Michael V. Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, working as a writer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing, teaching courses in writing non-fiction, spoken word, editing and publishing, and screenwriting.

We talked to Michael to find out a bit more about him and his teaching practices.

What are you passionate about?

I’m passionate about social justice, and creative expression, and all things queer. Some of that means paying attention to how I program and curate and assign readings, so that a wide range of voices and experiences are represented. As a professor, my job allows me to facilitate art-making for students from all manner of backgrounds and experiences. I try to help people find what they really care about, and to put language to that passion. Being a prof also means I get to help shape how people navigate how they make, for whom, from what, where, and maybe even why. I’m always asking students what are the silences in their lives, meaning what stories in their experiences and cultures and families haven’t been told, where have you felt silenced, what needs sharing, how can you be the best person to share what wants to be told? Living life as an artist and being paid to do that, as well as helping others find insight and purpose in a maker’s life, well, that’s pretty much the best job around, if you ask me.

How did you know you wanted to be a professor?

I’d always wanted to teach, ever since high school. I love people. But the real impetus came around 2006. I was an artist with an active career making things, but I needed a part-time day job to make ends meet, which meant that I was working all the time. Like, daytime I was writing and then working, and evenings and weekends I was organizing events or doing more writing. So I was exhausted. And broke. I needed a better return on my time. I went looking for jobs where I could be paid to be an artist and a community organizer. Over the years, I had taught workshops or Continuing Education courses, so teaching uni was a natural fit.

What most excites you and challenges you about your field of work?

That’s a clean split down the middle. I’m most excited by my students, who are amazing. I love them. I cry at every convocation because I’m going to miss those beautiful people, and I’m so happy for them. But I’m also excited by the power of story, for its ability to re-shape what we think we know, for its ability to bring us together, for the way art is a container for a communion between the maker and the audience, and among the audiences themselves. Stories have the ability to make us better people. History teaches us that stories have also made us inhuman. There is nothing with greater potential for power than a story. That’s a huge delight, and a sobering responsibility.

What kind of learning experiences do you offer your students?

I lead very practice-based classes, so students make a lot of things manifest in the world, off the computer screen or page. We do site visits to make audio installations, students get work displayed in the Kelowna Art Gallery or Alternator Gallery, or we create videos or podcasts or Instagram projects that require site research and material collection. I also program some students in my annual cabaret, Pony, every spring. Being in the world, finding audiences, building your creative community in your own backyard and in your city is vital to art-making. I want students to realize how accessible art-making is, how stories are right here, at our fingertips, wherever we are. And I want them to see their work out there in the world, so it’s not just something they do privately, in secret. We make work, we share work, and so we love and are loved better for it.

Installation shot of Away We Go by Lindsay Kirker

What: MFA Thesis Exhibition, Away We Go
Who: Lindsay Kirker
When: September 8 to 24, 2020; 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday
Where: FINA Gallery, CCS Building, UBC’s Okanagan Campus, Kelowna

MFA student Lindsay Kirker’s thesis exhibition is on now in the FINA Gallery at UBC Okanagan in the CCS building.

Lindsay says about her work:

I paint images of construction with Nature as a way to reinterpret the world around me. This method of painting within my current body of work developed significantly after experiencing loss. I intuitively began taking pictures of construction sites, as a need for stability, manifested itself through an attraction to structure. Life felt chaotic, but I found salvation in scaffolding, cranes, and concrete. Through my artistic practice, common themes emerged: the idea of home and a sense of place, but more so, preservation, fragility, demolition, and creation. There was an immediate agency to create, and my paintings became both a response and a way to make sense of the nonsensical.

Read more about Lindsay Kirker and view more images and learn more about her thesis exhibition on our FCCS Art Blog. More of Lindsay’s work can also be viewed on her web site, lkirker.com

Note: Visitors to the gallery must follow social distancing measures which include a maximum of 6 people in the gallery at one time. Please follow the signage and instructions when entering the CCS building.

Ariane Brun del Re (photo credit: Vincent Kember)

Ariane Brun del Re is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at l’Université de Montréal’s Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture québécoises, where she is co-supervised by Dr. Micheline Cambron (Université de Montréal, Département des littératures de langue française) and Dr. Francis Langevin (UBC Okanagan, Department of Languages and World Literatures).

