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.

Heather Leier posing with one of her prints

Heather Leier was a local Okanagan student who graduated with her BFA at UBCO’s FCCS and that has led her to pursue an MFA at the University of Alberta. Heather was initially drawn to UBCO because her sisters had great experiences with the campus and she was also living in Kelowna.

Her interest in FCCS originated from her desire to seriously pursue art as her career path. When she arrived in the BFA program, she said that she found “a tight- knit community of students, professors, technical assistants, and administrative staff who work together to add to the creative environment in Kelowna.” FCCS focuses on creating comfortable creative communities that foster the ability of students to express themselves in a productive and focused environment.

Heather made ample use of the resources available in the BFA program: “I was given opportunities to show my work at local art galleries as well as encouraged to submit my work to international exhibitions. Additionally, I was able to do a practicum at the Lake Country Art Gallery. This was an amazing experience that gave me extraordinary insight into working in the creative sector in a curatorial and administrative capacity which has proven to be invaluable.” She also found support on campus with Professor Briar Craig “who was and is still a pivotal supporter of my work and has created an amazing printmaking community at UBC Okanagan where students are not only given technical and conceptual education, but many professional development opportunities.”

Heather’s time with the FCCS was not just creatively fulfilling; it also provided a series of practical skills that helped build her résumé: “My BFA not only gave me a conceptual and technical foundation to pursue my education at the graduate level but also gave me practical skills to work in the artistic community. I was taught how to work as part of a community of makers, how to critique, and how to take criticism. These are transferable skills that I have been able to apply in many school and work environments. The small community at UBC Okanagan definitely fostered a sense of ownership, responsibility, and leadership in me that I now apply when teaching undergraduate students.”

work from the Dark Corpse series, photo lithography

Heather is now an MFA student in printmaking at the University of Alberta, which she describes as an absolutely incredible experience. Heather, in conclusion, says: “UBCO’s FCCS is a dynamic faculty to pursue an education in. It is a place where collaboration and innovation are fostered and opportunities extend beyond the campus. The Okanagan is the perfect place to have your creative ideas supported and realized.”

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.

Amber Choo at Niagra Falls

Amber Choo  graduated with her BFA at UBC Okanagan. She was drawn to FCCS because she had taken an interest in artistic endeavors during high school. Her passion for a broad range of creative outlets led to her taking the opportunity to work in many different fields on campus. While at UBCO, she worked with Dr. Aleksandra Dulic  in the Centre for Culture and Technology. In an interview, she explains: “I became a work study student, which helped me hone my skills in 3D modelling and constructing virtual spaces in the Unity game engine. The Phoenix  campus newspaper also hired me as their Arts editor for three years, which helped me hone my writing skills. Both jobs gave me the skills I would need for a master’s degree researching game design, games for health, and virtual reality applications.”

Her experience with UBCO’s FCCS helped her anticipate her future path as both an artist and a student: “The people you meet during the BFA program help you develop a rough context behind what to expect in the real world outside of academia. I think a lot of students come into the BFA program expecting to become best-selling artists but eventually realize their dreams will take a different form, which is often not what they initially expected.” However, she also says that “artists and designers are needed in the most magically obscure interdisciplinary research spaces, and sometimes you don’t know they exist until they ask you to join them, which is what happened to me.”

Virtual reality environment by Amber Choo

Amber is now a graduate student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC: “My latest graduate research work consists of constructing virtual reality applications to help acute and chronic pain patients better manage their pain experiences. We make our software in Unity and use head-mounted displays similar to the Oculus Rift. Next month, we’ll be running formal studies in a Vancouver pain clinic with the virtual realities I helped create.”

Amber Choo represents one of many success stories for students of UBC Okanagan’s FCCS. Her BFA was integral in developing both her technical and

Stereoscopic virtual reality environment by Amber Choo

artistic skills, which have proven vital to her continuing studies. She concluded: “I would strongly encourage new students to grab at opportunities as they appear, even if they don’t directly align with your current interests. The work study program was phenomenal and I made some of my dearest friends at the student newspaper. Pairing these types of on-campus opportunities with your undergraduate art studies creates a holistic learning experience and opens many doors for you.”

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.

Constance Crompton, assistant professor of Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus, has received a $297,357 Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada, a project she co-directs with Michelle Schwartz (Ryerson University). Susan Brown from the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (University of Alberta), Don McLeod Robarts Library Head of Serials Acquisition (University of Toronto), and Elise Chenier director of the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (Simon Fraser University) join Schwartz and Crompton as collaborators on the project.

Constance Crompton

The Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada (LGLC) project reconfigures Don McLeod’s books, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology volumes 1 and 2, as digital resources that will allow users to explore the people, places, events, and publications that defined the history of gay liberation in Canada between 1964 and 1981. Crompton and Schwartz are building an interactive digital resource for the study of LGBT history in Canada. This digital resource will exist as a freely available website and as an app available for smartphones and tablets.

By leveraging TEI-XML, semantic web technology, and graph databases (the type of database that powers social networking sites like Facebook), the LGLC illuminates connections between the people, the organizations, the periodicals and the demonstrations that defined the gay liberation movement as it moved from city to city, offering new insights into the political action, art, and lobbying that led to historic legal reforms in Canada. The LGLC project is supplementing the historical research that underpins the base text with new information about people, periodicals, and places, allowing users to generate custom maps and timelines in response to their searches.

LGLC is also an infrastructure pilot project within the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory at the University of Alberta. The XML-encoded volumes of Don McLeod’s chronology are housed by CWRC and will be integrated with their Online Research Canada database. By being included in CWRC, LGLC content will be made available as part of an interdisciplinary, open-access library database, for use by researchers and students worldwide.

Thanks to SSHRC’s support, in 2104 the project welcomed three new research assistants, Jessica Bonney (UBCO), Raymon Sandhu (UBCO), Sarah Lane (Ryerson), who joined the LGLC’s RA-Project Manager, Travis White (UBCO).