The 7th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference was held on May 5th to 7th. This conference brought together a diverse community of researchers, artists and experimenters from across North America. In its seventh year, the conference focused on “bumping zones,” liminal spaces of intersection where unique and differentiated regions of thought and discipline meet and thrive.

Conference sessions on campus

The conference was successful in accommodating over eighty attendees including graduate students, faculty, and artists from UBC Okanagan, Okanagan College, SFU, UVIC, Emily Carr, University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of Waterloo, , and UNAM (Mexico).

As well as attending conference presentations on campus, attendees were invited to a number of events around Kelowna including visual art installations, poetry readings, and a mix-and-mingle dinner. Session presentations were scheduled in such a way as to resist the traditional approach to conference scheduling: similarity. Instead, the conference focused on putting together seemingly disparate research presentations in an effort to reveal the interwoven threads that link work across disciplines. Presentations included subjects such as reimagining the role of doctors, to feminism in puck subcultures, indigenizing the institution, and decolonization. A poetry event was held down by the shores of Lake Okanagan, featuring keynote speaker and poet Rita Wong. Rita read poetry about the responsibilities that we carry towards activist intervention in environmental degradation, our relationships to land and water, and how we are all responsible for recognizing our connection to the spaces and lands we occupy.

“A number of the conference attendees let us know how successful they felt the conference was,” says one of the organizers, Mark Buchannan, “People were impressed with the possibility of the work that happens at this campus, as well as with the interdisciplinarity between programs and researchers.”

Many attendees were happy to discover the intersections between their work and other scholars’. The conference created a space for conversations between the attendees in which to share their knowledge that may not otherwise be possible within specific disciplines. For the twenty graduate students from UBC Okanagan, this was the first time for many to be able to hear each other’s work and share their research interests.

“This was a very rewarding experience for all involved. We engaged with the UBCO community and are extremely grateful for this opportunity and to everyone who attended and presented at the conference. Recognizing the common threads that motivate us to do the work we do is critical to re-imagining a new institutional approach to changing social and environmental conditions,” noted one of the conference organizers, Karolina Bialkowska.

In addition to the presentations, there were a few exhibitions that attendees were able to attend at the Alternator as well as in the FINA gallery on campus. Attendees were able to engage with art of UBCO graduate student Krista Arias, UBCO alumni Amy Modahl, and UBCO MFA candidate Jenifer LaFrance.

Event held at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art

The organizers of this year’s conference included graduate students Karolina Bialkowska (MA English), Mark Buchannan (MA English), Tomas Jonsson (MFA), John Harrison (MA English), and Mike Unrau (PhD IGS), with faculty advising from Ashok Mathur.

A ‘remnant’ of a Peter Morin and Ayumi Goto performance called “Hair”. The rocks, removed from the natural environment to function as weights for the performing body, were then wrapped and gently re-placed where they were found….

Students are invited to register in the 2016 Indigenous Summer Intensive to be held on campus from July 4 to August 15, 2016.

Organized by the Department of Creative Studies in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, the program features a core group of senior artists: Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, David Garneau, Lee Maracle and Adrian Stimson. It will also include upwards of 20 visiting studio artists and curators in residence as part of the “K’inadas studio residency.” These artists will develop new work addressing issues related to the ongoing complex responses to reconciliation, and art-making practices as a radical methodology for decolonization and Indigenizing contemporary theoretical discourse and art praxis. These artists include:

Raymond Boisjoly; Charles Campbell; Warren Cariou; Millie Chen; Leah Decter; Kevin DeForest; Andrea Fatona; Mimi Gellman; Mark Igloriorte; Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez; Michelle Jacques; David Khang; Elizabeth Lapensée; Michelle Lavalee; Cheryl L’Hirondelle; Cathy Mattes; Tannis Nielsen; Srimoyee Mitra
Cecily Nicholson; Haruko Okano; Julie Okot-Bitek; Camille Turner; Jackson TwoBears; Olivia Whetung; Tania Willard;  and Bear Witness.

Alongside the intensive residency, FCCS is offering numerous courses in visual art, creative writing, and performance. All of these courses will run in conjunction with the Indigenous Summer Intensive. Weekly meetings for all courses will allow for a sharing of multiple voices between the residency and the students. An online component will allow participation from artists and students not located at the UBCO campus.

