This year’s conference will take place on Saturday January 12, 2013 at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
Liz Heron, Alfred Hermida, Karen Pinchin, Steve Pratt – How Social Media are Changing Journalism
Liz Heron, Social Media Editor at The New York Times, Alfred Hermida, Associate Professor, UBC Graduate School of Journalism, Karen Pinchin, founding editor of OpenFile Vancouver, and Steve Pratt, Director of CBC Radio 3 and CBC Radio Digital Programming present a lively panel discussion. This is the first in a series of three free panel discussions of the Social Media, Journalism, and Politics Special Lecture Series at UBC Robson Square, hosted by UBC Continuing Studies’ Lifelong Learning Series in partnership with the UBC Graduate School of Journalism.
Select Articles and Books Available at UBC Library
Hermida, A. (2014). Tell everyone: Why we share & why it matters. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. [Link]
Hermida, A. (2012). Tweets and truth. Journalism practice, 6(5), 659-668. [Link]
UBC Resource Guides
Nir Eyal – Medical Tourism in South Asia: Moving From Brain Drain to Brain Gain
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College. With the 2012 global turnover expected to reach $100-billion USD, medical tourism (travel across international borders to obtain health care) is rapidly expanding. India and Thailand are currently the lead global service suppliers. Unfortunately, providing health care to tourists may exacerbate the already critical shortages of health professionals in these countries’ underserved sectors—in remote rural areas and in the public sector. What can be done to improve the impact of medical tourism on health worker availability in these sectors? State regulation of medical tourism might increase prices and send tourists to competitors. International regulation and codes tend to be toothless. Nir Eyal proposes an ethical accreditation system that might improve health worker availability at an acceptable cost. Accreditation could promote global health in additional areas. This lecture is part of the ongoing Green College Principal’s lecture series, “Thematic Series: Public Health Law and Policy in Asia.”
Biography
Dr. Nir Eyal is Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine (Medical Ethics) at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Eyal’s work addresses ethical ways to address critical health worker shortages; healthcare rationing in resource-poor settings; markets in human organs; the ethical grounds for informed consent; personal responsibility for health; the ethics of translational research; and accrediting corporations for improving global health.
Select Articles Available at UBC
Zimmerman M, Shakya R, Pokhrel BM, Eyal N, Rijal BP, Shrestha RN, Sayami A. (2012). Medical students’ characteristics as predictors of career practice location: retrospective cohort study tracking graduates of Nepal’s first medical college. British Medical Journal. BMJ Publishing Group. 345; Aug 13: e4826. [Link]
Eyal N, Bärnighausen T. (2012). Precommitting to Serve the Underserved. American Journal of Bioethics; 12(5):23-34. [Link]
Eyal N. (2011). Why treat noncompliant patients? Beyond the decent minimum account. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy; 36(6):572-88. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Julie Devaney and Gary Geddes
JULIE DEVANEY and GARY GEDDES
at the Robson Reading Series
Thursday, January 24, 2013, 7pm
UBC Bookstore at Robson Square
Robson Reading Series events are free and open to the public but registration is recommended. To register for this event, please click here.
“In giving us her rage, humour and fallibility, Devaney has perfectly highlighted our cultural fear of frankly discussing the reality of illness.” – The National Post
Julie Devaney is a patient-expert based in Toronto. She is the author and performer of the critically acclaimed show, educational workshop series, and book, My Leaky Body (Goose Lane Editions, September 2012). According to the National Post, “While this memoir is an uncompromisingly detailed account of one woman’s medical experiences, it acts as a sort of Everyman tome, a handbook on the rights of the patient to dictate their own path to wellness.” Devaney was named a Woman Health Hero by Best Health Magazine in 2011 and has been profiled on CBC Radio’s White Coat, Black Art and The Current, Chatelaine and the Toronto Star. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Life and numerous anthologies. Find her on Twitter: @juliedevaney
Her weakest moment spawned a crusade for change. Julie Devaney takes us on a journey through the health care system as she is diagnosed and treated for ulcerative colitis. In and out of emergency rooms in Vancouver and Toronto, she’s poked, prodded, and abandoned to a closet at one point, bearing the helplessness and indignities of a system that seems hell-bent on victimizing the sick.
Raw, harrowing, and darkly funny, Julie Devaney argues convincingly for fixes to the system and better training for all medical personnel. As she recovers, she sets out to do just that: setting up a gurney on stage at workshops and conferences across the country to teach Bedside Manners 101 and to advocate for repairs to the system.
Part memoir, part love story, part revolutionary manifesto, My Leaky Body is politically astute, gooey like cake batter, and raw like ulcerated bowels. Devaney writes the book that will heal her aching heart and relax her strictured rectum as she weaves stories from professional and public interactions with tales from her gurney.
