2016 FCCS Award Recipients: (left to right) Briar Craig, Marianne Legault, Shirley McDonald, Myron Campbell

As part of our ongoing efforts to recognize contributions and excellence in a variety of areas, FCCS has established four awards for the members of the FCCS community. These awards present FCCS with yet another opportunity to express gratitude for the contributions that advance our mission and the objectives of our strategic plan, and to shine the spotlight on those contributions.

This year’s award recipients are Briar Craig (Visual Arts), Shirley McDonald (English), Marianne Legault (French) and Myron Campbell (Visual Arts).

The year’s recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award is Briar Craig. Briar received this award on the basis of students support and teaching evaluations. Briar’s students note that he has a clear and concise teaching style; he offers fair and constructive feedback on assignments, taking the time to write a full and thoughtful critique for each student; and that he expands his teaching outside of the classroom by encouraging them to submit their work to exhibitions locally, nationally and internationally.

The 2016 Teaching Innovation Award recipients is Shirley McDonald for her work with Ramine Adl on a project called “Stopping Plagiarism Before It Starts,” (funded by an Innovation in Teaching and Learning Grant). The focus of this project is to talk to students about the prevention of plagiarism rather than penalizing inadvertent cases of plagiarism that arise in papers and essays.

Marianne Legault is the recipient of the 2016 Service Award for her contributions to the Faculty over the 2015 academic year. Marianne has generously given her time and expertise in the service of FCCS over the past year, and has worked with various areas of the University, both at the Okanagan and Vancouver campus, to promote FCCS and to assist with recruitment initiatives.

The 2016 Community Engagement Award recipients is Myron Campbell. Over the past year Myron has spent a number of hours working with the community in a variety of ways, including working with the Community Service Learning Program on campus in which his students work with community organizations to produce promotional videos for their programs or initiatives. Myron is also the creator of Draw By Night, a collaborative drawing party that involves faculty, students, industry and the general public.

To learn more about the FCCS Awards and the nomination process, please visit www.ubc.ca/okanagan/fccs/awards.html

Film Screening and Q & A with Jennifer Ruth Hosek  

The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies is please to present two screening of the film, Rodando en La Habana: bicycle stories. 

When: Wednesday, October 12, 4-5pm
Where: UBCO Campus, Reichwald Health and Science Centre, RHS 260. (This screening is presented as part of FILM 100 with Denise Kenney.)

When: Wednesday, October 12, 7pm
Where: Okanagan College Theatre. (This screening is presented as part of the Hispanic Cinema Retrospective 2016: Viva Cuba supported by OC and FCCS)

Rodando en La Habana: bicycle stories (30 min) Spanish with English subtitles, Santos and Hosek) is a tale of bicycling and community in Havana today, 20 years after the hardest time of the Special Period, when over one-million Chinese bicycles were imported to aid survival on an island suddenly without Soviet petroleum.

This collaborative documentary premiered at the 2015 Festival of New Latin American Cinema, is screening at venues including Cine Pobre and the International Bicycle Film Festival, and will be broadcast on Telesur TV.

Jennifer Hosek

Filmmaker and scholar Jennifer Ruth Hosel is an Assocaite Professor of German Studies and affiliated with Film and MEdia and Cultural STudies at Queen’s University. Her work includes Sun, Sex and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary (U Toronto, 2012). Current projects include a monograph on urban movement and cinema and the eTandem exchange LinguaeLive.ca

Bee Hotel. photo credit: Geoff Campbell

UBC’s Public Art Pollinator Pasture Project will hosting two big events at the Kelowna Art Gallery in October.

“Making Insect Hotels” is the UBC/ Kelowna Art Gallery Culture Days event on Saturday, October 1 from 10 am – 4 PM.  You can help designer Evan Hutchinson build a home for pollinators. Many solitary bees and other insects live in bee hotels all over the world. Evan is building a hotel to be permanently placed at Brent’s Grist Mill Heritage site as part of The Public Art Pollinator Pasture Project.  This family-friendly event is held in conjunction with the exhibition For All is For Yourself. On October 1, the public is also invited to participate in an open mic at 1:30 PM.  Local writers and bee-lovers are invited to come and share their pollinator poetry. See  http://kelownaartgallery.com/culture-days-2016/

“What We Can Learn From Bees” is a talk by Dr. Mark Winston on Thursday, October 6, 7 – 8:30 PM at the Kelowna Art Gallery. Mark Winston is that rare individual, a scientist who can speak eloquently to the public.  Recognized as one of the world’s leading expert on bees and pollination, Dr. Winston believes humans can learn a lot from the bees in terms of building a balanced community.  “Bees are an extraordinarily collaborative society, in which the good for society always comes first,” he says. Come and hear Dr. Winston’s talk and reading from his remarkable book, the Governor General’s award-winning Bee Time: Lessons From the Hive.  We ask that people preregister for this event at:  https://drmarkwinston.eventbrite.ca

Both events are free admission and will be held in the front project space of the Kelowna Art Gallery at 1315 Water St.  Community members interested in weeding, seeding, constructing insect hotels, and planting the pollinator pasture should contact the project at ecoartokanagan@gmail.com

Contact UBC Associate Professor Nancy Holmes at nancy.holmes@ubc.ca  or 250-807-9369.    More information is available at ecoartincubator.com.

