BA student Noelle Viger as the reader for the ceremony on June 7th

At this year’s convocation ceremony on June 7^th, the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies faculty and staff were happy to see nine masters and doctoral students, sixty Bachelor of Arts students, and fifteen Bachelor of Fine Arts students cross the stage.

“The Dean’s office and the entire FCCS faculty and staff are extremely proud of the year’s graduating students.  After many years of hard work and determination, ups and downs, our students crossed the stage at convocation, each and every one of them baring a radiant smile of success.” Says Marianne Legault, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies for FCCS.

After the ceremony, a reception was held in the Creative and Critical Studies building for all of the FCCS graduates and their guests to continue the celebrations of the day.

Bryce Traister, Dean of FCCS raised a glass to toast this year’s graduating class and their families.

“This year we say farewell, congratulations, and thank you to a group of super talented and hardworking students across the faculty. We say farewell to one of the smallest groups of BFA grads in our history, even as we welcome one of the largest entering BFA cohorts in UBCO’s fourteen years. We congratulate our big award winners and our quiet achievers alike. Your commitment to the arts, to culture, your practices and your interventions are truly inspiring, and for that, you have our thanks.”

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:

• Mirabel Ankora, Art History and Visual Culture Scholarship
• Evan Berg, Asper Graduating Prize; Norma and Jack Aitken Prize in Visual Arts; UBC Okanagan Visual Arts Award; Head of Class (BFA)
• Megan Butchart, Kelly Curtis Memorial Scholarship in English
• Nevada Christensen, Cultural Studies Scholarship
• Selena Clark, Spanish Scholarship
• Ayla De Grandpre, French and Spanish Scholarship
• Eddy Duc Minh Dinh, Bachelor of Media Studies Scholarship
• Bailey Ennig, Asper Scholarship
• Josh Fender, Grizzli Winery Awards in Fine Arts Excellence
• Amelia Ford, Jack and Lorna Hambleton Memorial Award
• Angela Gmeinweser, Elinor Yandel Memorial Award in Fine Arts
• Faye Ilsley, French Essay Prize
• Elizabeth Izquierdo, Grizzli Winery Awards in Fine Arts Excellence
• Miranda Mitchell, Creative Studies Transfer Prize in Creative Writing
• Emily Moroz, French Scholarship
• Brian Murphy, English Scholarship
• Peter Navratil, Interdisciplinary Performance Scholarship
• Jessica Peitsch, Creative Writing Scholarship
• Sarah Polak, Grizzli Winery Awards in Fine Arts Excellence
• Margaret Ann Richards, Craig Hall Memorial Visual Arts Scholarship in Printmaking
• Amy Salter, Okanagan Visual Arts Scholarship; Grizzli Winery Awards in Fine Arts Excellence
• Lark Spartin, Grizzli Winery Awards in Fine Arts Excellence
• Sara Spencer, Doug Biden Memorial Scholarship in Visual Arts
• Arianna Tooke, Visual Arts Scholarship; RBC Royal Bank Visual Arts Scholarship; Murray Johnson Memorial Award in Visual Arts
• Noelle Viger, Dr. Shelley Martin Memorial Scholarship
• Melissa Weiss, Creative Writing Prize
• Aiden Wilhelmina de Vin, Asper Scholarship; Frances Harris Prize in Fine Arts
• Zoe Wineck, German Canadian Harmonie Club Prize in German Studies
• Angela Wood, Grizzli Winery Awards in Fine Arts Excellence

FCCS Faculty Margret Reeves and Janet MacArthur, this years Mace Barer

Bryce Triaster with BFA Medal in Fine Arts recipient Evan Berg and his mom, Mary Berg

MFA students Erin Scott, Nazanin Sahebnassagh and Richard Amante

Celebration with FCCS graduates

Bachelor of Arts students

Ramine Adl congratulating his student

MFA graduate Mariel Belanger with FCCS prof and supervisor, Virginie Magnat

What: Technology, Culture, and Education Unconference
Who: Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies (FCSS)
When: June 18, 1:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.; June 19, 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Where: UBC Okanagan Campus, Commons building

UBC Okanagan is hosting an unconference on Technology, Culture, and Education on the UBC Okanagan Campus on June 18th and 19th. The conference, organized by professors Emily Murphy and Karis Shearer in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, is welcoming participants from the Okanagan technology, culture, and education communities. The event is generously hosted in the UBC Okanagan Library in the beautiful new Commons building.

What is an unconference?

