F O R T H C O M I N G   E V E N T S • • •

book launch ANNOUCEMENT

LATEST BOOK BY CCIE ASSOCIATE Professor Faye V. Harrison- University of Florida CCIE is please to announce the publication of CCIE Associate, Faye V. Harrison's newest book Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age." The book "presents an approach to critically reconstructing the anthropology discipline to better encompass issues of gender and race. Among the nine key changes to the field that Faye V. Harrison advocates are researching in an ethically and politically responsible manner, promoting greater diversity in the discipline, rethinking theory, and committing to a genuine multicultural dialogue. In drawing from materials developed during her distinguished twenty-five-year career in Caribbean and African American studies, Harrison analyzes anthropology's limits and possibilities from an African American woman's perspective, while also challenging anthropologists to work together to transcend stark gender, racial, and national hierarchies."

PAST EVENTS• • •

SYMPOSIA

Rethinking Youth Culture and Identity
June 3rd, 2008, 8:30-5:45pm, Scarfe Building, Faculty of Education, Room 1211
Organized by Dr. Yvonne Hébert (University of Calgary) and Dr. Handel Wright (UBC)

Even in these postmodern times identity continues to be the site of intense work on the part of youth and scholars. This symposium explored new ways of looking at youth as phenomenon, thinking about youth activity and identity formation, examining linkages with cultural policies and/or other forms of civic pluralism, so as to better understand contemporary realities of young peoples lives and future directions of youth studies.

• Program of Events

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Youth Research Symposium
Wednesday, April 2nd, 9:00am-6:00pm, St. John's College, Social Lounge
Organized by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education and sponsored by the University of Cambridge, UK

The Youth Research Symposium showcased the role of interdisciplinary research in rethinking conceptualizations of ‘marginalized’ youth identity’, debates on youth subcultures versus post-subcultures, issues of gender, sexuality and social exclusion, and the history of policing and surveillance of young bodies over time and across national spaces.  In particular, it sought to understand more fully how ideas about childhood and new youth identities have been generated and framed in different temporal, cultural and spatial contexts. The symposium also explored how the formation of new youth cultures may function, and to what degree, both as a response to, and a complex connection between, the macro and micro cultural forces of social and temporal change in the late 20th century and early 21st century.ancipation.

• Program of Events

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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.

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Multiculturalism With(out) Guarantees: The Anti-Racism Alternative - A day-long Symposium
April 2 , 2007 - 8:30 - 4:15pm in St. John's College, Social Lounge
Organized by Dr. Handel Kashope Wright and sponsored by UBC Associate Vice President of Equity, Tom Patch, and the UBC Equity Office, The David Lam Chair for Multicultural Education, the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE).

This day long symposium brought together UBC faculty, students and administers, along with leading experts in the field and members of the local community in order to explore both the possibilities and limitations of integrative anti-racism as an alternative discourse to multiculturalism. The symposium opened with remarks by UBC Associate Vice President, Tom Patch and CCIE Director & David Lam Chair, Dr. Handel Kashope Wright. This was followed by a key note address by Professor George Sefa Dei, who offered some critical points in theorizing “integrative anti-racism," as well as drew attention to the pressing need for new questions. Dr. Leslie Roman then provided a response paper in which she spoke about the importance of relational genealogies as a crucial component of integrative anti-racism. In addition, the symposium featured panels on the intersection of indigeneity and anti-racism; anti-racist teacher education and classroom practice; UBC administration’s anti-racism efforts; and faculty and staff anti-racism activism.

Keynote Address: Professor George Dei. Response to the Keynote Address: Dr. Leslie Roman

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African Education: Worldviews, Ways of Knowing & Pedagogy
November 24, 2006, 8:30 am - 4:30 pm in Neville Scarfe 310, 308A and 304
Organized by Drs. Samson Nashon, David Anderson and Handel Kashope Wright
and sponsored by and conducted through The David Lam Chair for Multicultural Education
and the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE).

