The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies welcomes Visiting Scholars, Richard Kerridge and Roy Miki. Each Visiting Scholar will spend one week on campus working with students and faculty, and community members. Kerridge and Miki will join together for a public reading to share their recent work on Thursday, March 19th.

• What: Public Reading with Richard Kerridge and Roy Miki
• When: Thursday, March 19, 7pm
• Where: Kelowna Art Gallery, 1315 Water Street
• Admission: Free and open to the public

Richard Kerridge

Richard Kerridge is a nature writer and ecocritic. Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians, published by Chatto & Windus in 2014, is a mixture of memoir and nature writing. It was adapted for BBC national radio and broadcast as a Radio 4 Book of the Week in July 2014. Other nature writing by Richard has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing.

Roy Miki

Accomplished poet/artist Roy Miki is a Professor Emeritus in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, and has published widely on contemporary Canadian literature and on Japanese Canadian concerns. Miki is the author of several books, his third book of poems, Surrender (Mercury Press 2001), received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Miki received the Order of Canada in 2006 and the Order of British Columbia in 2009.

In addition to this public reading, Richard Kerridge will also offer a lecture on March 18th at 2:00 on campus in CS 227 as part of the FCCS Eco Cultures Research Series. Roy Miki will offer a public talk on March 23rd at 12:30 on campus in ART 112.

For more information, visit fccs.ok.ubc.ca/news-events/speakers-guests/visitingscholars.html 

The Eco Cultures Research Series focusses on the complex intersection of culture, imagination, and ecological issues.  This series connects UBC Okanagan researchers with colleagues and students engaged in diverse explorations of  today’s most timely forms of artistic and critical innovation.

This fall we had two excellent presentations from Norah Bowman,  Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Okanagan College, and Vin Nardizzi, Associate Professor in English at UBC’s Vancouver campus.  Their talks were inspiring and relevant to a number of faculty member’s work in FCCS.

The series continues this month:

Wednesday, March 18
Richard Kerridge, Cold Blood
2-3:30pm, CCS 227 (UBC Okanagan Campus)

Renowned writer Richard Kerridge is one of the most distinguished ecocritics in Europe today, and a highly accomplished nature writer. He has published numerous critical essays; and he is a frequent invited speaker at international conferences. In May of this year, he published Cold Blood (Chatto and Windus), a nature writing memoir about reptiles and amphibians that was serialized on BBC Radio 4.

Wednesday, March 25
Jodey Castricano, Behind the Walls: Bioengineering, Animal Advocacy and the Ethics of Control
3:30 -5:00 pm, CS 227 (UBC Okanagan Campus)

Jodey Castricano is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, teaching in the English and Cultural Studies programs. Her primary area of expertise and ethical concern is in posthumanist philosophy and critical animal studies with extended work in ecocriticsm, ecofeminism and ecotheory.

Mina Rajabi Paak graduated with an MA in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies  at UBC Okanagan. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology at an international institution, but in her third and fourth years she was drawn to electives such as Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Critical Urban Studies, and Anthropology. “Thus my honors thesis,” she said in an interview, “ended up being an interdisciplinary project.” UBCO’s interdisciplinary graduate program offers students a unique opportunity to explore various disciplines as part of their research. In Mina’s case, her focus on Sociology eventually combined with an interest in other topics. Mina mentioned that UBC’s FCCS “was from the very start one of my top choices.Also, I was in touch with Dr. George Grinnell, who later on became my master’s supervisor, before I applied to the school and we discussed my project and found a good balance between our interests. So wanting to work with him was also an important factor in my choice.”

Once Mina arrived in Kelowna, she got comfortable with the campus and the city, in general, pretty quickly.

Mina Rajabi Paak

“I found a community of friends very soon, which helped a lot with my coping process. I got used to things a lot easier and a lot faster than I had expected.” Another unique aspect of UBCO’s FCCS is that the academic support for students is incredibly robust, particularly in regards to the size of the campus: “I had a great supervisor and a small team of brilliant scholars who helped me throughout my project. So although the department and the number of faculty members were fairly small, I received a great deal of support.”

FCCS’s scholarly support led to Mina’s academic work being developed and disseminated. In Kelowna, this included participating with her supervisor in an Alterknowledge presentation hosted by the Alternator Gallery. Additionally, “I was lucky enough to get a sizable travel grant from FCCS to go to CUNY’s international conference in New York in 2014 and present a part of my thesis project to a diverse audience. The feedback that I received at the conference influenced my final project to a great extent.” Finally, Mina also participated in and won one of the two FCCS spots for the 3 Minute Thesis Competition and noted, “I recommend taking part in it to everyone!” Mina has since continued on with her academic career, currently working on a PhD in Humanities at York University. She represents one of many success stories for students of UBC Okanagan’s FCCS.

In conclusion, Mina notes: “I would encourage people to become FCCS students if they have projects or interests in mind that they can’t quite figure out or fit into any field or if they are interested in a number of areas and feel like they can’t choose to pursue only one. The space and freedom of the IGS program gives them the opportunity to define things on their own terms and create a collage of their interests without having to worry about disciplinary limits.”

This story was written by Brandon Taylor, English major in FCCS. Brandon is a Research Assistant in FCCS, contacting alumni to find out about their experiences here at UBCO.

FCCS Faculty Researchers: Oliver Lovesey, Michael Treschow, Martin Blum, Suzanne Gott, Sean Lawrence

UBC is proud to be a place of research and Mar 2 to 6, 2015 marks the 10th year that UBC’s Okanagan campus will showcase its research and its importance to our communities and the world with its annual Celebrate Research week.

At the FCCS Brown Bag Luncheon series, Faculty members share their research by delivering recent conference papers.
Each session will be chaired; presenters will give a paper for 20 minutes each, followed by 10-15 minutes of discussion and questions.