[Re]visions installation shot

Currently in the FINA Gallery (running from September 19th to the 30th) is an exhibition entitled [Re]visions by former UBCO BFA graduate Laura Widmer. Always an extremely dedicated artist Laura graduated from the BFA program in 2012 and has since continued her successful studio practice by putting together a printmaking and paper making studio at her home.

Laura has participated in many juried International Printmaking Biennials and exhibitions and has had a number of solo and small group exhibitions throughout Western Canada. Her work has twice been shortlisted for the Open Studio National Printmaking Awards in Toronto (winning first prize in 2010 as a second year BFA student). She has also received the Muskat Award at the Boston Printmakers Biennial in 2011 (the Biennial and awards were juried by famed American artist Jim Dine), as well as the Anna Eglitis Award for Printmaking at the InkMasters Print Exhibition in Cairns, Australia in 2016.

[Re]visions is an exhibition comprised of a series of large scale linocut prints and small, poetry-based paper works. Of the linocut prints Calgary-based writer Gina Freeman suggests that they present “glimpses of a shifting, sensual world. Heads, hands and torsos are cropped, abstracted. Strings of pearls are grasped tightly and held dear, freely offered and willingly accepted, tangled about throats and fingers, and draped lovingly around shoulders. The exact nature of the moment remains enigmatic.” The collection of works alter the ambience of the FINA gallery creating a mood of calm, sensual contemplation.

There will be a closing reception for [Re]visions at 4:00 on Friday, September 30th. The artist will be in attendance.

Laura Widmer, Tide, linocut on handmade paper

Briar Craig, It Will Be Clear Soon, ultra-violet screenprint

Currently, Laura and Briar Craig (Professor of Printmaking in FCCS) have work in an exhibition entitled, Stand Out Prints held at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis, Minnesota from September 16 to October 15, 2016. Stand Out Prints is the second international juried print exhibition of 72 prints and objects (by 64 artists across four countries and 27 states) that were selected from more than 800 submissions through an international call. Both Laura and Briar were given awards for their work in the exhibition, Laura received the Juror Award, and Briar received the Stand out Prize.

What: Lecture, Miltonic Sovereignty Now
Who: Dr. Feisal Mohamed
Where: FIP 204, UBCO Okanagan Campus
When: Monday, Sept. 26th, 3:30pm

The Department of Critical Studies in FCCS is pleased to host a lecture by Dr. Feisal Mohamed, Full Professor at The Graduate Centre of the City University of New York.

Dr. Feisal Mohamed is the author of several books and numerous publications on sovereignty, terrorism, and human rights from the early modern period to the present day, including Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (2011).

The lecture, entitled Miltonic Sovereignty Now, will focus on how ideas about popular sovereignty that were developed in the early modern period can inform how political power is conceptualized now, especially in light of the recent re-emergence of right-wing nationalism.

John Milton, seventeenth-century poet and political theorist, is an early advocate of a modern idea of popular sovereignty, even as he is not the least bit democratic in our usual sense of that term. At a moment when several polities in the world have taken a hard turn to right-wing nationalism, it is thus especially opportune to re-examine the set of political ideas that we find in Milton, and the ways in which they anticipate later thought on sovereignty and political theology, especially that of Carl Schmitt.

All are welcome to attend. For more information, contact margaret.reeves@ubc.ca.

Cultural Studies student Lauren Richardson and History student Samantha Steenwyk encourage people to share their “sightings” of Ogopogo toys, sculptures, and other images they see in the Kelowna community. Their Ogopogo display was at the Okanagan Heritage Museum during the summer of 2015

The Cultural Studies program at UBC’s Okanagan campus is excited to announce a new course that focusses on community engagement. Students enrolled in the course will have the opportunity to work in collaborative teams to complete projects that support the work of community partners.

Mentored by the course Instructor, faculty mentors, and mentors from the community organization, students will complete innovative projects for community organizations. Further, the course will provide a valuable opportunity to critically reflect on the relation between theory and practice and to critically assess the relative merits of university experiential learning initiatives.

This course (CULT 499) is designed to provide students experiential learning based on the skills and knowledge of Cultural Studies scholarship. As such, students will complete a tangible research project that will be publicly disseminated, and they will acquire specific professional skills and experience suitable for inclusion in letters of application, resumes, and/or curriculum vitae.

“This kind of work and teaching is about building mutually beneficial relationships between the university and organizations in the community, and valuing the significance of humanities research and knowledge.” Says David Jefferess, Associate Professor in Cultural Studies.

This course achieves a longstanding ambition of the cultural studies program to provide its students with a standalone course that engages with community partners and thus better prepares undergraduate students with life-work experiences where their theoretical and practical communications skills are honed.

In previous years, students have taken a version of this course as a directed studies, last year, Lauren Richardson (Cultural Studies) and Samantha Steenwyk (History) researched how the creation of the Ogopogo as a mascot for the community appropriated and displaced N’ha-a-itk, the spirit of the lake. Read more about the project.

In order to enroll in CULT 499 Community Engaged Research in term two this year, students are required to submit an application that includes a resume, description of related skills and experience as well a letter of interest. For more information, please contact the course instructor, David Jefferess. david.jefferess@ubc.ca.