Unconferences are informal, participant-driven events that facilitate peer-to-peer learning and collaboration. While attendees generate and propose ideas on the day, organization of the event happens spontaneously to suit participant interests and support community building.

If you have an idea about technology and culture, how you’d like education to address these topics, or problems that education can solve, propose a session! Sessions can be presentations, brainstorming sessions, or workshops. Commit to as much as giving a presentation or as little as asking a question and facilitating a discussion.

Why participate:

Are you:

• An entrepreneur or business owner who wants to hire students with critical thinking and technology skills?
• A student interested in culture, history, and technology?
• A teacher interested in how to teach technology and culture together?  
• A researcher interested in how technology and culture come together in different classrooms?
• A librarian or public sector employee interested in supporting learning in technology and culture?

Join us with a problem, a solution, a skill, a workshop, a presentation, or a question!

Register for the unconference: http://bit.ly/TCE_UnconfReg  

And propose an idea: http://bit.ly/TCE_Unconf

Conference Schedule

Tuesday, June 18

• 1:30-2:00 Afternoon Unconference Welcome and Planning
• 2:00pm-3:15pm Breakout I—Unconference-style Breakout Sessions (rooms TBA) 
• 3:15-3:45 Coffee Break (at participants’ cost)                                               
• 3:45-5:00 Breakout II—Unconference-Style Breakout Sessions (rooms TBA)  

Wednesday, June 19                                 

• 9:30am-10:00am: Morning Unconference Welcome and Planning
• 10:00am-11:00am: Breakout III–Unconference-Style Breakout Sessions (rooms TBA)                 
• 11:00am-11:30am: Coffee Break (at participants’ cost)                                                 
• 11:30am-12:30pm: Breakout IV–Unconference-Style Breakout Sessions (rooms TBA)

Short Story Contest Winners: (left to right) Victoria Alverez, Aria Davis, Erin Scott, Dania Tomlinson, Matt Rader, Alyssa Kong, Katie Welch, Akke Englund

Dania Tomlinson, lecturer with UBC Okanagan’s Creative Writing Program and previous contest winner, had the task of selecting the best new short stories this year. The top stories were announced at a public event at Milkcrate Records in April, with each of the writers reading a part of their story.

The annual contest, organized by the Creative Writing program in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, is a writing competition open to fiction writers in British Columbia’s Southern Interior. Writers submit their stories, which are then read, anonymously, by faculty, and the shortlisted stories are sent to a guest judge to choose the winners in the adult and high school categories.

Erin Scott graduated with her MFA in 2018, with a specialization in Interdisciplinary Studies. Her story, “Turn First to the Body in Real Space”, earned her the top spot in this year’s contest.

“What made the top three stories stand out was not only their freshness, but each author’s narrative control,” says Dania. “Erin Scott’s winning story is whimsical and witty. It is deep without seeming to try too hard. I fell in love with the narrator; I didn’t want to leave her head. This story is only five pages long and it accomplishes a lot.”

Second place this year with her story “Saint Watching Over House About to Burn” was Katie Welch, a writer from Kamloops. Third place went to recent MFA graduate, Victoria Alvarez with her story “Castañas”; Victoria was also in the top three in the 2017 contest.

“My favourite part about Katie Welch’s second place story is the subtly apocalyptic setting paired with the narrator’s sometimes flowery language. This story takes many risks! It is like nothing I’ve ever read before,” Says Dania. “Victoria Alvarez’s historical short story, Castañas, is carefully researched and beautifully told.”

Dania commented that there were so many fantastic concepts in the shortlist that did not make the top three—a story based around a marshmallow salad, another that begins with a death and goes backwards, a reimagining of a totally disturbing murder. With some polishing, paring down, or expanding, any of the stories on the shortlist could have been winners.

This is the second year that the contest has had the high school category, with Alyssa Kong of Okanagan Mission Secondary winning top honour with her story, “Ich Habe Mich Verloren.” Second place was Aria Davis of Kelowna Christian School, with a story entitled, “A Silver Necklace,” and third was Akke Englund of Salmon Arm Secondary School, with her story “Meadowside Manor.”

“I did not expect the narrative maturity these young authors demonstrated in their writing. Alyssa Kong’s winning story ends with such a fantastic twist that I was thinking about it hours later. It still gives me goosebumps.” Noted Dania.

This year, the Okanagan Short Story Contest had $2,000 in prize money to present from contest funders and sponsors: the Central Okanagan Foundation, the Amber Webb-Bowerman Memorial Foundation, and the Kelowna Capital News. The first-place author received $1,000; second-place winner received $400 and third place received $200. Top high school student also received a $200 prize.