This one-day symposium brought together leading and emerging scholars and experts who have undertaken research in areas that in one way or the other lend to understanding of the African learner. The central aim of the symposium was to examine African worldviews, ways of knowing and pedagogy, which shape African students’ knowledge construction processes and which in many respects are unique and in other respects have similarities with the Western paradigm of the education process. To this end, presenters at the symposium drew on their experience and research in African contexts to elucidate these culturally rooted constructs.  This was done both in the form of formal paper presentation sessions which were followed by group discussions based on themes congruous with symposium focus, and through a keynote address.  The keynote speaker was Professor Ali Abdi, who presented a paper on the problematic relationship between African world views and their attendant educational and epistemological system on the one hand, and the dominant European discourses that have attempted to negate the validity of those, both in historical and contemporary Africa, on the other.  Professor Abdi’s paper was preceded by a response from Professor Kogila Adam-Moodley, which was followed by a presentation by Dr. Yvonne Brown on policy issues pertaining to Africa.  The afternoon was comprised largely of group discussions which provided participants with a unique opportunity to share experiences and perspectives with the guidance and input of Africans and Africanists.

Keynote Address: Professor Ali Abdi. Response to the Keynote Address: Professor Kogila Adam-Moodley.

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TOWN HALL

Exploring and Promoting Multiculturalism and Related Discourses
March 23, 2006 1:30-3:00 pm in Neville Scarfe 310
Organized by Dr. Handel Kashope Wright through The David Lam Chair for Multicultural Education and the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE) with the support of the Faculty of Education’s Network of Centres and Institutes in Education (NCIE).

This town hall served as an exploratory and planning meeting on multiculturalism and related discourses and brought together UBC faculty and graduate students from such research areas as multiculturalism, anti-racism, interculturalism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, cultural studies, social cohesion and identity/identification politics. The purpose of the town hall was to share research projects and interests, plan activities, identify potential collaborators in multiculturalism and related discourses.   In addition to the general discussion that took place, the town hall featured three guest presenters:  Professor Peter Seixas, Canadian Research Chair and Director of the Centre for Study of Historical Consciousness, who spoke on his current SSHRC project, “Benchmarks of Historical Literacy.”  Karen Rolston and Jack Lee from the Centre for Intercultural Language Studies, who  discussed  “town/gown” work, and Yvonne Brown, who presented on “African and Diaspora Literature for Children Project.

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CCIE PRESENTATIONS

High Anxiety? An exploration of the pedagogy of difference and the body in popular Hollywood film Dr. Andrew Thornton – Roehampton University, London UK August 5, 2008, noon to 2 pm, Neville Scarfe 310 In this presentation Dr. Thornton aims to explore the seemingly self-aware and ironic, even postmodern, construction of the imagery of the heroic body in popular Hollywood film. This oft repeated imagery arguably reinforces a series of retrograde notions of gender, race, and sexuality. However, Andrew will also highlight how much of this imagery also reflects a deep cultural anxiety concerning the dissolution of dominant hierarchies of identity and difference. Or in other terms popular films seems to be the site of an attempt to stabilize dominant identities and are not a celebration of difference. Examples are drawn primarily from recent ‘blockbuster’ films: The Fantastic Four, The Incredibles and Batman Begins. The concern is to draw attention to the visual economies and cultural logics that appear to underpin and organize the making and animating of filmic bodies. Or in other terms, he aims to explore the pedagogy of difference and embodiment in popular film. As well, Dr. Thornton will draw attention to the ways in which the imagery and symbolism of the sporting body seem to be central to the intelligibility of the ‘heroic’ body in popular Hollywood film.

Writing in English: an act of mimicry or betrayal—a discontinuous presencing of borderlines
Arpil 18 th , 2008, 12:30-2:30pm, Scarfe 310, Faculty of Education
Organized by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education and the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education

