Described by the Boston Globe as “the nation’s leading environmentalist,” Professor McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Deep Economy. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes often for Harper’s, National Geographic, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, a global warming awareness campaign that in October 2009 coordinated what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.”
Location: Woodward Instructional Resource Centre, Lecture Theatre #2. Directions are available here. Doors open at 7:30pm.
Vancouver Institute Lectures are free and open to the public.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and presented by the Global Civic Policy Society and the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at UBC. David Owen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly and, prior to that, a senior writer at Harper’s. He is also a contributing editor at Golf Digest. He is the author of more than a dozen books: High School, about the four months he spent pretending to be a high-school student; None of the Above, an exposé of the standardized-testing industry; The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning, a collection of his pieces from Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly; The Walls Around Us: A Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works; Around the House, a collection of essays about domestic life; The First National Bank of Dad: The Best Way to Teach Kids About Money; Copies in Seconds, about the invention of the Xerox machine; and Sheetrock & Shellac, a sequel to The Walls Around Us. In addition, he has written four books about golf—My Usual Game, The Making of the Masters, The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness, and Hit & Hope—and he co-edited a collection of golf stories entitled Lure of the Links. His most recent book is Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, which grew out of a widely discussed 2004 New Yorker essay called “Green Manhattan.” He lives in Washington, Connecticut, with his wife, the writer Ann Hodgman.
Global Islam: Past, Present and Future is presented by UBC Continuing Studies, the Department of Asian Studies at UBC, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Laurier Institution. It is part of UBC Continuing Studies’ Lifelong Learning Series. Laffan is a Professor of History at Princeton University where he studies the history of Southeast Asia, focusing at present on Islam, nationalism, Dutch colonialism and orientalism. He earned his B.A. in Asian Studies (Arabic) at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995) and got his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the University of Sydney (2001). He came to Princeton in 2005 from a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. In his first book, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (2003), he argued that Islam played a central and largely unacknowledged role in the Indonesian nationalist movement, which historians have tended to associate mainly with a secular, Dutch-educated elite. His forthcoming book, The Makings of Indonesian Islam, looks at the results of an engagement between Islamic reformers with intellectual links to Cairo and influential colonial scholars, arguing that they set the parameters for the ways in which Islam has been, and still is, imagined in specific ways in both Southeast Asia and the Academy. The next project, will use Sri Lanka as a lens to discuss a history of Indian Ocean mobilities and religious exchange. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Laffan, M. F. (2011). The makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the narration of a Sufi past. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Laffan, M., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (1999). The resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin party, 1916-1923. Cambridge, UK; New York, N.Y: Cambridge University Press. [Link]
Laffan, M. F. (2003). Islamic nationhood and colonial Indonesia: The Umma below the winds. New York; London: RoutledgeCurzon. doi:10.4324/9780203222577. [Link]
Laffan, M. (2007). “Another Andalusia”: Images of colonial southeast Asia in Arabic newspapers. The Journal of Asian Studies, 66(3), 689-722. doi:10.1017/S0021911807000939. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Wat Endowment and hosted by the Department of Asian Studies. Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture. David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinological Studies at Harvard University. The world’s leading scholar of modern Chinese fiction, his research specialties include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, late Qing fiction and drama, and comparative literary theory. Wang received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and has taught at National Taiwan University and Columbia University. His many honors include an honorary doctorate from Lingnan University (Hong Kong), and his appointments as an Academician of the Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and as a Yangtze River Scholar affiliated with Fudan University (Shanghai). Writing at a time when History has collapsed and Revolution has lost its mandate, writers cannot take up the two subjects without pondering their inherent intelligibility. Drawing upon theories on “post-history” as developed by scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, and contemporary fictional works as created by writers such as Mo Yan, Yan Lianke and Wang Anyi, this lecture will address the following three issues: History after Post-History, Enlightenment versus Enchantment and Socialist Utopia and “the Best of all Best Possible Worlds”.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by UBC’s Buddhism and Contemporary Society Program. This lecture is made possible by the generous support of The Tung Lin Kok Yuen Canada Foundation, in collaboration with the Institute of Asian Research and Department of Asian Studies. Venerable Sik Yin Kit, Head Nun, Po Lam Buddhist Assoc. of Chilliwack, BC. This lecture examines how a non-sectarian meditative practice brings peace and calmness to the disturbed and imprisoned, and reflects on experiences as a meditation teacher working with prisoners in the Fraser Valley.