Each talk will be 11:30 am – 12:30 PM (room indicated below).

Monday, March 2– Chair, Matt Rader, CCS 221

Suzanne Gott, Assistant Professor, Art History & Visual Culture – Breaking Boundaries: Curating a Research-based Museum Exhibition

Virginie Magnat, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Performance – Ecology and/of/in Performance

Tuesday, March 3– Chair, Oliver Lovesey, CCS 142

Michael Treschow, Associate Professor, English – Elegy and Eulogy in The Battle of Maldon

Sean Lawrence, Associate Professor, English – The Peace of Empires and the Empire of Peace in Shakespeare and Levinas

Wednesday, March 4– Chair Virginie Magnat, CCS 221

Greg Garrard, Associate Professor, Sustainability – Being Zoo: Bestial Humans and Sexual Animals

Aleksandra Dulic, Assistant Professor, New Media, Drawing – Artful Doing—Designing Reflective Experience for Sustainability Practice

Thursday, March 5– Chair Mercedes Duran Cogan, CCS 142

Oliver Lovesey, Associate Professor, English – Traveling Classification: George Eliot and the Postcolonial

Martin Blum, Associate Professor, English – East Germany’s Ecological Revolution: The Third Way

Friday March 6 – Chair Kyong Yoon, CCS 142

Anderson Araujo, Assistant Professor, English – Bravo, Canada boys!’: Pope, Pound, Owen, and the Politics of Pro Patria Mori

Lisa Grekul, Associate Professor, English – Novel Interventions: Narrating Canada’s First World War Internment Operations into Public Memory

For a schedule of other research related events on campus all week, visit celebrateresearch.ok.ubc.ca/schedule

Brandon Taylor, an English Major in Critical Studies, was awarded $2,500 from the FCC S Undergraduate Student Research Award fund. The research project involved a critical investigation of how contemporary American commercial television programming creates empathetic routes toward sociopaths and what this relationship implies. He immersed himself in the relevant literature of Television Studies (Fiske, Mittel, Kellner, Feuer, etc.) and on Breaking Bad, exploring how it shifts the white male psychopath paradigm (Martin’s Difficult Men, Sepinwall’s The Revolution was Televised).

Brandon completed a series of steps to conceive of, research, compose, create, and edit a scholary journal article under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Keyes. The article is under review from the Montreal-based online film studies journal Offscreen.com. “I feel that my article will productively add to the discourse surrounding television and its continuously transforming ecology.” Says Taylor. “I am confident the paper may find a home there and that Mr. Taylor may continue to further develop the notion that Breaking Bad represents a rupture in industrial mass produced and disseminated narrative form.” Says Dr. Daniel Keyes, Brandon’s supervisor for this research project.

“The grant application was successful on every front. It was incredibly helpful, in terms of creating a space and time to do research on both my topic and the field, as well as granting me the time to work directly with Dr. Keyes, which proved invaluable.”

The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Undergraduate Research Awards provide undergraduate students support to engage in research and creation activities over the summer months. The award is meant to encourage undergraduate students who are enrolled in a major in FCCS B.A. or B.F.A. programs (English, Cultural Studies, Art History and Visual Culture, French, Spanish, Creative Writing, Visual Arts and Interdisciplinary Performance, or Combined Majors) to pursue innovative and original research under the supervision of one or more FCCS faculty members.

The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies welcomes Visiting Scholar, Leigh Badgley, to share her work and expertise with faculty, students and the public.

• Who: Visiting Scholar Leigh Badgley
• What: Leigh Badgley presents the compelling documentary: The Dolphin Dealer
• When: Wednesday, February 18, 3:30 pm
• Where: University Theatre (9ADM 026)
• Admission: Free and open to the public

Leigh Badgley

Leigh is a born storyteller. Her greatest gift is the ability to engage people’s imaginations and inspire them to take a stand in their lives. The stories Leigh tells, through film, new media and print, empower audiences to re-commit to that place inside of them that knows that anything is possible and hope is the way to a better world.

Leigh has created a library of important, inspiring documentaries, including Greenpeace: Making a Stand (Global Television, 2006), winner of the Leo Award for Best Documentary and the Special Jury Award at the Explorers Club Film Festival in New York. This film helped preserve the forest homeland of Argentina’s Wichi indigenous people and was showcased at the World Peace Forum in Vancouver. The Dolphin Dealer (CBC, 2008) featured Ric O’Barry, star of the Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove, and exposed a controversial dolphin capture program in the Solomon Islands.

Other culture-oriented films include True Prince: Vladimir Malakhov, a one-hour performing arts piece for CBC and A&E, which won several prestigious awards including best arts documentary at the Hot Docs Festival, and How the Fiddle Flows, a one-hour special on Métis music and dance for Bravo! and the National Film Board of Canada.

Other producing credits include: the CBC television specials CannaBiz and ShockWave, Shimmy, a 26-episode belly dance series for Discovery, and Namaste, a 26-epiode series on hatha yoga for ONE, Body, Mind, Spirit, Love.
Leigh has a keen interest in combining traditional television and documentary programming with fresh digital components. Her first transmedia project for the hit television series Ice Pilots NWT was nominated for a Rockie Award at the Banff Television Festival.

Leigh is a part-time faculty member in the media department at Maharishi University of Management and at Alexander College in Vancouver. She is a frequent public speaker around environmental causes. Leigh is on the steering committee of Global Reef, an organization dedicated to producing media about ocean conservation, and is passionate about working towards a sustainable future for humanity.

This lecture is part of the FCCS Eco Cultures Research Series, which connects UBC Okanagan researchers with colleagues and students engaged in diverse explorations of today’s most timely forms of artistic and critical innovation.