Her research is titled “L’inscription de la francophonie canadienne dans la littérature québécoise récente (2005-2020)” (“The Place of Canadian Francophonie in Recent Québécois Literature (2005-2020)”).

Ariane shared with us some information about her research and affiliation with UBC Okanagan.

How is your postdoc connected to UBCO?

I was originally attracted by UBCO’s world literature and intercultural communication courses, as my own research looks at the contacts between different francophone communities and cultures. Given my project’s pan-Canadian perspective, involving UBCO and Dr. Langevin while conducting my research at the Université de Montréal and spending time in Ottawa allows me to be connected with a range of the diverse communities that my research focuses on as I develop my project. It also allows me to benefit from Dr. Langevin’s expertise on enunciation theories, narratology and la régionalité in recent Québécois literature.

On a more personal level, I got to spend a lot of time in Vancouver between 2012 and 2014. These trips gave me the opportunity to discover British Columbia’s vibrant francophone community. I am very much looking forward to learning more about this community, which is one of the fastest growing French-language communities outside of Québec.

Explain your research and how will you be able to conduct this research at UBCO?

I study how Canadian Francophonie is depicted in recent Québécois literature. The Estates General of French Canada, a series of conferences held at the end of the 1960s, marked a breaking point in the relationship between Québec and the Canadian Francophonie. Provincial or regional French identities emerged in other Canadian provinces and territories. French Canadian literature also dissolved into smaller provincial or regional literatures that became more or less independent from one another – the most autonomous, and also the most prominent, being Québec literature.

However, in the past 15 years, the number of Québécois novels incorporating elements of other parts of Canadian Francophonie (such as its spaces, local history, vernaculars or cultural references) has been increasing. This phenomenon, which Dr. Jean Morency refers to as “le retour du refoulé canadien-français” (“the return of the French-Canadian repressed”) hints at the beginning of a new relationship between Québec and Franco-Canadian communities.

What interests me the most about these novels is how they conceive their readership and the place they assign Franco-Canadian readers. This is important to better understand the current, and possibly even future, relations between Québec and the Canadian Francophonie in literature and beyond. These relations have been more widely studied in other disciplines but not as much from a literary perspective.

Unfortunately, because of COVID-19, I have had to adapt my research program. Dr. Langevin and I originally planned on organizing a workshop at UBC Okanagan, and it might have to migrate online. We might also wait until travel is possible again.

Why did you choose that topic, and what difference do you hope your research will make?

This project follows my doctoral thesis, where I studied the inclusion and exclusion of readers in Franco-Canadian literature. It showed that Franco-Canadian literature regularly reaches out to Québec readers. This new project does the opposite: I am trying to see if Québécois literature reaches out to Franco-Canadian readers in a similar manner.

By conducting this research, I also hope to contribute to the discussion on the audience of Québécois literature. There is an idea among some researchers that French Canadian Literature (from the 18th century to the 1960s) and Québécois literature (from the 1960s) caters mostly to a local audience. I wonder if this is still true of contemporary literature.

This project also provides the opportunity to study some of my favourite novels, such as Nikolksi (2005) by Nicolas Dickner, Le mur mitoyen (2013) by Catherine Leroux, La petite laine (2017) by Amélie Panneton, Il pleuvait des oiseaux (2011) by Jocelyne Saucier, and Les filles de l’Allemand (2016) by Annie-Claude Thériault. These Québécois novels are all set (at least in part) in other parts of Canada or depict Franco-Canadian characters.

About Ariane Brun del Re

Ariane Brun del Re is a Franco-Ontarienne from Ottawa. She specializes in Franco-Canadian literature (from outside Québec) and recent Québécois literature. She holds a bachelor’s degree in French Literature (2010) from the University of Ottawa, a master’s degree in French Language and Literature (2013) from McGill University and a PhD in French Literature (2019) from the University of Ottawa.