Book Launch for: Shirin and Salt Man /  by Nilofar Shidmehr
ISBN 978-088982-246-7 • 160 pp • $17.95 • pb • April 2008 • Poetic Novella
Shirin and Salt Man is a novella in verse, which tells the story of a young modern day Iranian woman, Shirin. She is an ordinary girl from Kermanshah born before the Islamic Revolution, who imagines herself to be an incarnation of princess Shirin, depicted in the ancient Persian classic Shirin and Khosro. At first she tries to shape her life to that of the myth, but later decides to change her destiny and become the author of her own story. She leaves her husband and runs away with the Salt Man, a 1700 year old mummy on display at the Iranian National Museum in Tehran. The poems form a compelling narrative of the life of a contemporary Iranian woman whose voice has been muted by Khosro, her fundamentalist and traditional husband. In an environment where the dominance of men is written in stone and where only men have the authority for fashioning and telling stories, Shirin reclaims a place for herself as a lover and teller of stories. She re-enters life through cracks of narrative to invent Shirin anew, one whose life-path radically diverges from that of her namesake, Shirin of Nezami’s story. She digs out Farhad, the mythical lover of princess Shirin, who has now become the Salt Man, from under the dust and stones of history and she gives him another opportunity to love her. In transforming Salt Man to another Farhad, Shirin creates a new history—one shaped and narrated by a feminine voice.

Biography
Nilofar Shidmehr was born and raised in Iran, and has lived in Canada since 1997. She holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and is currently working on her PhD at the Center for Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education. Nilofar is the translator of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye (Vistar Publishers: Tehran, 1997, reprinted in 2007). Her work has been featured in both Iranian and Canadian literary magazines, including Descant, A Room of One's Own, West Coast Line, Galleon, and the Shahrvand, a widely-read Iranian newspaper published in Toronto and Vancouver.Nilofar believes the way to understand the dilemma which is Iran, is through reading and connecting to the intimate stories that reflect Iranians’ lives. She is hoping that, through her writing, she can share these insights with her readers.

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Metropole: A Film Screening & Conversation with Directors
March 12th , 2008, 12:15-2:00pm, Faculty of Education, Scarfe 2415
Organized by Centre for Culture, Identity and Education

CCIE was pleased to feature a showing of the feature documentary, METROPOLE, a visual essay that explores the everyday dimensions of social class in urban North America. Both the film producer, Stephanie Skourtes (UBC), and the film writer, Brian Ganter (University of Washington), are CCIE associates. A visual exploration of the daily flux of life, labor, and leisure in a global city over one 24-hour period, as experienced by persons from across the social spectrum, METROPOLE contains no dialogue. Instead, it uses only images, sounds, and music to express the everyday and seemingly mundane moments of a unique, yet familiar, reality. The documentary follows six individuals as they go about their day from morning to night—through leisure time, home, and work. What at first appear to be unrelated, individual actions are connected by the complex economic and social relationships inherent to an urban consumer culture that compartmentalizes human activity. By combining beautiful cinematography, with an original, poetic musical score composed by Michael Hebert the complexity of our interdependence with one another in a post-modern economic climate is revealed. The purpose of the documentary is to highlight the contrasting social positions of consumer versus producer, positions that we all occupy, and to defamiliarize the everyday activities of work and rest. METROPOLE takes the seemingly disconnected interactions of our daily lives in order to mark them, label them and display them as something striking, something that calls for explanation, not to be taken for granted, not just natural. Visit www.metropolethemovie.com for more information.

DIRECTOR'S BIOS:

Stephanie Skourtes (Co-Director and Producer) is a self-taught independent filmmaker and educator. With an established academic background in sociology she moved into media production in 2000 with the desire to create aesthetically and politically conscious films and videos infused with a sociological understanding of everyday phenomena. Stephanie completed her first feature documentary project in 2003 that she wrote, directed, and produced titled, Growing Up a Mother. It follows the lives of three teenage mothers and their babies. A community outreach campaign accompanied this film resulting in numerous screenings around the country and wide distribution in educational markets nationally and internationally. Stephanie currently resides in Vancouver, BC where she is pursuing a PhD in Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research utilizes visual ethnographic methods to study female youth subcultures with a focus on the cultural politics of urban spaces.

