Geoffrey C. Bowker - Emerging Configurations of Knowledge Expression

Bramwell Tovey Exhibition at Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

November 8, 2012

On Thursday, November 22, 2012, the University of British Columbia will be honouring Bramwell Tovey at the UBC Chan Centre for Performing Arts with an Honorary Degree Doctor of Letters honoris causa. As part of the celebrations, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre in collaboration with UBC Music Library, is displaying a collection of Bramwell Tovey’s works in an exhibition at the IKBLC foyer.

A musician of striking versatility, GRAMMY® Award winning conductor Bramwell Tovey is acknowledged around the world for his artistic depth and his warm, charismatic personality on the podium. Tovey’s career as a conductor is uniquely enhanced by his work as a composer and pianist, lending him a remarkable musical perspective. His tenures as music director with the Vancouver Symphony, Luxembourg Philharmonic and Winnipeg Symphony Orchestras have been characterized by his expertise in operatic, choral, British and contemporary repertoire.

Mr. Tovey who is entering his thirteen season as Music Director of the Vancouver Symphony, also continues his association with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, and as founding host and conductor of the New York Philharmonic’s Summertime Classics series at Avery Fisher Hall. In 2008, both orchestras co-commissioned him to write a new work, the well-received Urban Runway, subsequently programmed by a number of orchestras in the US and Canada.

An esteemed guest conductor, Mr. Tovey has worked with orchestras in the United States and Europe including the London Philharmonic, London Symphony and Frankfurt Radio Orchestra. In North America, Mr. Tovey has made guest appearances with the orchestras of Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Seattle and Montreal as well as ongoing performances with Toronto, where his trumpet concerto, commissioned by that orchestra received its premiere in winter of 2009 as a preview of his first full-length opera “The Inventor” premiered in Calgary in winter 2011. To his already busy summer schedule in 2011 he made a return visit to the Philadelphia Orchestra, this time in their summer series in Saratoga, NY and added debuts with the Cleveland Orchestra and Boston Symphony both of which led to immediate invitations to return in summer 2012..

With a profound commitment to new music, Mr. Tovey has established himself as a formidable composer and is the first artist to win a Juno Award in both conducting and composing. Prior to his music directorship in Vancouver, Mr. Tovey spent twelve years as music director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, where he founded its highly regarded New Music Festival. A significant milestone in the ensemble’s exploration of new music, the festival premiered more than 250 works by diverse international and Canadian composers under Mr. Tovey’s leadership, with every performance broadcast on Canada’s CBC Radio. Mr. Tovey’s other accomplishments as a composer include receiving the Best Canadian Classical Composition 2003 Juno Award for his Requiem for a Charred Skull, performed and recorded by the Amadeus Choir and the Hannaford Band in Toronto.

Mr. Tovey has also built a strong reputation as an accomplished jazz pianist with two recordings to his name and has made memorable appearances on television, including two documentaries with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and a 1996 CBC TV broadcast of Victor Davies’ Revelation, a full-length oratorio based on the Book of Revelation, with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. He has an extensive back catalogue including recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra, Halle and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra He has also recorded several DVDs, of works including Holst’s The Planets Suite and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony as well as a solo recording with distinguished guests such as percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, among many others. His recording with the Vancouver Symphony and James Ehnes of the Walton, Korngold and Barber concerti received both GRAMMY® and Juno Awards in 2007.

Awarded numerous honorary degrees, Mr. Tovey has received a Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Music in London, honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Winnipeg, Manitoba, British Columbia, and Kwantlen University College, as well as a Fellowship from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. In 1999, he received the M. Joan Chalmers National Award for Artistic Direction, a prestigious Canadian prize awarded to premier artists for outstanding contributions in professional performing arts organizations.

