient in Canada to be granted an exemption, and with her typical sense of mischief, she sent emails headed “I’m going on a trip!”. They were followed by a serious, informative op-ed in the Vancouver Sun on August 31, 2021.

On Munson Pond February 1, 2022

A heron flew by

As the sun crept over the frozen surface

And a merl of red-winged blackbirds raised their voices in song

What: UBC Anti-Racist Reading Book Club and Reading Series
Who: UBCO’s Kevin Chong with guest author Katherena Vermette
When: Book club meeting March 9, 7:00 pm;  Public Reading with Katherena Vermette March 23, 7:00 pm.
Where: Live via Zoom

This book club and online reading series, organized by creative writing professor Kevin Chong, features high-profile writers of colour who have written recently about racism in society, and also in writing and publishing.

The second book that will be discussed is Katherena Vermette’s book The Strangers. Kevin Chong will lead the book club meeting on March 9 in advance of a public event with Katherena Vermette scheduled for March 23. Vermette is a celebrated author of poetry, novels, children’s fiction and film.

People must sign up be a part of the book club, limited to 25 members, and the first 20 people to sign up will get free copies of the books for the club. Please note that all 25 spaces in the book club have been taken, feel free to read the book on your own and join us for the public event on March 23rd.

Find out more about the author, and register for the pubic event on March 23rd below.

Register Now

This event is presented with support from UBC’s Anti-Racism Initiatives Fund.

Alongside the Dark event at the Woodhaven Eco Culture Centre

The FEELed Lab is a feminist environmental humanities field research lab with the goal of creating a hub for researchers, students and community members who share common interests in environment and sustainability issues, specifically from feminist, queer, anti-colonial and disability justice perspectives.

“We are interested in sharing ideas related to environment humanities with people who may not always feel part of ‘environmentalism’s’ target audience,” says Astrida Neimanis, director of the FEELed Lab. “We want to make sure that we include diverse voices in the field of environmental humanities which has emerged over the last two decades with a focus on environmentalism’s stereotypical subject – i.e. a white, male, abled, Western, and so on.”

Participants reading at the Alongside the Dark event

To date, the FEELed Lab has organized and hosted a series of events, such as the Littoral Listening sessions and Fringe Natures outdoor gatherings. Neimanis sees herself as a facilitator, creating both physical and virtual community space to gather people together so they can then pursue their own interests related to the field of feminist environmental humanities. She is also a Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan, and an Associate Professor cross-appointed in FCCS in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, and in FASS in the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies.

“We are very much interested in grounding this research in Kelowna, in the Okanagan watershed,” Neimanis explains. “We recognize we are on unceded Syilx lands, and we want to be accountable to that. We are interested in what situated research looks like, and building relationships with the human and more-than-human communities that we live with.”

‘The FEELed Lab is where the FEELed Lab does’

As a Canada Research Chair, Neimanis will work to build a research community in Canada related to feminist environmental humanities.

“The FEELed Lab is a strong hub for research here in our local area, but can also serve as a scaffold to maintain international collaborations,” says Neimanis.

She notes that her research already involves international collaborations, so keeping those connections through inviting researchers here whether in person or virtually, organizing exchanges, and sharing info through her networks will be a benefit for the lab community. It can serve as a resource for both local researchers, and those who are not from this area.

Madeline Donald and Dani Pierson work alongside Dr. Neimanis, forming the FEELed Lab team.

Dani Pierson, an undergraduate student majoring in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and minoring in Cultural Studies, is the lab administrator. Her previous education in arts and entertainment management made her the perfect candidate for this position, doing the behind the scenes work with administrative tasks, web site and social media, the creation of the lab newsletter and blog content management.

“I found out about this project and this position for the lab while in Dr. Neimanis’ Gender and Women Studies course last term,” Dani explains. “I was intrigued by Dr. Neimanis’ approach to dealing with environmental humanities issues, which is not based within a ‘doom and gloom’ lens.”

The FEELed Lab was presented as a very curious and welcoming place, which Pierson says was very refreshing as a student, and a young Metis-Cree-Dane-zaa woman who is trying to feel hopeful about our ability to repair relations with our world.

Madeline Donald is a FEELed Lab Research Associate, working to support the events and projects. As a PhD student, Donald was actively seeking out people to collaborate with when Dr. Neimanis arrived at UBCO in the winter of 2021, and was pleased to discover mutual interests with Astrida. Donald is in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program in the Sustainability theme. Her research is grounded in relational research methodologies, saturated by the riparian habitats of the Okanagan watershed, and rooted in the same values that uphold the FEEled Lab

“There is a deep curiosity and respect for the place in which we do our research. We work to understand our own deferring obligations and relationships to those places as settlers, indigenous researchers, and people of different genders and cultural backgrounds,” Donald says.

Events are a big part of what the FEELed Lab has been offering over the last number of months. The Littoral Listening sessions are held once a month in a virtual environment and are organized like a reading group, but the reading happens with everyone present.

