Alterknowledge Event, May 9, 2014

The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies was busy this past year with many events and projects.

The 2013-14 season of the AlterKnowledge Discussion Series saw more than 300 people participating in the 9 discussions. We would like to recognize the partnership of the Alternator Centre, who provided such a wonderful space for the series. AlterKnowledge will return in September with another series of discussions focused on issues of decolonization.

Award-winning documentary filmmaker and teacher Helen Haig-Brown spent a week on campus as our Visiting Scholar. She spent her time on campus working with students and faculty and offering a public talk and a screening of her recent documentary Legacy (2013).

For the second year in a row, Theatre26 presented student performances as well as a variety of events by performance and theatre groups from the Okanagan and beyond in the University Theatre to enthusiastic audiences of students, staff, faculty and community members.

The Visiting Author Series brought four acclaimed Canadian writers and poets to the Okanagan to present their work to enthusiastic audiences at the Okanagan Regional Library.

The Creative Studies department hosted four Visiting Artists who gave public lectures about their art practice to visual arts students, staff, faculty, and community members.

Emerging Visions event, January 2014

The Emerging Visions Research Series hosted excellent presentations from artist-researchers and scholars from all over North America.  The talks were inspiring and relevant to a number of faculty member’s work in FCCS, and were a great opportunity to be introduced to faculty members’ research in FCCS as well.

The Hispanic Film Series, co-presented by the Spanish Program and the Latin American & Liberian Studies Program at UBC Okanagan and Okanagan College, included films from all over Latin America. The theme for the Winter 2014 line up was realism in Hispanic films.

We look forward to the continued showcase of these and new events for the upcoming year.

Common Ground Anthology cover image

Common Ground is a UBC Okanagan anthology that was launched this past April, and was edited and published by graduate students.  As the title suggests, Common Ground explores the subject of place, it refers to what we all share: the natural world around us and the people and the stories that make us who we are.

Masters student, Kelly Mitton from the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies was the one that came up with the idea to produce this magazine. Kelly knew of another student anthology that had been done at UBCO a few years ago, and she was impressed by the community-building that happened around its creation and at its launch event.  She wanted to do something similar, but on a broader scale that would involve people from the entire campus.

Kelly enlisted other students to come on board to help with the organizing and editing of the anthology. The editorial team consists of Kelly Mitton (MA-IGS), Kelly Shepherd (MFA), Sarah Jacknife (BA Indigenous Studies), and Cameron Welch (The Phoenix Newspaper).

The first edition of the anthology received over 80 submissions from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty members. The contributions came from various faculties and departments at UBCO including Creative Writing, Sciences, Nursing, Business, Performance, and so on.

“The launch night itself was really fun and amazing; it was rewarding to see so many people there.” Says editor Kelly Shepherd. The launch had live music and poetry readings and was held on campus at The Well.

“It was great to meet the people I met, and especially to work closely with peers who I would not have worked with otherwise.”  Notes Shepherd.

The graduate students will be finishing their program this year, but they hope that based on the success of this project, that stude
nts in future years carry on this idea.

The anthologies were for sale at the launch event for $20 each, which went to offset the costs of printing with the profits donated to the UBCO Student Food Bank. Copies of the anthology can be purchased from the editorial team by contacting common.ground.ubco@gmail.com.

Shimshon Obadia

UBC’s Okanagan campus found a perfect subject for its recently launched Our Stories campaign: FCCS student Shimshon Obadia.

A video featurette and long-form feature story about Obadia can be seen at ourstories.ok.ubc.ca/shimshono.

Obadia, a third-year Interdisciplinary Performance major has been working with Grade 7 and 8 classes at École KLO Middle School in Kelowna, B.C., to restore a damaged wetland and lost habitat of the Western Painted turtle.

In 2013, Obadia was recruited to engage the habitat re-naturalization project through creative solutions, using eco art to help raise awareness and funds, which culminated with the public gallery exhibit “Concrete in the Creek.” The aim of this project was to get a natural learning environment conducive to embodied, practice-based learning through building enough support for this project in the community.

Obadia was hired as a research assistant with the Eco Art Incubator,  an initiative directed by FCCS professors Nancy Holmes and Denise Kenney. The Incubator supported Obadia’s project work with the school and enabled him to pursue more extensive research in the area of integrating art, nature, and science into interdisciplinary school projects.

Find out more about Our Stories at ourstories.ubc.ca.

