UBC Environmental Humanities Launch Events

Keynote 2: Dear Forest: Writing Across Breaking Points with More-Than Human Worlds

Thursday, May 20: 11:15 AM PDT / 7:15 PM BST / 11:45 PM IST

Host: Tracey Heatherington, University of British Columbia

Featured guest: Hilary Cunningham Scharper, University of Toronto

This keynote talk was sponsored by the Public Humanities Hub at UBC. Click here to go to the recording.


Paper Session 5: Oecologies and the Environmental Humanities at UBC

Thursday, May 20: 1:00 PM PDT / 9:00 PM BST / Friday May 21: 1:30 AM IST

Chair: Lane Hall, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

Presenters:

    • “An Otherwise Unremarkable Oak: Shakespeare, Ecology, and Urban Development in Early Twentieth-century Vancouver” | Patricia Badir, University of British Columbia, Canada
    • “The Trouble with Existential Risk” | Derek Woods, University of British Columbia, Canada
    • “It’s Raining Potatoes!” | Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia, Canada

Click here to go to the recording.


UBC Environmental Humanities Infrastructure & Initiatives

Thursday, May 20: 2:30 PM PDT / 10:30 PM BST | Friday, May 21: 3:00 AM IST

Event description: This roundtable will cover infrastructure and initiatives at UBC that support sustainability and climate justice research.

Chair: Mary Chapman, University of British Columbia, Canada

Speakers:

Tara Ivanochko | “The UBC Sustainability Initiative: Supporting UBC faculty and students to act on the planet’s most urgent sustainability problems”

Tara Ivanochko received a PhD in Paleoclimatology at the University of Edinburgh. In 2009 she joined the educational leadership stream faculty at UBC to direct, develop and teach in the Environmental Science undergraduate degree program. Now, as Academic Director, Tara provides vision, guidance, and oversight to the UBC Sustainability Initiative.

David Tindall | “Humanities Courses in the Minor in Environment and Society”

D.B. Tindall studies contention over environmental issues, including topics such as forestry, wilderness preservation, fisheries, and climate change. A major focus of his research has been environmental movements in BC and Canada and, in this context, the interrelationships between social networks, movement identification, and participation. His current research, funded by SSHRC, focuses on sociological aspects of contention over climate change in Canada, including perceptions about climate change, views about climate justice, and social processes affecting policies for dealing with climate change, and media coverage of climate change issues. He chairs Arts’ Minor in Environment and Society.

Liska Richer | “SEEDS Sustainability Program: Creating Applied Research & Partnerships”

Liska Richer is Manager of the SEEDS Sustainability Program at the UBC-Vancouver Campus. SEEDS utilizes the Campus as a Living Laboratory to co-create impactful student-led research opportunities and interdisciplinary partnerships that advance UBC’s ambitious sustainability and wellbeing commitments and create scalable solutions to critical societal issues. Over 1000 impactful applied research projects have been generated which inform the development and implementation of UBC’s sustainability policies and practices, and provide students with professional development and meaningful learning experiences and faculty with opportunities to integrate sustainability into the curriculum. She co-chairs the Campus Biodiversity Initiative: Research & Demonstration, Climate Change in Urban Biodiversity, UBC Food System Project, and the Climate Action Plan 2030. Additionally, Liska in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems. 

Anna Casas | “UBC’s zeroemissionuniversity petition”

Anna is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies and was a Wall Scholar at Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC. Her work explores intimate connections between gender, nationalisms, and regionalisms in modern Spanish and Catalan literature and visual culture. With Wall Scholars and other UBC faculty, Anna drafted UBC’s zeroemissionuniversity petition.

Meghan Wise | “Connecting and empowering university and community stakeholders to take bold climate action for a just future”

Meghan Wise is the Campus Climate Initiatives Lead with the Climate Hub and a graduate student in Political Science at UBC. Meghan’s research, writing, community engagement and organizing are rooted in three areas: Researching climate denialism as a barrier to climate policy and action; analyzing the lessons we can learn from the Covid-19 pandemic to better understand and address sociopolitical impacts of climate change; and researching impacts of climate change on community mental health and using art to build community wellbeing, resilience, and hope amid the climate crisis.


Lightning Talks to Launch the new UBC Environmental Humanities Research Network

Thursday, May 20: 3:30 PM PDT / 11:30 PM BST | Friday, May 21: 4:00 AM IST

Event description: This event will launch a new Public Humanities Hub-sponsored Environmental Humanities Research Network at UBC. Come hear what UBC colleagues are working on and how you can join the new Environmental Humanities Research Network. Join a breakout room discussion to meet colleagues and share information about what you are working on!

Chair: Mary Chapman, University of British Columbia, Canada

Speakers:

Matthew Evenden | “Watersheds: Environmental histories of water and electricity”

Matthew Evenden is a Professor of Geography at UBC and Associate VP of Research & Innovation.  He has written several books about rivers and energy, including Fish versus Power (Cambridge 2004), The River Returns (with Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles, MQUP, 2009) and Allied Power (UTP 2015).

Dallas Hunt | “We are an apocalyptic people: Indigenous Responses to Environmental Crises”

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta, Canada. He has had creative and critical work published in Settler Colonial Studies, the Malahat Review, Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. His children’s book, Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock, was nominated for the Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Canadian Picture Book Award. His debut book of poetry, CREELAND, was released by Nightwood editions this year. Dallas is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC.

Sarah Fox | “Archives of Contamination and Survivance: Practicing History in Radiogenic Communities”

Sarah Fox, author of Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West(University of Nebraska Press 2014, paperback 2018), is a Killam Doctoral Scholar and a PhD student in History at UBC. Her current research examines the contested terrain of ecological restoration, remediation, and environmental justice in the Pacific Northwest, and the ways in which these projects engage (or ignore) Indigenous sovereignty and local, experiential knowledge about histories of environmental change.  Fox continues to work on downwinder and radiogenic community issues in her capacity as a board member of the nonprofit group Consequences of Radiation Exposure (CORE).

Katia Bowers | “Imagining the Arctic”

Katherine Bowers is Associate Professor of Slavic Studies in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at UBC. Her research focuses on questions of genre, narrative, and form. Her first monograph,Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic, is forthcoming in 2021. Her new research project focuses on imagined geographies, futurities, Arctic space, and science fiction.

Derek Gladwin | “Narrating the energy-climate impasse through lived experiences of stories”

Derek Gladwin is Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy Education and a Sustainability Fellow with the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability at UBC (on unceded Musqueam territory). His interdisciplinary research and teaching aim to promote social understanding and relational action on environmental, health and well-being, and arts-based approaches through public forms of education and literacy. He is the author or editor of six books, including Ecological exile (2018) and Rewriting our stories (2021), and serves as Senior Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Environmental & Sustainability Education.

Jocelyn Stacey | “The Climate Emergency & Legal Disruption”

Jocelyn Stacey is Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at UBC. Her work focuses on environmental assessment law, disaster law, climate change, emergency powers and the rule of law. Her The Constitution of the Environmental Emergency (Hart Publishing, 2018) addresses what the rule of law requires in light of our vulnerability to catastrophic environmental harm. Professor Stacey works closely with First Nations on legal issues related to disasters, emergency powers and Indigenous jurisdiction. She is President of the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation, a non-profit society dedicated to training law students and young lawyers in public interest environmental law litigation.