“This is a chance to practice listening, attunement, and sharing ideas,” Donald explains. “We do short readings in these small groups so everyone has a chance to listen and share ideas.”

Neimanis adds that for each session, readings are chosen around a theme that is relevant to our work. The first session last fall was on the theme “in case you want to save the planet” (named for a poem that they recited together on the walk). This month the theme was “We”, and March will feature readings on sex ecologies.

The Fringe Natures events are also planned once a month – these are gentle, Covid-safe outdoor events, where participants can come together in person with various accessibility options.

Fringe Natures walk along the Rail Trail, November 2021

“These events are a place to meet others who may have similar interests in building a research community, but they also highlight feminist, anti-colonial, queer and disability related issues around environmental sustainability,” Neimanis explains.

Several of the events have been at the Woodhaven Eco Culture Centre. There are a number of eco-poetry and other events hosted by FCCS that have happened there over the years, and the FEELed Lab is working to make Woodhaven a more lively and accessible space.

Future plans for the lab include creating a bigger presence on the blog for undergraduate student research, co-hosting a symposium this spring called Fire and Water that will include arts-based presentations, workshops and discussions around issues of fire and water in the Okanagan, and creating education-based workshops preparing students to do research in and with place. The lab is committed to doing all of this work, recognizing importance of working with the Syilx Okanagan people and organizations.

For more information and to get involved in the FEELed lab, visit thefeeledlab.ca.

Friday Funday walk through the Woodhaven Regional Park, October 2021

The FCCS Brown Bag Research Series, supported by the Associate Dean of Research, is a chance to hear from our faculty and graduate students to learn what’s happening in each department. While the emphasis is on new faculty in the first instance, we’re looking forward to hearing presentations on research, scholarship and creative output from any and all of our colleagues in the coming months.

All speaking events will be held on Fridays from 12:00 to 1:00 pm and will be hybrid – CCS 142 for in-person attendance, Zoom for virtual attendance. Registration is required for both, we will provide free lunch to all those who wish to attend in person (vegetarian sandwiches and coffee/tea).

Reserve your spot whether to attend virtual or in-person, and have your lunch order confirmed, please register at the link provided below. Please note, the deadline to register if you want lunch included is Tuesday noon prior to the talk. 

List of speakers

Friday, January 21, 2022

Kaytlyn Barkved, MA student in the Digital Arts and Humanities theme, IGS
Preparing for the Oral Defense: Neuroqueer Imaging
In this graduate research symposium, Kaytlyn will present an abridged version of the defense of her thesis “Neuroqueer Imaging: An Autistic Autoethnography.”  Having just successfully defended in December 2021, she will speak about her own defense experiences, offer tips and advice, and field questions for those who are preparing for their own oral defense.

Zachary Dewitt, MA in English student
Ghosts and Haunting Metaphors: a critical approach to humanities research
Metaphors of ghosts and haunting appear frequently in humanities research to describe the interrelation of the past, present and future. What exactly do these metaphors imply, what theoretical approach do they draw from? In this short presentation, I hope to explore some of the theories that these haunted metaphors draw on, while also briefly drawing on the history of ghostly language in Western philosophy. Ultimately, I will look to literature — as many theorists do — to understand the implications of such theories, and to briefly communicate the critical value of these theories.

This event will be held in a virtual environment via zoom. Registration is required.

Friday, January 28, 2022

Dr. Greg Garrard, Professor
Raise a Glass to the Burrowing Owl: Endangered Species and Cultural Nationalism in the South Okanagan, BC, Canada 
The proposal to found a National Park in the South Okanagan region of British Columbia dates back to 1970 and the government of Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father. It still hasn’t been fulfilled, despite the fact that a high proportion of the species at risk in Canada are found there. The paper traces the history of the proposal, and opposition to it, in terms of the entanglement of biology and nation, nature and culture, and the curious invisibility of the US/Canada border that bisects the region.

Dr. Astrida Neimanis, Associate Professor
What (and why) is feminist environmental humanities?
I will take this opportunity to describe a research field whose title I (along with various collaborators) mostly just made up. Why did we feel the need to specify this moniker, and what does it accomplish? What does this name try to gather up, and what remains unarticulated? From here I will segue into an introduction to three FEH field-building projects I have initiated– COMPOSTING feminism and the environmental humanities (started in Sydney in 2015 with Jennifer Mae Hamilton), Hacking the Anthropocene (2016-2019) and the fledgling FEELed Lab, right  here at UBCO. This means I will also have to talk about collaboration as a feminist, anticolonial, queer and crip research method, and why it is so necessary, so joyful, and so hard.

This event will be held in a virtual environment via zoom. Registration is required.