In the fall of 2018, Bryce Traister, Dean of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, was invited to give a series of lectures in Moscow and St Petersburg, on the occasion of the launch of the Russian translation of David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest.

The trip was organized by the Moscow Embassy, Cultural Affairs Division, of the US Department of State. Whose mandate is to bring American artists and academics to Russia to engage Russian citizens with American culture. During his nine day visit, Traister presented a total of twelve lectures on Infinite Jest, on his own work on American Puritanism, and on the American dramatist, Arthur Miller, a favorite in Russia.

We met up with Dean Traister to talk about his research, the trip to Russia and how the trip impacted him.

Tell us about your research.

My research is primarily in the area of colonial American literature and culture, specifically religion. I am interested in how the legacies of Puritanism shaped and continue to shape politics and society in the United States today. I believe you can’t really understand America without understanding its past, and understanding the United States today is an important activity for everyone.

How did this trip change you, or change your perspective?

Wow. So I was a kid in the 70s, growing up in the chilliest phases of the Cold War, thinking that, any minute, the missiles would fly and we would all die in a nuclear fire or of radiation exposure. Russia, or the Soviet Union, was the “evil” agent in that extended national fantasy, and even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the “opening” again of Russia to the West, I took those memories with me to Russia.

The monuments to Lenin and Stalin are still there; the “wall of Heroes” is still displayed on the mighty Kremlin wall facing Red Square. But this is also the new Russia; their country, while not exactly “open” in the way we think of an open-access country, is curious about the West. Suspicious of it also, in various ways.

I loved interacting with Russians, in person, at cafes, on the subways. There is a kind of grim determination set in the faces of the Moscow subway riders, descending 100s of feet on the longest escalators I’ve ever seen, but there is also a ready wit and humor that came out at different times.

What was the most exciting or fascinating thing that you did while you were in Russia?

Hard to pick only one. I was invited to attend a lecture at Spaso House, the historical residence of the US Ambassador to Russia (whom I met), and I watched a debate erupt between the visiting speaker, a US political scientist talking about the (poor) state of US-Russian relations, and a famous Russian TV news anchor, who got into it over the Russian annexation of Crimea. Geo-Diplomacy right in front of me, while the US Ambassador fed his dogs treats in one of the most famous diplomatic buildings in the country.

The frosty political relationship between the US and Russia (and Canada) affected me directly, as I was told, on leaving Moscow, that I had become a “person of interest” to Russian state security because I entered the US Embassy several times, and visited Spaso House, all of which was tracked by Russian security. I hope that file is closed!

Oh, and the art! The art! The art!

Why was this trip important for your research?

In certain respects, it wasn’t—I am not a specialist in the American postmodern novel. But in another important sense, it confirmed my belief in the importance of bringing our work in the humanities and arts to the world, even if it involves a little risk (and a lot of time).

The Russians were fascinated by my talks about American Puritanism, how it explains so much, not just about the US, but about the resurgent millennial nationalism that the Russian Federation’s current president is advancing very specifically through the Orthodox Church.

As academics, we have much to offer, even when we think we don’t.

Statue of Stalin, Moscow (photo by Bryce Traister)

Kremlin Wall, Moscow (photo by Bryce Traister)

What: Disability, Access, and Art at UBC Okanagan: A Roundtable discussion

When: Tuesday, April 17 from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.

Where: The AMP Lab, FIP 251, Fipke Centre, 3247 University Way, UBC Okanagan campus

UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies is hosting a roundtable  discussion for students, faculty, and staff who identify as disabled or are identified as disabled, and how they navigate this in a university setting.

This event is planned alongside the launch of creative writing professor Matt Rader’s new book, Visual Inspections. Part memoir, part essay, part poetic investigation, this book reflects on disability, access, vision, pain, community and resilience.

Moderated by Rader, this event invites all members of the UBC Okanagan community to listen, tell stories, and consider what art-making can teach about negotiating access as individuals and as a community. This roundtable discussion offers an opportunity to share personal experiences in a public setting

Rader notes that professors and students alike struggle at times understanding the principles that inform policy around accommodation.

“Many students, faculty and staff at UBC Okanagan find ourselves disabled by our bodies, bureaucracies and built environments,” says Rader. “I wanted to create a space to have a conversation about the issues that we face, the ways we can deal with them and to make everything as transparent as possible.”

In working with these students at this institution, Rader says his only real strategy is to make everything as transparent as possible, and to negotiate the issues some people face through conversation.

“This book would not exist without community, so the launch of the book is an occasion to bring some awareness to accessibility issues.”

