C.E. Gatchalian

C.E. Gatchalian

April 1, 2012

C.E. Gatchalian

C.E. Gatchalian

Raw in its emotionalism and bold in its theatricality, C.E. Gatchalian’s latest play, Falling in Time (Scirocco Drama, 2012) is set in Vancouver in 1994 and tells the story of four individuals across two continents and over a span of more than forty years. The lives of these characters miraculously intertwine in an uncompromising meditation on war, masculinity, sexuality, personal boundaries, and love.

C.E. Gatchalian is a playwright, fiction writer, poet, editor, and teacher. His published works include: Motifs & Repetitions (Midpoint Trade Books, 2003), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award;Broken (New Bard Press, 2006), a suite of one-act plays, Crossing & Other Plays (Lethe Press, January 2011), and Falling in Time (Scirocco Drama, 2012). He has also published a chapbook of poetry calledtor/sion (Ranson Works Press, 2005). The winner of the 2005 Gordon Armstrong Playwright’s Rent Award, he has been Playwright-in-Residence at Playhouse Theatre Company and the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver, and Writer-in-Residence at the Berton House Writers’ Retreat in Dawson City, Yukon. His work has been produced on stages in Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg and New Zealand, as well as on CBC Radio and the Bravo Channel. He lives in Vancouver, BC.

C.E. Gatchalian will be reading at the Lillooet Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on May 10, 2012 at 2.00PM-3.00PM.

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Lee Maracle – The First Wives Club

March 29, 2012

Lee Maracle

Image Credit: Theytus

First Wives Club: Coast Salish Style (Theytus Books, 2010), is a poignant and powerful collection of short stories that provide revealing glimpses into the life experiences of an Aboriginal woman, a university professor, an activist and a single mother. With lyrical eloquence, Lee Maracle takes the reader on a deeply stirring and emotional journey that is at times humorous and heart-wrenching but not soon to be forgotten.

Lee Maracle is a member of the Stó:lo Nation and was born in North Vancouver. She is the author of numerous critically acclaimed literary works including: I Am Woman, Bobbi Lee – Indian Rebel, Ravensong,Sojourners & Sundogs, and Daughters are Forever. She has edited a number of anthologies including My Home As I Remember. She received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from St. Thomas University and the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. Lee currently teaches at the University of Toronto.

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"Chew On This" Sustainability Week Lectures at Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

March 29, 2012

As part of UBC’s Sustainability initiative, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, in partnership with Common Energy UBC, Oxfam UBC, and the UBC Commerce Undergraduate Society’s Sustainability Committee present “Chew On This,” a week-long series of lectures, panel discussions, and workshops.  Common Energy UBC is a student-run organization of diverse and forward-thinking individuals working to incorporate sustainability into all aspects of the UBC community. It aims to affect real change by building strong networks and working proactively with the University, while fostering leadership and engaging peers through innovative programming.  Oxfam UBC is an organization committed to developing innovative ways to support Oxfam’s important aid and relief work, and to raise awareness of global poverty.  The UBC Commerce Undergraduate Society‘s Sustainability Committee works to provide opportunities for Sauder students to educate themselves on what sustainability means in the context of business and motivate students to integrate sustainability into their professional and personal lives. As well as using the CUS as a model for how sustainability can be implemented into the operations and strategic thinking of an organization.

The purpose behind this week is to open a dialogue about sustainable food on campus and engage students through a variety of different forums. This is an opportunity for students, faculty, and staff to engage in an open discussion around these topics which are growing increasingly important as the world’s population continues to grow and the effects of climate change on food production begin to show.



Each evening examined Sustainable Food and Food Security from a different perspective:

Monday: The Business Case Behind Sustainable Food

February 13, 2012 – 4.00pm to 6.00pm at the Lillooet Room, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

Annie Moss and Randy Hooper, founders of Discovery Organics and Chef Steve Golob from Place Vanier Residence will discuss the business case behind sustainable food and the cost and benefit of eating local, organic. Speakers will discuss the business case behind sustainable food. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Tuesday: Taking a Bite Out of Your Campus

February 14, 2012 – 4.00pm to 6.00pm at the Lillooet Room, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

Sprouts is a 100% volunteer and student-run organization at UBC that connects us to our food and the people who grow it. Sprouts volunteers will lead this hands-on approach to food mapping to learn where our food comes from and how we access it at UBC and in Vancouver.

