Congratulations to EDST Emerita Dr. Jo-ann Archibald (Q’um Q’um Xiiem) on being appointed as an Officer to the Order of Canada. Governor General Julie Payette made 103 new appointments on December 27, honouring Canadians who have helped shape and innovate societies across the country. This is one of Canada’s highest honours.
Dr. Archibald is an Indigenous scholar, author, and pioneer in the advancement of Indigenous education, as well as the former Associate Dean for Indigenous Education and Director of the Indigenous Teacher Education Program (NITEP).
CBC interviewed Dr. Archibald about her appointment and her work in Indigenous education, which can be read here.
The Department of Educational Studies is pleased to extend a warm welcome to Dr. Sharon Stein. Dr. Stein joined the department January 1, 2019 as an Assistant Professor!
Against purity and for a politics of responsibility
Sponsored by the CRC in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change
Seminar with Dr. Alexis Shotwell, Carleton University
Thursday, January 17th | 4:00 – 6:00 p.m. | PCOH 2012
Often there is an implicit or explicit idea that in order to live authentically or ethically we ought to avoid potentially reprehensible results in our actions. Since it is not possible to avoid complicity, we do better to start from an assumption that everyone is implicated in situations we (at least in some way) repudiate. This presentation investigates that category of complex or big problems toward which we bear impossible responsibilities. Although these responsibilities arise from our particular and situated context — our individual lives — they are not resolvable individually. But most ethical systems on offer posit and return to an individual knower, willer, and actor, enjoining them to aim for personal ethical purity. An ethical approach aiming for personal purity is inadequate in the face of the complex and entangled situation in which we in fact live. Individualism, in the context of relations perceptible through considering embodiment, is an ethical problem because it constitutes ethical success as personal purity. Such personal purity is simultaneously inadequate, impossible, and politically dangerous for shared projects of living on earth. While personal purity may be a winnable aim in some ethical situations, is impossible in situations such as energy use and eating. We do better to aim for different sorts of ethical practice more consonant with the entangled and complex situations we meet. I explore the idea of a “politics of responsibility” as one way to practice this sort of ethics.
Alexis Shotwell is an associate professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin territory. She is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project, and author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Her website is alexisshotwell.com
EDST FRIDAY SEMINAR SERIES
Friday, January 18, 2019 | 2:00 – 4:00 P.M. | PCOH 1302
Northrop Frye’s writing on geography and space in the Canadian imagination: Universities and Colleges as
scholastic ‘garrisons’
Jed Anderson, PhD candidate
I intend to discuss the unique way higher education in Canada conforms to a certain spatial pattern with historical roots. I will draw primarily on the works of Northrop Frye, who argued that a “garrison mentality” exists in the non-indigenous Canadian imagination. I may draw from additional works by Margaret Atwood, and other Canadian literary figures to further this discussion. I will also refer to Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space as part of a discussion about the implications of Frye’s theory. This presentation represents research for a paper I intend to submit to the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education conference in 2019.
A Phenomenology of Utterance, the Threshold of Teaching
Adi Burton, PhD student, and Dr. Sam Rocha
In this paper, Adi Burton and Sam Rocha explore the relation between the utterance—the Call and the Response—and the Prophet who stands between the utterances in the threshold of teaching. This phenomenological exploration is inspired by texts and commentary by Augustine, Ricouer, Marion, Rosenzweig, and Buber, along with Burton and Rocha’s personal experience reading the Book of Samuel.
Congratulations to Dr. Shauna Butterwick, who has been inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Eductation (IACE) Hall of Fame! This Hall of Fame has been created to honour leaders in the fields of continuing education and adult learning.
Through her advocacy and research, she has advocated for community as a teacher, advancing how community is a source of significant knowledge, not just a site of research and learning. In partnership with national and local women’s organizations, Butterwick’s research through collaborative, community-based inquiry not only extends academic knowledge of the field, but makes a difference to the practice of adult education within grassroots organizations. Through all of her efforts, Butterwick has moved women’s learning and leadership within Canadian adult education out of the shadows and into the light.
Read Dr. Butterwick’s entire citation here.
The induction for the class of 2018 was held November 10 in New Orleans, Louisiana. This year marks the 23rd anniversary of the Hall of Fame.