For more information, please contact Kirsten Walsh, Head of UBC Music Library

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Weyman Chan – Chinese Blue

November 7, 2012

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre as part of the Robson Reading Series. Drawing on more than two thousand years of ancient Chinese tradition that present diverse philosophical modes of being, whether it be the spiritual teachings of Kong Zi or Lao Tzu, the military dicta of Sun Tzu or the complex sensibilities expressed by poets such as Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, Li Bai, Du Fu and Wang Wei in the wake of a tumultuous imperial government, Weyman Chan restates these concerns of the past while addressing other “first world problems” in our own contemporary era. In Chinese Blue, the poet “character” sifts through the earth’s long history of geological layering and forgetting, grappling with the perpetual fragmentation of identity. The poet struggles with the prospect of any inky blots that suggest the finished work of a creator, subject to expediencies—ambition, romance, betrayal—that leave us flawed and human, taking the reader on a spiritual quest burdened by an endless sea of flotsam. In a stoic attempt to reconcile biological drives with a stance of non-presence and to find a place beyond “perpetual worry” where he can accept ancestral mistakes while tentatively channelling the voices of advertising that condition our vernacular and massage our minds—offering a cliché happy ending to what remains of our physical existence—the poet finds himself wading through jazzily visionary delineations of the modern city, numbed and soundly crushed between “the word and the thing.” Here is Weyman Chan at his most fiercely ironic, tracing a lineage he interprets subconsciously and through the intricacies of its raw genetic material, with keenly biting language that echoes the rhythms of Qu Yuan in contemplation of his own mortality beside the flowing waters of impermanence.

Biography of Author

Weyman Chan was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1963, to immigrant parents from China. Chan wrote his first poem when he was thirteen years old. He has published poems and short stories in a wide variety of literary journals and anthologies. He won the 2002 National Magazine Awards silver prize for his poem “At work,” and the 2003 Alberta Book Award for his first book of poetry, Before a Blue Sky Moon. His second book, Noise From the Laundry, was a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the 2009 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry.

Author’s Titles at UBC Library

Chan, W. (2012). Chinese blue: Poems. B.C., Canada: Talonbooks. [Link]

Chan, W. (2010). Hypoderm: Notes to myself. Vancouver: Talonbooks. [Link]

Chan, W. (2008). Noise from the laundry. Vancouver, B.C: Talonbooks. [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Book, Theatre and Film Reviews

Chinese Studies Resources

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Ellen Gruber Garvey – What the 99 Percent Read, and What They Did with It, a Hundred Years Ago

November 7, 2012

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS). Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks-the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Writing with Scissors opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Like us, nineteenth-century readers spoke back to the media, and treasured what mattered to them. Ellen Gruber Garvey reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where the proliferating cheap press touched the lives of activists and mourning parents, and all who yearned for a place in history. Scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events such as living through the Civil War, mediated through the newspapers. African Americans and women’s rights activists collected, concentrated, and critiqued accounts from a press that they did not control to create “unwritten histories” in books they wrote with scissors. Whether scrapbook makers pasted their clippings into blank books, sermon collections, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark Twain invented, they claimed ownership of their reading. They created their own democratic archives.

Select Articles Available at UBC Library

Garvey, E. G. (2010). Nineteenth-century abolitionists and the databases they created. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 27(2), 357-366. [Link]

Ellis, J., & Garvey, E. G. (2012). Introduction: Teaching under attack. Transformations, 23(1), 11.

UBC Library Research Guides

Library, Archival, and Information Science

Learning Through Literacy and Technology

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Engaging Youth With Indigenous Materials in Libraries and Classrooms

November 6, 2012

Assessing and incorporating teaching and learning resources by and about First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples is critical for librarians, educators and parents. Awareness of diverse epistemologies, notions of cultural authenticity and historical accuracy, and the influence of colonialism, are essential when considering books, films and interactive media for library and classroom collections. This panel will address challenges facing Indigenous and non-Indigenous librarians, educators and parents when drawing upon materials representing Indigenous peoples and cultures. They will offer insights about such issues as cultural appropriation, stereotypes, addressing colonialism and what to do with dated resources. This session is ideal for teacher candidates, classroom teachers, teacher-librarians, youth librarians and parents.

Convener: Jo-Anne Naslund, UBC Education Library
Moderator: Lisa P. Nathan, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the First Nations Curriculum Concentration, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies
Panelists: Debra Martel, Associate Director, First Nations House of Learning;
Allison Taylor-McBryde, Adjunct Professor, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies.

Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library

Cupples, J. (1977). The Aboriginal studies library project. Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference, Library Association of Australia, Edited by Anne Batt. Hobart (Tasmania), Library Association of Australia Conference Committee, 1977 160-171

Briggs-Smith, N. (1997). Promoting library services for Aboriginals. Link-Up, Mar, 3-6.

UBC Library Research Guides

Education

Library, Archival, and Information Science

Learning Through Literacy and Technology

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Dodson Music Series Present “The larks, still bravely singing, fly”

November 2, 2012

“The larks, still bravely singing, fly” will present music of wartime, remembrance and peace.

“In Flanders Fields” is a war poem in the form of a rondeau, written during the First World War by Canadian physician and Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. He was inspired to write it on May 3, 1915, after presiding over the funeral of friend and fellow soldier Alexis Helmer, who died in the Second Battle of Ypres. According to legend, fellow soldiers retrieved the poem after McCrae, initially unsatisfied with his work, discarded it.

The first chapter of In Flanders Fields and Other Poems, a 1919 collection of McCrae’s works, gives the text of the poem as follows:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The programme will include music by Barber, Bloch, Richard Strauss, J.S. Bach, and Enesco.

The Dodson Music Series is organized and performed by students of the UBC School of Music. The Artistic Director is Chantal Lemire.

Admission is free.

The next concert in the Dodson Music Series 2012-2013 will be held on Friday November 9 at 12:00 pm in the Dodson Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

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Martha Fineman – Vulnerability and the Human Condition: A Different Approach to Equality

October 31, 2012

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College’s Cecil H. and Ida Green Visiting Professor Lecture Series. As part of the “Richard V. Ericson Lecture,” Martha Fineman develops the concepts of vulnerability and resilience in order to argue for a more responsive state and a more egalitarian society. Vulnerability is and should be understood to be both universal and constant, inherent in the human condition and not marking the difference between most of us and certain stigmatized “populations.” The vulnerability approach is an alternative to traditional equal protection analysis; it represents a post-identity inquiry in that it is not focused only on discrimination against defined groups, but concerned with privilege and favor conferred on limited segments of the population by the state directly and through the institutions it brings into existence through law and subsequently regulates and maintains. As such, vulnerability analysis concentrates on the role of those institutions and structures in allocating and generating resilience with which to manage our common vulnerabilities. This approach has the potential to move us beyond the stifling confines of current discrimination-based models toward a more substantive vision of equality.

Biography

Martha Albertson Fineman is a Robert W. Woodruff Professor. An internationally recognized law and society scholar, Fineman is a leading authority on family law and feminist jurisprudence. Her scholarly interests are the legal regulation of family and intimacy and the legal implications of universal dependency and vulnerability.

Select Books and Articles Available at UBC Library

Fineman, Martha Albertson. (2011). Gender, Equality, and the Human Condition. In J. Jones, A. Grear and R. Fenton (Eds.). Gender, Sexualities, and Law. New York : Routledge. [Link]

Fineman, Martha Albertson. (2011). Responsibility, Family, and the Limits of Equality: An American Perspective. In C. Lind, H. Keating, and I. Bridgeman (Eds.), Taking Responsibility, Law and the Changing Family. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. [Link]

Fineman, Martha Albertson. (2011). Transcending the Boundaries of Law: Generations of Feminism and Legal Theory. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2011. [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Law – Beginning Your Research

Law – Interdisciplinary and News Indexes & Databases

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Les Jacobs – When Things Go Wrong: Medical Error, Rights Violations and Access to Justice in Health Care on Asia Pacific Rim

October 31, 2012

This talk explores access to justice issues in different Asia pacific countries that arise in the health care context. The issues are examined from the perspectives of global health and instances of medical malpractice. Les Jacobs is Full Professor at the Law & Society/Political Science and Director of the York Centre for Public Policy and Law. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College’s Thematic Series: Public Health Law and Policy in Asia.

Biography

Les Jacobs is Professor of Law & Society and Political Science at York University and Executive Director of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice. His research interests are in Human Rights, Law and Justice, Public Policy, Health and Human Rights, and Access to Justice.