Friday, February 4, 2022

Sepideh Saffari, PhD student in the Digital Arts and Humanities theme, IGS
Using Digital Media to Interrogate UNESCO’s Approach to Iranian Architectural Heritage and the Cultural Identity
I am investigating the role of UNESCO in the construction of Iranian national identity through the representation of architectural heritage. While UNESCO believes that peace is based on dialogue and mutual understanding among nations, it does not sufficiently promote the cross-cultural influences that nations have on each other, particularly in its representations of visual culture. Hence, I argue how UNESCO’s approach obscures the transnational nature of Iranian architectural heritage.

Shimshon Obadia, MFA Interdisciplinary Studies Student
Trans Joy vs. the Trauma Plot
In this presentation, Shimshon Obadia (pronouns: they/them) will be briefly discussing the use of positive narrative representations of trans people–specifically, ones that highlight the intersectional complexities of their identities–in their research project, Queer Sounds in the Substructure. This cursory talk will focus on questioning how to balance authentic representations of people like Obadia who are queer, neurodiverse and people of colour, and often subject to painful personal histories of discrimination; without leaning into the territory of so called “trauma plots.” This term, which New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal recently created a lot of buzz around in the January 3rd & 10th, 2022 issue of the magazine, had Obadia wonder about the role they believe trauma can sometimes play in portraying joyful representations of marginalized people, in stories such as those their research creation is generating. Presenting their exploration and introspection on this ongoing topical debate, Obadia endeavours to ask themselves and their audience what trans joy looks like to them.

We will provide free lunch to all those who wish to attend in person in CCS 142 (vegetarian sandwiches and coffee/tea).

Reserve your spot whether to attend virtual or in-person, and have your lunch order confirmed, please register at the link provided below. Please note, the deadline to register if you want lunch included is Tuesday, February 1, 12:00 noon.

Friday February 11, 2022

Francisco Peña, Associate Professor, World Literatures
The Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography: Critical Edition and development of the first English translation of the General e Grand Estoria
In today’s pervasive climate of cultural and religious intolerance, this study and translation of Volume I of the General e grand historia offers timely insight into a work of storytelling that encouraged collaboration by writers and translators from diverse cultures, ethnicities, and religions, at a time and place when such intermingling was prohibited by law.

Anderson Araujo, Associate Professor, Languages and World Literatures
Fascist Modernism in Spain and Italy in the Years Between the World Wars
Of the three most prominent manifestations of European fascism in the early decades of the twentieth century, Francisco Franco’s in Spain remains the most galling. For one thing, it triumphed even as Mussolini was hunted down and killed near the Swiss border and Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Indeed, Franco did much more than just survive. His version of fascism held sway for nearly four decades. While Franco’s iron-fisted state apparatus relied heavily on surveillance, censorship, and the ruthless suppression of dissent, it also enlisted a sizable apparatchik of propagandists, intellectuals, artists, and writers. Among these was one of Spain’s foremost avant-gardists, Ernesto Giménez Caballero. His fascination with Franco predates the American poet Ezra Pound’s conversion to Italian Fascism and mussolinismo—the cult of Mussolini—in the early 1930s. Yet the shared intensity of their devotion to the strongmen and obsession with the aesthetics of power makes for one of the most intriguing and little-known parallels in the history of literary modernism.

Friday, February 18

Xiaoxuan/Sherry Huang, MFA Creative Writing
I am Yours, Votive Communication in All the Time
“Every letter is a loveletter,” writes Chris Kraus in I Love Dick, & it is true – from the actual epistle right down to the initial with which I sign.
One aspect of my thesis, All the Time: Poems / Letters / Effulgences, is concerned with explicitly votive acts of communication in both form & content. (Votive, a word lit up, means “expressing a desire.”) Following Derrida’s notion of différance, writing is a simultaneous act of discernment & deferral. So why write, then, if language never reaches its destination? Through thinking-feeling, All the Time wagers that the expression of desire is expression’s limit. I will share how & why I use poetry & autotheory to co-write this creative work, & speak to lyric strategies that help the text evade singular or linear constructions of narrative. I will also read select excerpts from the thesis.

– x

Stephenie Hendricks, PhD student in the Sustainability theme, IGS
Unintended Consequences:” An Open Education Resources Module series on Environmental Health and Environmental Justice
How can we empower students to become “global citizens”? How do we mobilize knowledge about our environment and its implications for health and justice? The answers to these questions can be found through compelling narratives from those working on the front lines of the intersections of environment, health, and justice. These stories are from people who are stepping forward into the battle for healthy and just environments; they come from many different disciplines, cultures, genders, educational experiences and geographic areas. The body of work I aim to do for my doctoral research provides an Open Education Resources (OER) curriculum that shares stories from environmental health and environmental justice stewards for post-secondary curriculum. This presentation includes a short demo podcast.