Brun del Re is the co-editor of the collection L’espace-temps dans les littératures périphériques du Canada (Éditions David, 2018). She also co-edited issue 117 of the scholarly journal Tangence on “les nouvelles solidarités en littérature franco-canadienne”, and in 2015, co-founded an online space dedicated to Franco-Canadian (mostly Acadian) art criticism, which she has been co-editing since.

When she isn’t conducting her research, Ariane can be found chasing her soon to be two-year-old who is currently passionate about anything red (especially firetrucks, shoes and crayons) and enjoys books as much as she does!

Understory by Jane Everett, installation shot

The next time you get a chance to walk through the ADM building on UBC Okanagan campus, remember to take a moment to look up, and take in the newly installed forest of charcoal trees floating from the ceiling, a work called Understory (2018–2019) by local artist Jane Everett. The six artworks displayed were generously donated by the artist herself to the Public Art Collection, the newest addition to an ever growing collection.

Jane Everett grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba and did her Fine Arts degree at Queen’s University, she currently divides her time between her home in Kelowna and her cottage on the north shore of Shuswap Lake. Jane’s artworks have been exhibited across the country, and are held in both private and public art collections. Understory is now set to be discovered and enjoyed for many years to come as part of our Public Art Collection’s campus wide displays.

Stacey Koosel – How did Understory start? What was the inspiration?
Jane Everett – When I am finished with a series and can’t settle on what to do next I return to drawing from life so this started with looking out the window of my Shuswap studio and working in charcoal. I had done a series of pastel drawings called Canopy that looked up at the tree tops, and this became a study of the next layer of the forest, the understory.

Stacey Koosel – Are the trees in Understory modelled after particular trees from the Okanagan?
Jane Everett – They are definitely particular trees, tree portraits In fact.

Stacey Koosel – Can you walk us through the technique of creating these pieces?
Jane Everett – I usually start with an underdrawing in red or ochre conte, shifting to black when I am satisfied with the composition. Because these are so large, I had to roll up the bottom of the drafting  film when I was working on my drawing board and then finish them on the floor. You can see the bottoms of the trees are less detailed. It started because of the physical process of doing a nine foot drawing in a small studio but I quickly realized that not anchoring them in the forest floor gave them a floating feeling that made me want to hang them from the ceiling. I use a spray bottle to apply watered down acrylic gel medium to the drawings which I let drip down and/or I slash at with an eraser and this is how I get the texture you see on the work. Some of them are sliced into six inch strips so they will move in the air currents.

Stacey Koosel – What future projects are you working on?
Jane Everett – I am currently working on some large oil paintings that are still landscape based but much more abstract than my previous work. I have new studio space that has allowed me to work this size. I’m also working on a collaboration with a textile artist, Lily Thorne, on an installation that involves a folding wooden boat, drawings of the shadows of cedar trees, and ‘sails’ dyed using old rusted objects and embellished with stitching. Stay tuned!

View the video below to hear Susan Belton chat with artist Jane Everett for more about the installation on campus

Greg Garrard is an English-sounding Canadian who lived in the Netherlands, Lebanon, England and Wales before coming to Kelowna in 2013. He is the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, and a Professor teaching courses in English and Sustainability.

Greg shared some insights on his teaching and research practices here at UBC Okanagan.

Tell us about your research interests.

In the broadest sense, I’m interested in cultures of nature: literary representations of wilderness, of animals, of wildfire, of climate change, and so on. But I also want to understand how those representations affect the things they represent. So, for example, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick embodies many of the ideas about whales and whaling that vindicated that industry at the time – that whale populations could sustain any amount of whaling, that whales didn’t feel pain. It also put some strange and discomforting ideas back into that cultural context – that the pursuit of whales could be seen as, itself, unhinged, and that there might be some unsuspected – at that time – kinship between humans and whales. Much later, in the 1960s and 70s, a huge cultural change in the West turned whaling from a major industry into a pariah profession, which in turn allowed some whale populations to rebound.

What kind of learning experiences do you offer your students?

