RESEARCH PROJECTS AND PUBLICATIONS

Audience Incorporated (Inc.): Youth Cultural Productions and the New Media - This talk was delivered by Dr. Michael Hoechsmann at the Centre on May 31, 2007. In this talk, Dr. Hoechsmann addresses how changes in access to technology have facilitated both new conditions and new challenges for the reception and conception of youth voice and expression. A full version of this talk is forthcoming in Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Fall 2007.

 • • •

Integrative Anti-Racism - This keynote address was delivered by Professor George Sefa Dei (OISE/University of Toronto) at the Symposium on: “Multiculturalism With(out) Guarantees: The Integrative Anti-Racism Alternative” University of British Columbia, Vancouver, April 2, 2007. In this paper, Professor Dei offers offers some critical points in theorizing “integrative anti-racism," as well as draws attention to the pressing need for new questions in the field of anti-racism. Specifically, he emphasizes the need for projects that will benefit both the academy and the community. As he notes at the end of his lecture, in pursuing such work, "We do not simply change our own world. We change ourselves."

 • • •

Is This An African I See Before Me? - This public lecture, which is forthcoming as an article in DIME, was delivered by Dr. Handel Kashope Wright as part of the Museum of Anthropology's Perceptions of Africa: A Dialogue series, which featured community centred talks, discussion, and reflection relating to Africa, AIDS, and Representation. In this paper, Dr. Wright addresses the ways in which "Africa and Africans have been continuously mis-recognized and overdetermined by western academic discourses" and looks at what is lost through this eurocentric framework.

top

CO-SPONSORED INITIATIVES

Innocent by Contamination: Queer World-Making,Ethnicity, and Technicity in Samuel R. Delany’s,Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand - Dr. Thomas Foster, University of Washington
Tuesday, January 22, 12:15-1:30pm, Scarfe 310
Principally organized by the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education as part of the CCFI Noted Scholars Lecture Series. Co-sponsored by the Department of English, Critical Studies in Sexuality, Centre for Culture, Identity, and Education and the Centre for the Study of the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies. Poster design adapted from original by Donal O Donoghue.

My earlier work analyzed "the antinomies of posthuman thought," in the attempt to define a more productive relation between informational systems and material embodiment. This talk builds on that analysis in order to define a set of specific problems in theorizing the status of racial formations within technoculture contexts. What happens to race when the normative is no longer identical with the natural, as occurs under conditions of technosociality? When technological denaturalization becomes a social norm, what different consequences are there for race, gender, and sexuality? This talk addresses these questions through David Tomas' concept of "technicity" and its relation to ethnicity. I ask what difference it would make to Tomas' theory of technicity if it were grounded in an African-American text like Samuel R. Delany's 1984 science fiction novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, rather than William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Delany's work offers an alternative to a dominant narrative of technicity and technosociality as inversions of the relation between nature and culture and as involving the replacement of ethnicity by technicity, rather than a more radical displacement of the oppositions structuring these terms. Thomas Foster is a Professor of English at the University of Washington, and the former director of the Cultural Studies Program and an adjunct faculty member in Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He is the author of The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. This talk forms part of his current book project, which is focused on the expropriation of cyberpunk convention by writers and artists of color and is tentatively entitled Ethnicity and Technicity: Race, Nature, and Culture in the Cyberpunk Archive.(http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/F/foster_souls.html)

 • • •

Indigenous knowledge and the environment - A day-long Symposium
Friday, Nov. 23rd, 2007 from 8:30-4pm at Ponderosa Centre, Arbutus & Dogwood Rooms
Organized and co-sponsored by the Pacific Peoples' Partnership, the Koutu Nui of the Cook Islands, the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education, the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education, and the Indigenous Education Institute of Canada

This full day symposium offered perspectives on the global environmental crisis from the lens of Indigenous knowledges. The diversity and plurality of Indigenous ways of knowing (traditional, academic, scientific and activist) was used to explore the impact of climate change on Indigenous communities, from the Cook Islands to Vancouver Island, as well as what constitutes Indigenous environmentalist responses at various sites and across different academic disciplines (e.g. anthropology, education, health sciences).  The plenary panel, “Shifting Tides: Indigenous Responses to Global Climate Change” was composed of Indigenous figures from Pacific Peoples’ Partnership, Vancouver Island and the Koutu Nui of the Cook Islands.  Other panels, which included UBC faculty, visiting scholars, the UBC Environment Caucus and graduate student representatives addressed “Indigeneity, Environmentalism and the Disciplines” and  “More Environmentalisms” (i.e. not necessarily Indigenous) .  An Aboriginal scholar from Australia drew on Australian Aboriginal communities’ experiences to provide the symposium’s concluding statement. Click here for a full schedule of events.