Friday, March 4, 2022

Michael Treschow, Associate Professor, English and Cultural Studies
The Exeter Book’s Fish in the River Riddle as a Metaphor for the Spiritual Life
The Exeter Book’s Riddle 84 derives from a simple and well-known Latin riddle with a ready-to-hand solution: a fish in a river. The Old English version, however, adds some complexity and moves this riddle’s focus from the physical world to the spiritual. Most strikingly, the riddle is told in the voice of the fish, who brings into play several lively details that do not feature in the older versions, along with a concluding note on the weighty theme of death. This reference to death functions initially on a literal level. The fish’s awareness of its mortality resonates with the recurrent theme of death running through the Exeter Book and invites reflection on creaturely vulnerability and transience. But this imagery’s import moves beyond the literal to function metaphorically. It evokes a comment attributed to St. Anthony in his Vita, where he refers to monks as fish, who die if they linger on the dry land of worldly conversation. On that understanding, the details that the fish relates about its life in the river come to elaborate on St. Anthony’s metaphor. The riddle serves as a reminder to all those who engage in the spiritual life of contemplation and prayer. It does so not in isolation but in interaction with other texts in the Exeter Book’s collection, with its meditative flow.

Ana Rewakowicz, Sessional Instructor, Visual Art
Foggy Pursuit of Ethical Response-Ability: Art and Science of Collecting Water from Fog
The presented Mist Collector art and science project, conducted collaboratively with scientists at École Polytechnique in Paris, has addressed water scarcity by investigating an alternative means of collecting water from fog. Through art and science collaboration, this art-based research proposed a non-standard method of harvesting fog water with a net of parallel vertical fibres that contributed to scientific innovation, while at the same time invited science to partake in artistic creation. The produced artworks have brought forward a phenomenological engagement with water by inviting the public to experience water at the scale of a single droplet and imaginatively speaking, aboard Spaceship Earth traveling through fog. Using imagination and poetics, this project calls for the necessity to begin creating a collective narrative of an ever deteriorating ecosophic Future/Present/Past that may still be envisioned and conceived together.

Friday, March 11, 2022

Natasha Harvey, MFA Visual Arts student
Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics and Love
This presentation will share my artistic research-creation practice, which seeks to communicate the effects of human interference on the environment while evoking the participatory spirit of love and beauty in the non-human world. I spend time deepening my connection with the land in the Syilx peoples’ unceded territories, walking and connecting through place-based research, collage landscape painting, and linocut prints. Over time, during these walks, I have found the expansion of dwellings, homes pushing up the mountainsides around and over wetlands, impacting wildlife habitat and ecology.  Construction cuts into the land. Culture and economy reshape the horizon, thus rendering ‘space’ as politically complex. Therefore, achieving the colonial sublime is not a simple image of beauty without erasure. I question whether my depictions of the landscape can illustrate this complexity and thus encourage a conversation about our expanding contribution to the detriment of the land.

Madeline Donald, PhD student in the Sustainability theme, IGS
Corrugating attentiveness: A presearch methodology
The education of attention and perception takes time and repetition. Corrugation, as defined here, is a dance between attention, memory, and the passage of time: experience folds into ideas folding into experience. I will speak to my experience of corrugating relations in some of the riparian habitats of the Okanagan and Similkameen watershed, where for one year I intentionally cultivated an attentional practice. It is my belief that in order to conduct research in a given habitat/community/context a researcher has the obligation to come into relation with and in the bounds of that research space. This presentation is a representation of how I tried to do that.

Friday, March 18, 2022

Anita Chaudhuri, Assistant Professor of Teaching, English and Cultural Studies
Supporting Respectful Understanding of Cultures
Culturally sustaining pedagogy offers a critical lens and a theoretical framework to understand the educational experiences we bring to our classrooms. In this presentation, I share some questions on access and equity that face our students and what researchers offer as ways to support “culture, language and learning potential.” (Paris & Alim, 2017, p. 3) Finally, from an educational leadership point of view, I offer the example of a student-led project that intends to create pathways for dialogue, argument and response.

Shawn Serfas, Associate Professor, Visual Arts
This Kind of Wilderness
The rhetorical battle between order and chaos, post-apocalyptic landscapes of refuse and discard will be discussed in light of recent artists’ projects and exhibitions on the theme of environmental aesthetics and the cultural role that painting plays in defining our perceptions of nature.

Meilan Ehlert, Sessional Lecturer, Languages and World literatures
Making better transition ‘Multi’ as a strategic tool: The case of ethnic Korean plurilingual youths from Northeast China
Plurilingualism can be understood as the study of individual repertoire and agency in several languages in different contexts, in which an individual is the locus of, and actor in, the context. The current study is based on the conceptual framework of plurilingualism and plurilingual competence. A focus is on to identify how a strategic pedagogical implementation of the multi (i.e., use of multilingual, multicultural and multimodal resources) can better support and empower plurilingual speakers and learners in today’s diverse classrooms. This presentation will begin with a brief review of how the increased mobility in China today has been motivating and challenging educators at an ethnic Korean minority school (K-MNS) in Northeast China, in order to support new generations of (Japanese or English as) foreign language learners. Then, move on to mainly looking at some key examples of how a group of senior level plurilingual learners at the K-MNS engage in imaginative uses of their linguistic resources, constantly exploring and developing various strategies of managing the multi in their dynamic repertoires, as they were making transition from high school to university.