Friday Seminar Series
Friday, December 7, 2018
2:00 – 4:00 PM
PCOH 2012
No pierden el humor: Post-disaster humor in Mexico
Gabriella Maestrini, PhD Candidate
Since my dissertation deals with the pedagogical possibilities of humor and comedy, it is timely to focus on natural disasters such as earthquakes to explore how people affected by them might find, share or create humor in disaster. The Mitacs research focuses on how people who have experienced natural disasters might make meaning, through humor, of these experiences. At the same time, it might provide insight into the political, cultural and social processes through which this humor reveals, shares and produces cultural memories.
How Colonization Mapped the Way for Public Mass Gun Violence and what Education and Society can do about it
Stephanie Glick, PhD Candidate
This work positions public mass gun violence (PMGV) as an intergenerational consequence of colonization, coloniality, and slavery in the United States. I map how the shooter’s white privilege, alongside his white/male fragility, combined with a national consciousness built on an ethos of colonization and coloniality, leads him to believe he has unearned “rights” to the social riches of the center.
I proffer that most of us who benefit from capitalist, neo-liberal, patriarchal state and social institutions are complicit in co-creating the conditions that produce PMGV’s gunmen because in order to exist in such a capacity, we perpetuate a system of insiders and outsiders. As illustrated, possibilities for allaying violence are located in practicing critical self-reflection and “pedagogies of discomfort” (Boler, 1999) that can counter bureaucratic expectations of submissiveness.
Boler, M. (1999). Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge.
Tuesday, November 27, 4:00 – 5:15 PM
Seminar: Are school textbooks decolonisable? Entanglements of the ‘colonial present’ in Israel and Palestine
Seminar with Dr. André Elias Mazawi, UBC
Hosted by the Comparative, International, and Development for International and Development Education Centre (CIDEC) <https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/cidec/>
How should school textbooks be understood within contexts of intractable politico-military conflicts and in contexts of struggle for self-determination?
Sociologist of education Dr. André Elias Mazawi of UBC discusses this question and more.
Presented by the Comparative, International & Development Education Centre (CIDEC) and Youth, Activism and Community (YAC), Equity Studies, New College.
You can tune in online at: https://zoom.us/j/661234725
Thursday, November 29, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
We Will Not Be Silent: Discussing Human Rights in the Middle East
Speakers include Human Rights Lawyer Maya Duvage and UBC Professor André Elias Mazawi
Hosted by the Liu Institute for Global Issues
Can the Displaced Speak? Refugee Muslim Young Woman Negotiating Identity and Belonging Through the Camera Lense
November 12 – January 4, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday December 7, 5:00 – 7:30 p.m.
Lobby Gallery, Liu Institute for Global Issues
Please RSVP: www.canthedisplacedspeak.eventbrite.ca
Please join EDST PhD Candidate and PSI Scholar, Neila Miled, and the PhotoVoice participants for a brief presentation and Q&A session followed by refreshments and light snacks.
This PhotoVoice project exhibits the voices of ten Muslim young women who have experienced displacement due to civil wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Syria. It captures the emotions, journeys and memories that a group of Muslim refugees from different cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds choose to share about the following themes: identity, belonging, the notion of home, and their school experiences.
These young women share being Muslims and becoming ‘refugees’, but this project is an invitation to see them beyond the ‘Hijab’ and the ‘Niqab’. Through the camera lens, they speak for themselves and encourage you to see the world through their eyes. They hope you listen to their stories, as told through their photographs, and invite you to experience the dreams they are chasing and the challenges they face.
Congratulations to EDST’s Dr. Amy Metcalfe for being awarded the 2018 Award for Significant Research on International Higher Education from the Council for International Higher Education (CIHE) of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). Amy received the award in recognition of her article, “Nomadic political ontology and transnational academic mobility,” published in Critical Studies in Education.
The award recognizes a highly significant research outcome in the field of international higher education. From the award citation: “The article is state-of-the-art knowledge and challenges current thinking, framing, and approaches to academic mobility through its “heretical” centering of the (academic) body and the epistemic and ontological changes that take place at the level of the individual. The article is innovative not only in concept but in academic writing style, and holds great potential to serve as a model for future research.”
