Michael Gurstein - Community Informatics

On September 30, 1-2pm, the IKBLC presents author of Red: A Haida Manga.  Through illustrative story telling, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas challenges native stereotypes. The stories of the trickster Raven, as told by Yahgulanaas, are what most people would call comics, and they are fun, humorous and sometimes rude. Yahgulanaas takes traditional Haida stories and turns them into manga (Japanese-style comics). He has dropped the traditional rectangu-lar boxes and voice balloons associated with the North American comics of Marvel and DC. Instead, he has developed a flowing style that uses a bold line stretched almost to the breaking point – a motif strongly associated with Haida art – to link the images in the narrative.

Thursday September 30, 2010 – 1:00-2:00pm at the Lillooet Room (301), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

To ensure a seat, please RSVP in advance: 604.827.4366 or ikblc-events@interchange.ubc.ca

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education as part of the plenary session at the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, Terrence Deacon explains the extravagant complexity of the human language and our competence to acquire it has long posed challenges for natural selection theory.  To answer his critics, Darwin turned to sexual selection to account for the extreme development of language.

Many contemporary evolutionary theorists have invoked incredibly lucky mutation or some variant of the assimilation of acquired behaviors to innate predispositions in an effort to explain it.  Recent evodevo approaches have identified developmental processes that help to explain how complex functional synergies can evolve by Darwinian means. Interestingly, many of these developmental mechanisms bear a resemblance to aspects of Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, often differing only in one respect (e.g. form of duplication, kind of variation, competition/cooperation).  A common feature is an interplay between processes of stabilizing selection and processes of relaxed selection at different levels of organism function. These may play important roles in the many levels of evolutionary process contributing to language.  Surprisingly, the relaxation of selection at the organism level may have been a source of many complex synergistic features of the human language capacity, and may help explain why so much language information is “inherited” socially.

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education as part of the plenary session at the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, Matthiessen poses the theme that is “language evolving”. This can be interpreted either very generally or more technically. (1) Taken very generally, this could mean language changing in any of the three time-frames that have been explored in systemic functional linguistics phylogenetic change (language changing in the human species, or in human societies, over a long period of time ranging from generations to history of the human species), ontogenetic change (language changing in human individuals [seen as organisms or as persons] in the course of a lifetime, or logogenetic change (language changing in the course of the unfolding of text). (2) Taken more technically (i.e. with “evolution” in the technical sense introduced by Darwin), this means language changing phylogenetically language evolving as part of the evolution of the human species (in biological terms) and as part of the evolution of human groups (in social terms), these two being complementary aspects of human evolution.

However, Christian Matthiesson focuses on the narrower, technical sense of “language evolving”. More specifically, he explores the “big history” of humans – a deep time view of human evolution in linguistic, or more generally in semiotic terms, starting with the emergence of the human line and moving up to the present.