Friday, March 25, 2022

Scott Moore, MFA Visual Arts
‘I’m not sure how this got here, but boy are they tasty oranges’: A subtle being concentrated approach to this place.
With social and environmental challenges facing the earth, can there be an approach to show how to re-calibrate our relationships to things and places? In my artistic research, I have been constructing methods of making to cultivate small spaces and unfamiliar gaps through digital sculpture that could allow for re-introductions to our existing realities. Oranges, squash, apples, computer cables, hard drives, books, vases, flowers, etc. highlight the aggregate elements that compose our families. Taking notice of a kabocha squash resting on a cluttered dining room table becomes subscendent sites of connection. Working in ways to reveal the existing unseen/seen objects leads to potential moments of intimacy and relationships.

Michaela Bridgemohan, MFA Visual Arts
Oleaginous duppy: alternate paths of connection through immaterial to material making
The common threads woven throughout my artistic practice originate from my deep interest in building familiarity through relational connections. Thinking about lasting impressions, from brief encounter(s) to reappearing figure(s), raises questions: Do these relational bonds foster resilience to cultural identity within art-making? Through an auto-ethnographic focus, my artistic research shares an intimate relationship with Jamaican folk figure, duppy—whose bodily essence mimics the very fabric of Afro-Caribbean diasporic experience. Not as a source of capital possession, abuse, or the forbidden, but as a multi-dimensional and deeply complex geographic figure of ontological importance, knowledge, memory, and feeling through transformation. I will share relational practices such as cooking, grooming, and storytelling as methods of self-sustenance and creative power. I would say that I understand the order of the world when I observe my father prep curry goat by washing the meat. vinegar–soak–drain. Dignity and dedicated time in front of the pot is analogous to the perseverance of Black survival.

Ahlam Bavi, PhD student in the Digital Arts and Humanities theme, IGS
Beyond Sight (Improving the Museum Experience for Low-vision Visitors)
Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) institutions have come a long way in accommodating differently-abled guests and facilitating their experience of art. A common rule when visiting a gallery or museum, ‘no touching’, is supposed to teach us to respect and appreciate art from a distance. While it prevents any damage or breakages, this rule teaches us to enjoy art with our eyes, not our hands. The question, then, is how blind and partially sighted could benefit from (GLAM) institutions? how might we make objects accessible in (GLAM) institutions for blind and partially sighted visitors? Increasingly, digitalization offers visitors new, barrier-free opportunities for interaction with cultural heritage in GLAM. Today, 3D  technologies worldwide are actively exploring strategies for the blind and partially sighted to experience art. My study examines 3D models as tactile, and gamified remediations and develops strategies and inclusive design principles for use of blind and partially sighted where artworks and artifacts cannot be touched.

Friday, April 1, 2022

Sakiru Adebayo, Assistant Professor, English and Cultural Studies
Complex Implication: Privilege, Positionality and Racialized Immigration in Canada
This paper examines what it means for Black African immigrant subjects to be discriminated against — yet implicated — in Canada’s settler-colonial project. It investigates the intricacies of what Mahmood Mamdani (2020) describes as being “neither native nor settler”. It studies the ‘complex implication’ (Rothberg, 2019) of racialized immigrant subjects in Canada’s original sin. It asks: what does it mean to be a privileged stranger? When does the immigrant dream of a ‘better life’ become entangled in the crime of Indigenous dispossession? And when does the implicated immigrant subject become an object of exploitation in the perpetuation of the settler colonial ambition? What does it mean to be an empowered yet disposable postcolonial subject? This paper employs an autoethnographic method of writing and analysis; it uses personal diary, observations, meditations and conversations with others to theorize questions of allegiance and alliance. It employs an ethnography of the everyday (JL Caughey, 1982) to explore the thin line between witnessing and spectatorship in the ongoing settler-colonial violence in Canada. It is also an attempt at auto-theorizing privilege, its fluidity, and what Blackness has got to do with it. It addresses the question of the global African elite and its accompliceship with the capitalist exploitation of people of African descent. Above all, this paper seeks to reinforce the necessity –while being cognizant of the precarity – of solidarity in the experience of racialization and classed immigration in Canada. It seeks to establish the need for– while recognizing the incalculability of – responsibility in the collective quest for justice and repair in Canada. It concludes that the work of implication is a work of uncomfortable self-reflexivity; it involves having a demanding relationship with history.