Until COVID-19 came along, most of my teaching took place in classrooms. However, I’ve always been enthusiastic about outdoor education and place-based learning. When was a professor in the UK, I took students to the landscapes associated with Thomas Hardy, John Clare and the Bronte sisters. In Canada, I taught ‘In Pursuit of the Whale’, examining literature about cetaceans, at Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre on Vancouver Island, and I’ve also taught ‘Writing the Okanagan’ in Kelowna, a course that examines regional literature in relation to the Kelownafornia myth. I’ve found that there’s something uniquely inspiring about teaching students outside a familiar environment, especially when they’re reading books that are deeply invested in specific places.

You supervise in the MA in English program. What opportunities do you offer for graduate students?

‘Place’ doesn’t map onto ‘environment’, exactly – the latter typically implies a scientific bias in terms of what belongs and what matters, whereas the former is more of a hodge-podge of geography, cultural representation and subjective value – but they do overlap in important ways. ‘Writing the Okanagan’ is a place-based course that seeks to enable students to perceive connections between the bioregion they inhabit – the Okanagan-Similkameen watershed, essentially – and the vastness of the global biosphere, where the familiar (and depressing) ‘global environmental crisis’ is understood to be happening. Through this kind of learning experience, I hope the Literature and Place-themed MA in English can help students appreciate the contemporary relevance and significance of literary study, whilst also providing a more manageable, less overwhelming context for their environmental interests and concerns.

You recently received a SSHRC Insight grant for a project titled, ‘Kelownafornia’. Tell us about that project.

‘Kelownafornia’ is (in addition to being a really terrible rap video) shorthand for the settler colonial idyll of the Canadian Okanagan. The research team, drawn from four faculties of UBC Okanagan, will look at four themes: literary and artistic representations of the Okanagan north and south of the 49^th parallel; the role of the tourist economy in constructing the idyllic view; the history of petroculture in the Valley, including the dominant feature of its human geography, highway 97; the long-running dispute over the South Okanagan-Similkameen National Park; and the landscape aesthetics of different demographic groups in the Okanagan.

Environmental issues are usually understood as scientific and technical, but they can seldom be resolved in these terms alone. For example, the scientific aspects of climate change are pretty well understood, and yet this has not yielded the kind of concerted political and social response that scientists might have hoped for. The Okanagan Valley is experiencing immense pressure from property development and agriculture, and this will only intensify as the population grows and the climate warms over the coming decades. The Kelownafornia project aims to improve citizens’ understanding of where they live, and to highlight the gap between the idyll and the biological and climatic reality. We hope that’ll increase support for measures to enhance the environmental sustainability of Valley communities in the future.

About Greg Garrard

Greg is an English-sounding Canadian who lived in the Netherlands, Lebanon, England and Wales before coming to Kelowna in 2013. While working at Bath Spa University in the west of England, he was a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Artswork Publishing Lab and later a Reader in environmental literature. He served as Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK and Ireland) 2004-2010 and as managing editor, later co-editor, of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 2008-2015.

Greg’s interests are somewhat ungovernable: his page on academia.edu collects essays on rhododendrons and Romantic poetry; Brexit and climate scepticism; Seamus Heaney, Heidegger and Nazism; air travel in climate change fiction; radical Canadian cinema, Werner Herzog and Wall-E; Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Derek Jarman, eco-pedagogy and feral dogs.

This year’s convocation ceremony on June 17^th was a special event, held in a virtual environment. The faculty and staff in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies are happy to congratulate all of the students who completed their degrees in 2020.

This year we have ten masters students, three doctoral students, forty-seven Bachelor of Arts students, and thirteen Bachelor of Fine Arts students graduating and who participated in the UBC Okanagan Virtual Ceremony. On behalf of all our faculty and staff, we congratulate the students and their families on the occasion of their graduation!

“I congratulate our students and their families on this occasion and look forward to see what they are going to do in the future. I look forward to welcoming our students back to our campus in the years to come. I congratulate and salute our students on their achievements and wish them all the best as they make their way into the future.” Says Bryce Traister, Dean of FCCS.

Bard Dawson, a member of the graduating class of 2020, was one of this year’s student readers at the ceremony. She shared these words with the graduating class:

“Let’s keep on striving, staying strong and focussed on a future of possibilities. We have already begun that process in a unique way as the first class to leave UBCO with a virtual ceremony. Let’s continue to be unique, let’s provide a fresh approach, let’s bring the best we have to offer to this challenging time.”