“Geddes has produced a work well worth reading for both its content and its call to action.” – The National Post
Drink the Bitter Root is a provocative, emotionally charged account of one writer’s travels in sub-Saharan Africa. Haunted by the 1993 murder of a Somali teenager by Canadian soldiers in what became known as the Somalia affair, and long fascinated by the “dark continent,” Gary Geddes decides at age 68 to make the trip. His explorations are guided by questions: How can a tribunal in a suburb of Europe change things on the ground in Africa? Is international aid improving the lives of ordinary Africans or contributing to their suffering?
Geddes’s search takes him first to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In Rwanda and Uganda, he attends grassroots criminal courts and encounters rescued street kids, women raped and infected with HIV during the genocide, and victims mutilated by the Lord’s Resistance Army. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Somaliland, with the help of fixers and the occasional armed guard, Geddes finds himself in the instructive—at times redeeming—presence of child soldiers, refugees and poets-turned–freedom fighters. Of particular note is his time in Somaliland, where he learns about the country’s concern with poetry as “a healing and a subversive art”; Somalia is known as a nation of poets, and Geddes attends various events that bear that appellation out, including a four-hour extravaganza of poetry devoted to celebrating the camel attended by 500 people.
The stories Geddes brings back are haunting, uplifting, stark and sometimes unbearable, but all are presented with the essential lightness Jean-Paul Sartre insisted is so crucial to good writing. This masterful blend of history, reportage, testimonial and memoir is a condemnation of the horrors spawned by greed and corruption and an eloquent tribute to human resilience.
Set across Africa, this is a deeply engaging investigation of trauma, justice and the redemptive powers of imagination from an internationally acclaimed author.
Gary Geddes has written and edited more than 45 books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translations and anthologies and won more than a dozen national and international literary awards, including the National Magazine Gold Award, Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lt.-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from Chile. His recent titles include two books of poetry, Falsework (Goose Lane, 2007) and Swimming Ginger (Goose Lane, 2010), and two works of non-fiction, Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things (HarperCollins, 2005) and Drink the Bitter Root: A writer’s search for justice and redemption in Africa (Douglas & McIntyre, 2011).
George Buchanan – Finding Information: Effects of Collaboration and Place
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by SLAIS. When seeking information, either within a document or in a large collection of materials, the contexts of collaboration and place have a strong influence on user performance. While those studying human behaviour have noted these factors, there is at present only a limited understanding of how to provide features that exploit these contexts in computer-based information discovery systems. In this seminar, Dr. Buchanan will report on a series of projects that have uncovered how each factor can be leveraged in new interactions between people and technology, and indicate how the interplay between social and location contexts can provide opportunities neither can on their own. George Buchanan is a Reader in the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design at City University London. His main areas of research encompass information seeking and mobile technologies. His work has received a series of best-paper awards, and he is currently Research Chair of the British Computer Society Special Interest Group (SIG) on Interaction.
Select Articles Available at UBC
Buchanan, George. (2010). The Usability of digital Documents – A Barrier to Digital Scholarship. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. 4(1-2). pp. 125 – 139. [Link]
Buchanan, George. (2010). The Fused Library: Integrating Digital and Physical Libraries With Location-Aware Sensors. Proceedings of the 10th Annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. JCDL ’10. pp. 273-282. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Truths and Consequences presented by the Capilano University Art Institute
The Reef, by Ian MacDonald
This is the second installment of this exhibition by a collective group of sculpture artists (featuring Olga Campbell, Ian MacDonald, Derek Stuart, and Susanna Blunt) at the Capilano Institute under the guidance of George Rammell. This exhibition will run from January 5 to January 30, 2013. The Art Institute, specializing in Sculpture, Media Art and Printmaking, is an artist-in-residence programs which offers advanced studies to artists with several years of experience in sculpture, media art, or printmaking, artists practicing in parallel media such as painting or photography, and recent university or art school graduates. Sculpture studios include the necessary facilities for woodworking, steel fabrication, stone cutting, art foundry processes and paper casting. Areas of concern are often multi-disciplinary and various forms of media.
Ian MacDonald – A retired businessman and successful inventor with commercial products distributed around the world, Ian is currently in third year at Emily Carr University and is a member of the Capilano Sculpture Institute. He is at the stage of his artist career where he wants to explore a wide variety of methods and materials – be it bronze, metal fabrication, wood, stone or synthetic materials.