Select Articles and Books from UBC Library
Chaudhary, A. (2009). Aspects of buddha-dhamma. Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers.
Nyanaponika, T., & Bodhi, B. (1986). The vision of dhamma. London: Rider.
Sonaṭakke, Y. (2010). The Buddha: Dhamma and doctrine. Delhi, India: Abhishek Prakashan.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by St. John’s College. Michael Church is a Professor Emeritus at UBC. Church’s research interests focus on the morphodynamics of rivers at all scales from steepland streams to large rivers. He is currently involved in long-term studies of sediment transport and stability in Fraser, Peace and Mackenzie rivers. The Fraser River Study is concerned with finding a way to manage the river to maintain or improve the existing flood protection while maintaining the ecological character of the river. The Sediment transport is also studied in an experimental program conducted in our environmental hydraulics laboratory. Church has been recognized as a world leader in fluvial sediment transport and the interpretation of river channel changes. In addition, he is interested in fluvial landscape evolution over intermediate time scales (order 10,000 years), history, and methodology of geomorphology.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Church, M., & Moore, D. (1989). Appreciation. Atmospheric Environment (1967), 23(6), i-i. doi:10.1016/0004-6981(89)90143-1 [Link]
Jakob, M., & Church, M. (2011). The trouble with floods. Canadian Water Resources Journal, 36(4), 287-292. doi:10.4296/cwrj3604928 [Link]
Dugmore, A., Borthwick, D. M., & Church, M. J. (2007). The role of climate in settlement and landscape change in the north atlantic islands: An assessment of cumulative deviations in high-resolution proxy climate records. Human Ecology [H.W.Wilson – SSA], 35(2), 169. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and presented by the Global Civic Policy Society and the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at UBC. David Owen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly and, prior to that, a senior writer at Harper’s. He is also a contributing editor at Golf Digest. He is the author of more than a dozen books: High School, about the four months he spent pretending to be a high-school student; None of the Above, an exposé of the standardized-testing industry; The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning, a collection of his pieces from Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly; The Walls Around Us: A Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works; Around the House, a collection of essays about domestic life; The First National Bank of Dad: The Best Way to Teach Kids About Money; Copies in Seconds, about the invention of the Xerox machine; and Sheetrock & Shellac, a sequel to The Walls Around Us. In addition, he has written four books about golf—My Usual Game, The Making of the Masters, The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness, and Hit & Hope—and he co-edited a collection of golf stories entitled Lure of the Links. His most recent book is Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, which grew out of a widely discussed 2004 New Yorker essay called “Green Manhattan.” He lives in Washington, Connecticut, with his wife, the writer Ann Hodgman.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Response strong to new, green Manhattan project. (2006). Waste News, 11(27), 5. [Link]
Berenholtz, R., & Reynolds, D. M. (1988). Manhattan architecture (1st ed.). New York; London; Toronto: Prentice Hall Press.