Barb completed her BFA degree with a major in Visual Arts.

The 2020 Virtual Graduation celebration can be viewed here.

FCCS is also pleased to recognize the achievements of the following graduating or continuing students who received awards for their outstanding academic performance this year:

• Jocelyn Boonstra, French and Spanish Scholarship
• Danielle Burrows, International Student Faculty Award
• Megan Butchart, Dr. Shelley Martin Memorial Scholarship
• Sage Cannon, Interdisciplinary Performance Scholarship
• Katie Chamberlain, Visual Arts Scholarship
• Emily Chu, Jack and Lorna Hambleton Memorial Award
• Sari Dale, Creative Writing Scholarship; Creative Writing Prize; Jessie Ravnsborg Memorial Award
• Aiden de Vin, Norma and Jack Aitken Prize in Visual Arts; Head of Class
• Amelia Ford, Doug Biden Memorial Scholarship in Visual Arts
• Josie Hillman, Jill Douglas Entrance Award
• Chloe Jenkins, Jaeger Entrance Award (BFA)
• Eve Kaspryscka, Henderson Award in International Development
• Amanda Kelly, Creative Writing Transfer Prize
• Melodie Krieger, Visual Arts Scholarship
• Alex Labarta-Garcia, International Student Faculty Award
• Ingrid Lassek, Kelly Curtis Memorial Scholarship in English
• Nyshaya Leck, Spanish Scholarship
• Carolina Leyton, International Student Faculty Award
• Brian Murphy, English Scholarship
• Melissa Plisic, Cultural Studies Scholarship
• Emerson Rogers, Art History and Visual Culture Scholarship
• Amy Salter, Asper Scholarship
• Ari Sparks, Murray Johnson Memorial Award in Visual Arts
• Sara Spencer, Elinor Yandel Memorial Award in Fine Arts; ASPER Graduating Prize
• Karen Takahashi, International Student Faculty Award
• Amy Thiessen, HSBC Bank of Canada Prize
• Arianna Tooke, Craig Hall Memorial Visual Arts Scholarship in Printmaking
• Isabelle Walters, French Scholarship; French Essay Prize
• Angela Wood, Asper Scholarship; Frances HARRIS Prize in Fine Arts
• Claire Worrall, Jaeger Entrance Award (BFA)

The FCCS Dean’s Honour list recognizes students in all years of the BA and BFA degrees, who are at the top of their class with a GPA of 85% or better.

Bachelor of Arts Students

Bachelor of Fine Arts Students

Monica Good, Assistant Professor of Teaching, FCCS

The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies is pleased to welcome Monica Good as the newest faculty member to join the Department of Languages and World Literatures as an Assistant Professor of Teaching.

Monica has been with UBCO as a PhD student since 2013, which she completed in the summer of 2020. She has worked as a term instructor for the last two years, teaching first and second year Spanish language courses, and will be teaching World Literatures courses in the near future.

We met up with Monica to find out a bit more about her and her teaching practices.

Why did you choose to come to UBC Okanagan as a doctoral student?

I was interested in the Interdisciplinary program. UBC Okanagan is the perfect option for me because of the work done alongside Indigenous peoples to revitalize Indigenous languages and strengthen Indigenous knowledges. I wanted to work with Jeannette Armstrong, who has influenced my writing and way of thinking deeply. UBC Okanagan is the perfect place for my research to thrive.

Tell us about your research.

My research focuses on Indigenous peoples’ language and cultural revitalization, specifically in Mexico. Last year I collaborated with a group of scholars to organize the first Un-Conference for Indigenous Language Interpreters and Translators, an International meeting held in Oaxaca, Mexico, in August 2019. The Un-Conference yielded a peer-review publication, in which I published a chapter entitled “Training and Professionalization of Indigenous Language Translators.”

What most excites and challenges you about your field of Indigenous peoples’ language and culture?