 • • •

Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) Triennial Conference
August 17th - 22nd, 2007, University of British Columbia
Co-sponsored by CCIE and the David Lam for Multicultural Education, among others.

This conference, on the theme "Literature For Our Times", addressed the role and function of literature in the twenty-first century through keynote speeches, paper presentations, panel discussions and literary readings. The program commenced with a reading and commentary by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott on the evening of August 17, 2007. There were keynote speeches on the mornings of August 18 -22nd, followed by concurrent sessions and panel discussions till the evening of August 22, 2007. Highlights of the conference included a keynote address by CCIE Advisory Board member, Professor Henry Giroux, and a reading by and a question/answer session with acclaimed Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Professor Thiong'o also gave a keynote address, in which he explored the importance of translation in fostering new kinds of literary communities among marginalized voices. His keynote was followed by a response paper, given by CCIE Director, Professor Handel Kashope Wright.

 • • •

Music, Culture and Indigenous Thought in Busoga, Uganda: Cultural Survival and Revival at Mpambo, the African Multiversity - A Public Talk by Paul Wangoola
Organized by the Museum of Anthropology and co-sponsored by CCIE and David Lam Chair of Multicultural Education.

In this public talk, Paul Wangoola discusses the field recordings of Shawn Hall. The two choirs associated with Mpambo and which were recorded by Shawn Hall during a visit in 2004 and samples will also be played. Paulo Wangoola, Nabyama (Founder-President) of the Mpambo Afrikan Multiversity, a recently established and village-based institution of research and higher education dedicated to the revitalization of African Indigenous Thought and Spirituality. The Mpambo campus is located in Isegero, Iganga in Busoga, Eastern Uganda. As part of the work of Mpambo, there is both an Mpambo traditional music and dance group and the Ebanguliro Afrikan Spiritual Choir. A national office is located in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.

 • • •

heARTS: Disability as higher education through the Arts
Dr. Leslie Roman (Educational Studies).  Co-contributed by CCIE and David Lam Chair of Multicultural Education.

The overall aim of the heARTS Series, an acronym for Disability as Higher Education through the ARTS is to launch a critical public dialog about disability equity and social justice issues through a ‘speakers’ series that will be led by artists and policy spokespersons from the cross-disability communities. Artists and speakers with disabilities will draw upon a variety of different media (visual and performing) and disability-related policy to publicly share their own authentic narratives in their own voices with the non-disabled public at UBC students, faculty and staff. Inspired by innovative cultural and arts-based engagement, the series will challenge the dominant tropes and stereotypes that persons with disabilities are leading lives of pity, charity, heroic inspiration, or more often, dire tragedy. The series will educate the non-disabled, as well as provide active mentorship to aspiring talented artists and speakers with disabilities who will be performing alongside or conjunction with renowned artists and speakers with disabilities. Talented artists and young scholars with disabilities drawn from the existing and prospective student body at UBC will be paired with one high-profile and well-known professional artist with a disability to give paired performances/talks, artistic or film- screenings to a large receive Grounded in the larger international, national and local disability arts, cultural and right’s-based movement, the heARTS series will instigate a long overdue dialog UBC that brings together artists, performers and speakers with disabilities in an approach that harmonizes artistic and cultural politics with a rights’-based and policy approaches to social justice on disability issues. The series is part of the three-year plan to establish a Visiting Artist-with-a-Disability-Residency program in the professional faculties of UBC (Education, Law, Medicine, Nursing and Social Work) of which the series is to be an integrated part. The goal is to increase the retention of undergraduate and graduate students with disabilities through the provision of role models from the disability arts and culture movement in and outside of higher education, particularly in the professional faculties.

top

ANNUAL REPORTS

David Lam Annual reports concentrate on the work of the Chair specifically, as it also touches on the Chair's promotion of research with Faculty of education community and beyond.  Each Annual Report includes a summary and set of suggestions which addresses the contribution the David Lam Chair is making and can make toward the consolidation of the Faculty of Education’s research activities in general and the relationship between the Chair, CCIE and NCIE.

2006-2007 - Coming Soon

top