Students who presented the project at the AlterKowledge event on May 9

Students studying colonialism and decolonization have produced a collection of critical/creative engagements with heritage commemorations in Kelowna and beyond.  The pieces in the collection use a variety of approaches, including experimental non-fiction and poetry, a graphic essay, postcards, and an academic essay. All are aimed at provoking discussion about how public histories are represented, whose voices and experiences are privileged, and how heritage projects produce belonging (and exclusion).

The projects were developed in a 3rd year Cultural Studies and English course that examined the history of colonialism as a cultural project.

Students were asked to analyze the degree to which heritage commemorations in Kelowna, or their home communities, reflect the ‘settlement myth.’

Settler Melankelownia cover image

The settlement myth refers to the story people in settler colonial societies, like Canada, tend to tell. For instance, in this narrative, ‘history’ begins when the first European settlers arrived, Indigenous histories and knowledge are ignored or relegated to the past, and heritage commemorations become ways to show how a ‘wilderness’ was transformed into ‘civilization.’ As a number of the contributions illuminate, remembering Kelowna’s past requires forgetting the violence of colonialism.

The collection includes engagements with: historical narratives of the ‘settlement’ of Penticton; the narrative of progress that shapes the Okanagan Heritage Museum exhibits; the way in which streets and mountains are named for white settler men, and how this reflects ways of thinking about the land; the narrative of Father Pandosy as first settler; the Calgary Stampede, and the Last Spike heritage site at Craigellachie.

The collection also includes an Introduction written by the course instructor, David Jefferess.

AlterKnowledge event at the Alternator Centre, May 9

This project was presented at last Friday’s Alterknowledge Discussion Series, which was the last of the 2013-14 season. The series saw more than 300 people participate in the 9 discussions, and will return in September with another series of discussions focused on issues of decolonization.

A copy of the collection can be found on the Cultural Studies webpage highlighting student work.

Click here for more information about the Cultural Studies program.

2014 IGS Conference Organizers

2014 marks the fifth year that the Graduate Students in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies have taken the lead in organizing the IGS Grad Student Conference. This year’s conference, entitled Rethinking Sustainability: New Critical and Cultural Horizons, will be held May 2-3rd on UBC’s Okanagan Campus.

The organization of this years conference is being coordinated by interdisciplinary graduate students for graduate students across disciplines; Mina Rajabi Paak (Co- Chair), Shandell Houlden (Co-Chair), Spela Grasic, Matt M. Husain, Joanne Taylor, Max Dickeson, Fabian Cid Yañez, Camilo Peña, Katey Kyle, David Kadish, and Jeannette Angel. Organizing and running a conference offers a unique opportunity for students to become familiarized with aspects of academia beyond writing and studying, such as communicating between departments, applying for funding, organizing catering, volunteers and so on.

When thinking about ‘sustainability,’ it is common to assume a connection to environmental discourse and practice, rather than consideration of sustainability itself as a framework of maintenance, legacy, and change. But what exactly is ‘sustainability’? And what does it mean to practice sustainability? Is this a framework exclusively applicable to environmental practices and thought? Or can the concept of sustainability, or the question of what it means to sustain, be applied more broadly to the study of literature, anthropology or mathematics? How do epistemologies of sustainability vary across fields? In short, what do we sustain? What becomes normatively understood as deserving sustaining?

This year’s conference welcomes keynote speaker, Sarah de Leeuw from the University of Northern BC.  de Leeuw’s research is focused on relationships between people in place – this often includes how people care for or account for each other, mobilize power in relation to each other, or even how they relate to each other creatively and/or strategically.

The conference will also host an Eco Cultures Discussion with conference participants and invited guests Professors Denise Kenney

Jeannette Angel getting ready to install “Materiality” in the FINA Gallery

(Interdisciplinary Performance), Jodey Castricano (Critical Animal Studies) and recent MFA Graduate Cathy Stubington. The discussion is intended to generate conversation on the role of the arts in sustainability across multiple communities.

This discussion will be held in conjunction with the FINA Gallery Exhibition Materiality featuring interactive works on the relationship between nature and technology by David Kadish and Jeannette Angel, as well as a poetry reading by Kelly Shepherd on May 3 at 11:45am.

The exhibition will be open for the two days of the conference May 2 & 3rd, 9-4pm in the FINA Gallery in the CCS Building at UBC Okanagan.

In addition, the conference will close with a reception in the UNC ballroom, beginning at 4:00 PM on Saturday May 3rd.  Tickets for the reception will be $15, payable at the door; purchase of a ticket includes appetizers and one drink, with additional drinks purchasable at the bar. For more information, you can email the conference organizers at igsconference2014@gmail.com.

Visit our blog to view the conference program and for registration information.