The launch of Rader’s new book will take place on April 17, at Kettle Rover Brewery and will include two Masters of Fine Arts students, Richard Amante and Victoria Alvarez, reading from their final thesis.

Matt Rader is the author of four books of poems: Desecrations (McClelland & Stewart, 2016), A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno (House of Anansi, 2011), Living Things (Nightwood Editions, 2008), and Miraculous Hours (Nightwood Editions, 2005), as well as the story collection What I Want to Tell Goes Like This (Nightwood Editions, 2014). His poems, stories and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications across North America, Australia and Europe including The Walrus, Geist, 32 Poems and The Wales Arts Review, as well as several editions of Best Canadian Poetry in English.

Students from an Advanced Drawing class in the BFA program, have been working all year on a mural design to transform University Way into an experimental public art piece. These students, lead by visual arts professor Aleksandra Dulic and teaching assistant Emerald Holt, came up with the idea to convert the road into a locally situated, yet imaginative river.

“The mural responds to the ideas of human and environmental wellbeing in the Okanagan,” explains Aleks Dulic, “the class engaged in a set of readings on the topic of local sustainability to create experimental mural design that celebrate solutions that empower community resilience and diversity within the Okanagan.”

The larger goal for this project is to create an invitation for other classes and interests to participate over this year, with the overall purpose of enlivening and celebrating the campus public space with a positive and inspiring sustainability narrative.

The Campus Planning and Development and Campus Operations were closely involved into realization of this project. Led by David Waldron’s vision to initiate this temporary mural on the road along the University Way, this project celebrates the decision to convert the road into a pedestrian zone.

The initial mural, created in the fall of 2018, acted as an aspiration is to create an invitation for other classes that continued to develop this design this spring, with the overall purpose of enlivening this public space on campus.

As outlined in the UBC strategic plan “places play a profound role in shaping the experience of the people who work and live in them; people, in turn, are powerful influences on their places.” Building on this reciprocal relationship between people and places, the aim is to engage the students in thoughtful and conscious dialogue with Okanagan’s rich heritage across Indigenous peoples and settlers, local sustainability, and socio-environmental wellbeing.

“This artwork is be shaped and reshaped, as students get deeper into the researching and exploring the multifaceted colors of our beautiful Okanagan.” Says Dulic.

These students have worked transform the University Way road into a space for poetic expressions that enables our communities to experience, celebrate and extend their understanding of the Okanagan.

Students involved in the project are: Sara Spencer, Sidney Steven, Brock Gratz, DJ Haywood, Cassie McKenzie, Barb Dawson, Clare Addison, Gary Alexander, Reggie Harrold, Chelsea Robinson, and Mirjana Borovickic.

Peter Navratil at an open mic stand-up comedy night

A program that allows you to take creative writing, visual arts of multiple disciplines, learn unique performance techniques, and earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts was exactly what Nav was looking for to pursue his degree.

Now in his final year of the BFA program, where he is concentrating on interdisciplinary Performance, Nav notes that he has learned a lot about himself and has found direction for his future. He is a multidisciplinary artist working in found art sculpture, screen-printing, writing and all kinds of performance.

“I have a better idea of what I want, I have direction, I learned how to fail, and now I better understand what I can and cannot do,” says Nav “I reaped the benefits of an education and my mind is better for it.”

Nav gives some of this credit to the talented and supportive faculty and staff that he has worked with throughout the program. He notes that there are a number of incredibly talented and caring individuals working in the fine arts program.

“I regularly leave a meeting or class feeling uplifted in my pursuits, or troubled with the right questions to get my work done. The collective accomplishments of the people that work in the CCS building are substantial and they are more than willing to impart what they have learned.”

For the past two years, Nav has been heavily involved in the volunteer collective for the Living Things Festival, gaining experience in the real world of creating theatre and performance in the community.

The festival, organized by FCCS professor Neil Cadger, features a month long program containing performances from world-renowned theatre performers, community events, and opportunities for local artists. Throughout this festival there are numerous opportunities for students to interact with professional artists and gain exposure to some fantastic performance work the Okanagan would never see otherwise.

“Watching these shows and talking with the selected artists has helped me set achievable goals for a career in the arts, maintain motivation to continue my work, and create more interesting pieces through a broadened perspective.”

When asked what advice he would give to fellow and incoming students, in addition to diversifying your interests and trying a variety of electives, Nav reminds everyone to make educational choices based on personal development and interest. “Regardless of grades, regardless of career opportunities, pursue something that excites you. Eventually every meal gets cold, you have to stay hungry anyway!”