Marie Loughlin, Associate Professor, English and Cultural Studies
Who Do You Think You Are? Genealogy’s Early Modern and Contemporary Connections
While family genealogy continues to have the reputation of being solely the tool of cultural elites and the clearest testimony to a debilitating human investment in social inequality, in early modern England familial genealogy was not just about rank and social status. It was, in fact, a productively flexible discourse; its signs, after all, were increasingly available not just for the use of traditional elites, but also for the use of marginalized individuals and communities, from women and tradesmen to merchants and Roman Catholics. From the mid-sixteenth century, there were, moreover, enormous changes in what people imagined genealogy meant for them as individuals and as members of families and communities; individuals became increasingly interested in the lives and deeds of specific ancestors as models for self-fashioning and touchstones for self-knowing. At the beginning of the 21^st century, family genealogical research and publication exists in a similar moment of tension, personally and numinously significant for millions of people, but subject to increasing and popular excoriation as anti-scientific, anti-democratic, and anti-Enlightenment.

Friday, April 8, 2022

Yasaman Lotfizadeh, MA student in the Digital Arts and Humanities theme, IGS
Representing Nature in an Illustrated Khamseh of Nezami Manuscript
Using a selected Persian Safavid Khamseh of Nezami manuscript from the mid-sixteenth century, British Library Or. 2265, this study examines how painters portrayed the natural world by comparing the poet’s verbal imagery in the text with the visual choices of the painters. Using digital humanities tools and methods and close-looking, I investigate the typology and range of nature representations in text and image to better understand Safavid artists’ perceptions of the natural world.

Brianne Christensen, MA in English student
Hospitable Narratives: The Synergies of Hospitality Studies, Migration Ethics, and New Sincerity Literature
Socio-political tensions resulting from concurrent increases in globalization and hyper-nationalism, and the assurance that climate change will expedite the migration of people over the coming decades, identify our present moment of history as the unstable precipice of multiple crises. My Master’s thesis is a critical effort to understand the implications of hospitality in a time of multiple crises related to border crossings, security, and migration ethics. I suggest that British writer Ali Smith’s recent four-volume Seasonal Quartet marks a turn to an ethical, socially accountable fiction that responds to this reality through her use of sincere, hospitable narrative techniques. I am most interested in the quartet’s numerous representations of the figure of the stranger. When completed, my work will locate Smith’s quartet in the growing corpus of New Sincerity literature. My arguments and close readings are currently under construction; therefore, this presentation will navigate the synergies between hospitality studies, migration ethics, and New Sincerity literature. I will demonstrate their collective potential to promote an affective recognition of the stranger­­.

In the Creative Writing program’s capstone course, CRWR 470, in addition to work on a major project at the core of their writerly practice — a collection of poems or short stories, a play, a portion of a novel — professor Anne Fleming asks students to produce what she calls an Oddball Submission.

Here is the assignment:

As you might imagine, the latitude on the Oddball Submission is wide. It could be wildly experimental or just something you haven’t tried before — a graphic memoir, a collage, poems painted on thrift store paintings — anything you can think of (I just saw someone on twitter who posted a poem she wrote for dogs — a photo of a series of sticks. It could be something like that, but longer.) It could be a written object or sculptural piece of writing — a handmade book, an object with print or writing on it, a book turned into something else (cut into, twisted, posed, stacked). Ideally, it would include your own writing or at least comment on the writing if manipulating existing writing.

The results surprise and delight: poems rendered in yarn and children’s alphabet beads, a poem that is also a dance in a snowy back yard, a box of delicious and slightly macabre Victorian-era words to be assembled at random, a choose-your-own-path story-game, a story with many endings. Below are some of the student projects.

Natasha Elliott

Story with three endings: Where the World Began V1 | Where the World Began V2 | Where the World Began V3

Mackenzie Tennant

The Skeletal System of Seasonal Sadness

Mackenzie Tennant Choreographic Writing Map Poem :

Mackenzie Blackwood

Demonstrating her handmade word cards:

Elliott Bojin-Armstrong

Bead-based poems:

Jenna Tulak

Erasure poetry

Sarah Kloos

Poem rendered in yarn

Installation shot of Waterways at the Okanagan Heritage Museum

This post was written by Eun Jee, an Art History and Visual Culture major in FCCS. Eun Jee is currently working this fall as the Communications Assistant as part of the UBCO Co-op program. 

Waterways – Past, Present and Future is the materialization of a four-year collaborative project between faculty and students at UBC Okanagan, Elders and Knowledge Keepers of the Syilx Okanagan community, Kelowna Museums Society, Okanagan Basin Water Board and the Okanagan Collaborative Conservation Program. This exhibition intends to raise awareness of the “fragile relationship between people and water in the Okanagan Valley and catalyzing sustainable water practices among residents.”

Waterways – Past, Present and Future is comprised of two main spaces and three main components. The outer walls highlight the Indigenous Syilx teachings, wisdom related to human-water relations, and the value of water, while the inner walls are centered around sharing the stories of knowledge and importance of water and water ecosystems management and sustainability. The three main components involve a physical “playground” with interactive elements for children, a virtual interactive storybook about the Okanagan Valley, and a documentary about the restoration projects.  