Brian Ganter (Co-Director and Writer) Brian Ganter is a filmmaker, cultural critic and teacher whose areas of research include Marxist social and cultural theory. He has published and spoken on the politics of representation in film and new media in a number of international journals, invited forums, and conferences. His work centers on matters of social justice and radical political praxis in the arenas of class, race, and gender especially in the wake of globalization and the new ‘global’ U.S.-led imperialism. Brian has studied media theory and film production at various universities in New York and he is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

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Teaching Whiteness in a Multicultural Context and Color-blind Era - Dr. Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Berkeley
Thursday, Sept. 27th, 2007 from 12:30-2pm in Ponderosa, Cedar Room
Organized by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education, and the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education

This presentation centered around the critical theme of whiteness. Since the innovation of whiteness studies within the multicultural literature in the late 1980s, the question of "What to do with whiteness?" has been posed. There are two principal strategies for dealing with the politics of whiteness: White reconstructionism and White abolitionism. White reconstructionism is arguably a strategy of reinventing whiteness in hopes of rescuing its anti-oppressive dimensions. In white abolitionism, there is no hope in whiteness and the strategy is to locate it, insist that whites disidentify with it, and thereby commit race treason. This presentation appraised the conceptual and strategic understanding of whiteness through the prisms of white reconstructionism and abolitionism.

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Multiculturality, Multiculturalism and the Phenomenon of Cross-Cultural and Interfaith Marriage in Canada and the United States
June 2, 2007 9:00-11:00am, MY Place Scotia Creek Lounge, Whistler BC
Organized by The Whistler Interface Society

In this keynote address paper, Dr. Wright explores the phenomenon of cross-cultural and interface marriage in Canada and the United States. In particular, Dr. Wright challenges the assumption that cross-cultural and interfaith marriage is a new phenomenon. Instead, Dr. Wright argues that there is a long history of mixed relationships and biracial offspring in Canadian and BC history. But Dr. Wright does agree that today there are several differences in the current phenomenon: people of different backgrounds meet more easily now due to increased diversity in neighborhoods and workplaces, mixed raced couples are more accepted both by their families and by society, and "mixed raced" is more frequently and easily claimed as an identity.

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Youth and Media: Literacies Old and New – Dr. Michael Hoechsmann, McGill University
May 31st , 2007 12:30–2:00pm in Neville Scarfe 310
Organized by The David Lam Chair for Multicultural Education and The Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE)

This paper focused on how changes in access to technology have facilitated new conditions for young people to shoot, cut and mix multimodal texts, and the emergence of the Internet as ’home theater’ for a global audience has enabled youth to communicate across borders and across the street. Using a cultural studies approach to youth and media, Dr. Hoechsmann argues that differing conceptions of audience -  incorporated into the act of media creation - produce different outcomes, that there are strong residual communicational and cultural elements in contemporary “participatory” media production, and that as young people are drawn into new forms of media practice, they draw substantially on a pre-existing repertoire of cultural meanings. Dr. Hoechsmann contexutalized these claims in relation to his research on Web 2.0 applications, community youth media organizations, school-based media education and youth participation in the traditional new media. Go to media to view his presentation.

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Changing Nature of Australian Multiculturalism and its Implications for Ethnic Minorities and Education: Critical Reflections  – Dr. Siri Gamage, University of New England, Australia
October  11, 2006 12:00–1:30pm in Neville Scarfe 308A
Organized by The David Lam Chair for Multicultural Education and The Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE)

This paper focused on how Australian multiculturalism and associated political discourses and policies have undergone substantial changes in emphasis and direction in the last decade compared to the previous decades under the liberal-nation federal government.  In particular, the paper outlined the nature of these changes and their implications for ethnic minorities and multicultural education as well as for co-existence in a harmonious society.  The paper also addressed the shift in emphasis on multiculturalism as compared to Australianness (citizenship).

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Identity Conversion, Citizenship, and Social Studies: Asian-Australian Perspectives on Indigenous Reconciliation and Human Rights – Professor Michael Singh, University of Western Sydney, Australia
March 22, 2006 1:00–2:15pm in Neville Scarfe 308A
Organized by Dr. Handel Kashope Wright and sponsored by The Department of Educational Studies, The David Lam Chair for Multicultural Education, The Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE) and The Office of the Associate Dean of Indigenous Education.