Image courtesy, Susanna Blunt
Susanna Blunt – Having lived in the San Francisco Bay area for three years before returning to Vancouver, Susanna continued teaching in both private and public institutions, including three years on the faculty of the Fine Arts Department at the University of British Columbia. She has worked with Yoko Ono, assisting her with various art projects and was invited with David Hockney to jury a national art competition. She then moved to California and started a teaching career.
Susanna Blunt became known for her trompe l’oeil paintings and designed the optical illusion room for the Science World museum in Vancouver in 1988. In 1991 and 92, she lived in France and took part in five shows, group and solo, winning an award in an international competition. She is widely acclaimed by a large international clientele who have commissioned her to paint their portraits. Among the well-known people she has painted are Toni Onley, painter, Vancouver; George Woodcock, author, Vancouver; Stanley Donen, film producer, Los Angeles; Stephen Isserlis, Cellist, London; and was chosen in a nation wide competition, by Her Excellency, Gerda Hnatyshyn, wife of Governor General Ramon Hnatyshyn, to paint her portrait for Rideau Hall in Ottawa, Ontario. In 1997, she painted and personally delivered to Buckingham Palace a portrait of His Highness, the Prince Edward. Please visit Susanna Blunt’s website for more information about her work.
Sculpture by Olga Campbell
Olga Campbell – Olga Campbell has been creating art since 1993 when she graduated from Emily Carr School of Art and Design. Her work includes sculpture, mixed media, digital prints and photography. She has had numerous shows in Metro Vancouver throughout the years, including a solo exhibition on the Holocaust at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery in Vancouver. In her first book, Graffiti Alphabet, she has combined her passion for photography with her love of graffiti. Olga is currently a member of the Art Institute in Sculpture at Capilano University. Please visit Olga Campbell’s website for more information about her art.
Derek Stuart – Derek is interested in creation/design, both artistic and technical. He studied sculpture and bronze casting at the Vancouver School of Art under the late sculptor Jack Harman. During this period, he created a number of bronze sculpture maquettes and in 1977 received a commission to produce a one meter tall enlargement of one of the maquettes, “Freydal (The walking woman)”, for the Coquitlam Centre in Coquitlam, B.C. In 1996 he was accepted into Capilano College Art Institute program where he studied sculpture and ceramic-shell casting of bronze, under the guidance of sculptor George Rammell, the facilitator of the casting of the large bronze sculptures of Haida sculptor, Bill Reid. Subsequent to this two year study/work experience, Derek set up a home/studio space on Bowen Island, complete with bronze foundry. The primal allure of light and colour combined with his sculptural inclinations, has drawn Derek to the world of “cire- perdue “ (lost wax) casting of glass. His studio now includes the specialized materials and equipment required to cast sculptural glass. Please visit Derek Stuart’s website for more information about his work.
George Belliveau – Shakespeare and drama in the primary classroom
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Faculty of Education’s CREATE series. George Belliveau is Associate Professor at the UBC Department of Language and Literacy Education. He gave the Opening Keynote address, “Shakespeare and drama in the primary classroom” for the Drama New Zealand National Conference in April, as well as conducted workshops with elementary and secondary teachers on drama in the classroom. As a Visiting Professor at the University of Auckland for April 2011, he was invited to present a public lecture on “Research-based theatre.” In May, Belliveau presented “Research-based theatre: Shakespeare in the Elementary classroom,” an invited research presentation at the University of Melbourne.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Belliveau, G. A. (2014). Stepping into drama: A midsummer night’s dream in the elementary classroom. Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press.
Fels, L., & Belliveau, G. A. (2007). Exploring curriculum: Performative inquiry, role drama & learning. Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press.
Belliveau, G. (2007). An alternative practicum model for teaching and learning. Canadian Journal of Education / Revue Canadienne De l’Éducation, 30(1), 47-67. [Link]
Belliveau, G. (2004). Struggle to success: Collective drama on anti-bullying. Canadian Theatre Review, 117(117), 42. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Brandon Konoval – Fatal Enlightenment: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality by Rousseau
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by UBC Arts One. Philosopher, novelist, playwright and composer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 — 1778) became a leading figure of the Enlightenment as one of its sharpest critics. His Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755)—a trenchant analysis of the political, moral and psychological hazards of civil society, and of the alienation of the modern self captivated Rousseau’s contemporaries, and remains compelling to this day.
Biography
Dr. Brandon Konoval is a Professor at the UBC School of Music. He has long been associated with the development of distance learning initiatives, co-authoring a music appreciation course with noted Canadian pianist, Dr. Robert Silverman, and creating his own online introduction to music theory. His research interests are in music theory and history, European intellectual and cultural history, history and philosophy of science.
