Stephen Hornsby, Director, Canadian-American Center, University of Maine
Geography Building Room 130 Monday, March 19, 5-6:30 pm
Transforming canada: FISH AND FUR AND THE NATURE of CANADA
Transforming canada: CITIES AND THE NATURE of CANADA
Michèle Dagenais – Département d’histoire – Université de Montréal – on MONDAY 12 March 2012 in the GREEN COLLEGE COACH HOUSE at 5:00pm
CITIES AND THE NATURE OF CANADA
Although some 80 percent of Canadians are urban dwellers, Canadians have long held a somewhat ambivalent—even antagonistic—attitude toward cities, and especially large cities. Cities are rarely considered in discussions of “the nature of Canada” and amid the plethora of images of forests and prairies, cities hardly figure in definitions of Canada or the collective imagination of the country. Prevailing views of cities as power containers, and monopolisers of hinterland resource wealth pose a false dichotomy, conceiving of cities and their inhabitants as distinct and separate from the rest of the country.
The talk will place cities at the centre of Canadian nature and illuminate some of the social and environmental processes produced by urbanization in the 19th century. It will address three questions at the heart of debates about contemporary cities from an historical perspective: the ecological imprint of cities on Canadian space; the diversification of urban populations; and the urban metabolism produced by the exchange of goods between cities and their hinterlands. Finally, the talk will ask whether contemporary Canadian cities are on the way to becoming sustainable, bio diverse and healthy places.
Transforming canada: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE NATURE OF CANADA
Ken Cruikshank, Department of History, McMaster University
Wednesday 29th February, 5:00PM Geography room 130
KEN CRUIKSHANK is a historian from McMaster University. He has written effectively on the Intercolonial Railway and the administrative state and he is interested in the interaction of business, state and society in Canada and the United States between the 1850s and the 1950s. His current work focuses on issues related to urban environmental history. He and Nancy B. Bouchier are currently exploring the interaction of social and environmental change, public policy and the popular use of Hamilton Harbour.
ABSTRACT:
Grounded: Communications and the Nature of Canada Ken Cruikshank McMaster University
Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and their followers have emphasized the materiality of media over its messages. Other historians explore the ways in which new technologies of communication and transportation transformed the human experience of space and time.
This talk takes a different approach to understanding the materiality of the medium. Transportation and communications companies needed wires, cables, pipes, towers, rails, roads, bridges, runways and other built structures to transform the flow of peoples, goods and information in Canada. We are used to thinking of those structures in terms of the large and ambitious communications networks of which they were a part. We are also used to thinking of them as monuments to the human capacity to transform the landscape, erasing topography and distance.
In this talk Ken Cruikshank will urge that we also take seriously the ways in which local human and non-human processes interacted with these structures and the new flows of people, goods and information, and incorporate those into our understanding of the development of a networked society. The talk will explore several luminous moments that illustrate both the fragility and resilience of local natural and human networks in the face of new communications and transportation systems. No matter how much they seemed to annihilate the bounds of time and space, those networks – yes, even cell phone networks — were grounded.
Transforming canada: WILDERNESS CULTURE AND THE NATURE of CANADA
Claire Campbell, Department of History, Dalhousie University
GREEN COLLEGE COACH HOUSE
CLAIRE CAMPBELL is a historian from Dalhousie University where she lso heads up the Canadian Studies programa dn was a foundation member fo their Sustainability BA program. Her interests are in Parks (editor of a recent volume with UC Press) and Public History and she is the author of Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay (UBCPress)
This talk takes its inspiration from a passage in Stephen Leacock’s 1936 essay, “I’ll stay in Canada,” in which he writes: “To all of us here, the vast unknown country of the North, reaching away to the polar seas, supplies a peculiar mental background.” Leacock’s apparent affinity for a vast and never-seen space, the comfortable nationalization of an Ontario point of view, and the belief that Canadians share a “peculiar mental background” by virtue of our geographical location says a lot about Canadian attitudes toward nature in the twentieth century.
Claire Campbell will interrogate this by focusing on the arts to examine Canadians’ cultural investment in both the concept and geography of wilderness spaces. Her talk will focus on post-Confederation Canada, because her concern is with Canadians trying to act as Canadians: naturalizing a certain territory and certain behaviour. It will draw together an eclectic constellation of sources to give a sense of the ubiquitous reach of wilderness references, moving from the more imaginative and impressionistic in the arts, to popular and consumer culture, and then to physical places where we have attempted to realize an ideal.
Play Chthonics 2012 series
Graham House (in the Piano Lounge), UBC Green College: 6201 Cecil Green Park Road, from 5:00 to 6:30 on the Wednesday dates below.
Nikki Reimer (Vancouver) 21-Sep-11
Gail Scott (Montreal) 21-Sep-11
Daphne Marlatt (Vancouver) 16-Nov-11
Meredith Quartermain (Vancouver) 16-Nov-11
Cecily Nicholson (Surrey) 07-Dec-11
Jim Johnstone (Toronto) 07-Dec-11
Bill bissett (Toronto) 18-Jan-12
Alex Leslie (Richmond) 18-Jan-12
Warren Cariou (Winnipeg) 15-Feb-12
Marie Clements (Galiano Island) 15-Feb-12
Robert Majzels (Calgary) 7-Mar-12
Erín Mouré (Montreal) 7-Mar-12
Robson Reading Series – Lynn Coady and Anne Perdue
UBC Library/Bookstore at Robson Square
“The Antagonist excels at a number of levels: It’s a readable, quixotic coming-of-age story, a comedy of very bad manners, and a thoughtful inquiry into the very nature of self. It’s the sort of novel–and Coady the sort of writer–deserving of every accolade coming to it.” –Robert J. Wiersema, National Post
Transforming canada: GENDER AND THE NATURE of CANADA
Joanna Dean, Department of History, Carleton University
Geography 130
Film Screening & Talk – Peter Blow & ‘Village of Widows’
Tuesday, January 31, 4:30-6:30 pm
Michael M. Ames Theatre, UBC Museum of Anthropology
Admission to MOA: UBC staff, students & faculty free with ID; Others $9
‘Village of Widows’ ―a documentary directed by award-winning filmmaker Peter Blow―recounts the remarkable story of the Sahtu Dene people, who were employed by the Canadian Government during WWII to transport uranium, which became fuel for the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Peter Blow is a researcher, writer, producer, and director based in Toronto. He has worked on close to 100 broadcast documentaries both in England and Canada, many of which have garnered numerous awards including two Oscar nominations.
This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, ひろしま hiroshima by Ishiuchi Miyako, on display at the UBC Museum of Anthropology through February 12, 2012.
Sponsors: Vancouver Save Article 9 and UBC Centre for Japanese Research, Department of Asian Studies, Indigenous Education Institute of Canada, International Canadian Studies Centre, Department of Theatre and Film, Department of Language and Literacy Education, Museum of Anthropology
Robson Reading Series – Sachiko Murakami and Nick Thran
UBC Library/Bookstore at Robson Square
“These are angry poems. Proud and angry. But smart and quirky, too, daring us to tear up our death pledge to real estate, and rethink our citizenship in scandalous cities.” –Meredith Quatermain, author of Recipes from the Red Planet
Transforming canada: SIZE AND THE NATURE of CANADA
Alan Maceachern, Department of History, University of Western ontario
GREEN COLLEGE COACH HOUSE