Indigenous languages carry important knowledge about cultures, lands, and ceremonies. It is exciting to know that other scholars are also pursuing the revitalization of Indigenous languages. Briceida Sanchez Cob, Natalio Hernández, and Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatij are outstanding examples. The negative imprints of a colonial regime that continue to afflict Indigenous languages challenge me. My language and my color continue to be both my place of resistance and my force of empowerment.

How did you know you wanted to be a professor?

When I arrived at UBC Okanagan as a graduate student I had the privilege of working alongside great faculty members such as Dr. Grisel Garcia-Perez. Her classes were always fun and student centered. She has been a great mentor of mine and under her guidance I realized that learning should be enjoyable and engaging as opposed to the rigorous teaching methods. I wanted to run a classroom the way Dr. García-Perez and Dr. Diana Carter did. It was under their guidance that I realized the educational stream was the perfect fit for me.

What kind of experiences do you offer to students?

I teach Spanish and, in the future, I will be joining the World Literatures program. While I often cannot take students out of the classroom, I can bring culture to them. In the past I have had guest speakers from Mexican Indigenous communities talk to students. I also take advantage of the curricula to include Indigenous knowledge and cultural aspects related to the Spanish speaking communities. The students find those lectures enriching. In the future, I would love to take students to Mexico as part of the Go-Global program.

About Monica Good

Monica Good holds a B.A. in Modern Languages from Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas, an M.A. in Spanish-American Literature and Linguistics from New Mexico State University, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies from UBC Okanagan.

Her work encompasses Indigenous language revitalization and linguistic rights for Indigenous peoples, specifically in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Her dissertation traces the role of the Indigenous language interpreter as a cultural and knowledge keeper. Monica has performed community engagement research in conjunction with Indigenous organizations in Mexico. Her research gives voice to Indigenous survivors of the legal system and advocates for better training programs for Indigenous language interpreters while interacting in the legal setting.

Dr. Keyes in a Cultural Studies class

Daniel Keyes is an Associate Professor at UBC Okanagan, teaching courses in English and Cultural Studies with an emphasis on film and television studies. In 2007 he served as the founding chair of the Cultural Studies program, the first new program on the Okanagan campus.

Dr. Keyes shares some insights on his teaching and research practices here at UBC Okanagan.

Give us some insights on your research and its impact.

UBC has given me the opportunity to explore local phenomenon like whiteness and red face in the Okanagan while also exploring more global issues relating to digital ephemerality that arise with Web 2.0. With both the local and the global, I am able to explore questions of power and representation.

I have co-edited a book, with Dr. Luis Aguiar, an anthology on Whiteness in the Okanagan that I trust will have a greater impact than my own publications on this topic that have appeared in academic journal articles. This anthology’s varied perspectives on what my co-editor refers to as ‘smug whiteness’ in the Okanagan will furnish a public venue for thinking about race in the Okanagan in terms of the legacy of the Okanagan colonial history of land dispossession of the Sylix peoples and the tilt of this region towards neoliberal entrepreneurial thinking. The book, White Space: Race, Privilege, and Cultural Economies of the Okanagan Valley was published in December 2021 by UBC Press.

My research on digital ephemerality explores how while we live in an age of digital abundance where we can capture representations of everything, we also inhabit an age of profound and often lopsided digital loss where non updating software platforms and rapidly improving hardware means that technology that was cutting edge not more than five years ago is obsolete. Paying attention to the politics and complexity of digital loss is a global issue.

What most excites you about your field of work?

I find research of all varieties exciting. Whether it is sitting in a basement archive paging through decrepit newspapers or interviewing an interactive documentary director about her work that will disappear from the Internet in 2020, the thrill of research is in glimpsing something out of sight and bringing it to light. What challenges me in this process is the writing and documenting. The painstaking efforts to improve expression and ensure documentation is accurate remains a worthwhile challenge.

How did you know you wanted to be a professor?

I began teaching as a graduate student at York university with seminars of 2^nd year undergraduate students studying an introduction to Western drama. These students tended to be the first in their families to attend post-secondary education. A turning point for me with these students was seeing how looking at a moldy racist melodrama like Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) could ignite passions as students saw many of the play’s creaky representations of gender, race, and class casting a long shadow into their daily life.