O k’inadas is a multi-part project that will bring together artists from various artistic disciplines to inhabit a six-week residency that will result in the production of new individual and collaborative work addressing the complexities of reconciliation practices. The artists will be mostly Indigenous, with the non-Indigenous participants drawn largely from racialized communities, countering the usual reconciliation discussion framework that depends on the pairing of European and Indigenous parties. This different formation will be a radically unique contribution to responses to colonialism, allowing for the generation of a new creative paradigm around reconciliation. Curators, artists, and writers will work together to produce a significant body of work that transcends colonial politics and art-making.

k’inadas* is a three-person artist collective formed around the Tahltan oral articulation of “walking on the land.” The purpose of this collective is to function as an organizational hub to develop creative work with larger groups of artists that address the principles and problematics of reconciliation and land-based art. The collective is comprised of: Peter Morin, Tahltan interdisciplinary and performance artist, currently Assistant Professor of Visual and Aboriginal Art at Brandon University; Stephen Foster, Haida/Metis digital artist, currently Director of the Centre for Indigenous Media Arts (CIMA) at the University of British Columbia (Okaganan); and Ayumi Goto, Japanese-Canadian performance artist, currently a doctoral candidate in Communications Studies, Simon Fraser University.

This project is supported by The Canada Council for the Arts, the McConnell Foundation, and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus.

For course information, fccs.ok.ubc.ca/programs/summer.html

An impressive number of FCCS faculty members along with current as well as former FCCS students will be speaking in several Societies at the upcoming Congress meetings at the University of Calgary less than a month away.

The ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) program includes the following FCCS faculty: Anderson Araujo, Jodey Castricano, Lisa Grekul, Janet MacArthur, and Shirley Ann McDonald. Six of our current graduate students–Mathieu Aubin, Karolina Bialkowska, Mark Buchanan, Peter Hiles, Cole Mash, Daryl Ritchot, as well our former graduate student Shandell Houlden, now doing her Ph.D. at McMaster—are also presenting at ACCUTE.

Other faculty members attending Congress this year include Michael Treschow, presenting in the Canadian Society of Patristic Studies, Bernard Schulz-Cruz, presenting in the Canadian Association of Hispanists, and Virginie Magnat, presenting in the Canadian Association for Theatre Research.

The Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies program includes Constance Crompton, who is speaking on a Digital Humanities Roundtable, Margaret Reeves, speaking on early modern children’s reading practices, as well as two current FCCS graduate students, Gwen Pierce and Daryl Ritchot, and one former FCCS English major, Brandon Taylor, now doing graduate studies at the University of Victoria.

Another FCCS faculty member, Ashok Mathur, has organized a panel for the Indigenous Literary Studies Association, and is convening a conversational session that includes FCCS graduate students Karolina Bialkowska, Amberley John, and Monica Good as well as IKBSAS students Krista Arias, Lindsay Harris, and David Lacho.  Prof. Mathur is also presenting new poetic work in an ILSA round table responding to the literary contributions of Métis writer Sharron Proulx.

For information on the associations mentioned above, please see:

ACCUTE: accute.ca

ACH:  www.hispanistas.ca/inicio.html

CATR:  catracrt.ca

CSPS:  www.ccsr.ca/csps

CSRS: www.csrs-scer.ca/congress.htm

ILSA: www.indigenousliterarystudies.org

‘Heartbreaking’ story wins 2016 Okanagan Short Story Contest

The winners of the 2016 Okanagan Short Story Contest were announced March 16 at a ceremony and reading at the Royal Anne Hotel in Kelowna.

UBC alumna Dania Tomlinson won first prize for her story “Badlands.”

Award-winning fiction writer and teacher Tamas Dobozy served as contest judge during his time as UBC Okanagan’s Writer in Residence. Of Tomlinson’s winning entry, Dobozy said, “The writer is totally in command of the narrative.”

“It’s very deeply felt, even heartbreaking (in the best sense of the word) in places. The last sentence is startling and beautiful and lifts the story beyond itself—as most good endings do.”

The accolades mean a lot to Tomlinson, an MFA graduate and current employee at UBC Okanagan. She also took part in the one-on-one writing workshop Tamas offered local writers during his residency.