Macdonald, E. C. (1994). Manhattan oasis. Architectural Review, 194(1170), 45-47. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and UBC Woodward Library as part of the “Health Information Series.” Dr. Larry Goldenberg is an award-winning Canadian researcher, pioneer in the treatment of prostate cancer and world-renowned advocate of patient education. Dr. Goldenberg authored one of the first books to explain prostate cancer treatment options in layman’s terms. Prostate Cancer: All You Need to Know to Take an Active Part in Your Treatment, now in its third edition, is widely considered to be one of the best resources available to men diagnosed with the disease. Dr. Goldenberg talks about how the 21st century will be a century of aging, and how the Men’s Health Initiative will help people not only live long, but live healthy.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS). Many Canadian First Nations and Aboriginal organizations are using digital media to revitalize their languages and assert control over the representation of their cultures. At the same time, museums, academic institutions, and individuals are digitizing their ethnographic collections to make them accessible to originating communities. In this presentation I will explore how the term “virtual repatriation” is being applied to the digitization and return of heritage to Aboriginal communities, and draw attention to the opportunities, challenges, and critiques associated with digitization, circulation, and remix of Aboriginal cultural heritage. I will discuss recent projects including the collaborative production of a Virtual Museum of Canada exhibit with the Doig River First Nation, a Dane-zaa community in northeastern British Columbia, and a current collaborative production of a virtual exhibit with members of the Inuvialuit community in the western Arctic and curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. I will show that while access to cultural heritage in digital collections can facilitate the articulation of intellectual property rights to digital cultural heritage—-including the right to restrict circulation—-it also amplifies the difficulty of enforcing those rights. Kate Hennessy is an Assistant Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT). She has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MA in the Anthropology of Media from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. As the director of the Making Culture Lab at SIAT, her research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage, and in the mediation of culture, history, objects, and subjects in new forms. Her video and multimedia works investigate documentary methodologies to address Indigenous and settler histories of place and space. She is a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia Curatorial Collective, an international group exploring the borders of anthropological, curatorial, and artistic practice (http://ethnographicterminalia.org). As assistant editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review, she designed its first multimedia volume. Her work has been published in journals such as American Indian Quarterly, Museum Anthropology Review, and Visual Anthropology Review. She was a Trudeau Foundation Scholar from 2006-2010, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Graduate Scholar from 2005-2009, a Canadian Polar Commission Scholar in 2006-2007, and a Commonwealth Scholar in 2001-2002.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Hennessy, K. (2012). Cultural heritage on the web: Applied digital visual anthropology and local cultural property rights discourse. International Journal of Cultural Property, 19(3), 345-369. doi:10.1017/S0940739112000288. [Link]
Hennessy, K. (2009). Virtual repatriation and digital cultural heritage: The ethics of managing online collections. Anthropology News, 50(4), 5-6. doi:10.1111/j.1556-3502.2009.50405.x. [Link]
Hennessy, K., & Moore, P. (2006). New technologies and contested ideologies: The tagish FirstVoices project. The American Indian Quarterly, 30(1), 119-137. doi:10.1353/aiq.2006.0006. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College. Both demographically and ecologically, humans are a remarkably successful species. This success is generally attributed to our capacity for culture. But how did our species’ extraordinary cultural capabilities evolve from its roots in animal social learning and tradition? In this seminar, Laland will provide a provisional answer. After characterizing contemporary research into animal social learning, he will focus in on a case study of stickleback learning that illustrates the strategic nature of animal copying. Laland will go on to describe the findings of an international competition (the “social learning strategies tournament”) that he organized to investigate the best way to learn. Laland will suggest that the tournament sheds light on why copying is widespread in nature, and why humans happen to be so good at it. Finally, he will end by describing some other theoretical and experimental projects suggesting feedback mechanisms that may have been instrumental to the evolution of Culture.
UBC Library Resources
Laland, K. (2004). Social learning strategies. Learning & Behaviour, 32(1), 4-14. [Link]
Reader, S. M., & Laland, K. N. (2002). Social intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99(7), 4436-4441. doi:10.1073/pnas.062041299. [Link]
Hoppitt, W., Laland, K. N., & ebrary eBooks. (2013). Social learning: An introduction to mechanisms, methods, and models. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Link]
Laland, K. N., & Brown, G. R. (2011). Sense and nonsense: Evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
