The B.C. History Digitization Program (BCHDP), an initiative of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, has been awarded a Programs and Services Merit Award by the British Columbia Library Association (BCLA). The award was presented at the annual BCLA conference in April. The awards committee noted that the organization was impressed with the project’s scope and its ability to connect communities across the province through their histories.
The BCHDP, launched in 2006, provides matching funds for digitization projects that provide free online access to B.C.’s unique historical material. In 2007, funding was awarded to 17 successful program applicants from around the province; that number increased to 21 in 2008. For more information, please visit www.ikebarberlearningcentre.ubc.ca.
Congratulations to University Archivist Chris Hives, and his team members Bronwen Sprout and Rob Stibravy, who developed and administered the program. Congratulations also to the adjudication team members: Pat Roy, George Sipos, Mark Jordan, Chris Ball, Patrick Dunnae and Simon Neame. Thank you all for your vision and commitment.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Dr. Henry Yu is a Vancouver speaker at the 2nd Annual Asian Heritage Month National Video Conference presented by VAHMS as part of explorASIAN 2012 in partnership with IKBLC and the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC. Dr. Henry Yu will be presenting his involvement and experience with a $1.2 million multi-media platform: Chinese Canadian Stories.Dr. Yu is the Principal for St. John’s Graduate College (UBC) and Director of the Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Chinese Canadian Studies (INSTRCC). Outside of UBC, Dr. Yu serves as Co-Chair for City of Vancouver’s “Dialogues Between First Nations, Urban Aboriginal, and Immigrant Communities in Vancouver” as well as a founding member of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC.
Biography
Professor Henry Yu is currently the Principal of St. John’s Graduate College, UBC’s international graduate college, and served as its Associate Principal from 2005-2009. A Founding Board Member of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia http://www.cchsbc.ca, Prof. Yu continues to serve on the Board of Directors and actively engages his UBC students in community history projects through CCHSBC.
In 2012, Prof. Yu was honoured for his work with a Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Yu, Henry. (2011) “The Rhythms of the Trans-Pacific” and “The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific,” in Donna Gabaccia, Dirk Hoerder, editors, Connecting Seas and Connecting Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s. (Leiden: Brill, 2011). [Link]
Yu, Henry. (2011). “Nurturing Dialogues between First Nations, Urban Aboriginal, and Immigrant Communities in Vancouver,” in Ashok Mathur, Jonathan Dewar, Mike DeGagné, editors, Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity. (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2011):300-308. [Link]
Yu, Henry. (2009). “Global Migrants and the New Pacific Canada,”International Journal. (Autumn, 2009):147-162. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. C.E. Gatachalian will be reading from his new book, “Falling In Time.” Gatchalian is a playwright, fiction writer, poet, editor, and teacher. He is an alumnus of the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing program, and the author of three books: Motifs & Repetitions & Other Plays (2003), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; a chapbook of poetry, tor/sion (2005); and Broken, a suite of one-act plays. Gatchalian was the recipient of the 2005 Gordon Armstrong Playwrights’ Rent Award. His work has been produced on stages in Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg and New Zealand, as well as radio (CBC) and television (the Bravo! Channel).
Author’s Titles at UBC Library
Gatchalian, C. E. (2012). Falling in time. Winnipeg: Scirocco Drama. [Link]
For twenty years, Jan Wong had been one of the Globe and Mail’s best-known reporters. Then one day she turned in a story that set off a firestorm of controversy, including death threats, a unanimous denunciation by Parliament and a rebuke by her own newspaper. For the first time in her professional life, Wong fell into a severe clinical depression. Yet she resisted the diagnosis, refusing to believe she had a mental illness. As it turned out, so did her company and insurer. With wit, grace and insight, Wong tells the harrowing tale of her struggle with workplace-caused depression, and of her eventual emergence … Out of the Blue.
Jan Wong is a third-generation Canadian who grew up in Montreal speaking English, some French and zero Chinese. In the summer of 1972, while majoring in Asian studies at McGill University, she traveled alone to the People’s Republic of China. At 19, she talked her way into a spot at Peking University, becoming the first of two Westerners to study in China during the Cultural Revolution, a tale she recounts in her memoir, Red China Blues, My Long March from Mao to Now.
Praise for Out of the Blue, a Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness
“Jan Wong has clearly and accurately presented the history, signs and symptoms of depression and its underlying and associated pathological correlates. Her research is thorough and presented clearly. Bravo! Perhaps more importantly, she has painted an accurate and evocative portrait of a person trying to live a life with major depression. Jan Wong tells the story like a human being, in a way which will edify, disturb, or comfort the reader depending on who he or she is, but whatever that reader’s detailed response, they’ll be seriously engaged.” — Dr. Irvin Wolkoff, Toronto psychiatrist, writer and broadcaster.
“Jan Wong is a wonderful writer and, as she tells her own story, she speaks for me and for many. Some say depression is a gift. Well, it’s not. But this book is.”
— Shelagh Rogers, O.C., Broadcast journalist and recipient of the Champion of Mental Health Award
NOW Magazine wondering why Doubleday suddenly decided to drop the book: “I mean, really, what’s likely to sell more, a book about depression with a courageous personal account by a survivor of the disease or a book about depression with a courageous personal account by a survivor of the disease that includes her conflict with her employer, Canada’s iconic national newspaper?
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College. It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much of the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people’s moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people’s moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. Dr. Knobe argues that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.