What struck me the most was the usage of interactive media and the constitution of the exhibition. The cyclical presentation of the documentaries and storytelling creates an immersive feature that engulfs the viewers – and the combination of the auditory, visual and physical interactions furthers this sensation. In addition, the woodcut pieces that hold up the monitors depict aerial photos of the Okanagan Valley from 1948 onwards, which added to the changing environment. These woodcut pieces also have mobile cutouts of different species that were negatively affected and displaced due to the water practices and industrialization. It was interesting to see how the exhibition used these mobile woodcut pieces to further the narrative of the catalyzing effects of the water practices. These pieces enabled the audience to move these animals around the exhibition, displacing them and rearranging the initial presentation. It also furthered the child-like, storybook, playground aspect the exhibition was promoting.   

Another key feature of this exhibition was to raise awareness of the Indigenous led twenty-year salmon restauration project in the Okanagan Valley, and other ongoing environmental restoration projects. The purpose of sharing the water ecosystem management and sustainability was to raise awareness of the declining salmon population and how our actions of industrialization have caused a near extinction of a species native to our water.  

Panel depicting information from the Okanagan Nation Alliance

Furthermore, Waterways is a travelling exhibition that has efforts to travel around BC. Knowing how educative the exhibition is in nature, I find the travelling aspect (and potentially other provinces) to spread awareness and education about the indigenous led restauration projects and water ecosystem management to the rest of Canada. Knowing how educative the exhibition is in nature, I find the travelling aspect of this exhibition as one of its key features. While water ecosystem management, sockeye salmon restoration etc., are more focused on the Okanagan Valley, the overall message and teachings of the Syilx Indigenous community in their efforts to restore their traditional lands and water are stories to celebrate and spread more awareness of.  

After viewing Waterways, it made me reevaluate how we view industrialization and the change in our landscape. While the Okanagan’s water practices and industrialization has their benefits and plays a crucial role in the economy and production of goods and services, it’s also essential to recognize the damage and harm it did. Like a double-edged sword, without these water practices, the economy and standard of living would not be the best, however, because of these practices, local species are going extinct, and infrastructure issues such as floods exist.

The interviews and stories the Syilx Indigenous community shared, especially how they demonstrate their resilience in the face of the mistreatment of their lands and water and overall injustice have enlightened me with the various forms of expressing resilience through peaceful and beneficial actions and endeavors. 

Another key feature of the exhibition was its way of highlighting the collaboration between the Indigenous and Settler communities to come together to protect and restore the Okanagan waterways. The exhibition brings together two incompatible communities that are often in deplorable affairs and demonstrates how one can come together for a shared cause. It shares the message that regardless of our cultural background, history, and differences, all those can be tossed to the ground to campaign for our shared believes and objectives. 

Detail of salmon spawning video

About Eun Jee Lee

Born in South Korea and raised in the Philippines, Eun Jee Lee is the 2021 Fall Co-Op Communications Assistant for the Faculty of Creative Critical studies, directly working under Shauna Oddleifson. Majoring in Art History and Visual Culture, her passions lie in exploring how the arts affect society and culture and the various ways to celebrate the arts. As her first editorial, this article explores her understanding and takeaways from the featuring exhibition Waterways: Past, Present and Future. 

This videos talks about the Waterways – Past, Present and Future project and exhibition – the materialization of a four-year collaborative project between faculty and students at UBC Okanagan, Elders and Knowledge Keepers of the Syilx Okanagan community, Kelowna Museums Society, Okanagan Basin Water Board and the Okanagan Collaborative Conservation Program. The final project was exhibited at the Kelowna Museum from September 2021 to the end of January 2022.

This interdisciplinary symposium on Gender, Race and Medicine will take place at UBC Okanagan on December 3 and 4, 2021. Current and former students of the course “Gender, Race and Medicine: The Construction of the Hysteric” will participate in a series of panels that consider the entanglement of medicine, science, culture, and power as well as the shifting definitions, diagnoses, treatments and representation of ‘hysteria’ over time.

Two keynote speakers, Dr. Maddalena Canna (Northwestern University, Department of Anthropology)  will reflect on her research and work and engage in a discussion with the audience and conference participants.

The conference is open to the public. All presentations will take place in ART219 and will also be accessible via Zoom.