Wednesday: Food Security, Eh? A Panel Discussion on Sustainable Food in a Canadian Context

February 15, 2012 – 4.00pm to 6.00pm at the Lillooet Room, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

A diverse group of panelists shared their research and thoughts on the topic of Canada and what it means to have sustainable food in Canada.  Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Speakers include:

Panelists include:

  • Dr. Andrew Riseman, Associate Professor of Applied Biology and Plant Breeding in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems; co-chair of the Campus Academic Plan committee working to guide the future of the UBC Farm.
  • Dr. Sean Smukler, Assistant Professor of Applied Biology and Soil Science; Junior Chair, Agriculture and the Environment; research working with farmers to assess impacts of farm management practices.
  • Dr. James Vercammen, Professor in both the Faculty of Land and Food Systems and the Sauder School of Business; research focussing on food and resource economics.
  • Will Valley, Project Coordinator, Think&Eat Green@School; member of Inner City Farms. Will’s research interests include the analysis and application of community-engaged scholarship and food system education
  • Anelyse Weiler, Communications Coordinator, UBC Farm
  • Sophia Baker-French, Registered Dietician; MSc Candidate in Human Nutrition; previous Research Assistant with Think and Eat Green @ School; prior coordinator at the UBC Farm School Tours program.

Thursday: Hungry for Change Banquet

February 16, 2012- Doors at 6pm at Thea’s Lounge. Tickets $5.

Oxfam UBC’s most well-known event has connected with Chew On This: A Week of Perspectives on Sustainable Food to bring together students, faculty, and staff for an eye-opening conversation and delicious meal. This night is meant to satisfy the appetites for learning through interesting speakers and engaging conversations.

Drop-ins are welcomed but if possible, please register in advance so that organizers can prepare an appropriate amount of food to be served.
Please share this with your friends on Facebook.

 

Presented in partnership between:

Common Energy UBC
Oxfam UBC
CUS Sustainability

And with generous support by:
AMS Sustainability Fund
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
UBC Food Services

UBC Library Resources

Books:

Are you interested in more about this area?   There are open access resources available online selected by UBC Librarians

  • Small Business Accelerator: http://www.sba-bc.ca/
  • Industry Canada: http://www.strategis.ic.gc.ca/ic_wp-pa.htm
  • Agricultural Communications Documentation Centre: http://web.library.uiuc.edu/asp/agx/acdc/
  • Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN: http://www.fao.org/

Other on-line resources:

UBC Resources

UBC Courses on Sustainability – http://www.sustain.ubc.ca/teaching-learning/curriculum/courses

For more information, please contact Allan Cho

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Alannah Mitchell – Sea Sick

March 27, 2012

Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Alanna Mitchell is a Canadian journalist and author. Her literary non-fiction wins praise for its ability to describe complex ideas in plain language. Mitchell’s subjects are science, education and human behaviour and she is known for her strong narrative style. Sea Sick is the first book to explain how the global ocean — 99 per cent of the planet’s living space — is undergoing vast chemical changes at the hand of man and why that matters. In a nutshell, some of the carbon dioxide we are putting into the air by burning fossil fuels is being absorbed by the ocean. That reverts it to a state it has not been in for millions of years: more acid, warmer, and more prone to vast oxygen-deprived dead zones. At risk is the very structure of life in the ocean and therefore, on the planet as a whole. UBC Reads Sustainability is supported by AMS Sustainability, the UBC Sustainability Initiative, and the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, and webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre).

Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library

Jones, J. A. A., & International Geographical Union. Commission for Water Sustainability. (2010). Water sustainability: A global perspective. London: Hodder Education.