Select Books and Articles Available at UBC Library

Azmi, S. Foster, L., Jacobs, L.A. (2012). Balancing Competing Human Rights in a Diverse Society. Toronto: Irwin Law Books with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. [Link]

Jacobs, L.A. (2012). Gender, Trade Liberalization, and Tobacco Control in China. In Pitman Potter and Heather Gibb, (Eds.), Gender Equality Rights and Trade Regimes: Coordinating Compliance. Ottawa: North South Institute. pp. 141-158. [Link]

Jacobs, L.A. (2011). China’s Capacity to Respond to the H1N1 Pandemic Alert and Future Global Public Health Crises: A Policy Window For Canada. In Pitman Potter & Thomas Adams (Eds.), Issues in Canada-China Relation. Toronto: Canadian International Council. pp. 333-343. [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Health Care Administration

Law – Beginning Your Research

Political Science

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Poetic Representation

October 31, 2012

Robin Lugg – Woman and Bird

Poetic Representation is an art sculpture exhibitions curated by a collective of art sculpturists (including Parvin Peivandi, Linda Schmidt, Robin Lugg, and Veronica Aimone) trained at the Capilano Institute under the guidance of George Rammell. 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 may involve the media centre.

Artists Bios

Robin Lugg – Born in Canterbury, England his background has been varied, artistically working with oil and acrylic painting, music, and sculpting. Currently at Capilano University, Studio Arts Department under the supervision of George Rammell, Robinʼs working mediums are, welded found objects, stone carving, and bronze casting, each of which components are found in this exhibit at the University of British Columbia , IKBLC Art Exhibition, at the original library at UBC, for the month of November 2012.

Image – Linda Schmidt

Linda Schmidt – An artist who works in 3-D, Linda is an artist that sculpts in bronze, glass, wood, concrete and polymers. Over the years she has created many paintings in mixed media, and has shown her work in a solo show and several group shows with the West Coast Clay Sculptors Society and the Sculptors Society of British Columbia. Currently, she am a member of the Sculpture Division of Art Institute at Capilano University. Please visit her website to see more of her art works.

Parvin Peivandi – Parvin’s works are exhibited in solo and group shows around the world. In doing so, she won many awards including Olympic Academy’s award for her painting with the theme of sport. Parvin Peivandi is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes wide range of mediums: from painting, drawings to sculpture and ceramics. She has studied Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Capilano University ,where she has learned diverse skills and more knowledge about the Contemporary Art.

Veronica Aimone – Veronica’s lifelong transformations inspire her to create art. Continuously changing her own life, from banker to teacher, surveyor and fisherman to the high tech industry and artist, she wants to take her emotions, an object, or a captured moment and feel it ‘materially’ transform. She is strongly attracted to the sensuality of materials, to understanding their personalities, to the surprises they reveal and how by working with their natures, they challenge the way she thinks about representing her own life and society and the culture of our current lives. She draws to capture her moments in the everyday, her travels through Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and India. Her art is inspired by Betty Goodwin, Amadeo Modigliani and Alberto Giacometti.

For more information, please contact Allan Cho, Program Services Librarian.

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James Russell – A Career in Ruins: Memories of Excavating an Ancient Roman City in Turkey

October 29, 2012

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College’s Lecture Series: Senior Scholars’ Series: The Passions that Drive Academic Life. Anemurium, the subject of the lecture, was a medium-sized Roman and early Byzantine city located on the southernmost promontory of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, which was abandoned around the end of the 7th century CE. It has been the subject of investigation by a UBC sponsored archaeological team directed by James Russell for forty years. The work has concentrated on the excavation and conservation of the city’s public buildings—theatre, baths and civil basilica as well as three early Christian churches with well-preserved mosaic floors and certain tombs in the city’s large cemetery decorated with interesting figured wall-paintings. The lecture will include a brief overview of the excavations and their results demonstrating how the team has applied its discoveries, including architecture, mosaics, inscriptions, pottery, coins and small artifacts of bone and metal, to provide a rich picture of the history, economy, religion and social life of a city for which very limited literary testimony exists.

Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library

Bradley, K. R. (1990). The ancient roman city. American Historical Association. doi:10.2307/2163785 [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Anthropology

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