Conference Schedule

Friday, December 3^rd | 11:30 am – 5:15 pm (ART219)

11:30 – Introductory Remarks

•  11:45- 1:00 – Panel 1: Gender and Hysteria in Literature (Chair: Cameron Crookston)
  • Kyla Morris, “Medical Mythologies and Hysterical Documents: Theorizing Hysterical Bodies as Space in Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love”
  • Emily McNutt, “Creation of Mass Hysteria within Lord of the Flies”
  • Joseph Veltri, “Hysteria in The Crucible and the U.S.A.”
• 1:00 – 2:00 Lunch
• 2:00 – 3:30 – Panel 2: Emotion, Excess, and Grief (Chair: David Jefferess)
  • Amal Alhomsi, “Crazy in Love: The Hysteria of Qais Ibn Al-mulawwah”
  • Karis Dimas-Lehndorf, “Wandavision, Midsommar, and The Babadook: An Exploration of Grief and the ‘Hysterical’ Woman”
  • Alison Kloosterman, “Devotional Hysteria: Mourning, Melancholia, and the Mystical”
• 3:30 – 3:45 Break
• 3:45 – 5 :15– Panel 3: Culture, Affect, Intersubjectivity (Chair: Melissa Jacques)
  • Jen Ducharme, “The Bakkhai: Cult, Theatre, Mass Hysteria”
  • Karleen Rutter, “The Affect of Emotions in Mass Hysteric Episodes: A Theoretical Analysis of The Falling and Post 9/11 America”
  • Carrie Terbasket, “The Privilege of Happiness: Exploring the Ideas of Sara Ahmed and Laura Briggs”

Saturday, December 4^th | 10 am – 2 pm (ART 219)

• 10:00 – 11:15 – Panel 4: Hysteria and Popular Culture (Chair: Kelly Panchyshyn)
  • Brian Kerr-Bassett, “Hystericizing Britney Spears”
  • Alex Labarta-Garcia, “Western influences of the “Hysteric” in the construction of “Hwabyung” in Tale of the Nine Tailed”
  • Mariza Micallef, “Dancing Mania: A Phenomenon that Transcends the Barrier of Time”
  • Melissa Plisic, “Hysteria Christianity Capitalism” (Zine)
• 11:15 – 11:30 Break
• 11:30 – 12:50 – Panel 5: Pathologization and Embodiment (Chair: Matt Rader)
  • Jessica Beaudin, “Maddening Pain: Endometriosis, Iatrogenesis and Hysterical Hauntings in Alice Seabright’s End-O” (Paper)
  • Sarah Becking, “Hysteria in a Contemporary Context: Emotionality Pathologized” (Video)
  • Tatyjania Khounviseth, “Lessons on the Female Body: The Hysterical Woman” (Medical Journal)
• 1:00 pm – Keynote Lecture (via Zoom)
  • Dr. Maddalena Canna, Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University

Register Now

This conference is organized by Dr. Maria Olive Alexopoulos, Lecturer in Cultural Studies, and supported by the Department of English and Cultural Studies.

The past year has been challenging for students at UBC Okanagan. In addition to the normal financial pressures of being a student, FCCS students have had to adjust to new ways of learning and a lack of employment opportunities.

In an effort to support students, Jordan Stouck, Associate Dean, Undergraduate Studies in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, has kindly donated her $3,000 Provost’s Award in Teaching Excellence & Innovation prize to create one-time awards for students in the faculty.

Dr. Stouck came up with this initiative after teaching throughout 2020-21 and seeing the challenging circumstances students were in and how they persevered through it all.

“The pandemic impacted and continues to impact students’ ability to work and study, and I think, as a faculty, FCCS really just wanted to support students through this difficult time.”

She invited other UBCO faculty and staff to join her in supporting our students by creating a crowdfundraising campaign through the Development and Alumni Engagement office with the goal of raising $6000 to offer three different awards, one in each of the departments.

“I was so pleased to see that we exceeded our goal and raised a total of $7200. We are now able to offer awards that can make a real difference to our students,” says Dr. Stouck.

With this funding, three one-time awards of $2400 each have been set up that will be awarded by each of our departments to students who are majoring in an FCCS program. These awards are available to domestic and international undergraduate students who are enrolled in the BFA, BMS, or the BA with a major, or combined major, in English, Cultural Studies, Art History and Visual Culture, French, Creative Writing, or Languages.

“We want to ensure that all of our students have the necessary supports they need to complete their studies here at UBC Okanagan, and I am so proud of our community for coming together to help students during these challenging times,” says Bryce Traister, Dean of the Faculty.

Students must apply to be considered for the award, and decisions will be made by each department. More information on these awards and the application can be found on the link below.

Learn More

On November 17th, Ian Williams read from his new book, Disorientation, and discussed the ways writing and race intersect. Disorientation examines the role that racism plays in the daily life of ordinary people.

Ian Williams is a distinguished author of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and was hosted by UBCO’s Anti-Racist Reading Book Club and Kevin Chong, assistant professor of creative writing. Earlier this month, members of the club read Williams’ latest work Disorientation and met to discuss the book prior to this public event.

View the recording of the talk in the link below.

Ian Williams Public Talk

This event was organized by Kevin Chong, funded by the UBC Anti-Racism Initiatives Fund and supported by the Department of Creative Studies department.