CROXALL, J. P., & NICOL, S. (2004). Management of southern ocean fisheries: Global forces and future sustainability. Antarctic Science, 16(4), 569-584. doi:10.1017/S0954102004002330 [Link]

Anon. (2012). Global ocean-based industries to focus on sustainability. Australian Maritime Digest, (218), 11-11. [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Sustainability

English

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Addressing Injustice: UBC’s Response to the Internment of Japanese Canadian Students

March 23, 2012

On Wednesday, March 21, 2012, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre hosted a symposium called Addressing injustice: UBC’s Response to the internment of Japanese Canadians students, which examined UBC’s role and response to the internment of 76 Japanese Canadian students during the Second World War, and how those issues resonate today.  The March 21st symposium examined UBC’s role. Participants also examined related ethical issues to connect issues of justice and responsibility in what happened 70 years ago to issues that still resonate today. You can view the webcast here.    A 32 minute video directed by Alejandro Yoshizawa  featuring the stories of six Japanese Canadians who were UBC students in 1942 was shown.  Seventy years after Japanese Canadian UBC students were forcibly removed and exiled from the B.C. coast, UBC is examining its own role in this injustice with a symposium.

Although the Canadian government implemented the internment policy, the role and responsibility of UBC regarding its Japanese Canadian students remains an uncomfortable question. Many U.S. universities protested the inclusion of Japanese American students in the forced removal, tried to place their students at other universities or supported the completion of their degrees during the internment.

This was not the case at UBC. Even before internment, Japanese Canadian students in the university’s Canadian Officers Training Corps (C.O.T.C) had their commissions stripped by the university’s Senate Committee on Military Education. Two UBC faculty members, Henry Angus and E.H. Morrow, were among the few who spoke out against the injustice.

Symposium speakers included:

  • Mary Kitagawa, an active member of the Japanese Canadian community who led the campaign for UBC honorary degrees
  • Stan Fukawa, community historian, will speak about what life was like at UBC for Japanese Canadian students before the war
  • John Price, University of Victoria history professor, will speak about the larger contexts for the forced removal of Japanese Canadians in 1942
  • Henry Yu, UBC history professor, will address issues of justice and responsibility both in the past and present and why an awareness of history is a crucial element of citizenship and civic participation for all Canadians

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World Poetry Call for Peace Poems for International Peace Festival at Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

March 23, 2012

World Poetry Call for Peace Poems for our International Peace Festival in May! 

Guidelines:

Poems need to be dedicated to peace or for peace.

One page only, two pages in another language

Deadline:  April 15th , 2012, Poems need to have copyright © and include the name of poet and country. All selected poems will be put on display at the Richmond Cultural Centre during the International Peace festival at the Richmond Cultural Centre, Richmond, BC, May 25-26  and at Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, May 1-31.

Selected poems will be read on the World Poetry Café Radio Show, CFRO, 102.7 FM in Vancouver British Columbia. If possible they will be included in the World Poetry Peace Poem  e-anthology.

Please send to ariadnes@uniserve.com  or astarte_sita@yahoo.com

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Juanita Sundberg – Community building

March 20, 2012

Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Common Energy UBC’s NOW (No Other World) Forum. Dr. Juanita Sundberg brings the insights of feminist geography and the sensibilities of an ethnographer to bear on the cultural politics of nature conservation. Dr. Sundberg’s work seeks to foster conversations between feminist theory, critical race theory, post-humanism, political ecology, and Latin American studies. In this webcast, Dr. Sundberg discusses why the environmental movement is dominantly female and strategies on building a community of climate activists.

Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library

Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33-47. doi:10.1177/1474474013486067 [Link]

Sundberg, J. (2006). Conservation encounters: Transculturation in the ‘contact zones’ of empire. Cultural Geographies, 13(2), 239-265. doi:10.1191/1474474005eu337oa [Link]

Sundberg, J. (1998). NGO landscapes in the Maya biosphere reserve, Guatemala. Geographical Review, 88(3), 388-412. [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Sustainability

Political Science

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Bob Evans – Our Energy Future – Can We Make it More Sustainable?