Select Articles and Books Available at UBC Library
Knobe, J. M., Nichols, S., & MyiLibrary. (2008). Experimental philosophy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. [Link]
Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63(3), 190-194. doi:10.1093/analys/63.3.190. [Link]
Knobe, J. (2010). Person as scientist, person as moralist. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(4), 315-329. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000907. [Link]
Knobe, J. (2010). Action trees and moral judgment. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2(3), 555-578. doi:10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01093.x. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by UBC Faculty of Forestry’s TerreWEB Seminar Series’ “Perspectives on Challenges for Effective Communication of Science and Global Change. Communication is the most important biological activity that allows species, including Homo sapiens, to survive. In our complex, and some might argue, “detached from nature” world, academic communication has not kept pace with population growth, affluence and technology. The human desire is for more but the Earth from a human dimension is finite. Human impacts on our natural environment are increasing in intensity, in geographic space and in ways that are not predicted. There is a recurring sentiment that we are heading for a place we do not want to go! Science education and effective communication provides a framework for informed debate to facilitate the emergence of shared, equitable values and governance policies that could change our future direction. We must understand what is natural science, how we interpret science and how we use science to sustain the human enterprise. Emergent technologies help in understanding science and through communication, its equitable applications. We need tomorrow’s thinking to solve today’s problems caused by yesterday’s actions.
L.M. (Les) Lavkulich is professor emeritus of Soil Science and Resource Management and Environmental Studies at UBC. Born in Alberta, he received his B.Sc and M.Sc (1963) from the University of Alberta and Ph.D. from Cornell University (1966). He has offered a range of courses at UBC including soil chemistry and mineralogy, pedology and perspectives on resources and environment.
He helped develop the interdisciplinary Resource Management and Environmental Studies program and the Institute for Resources and Environment (1979-2004). He was Head of Soil Science from 1980 to 1990. His focus is on student education and student development. He has served on over 200 graduate student committees as supervisor, committee member, thesis examiner and is still learning. With his graduate students and colleagues he has published over 200 refereed articles. His adventures have taken him to Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Morocco, Thailand, the Philippines, Brazil and Chile and several countries within the European Union. Les serves as the Chair of the TerreWEB Program.
Relevant Books and Articles from UBC Library
Oka, G., Thomas, L., & Lavkulich, L. (2014). Soil assessment for urban agriculture: A Vancouver case study. Journal of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition, 14(3), 657-669.
Grand, S., & Lavkulich, L. (2008). Reactive soil components and pedogenesis of highly productive coastal podzols. Geochimica Et Cosmochimica Acta, 72(12), A323-A323.
Lavkulich, L., & Arocena, J. (2011). Luvisolic soils of canada: Genesis, distribution, and classification. Canadian Journal of Soil Science, 91(5), 781-806. doi:10.4141/CJSS2011-014 [Link]
Yuan, G., & Lavkulich, L. (1995). Environmental phosphorus indices in manure amended soils in the fraser basin of british columbia, canada. Journal of Environmental Science and Health Part B: Pesticides, Food Contaminants and Agricultural Wastes, (6), 841-841.
Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College. Lisa Piper is Professor at the Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, and specializes in the field of environmental history. Liz Piper is currently involved in a research project that examines the relationship between disease outbreaks and environmental change in the North, with a focus on the Mackenzie and Yukon river basins in the period between 1860 and 1970.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Douglas, I., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (2013). Cities: An environmental history. London: I. B. Tauris.
Duke, D. F. (2006). Canadian environmental history: Essential readings. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Kheraj, S. (2013). Inventing Stanley park: An environmental history. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Chakrabarti, R., & Jadavpur University. Department of History. (2006). Does environmental history matter?: Shikar, subsistence, sustenance, and the sciences. Kolkata: Readers Service.
There is a near universal interest in morality that has sparked thought-provoking inquiry for thousands of years. Much of that inquiry proceeded without the benefit of modern cognitive science, but that is now changing. And the change promises to shed new light on morality, particularly its practices, development, and the psychology behind ethical thought. In this series we bring together speakers from a vast array of disciples–from philosophy and law to biology and psychology–to discuss cutting edge research in the cognitive science of morality. Dr. Haidt is a Professor in the Social Psychology area of the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He studys morality and emotion, and how they vary across cultures. He is also active in positive psychology (the scientific study of human flourishing) and study positive emotions such as moral elevation, admiration, and awe. Dr. Haidt’s research these days focuses on the moral foundations of politics, and on ways to transcend the “culture wars” by using recent discoveries in moral psychology to foster more civil forms of politics. Morality, by its very nature, makes it hard to study morality. It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth. It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups.
Select Articles and Books from UBC Library
Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316(5827), 998-1002. doi:10.1126/science.1137651 [Link]
Haidt, J. (2012) For revealing the psychology of partisanship. Foreign Policy, (197), 110. [Link]
Haidt, J. (2013). Moral psychology for the twenty-first century. Journal of Moral Education, 42(3), 281-297. doi:10.1080/03057240.2013.817327 [Link]
Keyes, C. L. M., Haidt, J., & PsycBOOKS. (2002). Flourishing: Positive psychology and the life well-lived. Washington: American Psychological Association. [Link]
The B.C. History Digitization Program (BCHDP), an initiative of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, has been awarded a Programs and Services Merit Award by the British Columbia Library Association (BCLA). The award was presented at the annual BCLA conference in April. The awards committee noted that the organization was impressed with the project’s scope and its ability to connect communities across the province through their histories.