This presentation explored Asian-Australian perspectives on Indigenous Reconciliation in Australia, providing both an overview  of the colonialist legacy of White Australia that continues to sustain a problematic relationship between Indigenous- and Asian-Australians, and a discussion on how Indigenous Australians have sought to publicly reclaim their humanity and sense of dignity .  Specifically, the presentation did this through an analytical interpretation of interviews with informed and active Australian citizens who identify themselves as signifying the complex and differentiated admixture of Asian-Australians. 

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CO-SPONSORED EVENTS

Transforming the Face and Reception of Dis/ability
March 29th , 2008, 7:30-10:30pm, Reception Room, Green College
Organized by Leslie Roman and Geoff McMurchy and sponsored by Green College. CCIE is a contributing sponsor for this event.

The Unruly Salon series shows the power of persons with disabilities to represent their own experiences as a valued part of humanity, humans, being together across borders of many kinds. The Unruly Salon consists of performances by scholars and/or artists with disabilities as knowledgeable, capable, and self-empowered actors, speaking back, staring back, performing out loud, joyfully and in community with all other peoples. This series combines artists and scholars from a range of performance arts, media and interdisciplinary endeavors to create a dialog at UBC not just ‘about us’ but with us. There are seven scheduled Salons this semester. Each Salon will culminate in an informal reception offering presenters, artists and audience an opportunity to discuss ideas raised in presentations. The intent is to facilitate interactive and innovative dialogs and methodologies, leading to further international collaborations for disability arts, culture and scholarly programme development at the graduate and undergraduate levels at UBC.

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International Women's Day: Mothering Work and the Performance of Daily Life Care-giving
March 8th , 2008, 1:00-5:00pm, Reception Room, Green College
Organized by Leslie Roman and Geoff McMurchy and sponsored by Green College. CCIE is a contributing sponsor for this event.

The Unruly Salon series shows the power of persons with disabilities to represent their own experiences as a valued part of humanity, humans, being together across borders of many kinds. The Unruly Salon consists of performances by scholars and/or artists with disabilities as knowledgeable, capable, and self-empowered actors, speaking back, staring back, performing out loud, joyfully and in community with all other peoples. This series combines artists and scholars from a range of performance arts, media and interdisciplinary endeavors to create a dialog at UBC not just ‘about us’ but with us. There are seven scheduled Salons this semester. Each Salon will culminate in an informal reception offering presenters, artists and audience an opportunity to discuss ideas raised in presentations. The intent is to facilitate interactive and innovative dialogs and methodologies, leading to further international collaborations for disability arts, culture and scholarly programme development at the graduate and undergraduate levels at UBC.

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The Misadventures of Critical Thinking - Professor Jacques Rancière
Tuesday, March 7th, 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.

Abstract:  Gramsci once said that the soviet revolution was a revolution against Marx' Capital , because Marx's book had become the book of the Bourgeois scientists. The same thing may have occurred with the forms of social critique, which, forty years ago, denounced the mythologies of the commodity, the fallacies of consumer society, and the empire of the spectacle. They were supposed then to unmask the machineries of domination, so as to provide those who fought against them with new weapons. Apparently they have turned to exactly the contrary: a nihilist wisdom of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence of anything with anything, of anything with its image and of the lie of any image. I will try to analyze the mechanism of this reversal and to trace it back to the original tension between the logic of social and cultural critique and the logic of emancipation.

Bio: Jacques Rancière is Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Paris VIII where he taught from 1969 to 2000.  He continues to teach, as a visiting professor, in a number of Universities, including Rutgers, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. His work has been translated into 14  languages, and has been subject to numerous special issues, symposia and critical commentaries. His latest titles to appear in English translation are Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy (1998), Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003), The Philosopher and his Poor (2004), The Flesh of Words (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics (2005), Film Fables (2006), and The Hatred of Democracy (2007).

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Transnational Place-Making: Food, Justice, and Autonomy - Professor Devon G. Peña, University of Washington
Tuesday, February 5th, 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.

Abstract:  While post-modern theories of globalization declare the end of the local (e.g., Appadurai), Professor Peña's talk will present an alternative theory of transnational place-making and re-inhabitation. Place and place-making, he will argue, have decidedly more significance today as localized communities resist all aspects of the neoliberal enclosure of the "commons."  Dr. Peña will discuss his collaborative research with the South Central Farmers Feeding Families, a grassroots organization that established the largest urban farm in the United States and is now involved in a regional campaign for food democracy.

