Each of our program areas invite renowned scholars, literary and cultural critics who provide campus talks and public presentations demonstrating their expertise in their fields.
We are pleased to welcome acclaimed author Jack Halberstam to UBC Okanagan on April 7, 2022.
Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton. It is playing at MoMA until January 30, 2022.
Join us for a public talk with Jack Halberstam and respondent, El Chenier.
Title: Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse
When: April 7, 2-3:30
Where: ART 214
In this talk, Halberstam will talk about his idea of “unknowing”, and will discuss a way to know the world differently, to change our ideology or worldview, around what we value.
This event is free and open to all faculty, but registration is required. After the talk, we will host a small reception in ADM 115. Please register for the talk and reception below.
This event is supported and organized by FCCS in partnership with the Public Humanities Hub Okanagan.
Abstract
World, in many of the major philosophical traditions of the last century, presumes a totality of things, a form of being that exists through the sorting of subjects from objects, objects from things and things from unseen forces. And while “world,” and “life” seem to offer vectors for utopian thinking (“another world is possible”), these totalizing concepts have also been predicated upon anti-blackness and from the elevation of the human above all other forms of life. Rather than holding out for new worlds, revitalized notions of life, or remade utopian dreams, this lecture begins with the premise that world-making as we currently conceive of it can only proceed by way of unworlding, world unmaking in which concepts such as the human, subject, object, animal, vegetative are tipped out of their hierarchical formations and disordered in meaning and in their relations to one another. My talk follows a series of aesthetic experiments from the 1970’s to the present that revel in collapse, destruction and ruination.
About El Chenier
El Chenier (they/them) is a professor and oral historian in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University whose teaching and research focuses on the history of sexuality in modern Canada and the United States, and the digital humanities. Their award-winning article “Love-Politics: Lesbian Wedding Practices in Canada and the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s” was published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. They are also the founder of the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony, a unique online collection of oral interviews housed on SFU’s Special Collections, and author of Radical Inclusion: Equity and Diversity Among Female Faculty at Simon Fraser University (2019) .
Presented by the Department of English and Cultural Studies and the Centre for Teaching and Learning, Dr. Zawacki offered a workshop and lecture on principles and practices of writing across the curriculum.
Emerita professor Terry Myers Zawacki directed the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program and the writing center at George Mason University.
Tanya Talaga is the acclaimed author of Seven Fallen Feathers, which was the winner of the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult.
For more than twenty years she has been a journalist at the Toronto Star, and has been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism. She was also named the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy.
Jo-Anne McArthur is an award-winning photographer, author, and educator based in Toronto, Canada. Through her long-term body of work, We Animals, she has been documenting our complex relationship with animals around the globe for fifteen years.
McArthur is the author of two books, We Animals, published in 2014, and Captive, published in 2017. McArthur’s newest endeavour, The Unbound Project, is a photographic project that celebrates female leaders at the forefront of animal advocacy, both contemporary and historical.
Marina Kriscautzky was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she trained as a kindergarten teacher, here was where she found her biggest passion, to comprehend how children learn to read and write. Kriscautzky moved to Mexico in 1990 to pursue a BA in Education from UNAM and a Masters and PhD in Science from the IPN where she studied the theories of Jean Piajet under the direction of her mentor Emilia Ferreiro, a pioneer in the recent studies on the learning of written language in early childhood.
Claudio García Turza is one of the most renowned scholars worldwide in the study of the history of the origins of Romance languages. He is a Full Professor in History of the Spanish Language at the University of La Rioja in Spain and the Director of the Instituto Orígenes del Español (Origins of the Spanish Language Institute) at the Centro Internacional de Investigación de la Lengua Española. His research focuses especially in Medieval Studies, Spanish Language, Spanish Dialectology and Historical Linguistics of the Spanish Language.
John Greyson is a Toronto film/video artist whose shorts, features and installations include: Fig Trees, Proteus The Law of Enclosures, Lilies, Un©ut, Zero Patience, The Making of Monsters and Urinal. An Associate Professor in Film Production at York University, and a Phd candidate in Sexual Diversity/Drama at U of T, he was awarded the Toronto Arts Award for Film/Video, 2000, the Bell Canada Video Art Award in 2007, and the Alanis Obamsawin Cinema Politica Award, 2011.
Juana Muñoz Liceras is a specialist in the analysis of bilingual language acquisition and an expert in the study of non-native acquisition from a linguistic perspective.Departing from the biological, psychological and linguistic pillars of the Universal Grammar approach to language acquisition, and using both experimental and longitudinal data, Professor Liceras has carried out her innovative research on a wide variety of grammatical processes in child and adult second language acquisition with Spanish, English, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Finnish and Arabic as target or source languages.
Richard Kerridge is a nature writer and ecocritic. Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians, published by Chatto & Windus in 2014, is a mixture of memoir and nature writing. It was adapted for BBC national radio and broadcast as a Radio 4 Book of the Week in July 2014. Other nature writing by Richard has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing.
Leigh Badgley is a Transmedia Producer, Filmmaker, Writer, Teacher and Speaker, who has created a library of important, inspiring documentaries, including Greenpeace: Making a Stand (Global Television, 2006), winner of the Leo Award for Best Documentary and the Special Jury Award at the Explorers Club Film Festival in New York. The Dolphin Dealer (CBC, 2008) featured Ric O’Barry, star of the Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove, and exposed a controversial dolphin capture program in the Solomon Islands.