What kind of learning experiences do you offer your students?

Dr. Daniel Keyes teaching a Cultural Studies course in the fall of 2019

My 3^rd year Television studies course has a “make tv” assignment where groups of students create 30-second television ads for a client. In 2018, our client was the head of marketing for the car share service Modo, based in Vancouver. She was keen to post ads on social media launching a new product aimed at recruiting inexperienced drivers to Modo. Students met with her to learn about the product. They developed their ads by first pitching their ideas and then developing them into a storyboard, rough-cut, and final cut while receiving constructive criticism from the marketing head and classmates. This assignment gave students a glimpse of how broadcast regimes and notions of audience’s expectations influence commercial broadcast. Students also gained fabulous hands-on media and teamwork skills that will serve them well after graduation.

You supervise in the MA in English program. What opportunities do you offer for graduate students?

Dr. Daniel Keyes teaching a Cultural Studies course in the fall of 2019

I like to think of supervision as a way of guiding a junior scholar to develop and hone their focus and analytical skills to generate innovative and unique research. I had an incredible supervisor for my PhD, Robert Wallace, at York University. He allowed me to intellectually roam, to take risks, and to pose questions that had not been asked while situating my thinking in an established body of research. I have adopted his style of supportive, yet not adverse to risk supervision.

My research in the Okanagan looks at how race and space function in the contemporary, modern and colonial Okanagan. I am excited to support and do archival research into how settler-invaders exalt and frame the Okanagan as Edenic pastoral, but I am also excited to do research on how contemporary Okanagan media keeps alive this moribund fantasy. Another project that I am currently working with Catalina Brinceno at the Université du Québec à Montréal is a small project exploring the shelf life of online databases devoted to documenting and accessing Canadian film and television. This project is part of a larger study of how in this era of seemingly infinite storage in the cloud the digital promise of longevity fails.

I’m excited to support research into either of these two relatively narrow areas of research along with the broader field of Media and Cultural Studies.

Kevin Chong. Photo credit: Andrew Querner

The Department of Creative Studies is pleased to welcome Kevin Chong as the newest faculty member to join the Creative Writing Program. Kevin comes to the UBC Okanagan campus from the UBC Vancouver campus, where he taught Creative Writing for the past 13 years. This coming year, he will be teaching a first year Intro to Fiction and Drama course, and a second year non-fiction course.

We met up with Kevin to find out a bit more about him and his teaching practices.

Why did you choose to come to UBC Okanagan?

I was on campus for a reading in 2015, but that night has faded in my memory, and I did my job interview on Zoom because of Covid-19. The pandemic has really made things different. But I did choose to come because I wanted to work with colleagues like Nancy Holmes, Anne Fleming, Michael V. Smith, and Matt Rader, most of whom I’ve known for 20 years.

Tell us about your most recent book.

My most recent book is a retelling of the 1947 Albert Camus novel, The Plague. My novel has the same name, but this time it’s the city of Vancouver that’s quarantined with an infectious disease. The book was published in 2018, but, well, because of current events it’s received some additional coverage. That’s been a minor silver lining. Currently, I’m writing another novel and working on a TV adaptation of My Year of the Racehorse, my nonfiction account of owning a thoroughbred, for the CBC.

What most excites you and challenges you about the field of Creative Writing?

I teach Creative Nonfiction and what makes it exciting is that the most interesting writers in the genre, be it Olivia Laing or Claudia Rankine, demolish the borders between factual prose writing for a general audience and fiction, poetry, visual art, and literary criticism. What challenges me is keeping up with all the new voices and their politics of inclusion and permission. I’m a person of colour, but I was also born in 1975, and I grew up very much trying to fit into the white mainstream. So I’m excited by how things are changing, but still learning.

How did you know you wanted to be a professor?

Weirdly enough, I wanted to be a prof after a few years as an adjunct. When I first started teaching a workshop, it was a job and it served as ego gratification—“wow, they let me teach students!” My pedagogy, at the beginning, was about an assertion of personality. I was completely wrong. A couple of years later, my approach lost its luster, and it was just a job for a while. It was only when I realized that teaching should really about listening to your students and asking them what they want to learn, and after getting Instruction Skills training, that being a better teacher became a goal alongside my writing.