Bio: Devon Peña is Professor of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, and an activist in the environmental justice movement. His book, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border won the "1998 Outstanding Academic Book" award of Choice Magazine and the American Library Association. The book is a study of women workers and their struggles against capitalism and environmental destruction in the maquiladora industry of Juarez, Mexico. His most recent book is Mexican Americans and the Environment (2005, University of Arizona Press). Peña is adjunct professor with Women's Studies, the Center for Water and Watershed Studies, Latin American studies, Program on the Environment, and the
Institute for Public Health Genetics.

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Innocent by Contamination: Queer World-Making, Ethnicity and Technicity in Samuel R. Delany's in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand - A Talk by Dr. Thomas Foster, University of Washington
January 22nd, 2008, 12:15-1:30pm, Scarfe 310, Faculty of Education
Organized by the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry and sponsored CCIE, Critical Studies in Sexuality and the Centre for the Study of the Internationalization of Curriculum

Thomas Foster is Professor in English at the University of Washington, and the former director of the Cultural Studies Program and an adjunt faculty member in Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He is the author of The Souls of Cyber folk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (University of Minnesota Press). This talk forms part of his current book project, which is focused on the exploration of cyberpunk convention by writers and artists of color and is tentatively entitled Ethnicity and Technicity: Race, Nature, and Culture in the Cyberpunk Archive.

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Glo/cal Citizenship, Music and Inclusive Education
January 19th, 2008, 7:30-10:30pm, Great Hall, Green College
Organized by Leslie Roman and Geoff McMurchy and sponsored by Green College. CCIE is a contributing sponsor for this event.

The Unruly Salon series shows the power of persons with disabilities to represent their own experiences as a valued part of humanity, humans, being together across borders of many kinds. The Unruly Salon consists of performances by scholars and/or artists with disabilities as knowledgeable, capable, and self-empowered actors, speaking back, staring back, performing out loud, joyfully and in community with all other peoples. This series combines artists and scholars from a range of performance arts, media and interdisciplinary endeavors to create a dialog at UBC not just ‘about us’ but with us. There are seven scheduled Salons this semester. Each Salon will culminate in an informal reception offering presenters, artists and audience an opportunity to discuss ideas raised in presentations. The intent is to facilitate interactive and innovative dialogs and methodologies, leading to further international collaborations for disability arts, culture and scholarly programme development at the graduate and undergraduate levels at UBC.

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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, Dr. Handel Kashope Wright. Both Professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o's keynote and Professor Handel Wright's response paper are forthcoming.

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

In this 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.

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African Delegates: Health and HIV/Aids Grassroots Initiatives Symposium
October  24, 2006, 7pm in Neville Scarfe 310
Organized by the African students in the Faculty of Education and co-sponsored by EPLT, GSSB, GO Global, YLead, The David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education and the Centre for Culture,  Identity and Education (CCIE).

This symposium brought together African delegates working on the front lines of the HIV/AIDS  pandemic.  The purpose of the symposium was to enable delegates to connect with UBC students and faculty around specific projects and initiatives.  The symposium also provided an opportunity for participants to discuss potential partnerships and future funding initiatives, as well as explore how models for social change in their own communities could be applied elsewhere.  The symposium included four panelists, as well as remarks by Her Excellency Ms. Motseoa Senyane, the High Commissioner of Lesotho to Canada.  The four panelists were: Meisie Maaroganye (Community Leader, Evaton West Community Development Forum in South Africa), Lerato Legoabe (Project Coordinator, Girls’ Net), Agnes Pareyio (UN Person of the Year in Kenya, 2005), and Sipho Mamba (formerly from Swaziland’s diplomatic services, AIDS orphans care). The symposium also featured remarks by the Lesotho High Commissioner to Canada, Ms. Motseoa Senyane, who spoke of the pressing need for a clearer and much more unbiased image of Africa. A video-stream of High Commissioner Senyane's comments can be found at the following YouTube feed: Clear words from a Lion

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