“Writing can be an isolating activity,” Tomlinson says, “and after completing my MFA and leaving the writing community that came along with that experience, I sense that isolation more than ever.

“To have such an accomplished writer as Tamas Dobozy validate my work gives me a boost of confidence. I have benefitted enormously from this year’s Writer in

Award-winning writers Dania Tomlinson, left, and Bronwyn Berg at the 2016 Okanagan Short Story Contest event.

Residence.”

Second place was awarded to Kelowna writer Bronwyn Berg for “The Weight of Things,” which Dobozy called “really funny and beautifully restrained.” Bronwyn’s story wryly and tenderly chronicles the decline of a World War Two veteran and former railway accident photographer as he moves into old age and dementia.

Third prize went to another Kelowna writer and UBC alumna, Brittni Mackenzie-Dale, a graduate of the university’s Creative Writing program and a third-place winner in 2014. Her story, “That’s What They Call It, Anyways,” got the nod this time around.

Before introducing the winners and reading from his own work, Dobozy emphasized the importance of funding the arts and thanked the Central Okanagan Foundation for their longstanding financial support of the valley-wide contest.

The Okanagan Short Story Contest is an annual event sponsored by UBC’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, the Central Okanagan Foundation, and Kelowna’s Capital News. It is open to all residents of BC’s Southern Interior.

Who: John Greyson, FCCS Visiting Scholar

What: Documentary film screening: “Fig Trees”
When: Monday, March 21 at 7 p.m.
Where: University Theatre (ADM 026), UBC’s Okanagan campus, Kelowna
Admission: Free and open to the public

What: Public talk: “Narcissus in Cairo”
When: Thursday, March 24 at 7 p.m.
Where: Black Box Theatre, 1375 Water Street, Kelowna
Admission: Free and open to the public

He’s talented, outspoken, openly gay, and has spent months in a brutal Egyptian prison, held without charges.

Human-rights activist John Greyson is also a Toronto film/video artist and professor at York University, who will spend a week at UBC’s Okanagan campus working with students and faculty. Also during his March 21-25 visit, Greyson presents a film screening and a public lecture.

Greyson was invited to be one of 2016’s Visiting Scholars by UBC’s Michael V. Smith, associate professor of Creative Writing, and Daniel Keyes, associate professor of Cultural Studies, both in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies (FCCS).

“John Greyson isn’t just one of the most influential independent filmmakers in Canada, nor just a world-class artist-activist, he was also a cause célèbre for his illegal incarceration in Egypt,” says Smith. “Artists around the world denounced his seizure. His Okanagan visit will be inspiring, as he brings together filmmaking, politics and global responsibility.”

Greyson’s film shorts, features and installations include: Fig Trees, Proteus the Law of Enclosures, Lilies, Un©ut, Zero Patience, The Making of Monsters and Urinal.

During his visit to UBC Okanagan, Greyson will screen Fig Trees, a feature-length documentary opera about the struggles of AIDS activists Tim McCaskell of Toronto and Zackie Achmat of Cape Town, as they fight for access to drug treatment. The free screening is Monday, March 21 at 7 p.m. in the University Theatre (ADM 026) at UBC’s Okanagan campus.

Greyson also presents a free public lecture, titled “Narcissus in Cairo,” on Thursday, March 24 at the Black Box Theatre, 1375 Water St., downtown Kelowna, 7 p.m. Detailing his self-named “Egyptian spa vacation,” the talk is a queer reading of his internationally-denounced detainment in an Egyptian prison sell with 38 other prisoners, without charges, for seven weeks in 2013.

An Associate Professor in Film Production at York University, and a PhD candidate in Sexual Diversity/Drama at U of T, Greyson was awarded the Toronto Arts Award for Film/Video (2000), the Bell Canada Video Art Award (2007), and the Alanis Obamsawin Cinema Politica Award (2011).

Beyond traditional feature and documentary filmmaking, Greyson has created a number of activist new-media projects, including a 40-webisode murder mystery he created for the Toronto Transit Commission to be broadcast on their subway platforms (2014).

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Contact: Dan Keyes, daniel.keyes@ubc.ca, 250-807-9320