March 20, 2012

Robert Evans is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at The University of British Columbia (UBC). He obtained a B.A.Sc. degree in mechanical engineering from UBC, an M.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Dr. Evans has served as Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and was founding Director of the Clean Energy Research Centre at UBC. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and the Society of Automotive Engineers. Dr. Evans is the author of “Fueling Our Future: an Introduction to Sustainable Energy”, published by Cambridge University Press. The book is also available in Chinese, Arabic, and Turkish, and was short-listed for the 2007 Donner Prize for the best book on public policy published by a Canadian author.

Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library

Kumar, V., Haapala, K. R., Rivera, J. L., Hutchins, M. J., Endres, W. J., Gershenson, J. K., . . . Sutherland, J. W. (2005). Infusing sustainability principles into manufacturing/mechanical engineering curricula. Journal of Manufacturing Systems, 24(3), 215-225. doi:10.1016/S0278-6125(06)80011-7 [Link]

Davim, J. P., & SpringerLINK ebooks – Engineering. (2014). Modern mechanical engineering: Research, development and education (1; 2014 ed.). Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-45176-8 [Link]

Holloway, M. D., & Rudd, O. (2013). Energy sustainability: Fracking : The operations and environmental consequences of hydraulic fracturing. John Wiley & Sons. [Link]

Gheorghe, A. V., Masera, M., Katina, P. F., & SpringerLINK ebooks – Engineering. (2014). Infranomics sustainability, engineering design and governance (2014th ed.). Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-02493-6 [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Sustainability

Mechanical Engineering

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Michiah Prull – Beyond awareness: the power of public narrative

March 20, 2012

Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Common Energy UBC’s NOW (No Other World) Forum. Michiah Prull works as a Community Leadership Coordinator at the David Suzuki Foundation. Michiah has previously worked on President Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign, thus he is very knowledgeable about engaging people in a cause. In this lecture, Michiah makes the case for focusing on telling a narrative in order to engage people in the climate crisis.

Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library

Miller, H. T. (2014). Narrative competition in public discourse. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 36(3), 287-307. doi:10.2753/ATP1084-1806360301 [Link]

Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701-721. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701 [Link]

Journet, D., Boehm, B. A., & Britt, C. E. (2011). Narrative acts: Rhetoric, race and identity, knowledge. New York: Hampton Press.

UBC Library Research Guides

Education

Language and Lingusitics

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Richard Carpiano – Measuring Community Social Capital in British Columbia: An Eco-metric Approach for Population Health Research

March 20, 2012

Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College. Richard Carpiano’s interests centers on the sociology of health and illness, particularly community and individual socioeconomic influences on physical and mental health. Research- and policy-related concern with how community social and physical conditions serve as determinants of health has necessitated improved measurement of these contexts. Consistent with this need, there has been increased interest in “ecometrics”—the scientific approach to measuring ecologic settings—for creating reliable and valid measures of community context derived from survey-based ratings of community conditions by local residents. Existing research using ecometric techniques, however, has been conducted in a limited number of (mostly urban and non-Canadian) contexts. This talk will discuss an interdisciplinary study that applied ecometric approaches to creating several measures of community social cohesion and social capital. Using survey data collected from residents of 100 British Columbia communities, we evaluate separately for urban and rural communities: (a) the degree to which the reliability of specific ecologic measures is contingent upon the number of “raters” in a community who are providing information and (b) the validity of the resulting measures. The implications of these findings for guiding future studies of community context—for population health and other areas of focus—is also discussed.

Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library

Carpiano, R. M. (2006). Toward a neighborhood resource-based theory of social capital for health: Can Bourdieu and sociology help? Social Science & Medicine, 62(1), 165-175. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2005.05.020 [Link]

Carpiano, R. (2014). When should one (dis)trust trust measures? Response to Lindstrom and Sawada. Social Science & Medicine, 116, 239-240. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.06.032 [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Population and Public Health

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