In the summer of 2009, the battle of the Plains of Abraham was fought one more time in Quebec. The debate that stormed over the commemoration of the event proved that it is not easy to negotiate the meaning of this founding moment of Quebec’s destiny. Yet, it has been 250 years since “the English burned our farms and bombed our city”. What is to be done today with the Conquest, its history and memory?
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Létourneau, J. (2014). Je me souviens?: Le passé du Québec dans la conscience de sa jeunesse. Anjou, Québec: Fides.
Létourneau, J. (2010). Le Québec entre son passé et ses passages. Montréal: Fides.
Létourneau, J. (2006). Que veulent vraiment les Québécois?: Regard sur l’intention nationale au Québec (français) d’hier à aujourd’hui. Montréal: Boréal.
Létourneau, J. (1996). Les années sans guide: Le canada à l’ère de l’économie migrante. Montréal: Boréal.
The application of information and communications technology (ICT) to enable and empower community processes, the goal of Community Informatics is to use information communication technologies (ICT) to enable the achievement of community objectives including overcoming “digital divides” both within and between communities. However, community informatics goes beyond discussions of the “Digital Divide” to examine how and under what conditions ICT access can be made usable and useful to the range of excluded populations and communities and particularly to support local economic development, social justice, and political empowerment using the Internet. Community informatics as a discipline is located within a variety of academic faculties including Information Science, Information Systems, Computer Science, Planning, Development Studies, and Library Science among others and draws on insights on community development from a range of social sciences disciplines. At the forefront of this new field of research is Michael Gurstein, Director of the Center for Community Informatics Research, Training and Development in Vancouver, Canada, which works with communities, ICT practitioners, researchers, governments and agencies as a resource for enabling and empowering communities with Information and Communications Technologies. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Gurstein, M. (1981). Videotex in Canada: A working paper on the study of social impact. Ottawa: Socioscope.
Gurstein, M. (2003). Effective use: A community informatics strategy beyond the digital divide. First Monday, 8(12), unknown-unknown. [Link]
Gurstein, M. (1985). Social impacts of selected artificial intelligence applications: The Canadian context. Futures, 17(6), 652-652. doi:10.1016/0016-3287(85)90018-7 [Link]
Gurstein, M. (2007). What is community informatics (and why does it matter)? [Link]
Global warming is moving much more quickly than scientists thought it would. Even if the biggest current and prospective emitters – the United States, China and India – were to slam on the brakes today, the earth would continue to heat up for decades. At best, we may be able to slow things down and deal with the consequences, without social and political breakdown. Gwynne Dyer examines several radical short- and medium-term measures now being considered—all of them controversial.
Speaker Bio
Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years, but he was originally trained as an historian. He received degrees from Canadian, American and British universities, finishing with a Ph.D. in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Dyer, G. (2005). With every mistake. Toronto: Random House Canada.
Dyer, G. (2014). Canada in the great power game: 1914-2014. Toronto: Random House Canada.
Dyer, G. (2004). Future Tense: The coming world order. Toronto: M&S.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Asian Studies Department’s Buddhism and Contemporary Society Program, Phakchok Rinpoche is the Supreme Head of the Taklung Kagyu lineage, the Abbot of a monastery in Chapagaon in Kathmandu, and the Head of Riwoche Monastery in Tibet. Born in 1981 to Chokling Rinpoche and his wife Dechen Paldron, Phakchok Rinpoche is grandson of Tulku Ugyen Rinpoche and the eldest brother of the Yangsi Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. Recognized by the Kagyu regents and ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he has studied with a number of great lamas, including Khyentse Rinpoche, Dudjom Rinpoche, Tulku Ugyen Rinpoche, Penor Rinpoche, Trulshik Rinpoche and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. An enthusiastic and vibrant young lama, his teachings are direct, accessible, and always fresh, opening up our minds in a playful and inspiring way.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Nelson, J. K., & Project Muse University Press eBooks. (2013). Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and activism in contemporary Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. [Link]
Chʻoe, C. (2007). Buddhism: Religion in Korea. Seoul, Korea: Ewha Womans University Press.
Harris, I. C., & Project Muse University Press Archival eBooks. (2005). Cambodian Buddhism: History and practice. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. [Link]
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
The latest issue of UBC Reports features an article on a community service-learning pilot program that involved various UBC units, including the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
You can view the article here, and the entire issue of UBC Reports here.
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.
A recent article in the Georgia Straight about an online exhibit dedicated to Chinese Canadian history also cites UBC Library’s recent news about a $900,000 contribution from the Community Historical Recognition Program. This funding supports an English-Chinese Web portal entitled “Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Histories from a Common Past.”
You can view the the Georgia Straight article here, and the CHRP announcement and other media coverage here.
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.
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, Michael Halliday questions the idea that evolution of language seems a simple enough concept: it arose in the work of scholars studying the history of linguistic forms (phonology, morphology, some syntax). But a language is a semiotic system; more importantly a semogenic, or meaning-creating, system; and meaning also has a history – a highly complex one. Every language has, in Sapir’s term, a “certain cut”, its own (constantly evolving) ways of meaning; yet most of its features are shared with other languages. We seek out the history of meaning along various routes: in the history of the form of language, in the history of the people that speak it, in the history of the locale where it is spoken, and in the history of its varied cultural contexts. Consider English and Chinese, as two widely spoken and widely-documented languages.
The history of meaning in English includes changes that took place in ancient Greek and in ancient and medieval Latin, even though English is not “descended from” these languages; Chinese has undergone somewhat less upheaval, but the history of Mandarin involved contact with ways of meaning derived from Sanskrit and from Mongolian, both also “unrelated” to Chinese. I think that, to study the history of meaning, we take account of both child language development and the emergence of learned forms of discourse; we maintain a trinocular perspective; and we seek systemic and functional (especially metafunctional) explanations of semiotic patterns in discourse.