UBC Library Research Guides
Rhea Tregebov – Reading from Rhea Tregebov’s 7th Collection of Poetry, All Souls’
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College’s Principal’s Series: Interdisciplinarity In Action. Bluesy, opinionated, sly, self-chastising and tender, UBC Creative Writing professor Rhea Tregebov’s All Souls’—her first collection since 2004—commands a range of tones wider and bolder than anything in her previous six books. All Souls’ bracingly addresses the quandary at the heart of our present moment: the fear of change and the fear of standing still. Enriched by a sharp palate and crackling with confidence, Tregebov’s new poems capture life in all its rueful aspects, and do so with a lyricism of considerable beauty and power. Rhea Tregebov, is professor at the Creative Writing Program, UBC. This lecture is part of the ongoing Green College Principal’s Series: Thinking at the Edge of Reading: Interdisciplinarity in Action.
Biography
Rhea Tregebov is the author of poetry, fiction and children’s picture books. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, where she teaches poetry, children’s literature and literary translation. Her work has received a number of literary awards, including the J. I. Segal Award for fiction, the Pat Lowther Award, the Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award, and the Malahat Review Long Poem Award.
Select Books Available at UBC Library
Tregebov, Rhea. (2012). All Souls. Montreal, Quebec : Signal Editions. [Link]
Tregebov, Rhea. (2009). The Knife Sharpener’s Bell. Regina, Saskatchewan: Coteau Books. [Link]
Tregebov, Rhea (Ed.). (2007). Arguing With The Storm: Stories By Yiddish Women Writers. Toronto, Ontario: Sumach Press. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guide
Nyla Matuk, Alix Ohlin and Matthew Tierney
NYLA MATUK, ALIX OHLIN and MATTHEW TIERNEY
at the Robson Reading Series
Thursday, December 13, 2012, 7pm
UBC Bookstore at Robson Square
Robson Reading Series events are free and open to the public. To register for this event, please click here.
“Make no mistake, Sumptuary Laws is a signpost book deserving of wide attention” – The Urge
Sumptuary Laws, Nyla Matuk’s first full-length collection, is a work of irresistible originality. Taking as her inspiration the feudal rules that once enforced social rank by legistating what a person was permitted to wear and eat, Matuk discovers a new metaphor for contemporary desire and explores, in wildly imaginative and linguistically daring poems, the 21st century “sumptuary laws” that dictate our divisions of luxury and necessity, splendour and squalor. A poet of immense gifts, Matuk has written a book of lasting impact.
Nyla Matuk is the author of the chapbook, Oneiric, published in 2009. Her poems have appeared in Maisonneuve, The Walrus, Canadian Notes and Queries, ARC Poetry, the Literary Review of Canada, and other publications. Her first full-length collection, Sumptuary Laws, was published in Fall 2012 with Signal Editions/Véhicule Press. She was nominated twice in 2012 for The Walrus Poetry Prize.
“Alix Ohlin: A writer who should be famous.” – The Globe and Mail
In Alix Ohlin’s Inside, we follow four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. When Grace, a highly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man in the snowy woods who has failed to hang himself, her instinct to help immediately kicks in. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. At the same time, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments. And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. With a razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the manifold dangers and imperatives of making ourselves available to, and indeed responsible for, those dearest to us.
Alix Ohlin is the author of two novels, Inside and The Missing Person, and Babylon and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices, and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” Born and raised in Montreal, she is currently on leave from Lafayette College and will spend the year in Los Angeles.
“Lots and lots of the poems in Probably Inevitable are good poems… only Tierney could come up with something so beautiful, so linguistically earned, so sweetly charming and weird.” – The National Post
Matthew Tierney follows his celebrated collection The Hayflick Limit with, Probably Inevitable, a new group of high-energy poems riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time. “Time’s not the market, it’s the bustle; / not the price but worth,” he muses, sailing through the rhythms and algorithms of a world made concrete by Samuel Johnson, before it was undone by Niels Bohr. Tierney’s narrators grapple with the gap between what’s seen and what’s experienced, their minds tuned to one (probably) inevitable truth: the more I understand, the more I understand I’m alone.
What continues to set Matthew Tierney’s poems apart is their uncanny ability to find within the nomenclature of science not mere novelty but a new path to human frailty, a renewed assertion of individuality, and a genuine awe at existence.
Matthew Tierney is the author of two books of poetry. His second, The Hayflick Limit (Coach House Books, 2009) was shortlisted for a Trillium Book Award. He is a former winner of the K.M. Hunter Award, and has placed his poems in numerous journals and magazines all across Canada. His next book, Probably Inevitable, considers the science and philosophy of time and will come out in Fall 2012. He lives in Toronto.