L-R: Professor James Clark (Exeter), Dr. Charlotte Tupman (Exeter), Dr. Emily Murphy (UBCO), Dr. Lizzie Williamson (Exeter), Gary Stringer (Exeter), and Dr. Karis Shearer (UBCO).

What do mid-century sound recordings and medieval manuscripts have in common? Thanks to a new Digital Humanities (DH) collaboration between the University of Exeter and the University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO), students now have new resources to learn to digitize both.

Digital pedagogy research has shown that one of the biggest challenges students face in DH is the lack of formal training in the tools and technologies required of them. We also know that resources are one of the biggest challenges to providing this training. Teams from both universities meet in Exeter for 10 days last week to share best practices for student training and research and to develop two online training modules, one for audio digitization, and another for text encoding.

“While online training alone isn’t the solution, delivering these skills through a hybrid model combining self-paced online modules with in-person training that brings participants into the lab communities is more closely aligned with the collaborative ethos that undergirds DH and is, I think, very promising,” says Dr. Karis Shearer, Associate Professor of English and Director of the AMP Lab.

UBCO team members from the AMP Lab and the Centre for Culture and Technology in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies (FCCS) visited the Exeter Digital Humanities Lab in the College of Humanities. The labs at the two universities apply the methods, tools, and critical approaches of the Digital Humanities in teaching and research. The new modules they have created will be implemented in classrooms, as independent self-paced learning, and as research training.

The collaboration builds on the foundations laid this spring, when Professor Bryce Traister, Dean of FCCS, made a visit to the University of Exeter. This June provided an opportunity to deepen the partnership at the Digital Editions, Digital Archives symposium organised by Karis Shearer and Dr Francisco Pena, Associate Professor of Spanish. From Exeter, Professor James Clark, Associate Dean for Research and Impact for Exeter’s College of Humanities, and Dr Charlotte Tupman, Research Fellow in Digital Humanities, attended to discuss their research and opportunities for collaboration.

The two visits established that the complementary expertise of our institutions will enable knowledge exchange in several key areas of digital expertise, including text encoding, audio digitisation, 3D printing, and 2D digital photography.

Digital Humanities research and training is key in both universities, notes Traister: “Exeter University has one of the top humanities faculties in the UK, in no small part because it has united the best of traditional humanities scholarship with visionary investment in cutting-edge and newer forms of humanities research. Exeter is a natural partner for the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus.”

Student training in digital humanities is at the heart of this initiative, with student interns actively involved in the production of the modules themselves. At UBCO, student intern Stephen French (BA English candidate and SpokenWeb RA), brings strong technical skills, as well as interests in literary audio and podcast production. With Shearer and Dr. Miles Thorogood, he will contribute to the reel-to-reel and compact-cassette digitisation content creation. At Exeter, student intern Connor Spence (in the second year of his undergraduate studies in English) will contribute his encoding skills and his experience as a DH Lab intern to this initiative. With Tupman, he will assist in the creation and testing of the collaborative training module for encoding languages to digitize text.

These modules will be implemented immediately in student training. Dr. Emily Murphy, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, will use the text encoding module in her courses next year, and audio digitization module will support the research training for the AMP Lab and SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership.

“UBC’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies is thrilled to be collaborating with the University of Exeter on digital humanities training,” says Greg Garrard, Associate Dean of Research in FCCS. “It will help support our new Digital Arts and Humanities graduate degree, and at the same time also provide exciting research opportunities for students.”

To continue the collaboration, the teams at the two universities are looking for new ways to support student training and professional development.

“We anticipate that this collaborative pilot project will lead to the development of a wider programme of online, self-paced training provision in digital skills for Exeter and UBCO students, and a longer-term collaboration between Exeter and UBCO in Digital Humanities.” Says Tupman

“This is an exciting development for digital humanities at Exeter, just a year after our new Lab facilities were opened,” says Professor James Clark. “As might be expected from connective technology, digitally-enabled Humanities is a truly international research community, characterised by creative exchanges right across global Higher Education. Our project with UBC Okanagan is an excellent opportunity to enhance and extend our own practice in partnership with a centre of excellence at one of the world’s leading universities.”

Photo credit: Stephen French
Emily Murphy (AMP Lab Assistant Director and Professor of Digital Humanities) and Leif Isaksen (Professor of Digital Humanities).

Photo credit: Karis Shearer The UBCO team get a tour of the city of Exeter.

Photo credit: Stephen French (UBCO undergraduate intern). DH Lab Manager Emma Sherriff facilitates a session on Wikipedia editing.