What kind of learning experiences do you lead outside of the classroom?

When I taught at the Vancouver Campus, I would lead my classes on field trips to local publishers, and students were always excited to know about how their work could find an audience. Earlier this year, I took another group of students to the art gallery to write about an exhibition of the work of visual artist and writer David Wojnarowicz, whose work largely chronicled the devastation of AIDS among the gay community in New York in the 1980s. It was fascinating to think of how he processed an epidemic as a different kind of disease was sweeping through the world in 2020.

About Kevin Chong

Kevin Chong is the author of six books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novel The Plague. Those titles have been named books of the year by Globe and Mail, National Post, and Amazon.ca, listed for a CBC prize, a BC Book Prize, and a National Magazine Award, optioned for film and TV, and published in the US, Europe, and Australia. His creative nonfiction and journalism have recently appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Rumpus, and the South China Morning Post.

Communications and Rhetoric (CORH) is a new program area offered in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies (FCCS) at UBC Okanagan. The courses offered in this area are designed to enable students in all programs to best express their ideas and expertise in their academic discipline and in their chosen professions. Communication and rhetoric is not just about composition, but about a broad range of skills that are valuable in any field of study – the sciences, social sciences, business and management, arts and humanities, engineering, health sciences, and media studies.

Communications is vital for talking about pressing social issues, and for thinking about how certain stories, ideas, and perspectives are shared. Rhetoric is embedded in every act of communication through the purpose and persuasive strategy that we weave into our verbal, non-verbal, and creative acts, explains English professor, Aisha Ravindran.

“Whether at university, in your personal life, or at your place of work, the ability to communicate well places you at an advantage.” She says, “Being aware of how language is used to persuade, and using it strategically and ethically to achieve your objectives, can make you more productive, confident, and highly respected as an efficient communicator.”

Communication skills are in-demand by employers and a key outcome for the BA degree at UBC Okanagan. Feedback from the community and employers in a variety of fields has shown that the ability to communicate through different means is seen as a valuable asset. Today, we see how important it is to communicate your ideas in written or oral form or using different media so that a message has a positive impact on the receiver of the message.

“Students will gain skills that benefit them personally in being able to talk to and persuade others more effectively and will also benefit in terms of increased employability,” notes Jordan Stouck Associate Dean in FCCS.

Starting in the fall of 2020, students can take one of three CORH courses as electives within their programs in the BA, or as credits to fulfill the English or Communications requirement for BSc students, depending on the specific program. In these courses, they will broaden their skills to communicate their ideas effectively, so their ideas have the impact they deserve. Students will bring in their knowledge from different programs and fields of study so there is shared understanding that will strengthen the ability of students to communicate with ease in different contexts.

Future Degree Options

With assistance from the ALT Fund, an advisory team is developing a full certificate and minor in Communications and Rhetoric. The development of this area is a critical step for UBC Okanagan students to become aware of their own identity, disciplinary cultures of learning, and apply this knowledge for improved communication in their future professions.

The team that includes Drs. Aisha Ravindran, Jordan Stouck, Marie Loughlin, and Anita Chaudhuri, supported by fourteen members from other faculties on campus, are working on curriculum development for the certificate and the minor.

The 15-credit Certificate structure contains four thematic interdisciplinary clusters, with the learning outcomes for each cluster of courses focusing on a specific conceptual aspect of communications, and a final capstone project. The course design will have an experiential learning focus, and the program will have a final capstone to combine different disciplinary strands in a research-centric collaborative project.

The 30-credit Minor will align with the communications needs of students across the disciplines with a suite of 10 courses that will combine communication skills with discipline-specific content, and broader interdisciplinary and professional applicability in real-world contexts.

The program advisory team includes faculty from the Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies, Faculty of Health and Social Development, Faculty of Management, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, Okanagan School of Education, School of Engineering and the UBC Okanagan Library.

The anticipated launch for the Credit Certificate is Fall 2021, and Fall 2023 for the Minor.