Last year, the Office of Equity Transformation (OET) introduced the Listening, Learning, Leading series to help us move beyond polarization and build foundations for increased understanding and dialogue. OET is now introducing the Public Classroom Initiative, an extension of that series, designed to foster informed dialogue and deepen understanding of contemporary issues within the UM community. 

Recognizing the wealth of expertise across the university and the growing interest in key topics, the Public Classroom Initiative will provide accessible learning opportunities on a range of critical and timely topics. Held around lunchtime in the Fireside Lounge (first floor, UMSU University Centre), participants will gain insights from UM experts in a concise, 20-minute presentation followed by a 10-minute question and answer period.

Upcoming sessions:

Media Literacy and Critical Thinking

Presenter: Cecil Rosner (Media Literacy Program Instructor, Extended Education)

Thursday, December 12 at 12:30 p.m.

Antisemitism: Histories and Contemporary Manifestations

Presenter: Belle Jerniewski (Jewish Heritage Centre)

Friday, January 10 at 12 p.m.

Islamophobia: Histories and Contemporary Manifestations

Presenter Youcef Soufi (UM Institute for Humanities)

Monday, January 13 at 12 p.m.

Subsequent sessions will include:

• Corporate Responsibility and Supply Chain Justice (presenter: Minelle Silva, I.H. Asper School of Business)
• International Human Rights Law (presenter: Nathan Derejko, Faculty of Law)
• Environmental Racism and Land (presenters: Dan HenHawk, Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management and Bruce Erickson, Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources)
• The Zimbabwean Experience with Death, Mourning, and Funeral Practices in the Diaspora (presenter: Joy Chadya, Faculty of Arts)

Emily Kalo, a Fellow in Equity, Anti-Oppression, and Social Justice, is working on the project. She says, “It’s a privilege to work alongside Dr. Tina Chen and the OET team on this important initiative to drive positive change through education. Many of us have likely faced difficult interactions with individuals holding narrowly focused views. The Public Classroom sessions aim to provide us with the knowledge and empathy needed to navigate such situations while enriching our own understanding of current issues.”

While the Public Classroom sessions will be in-person only, OET is also working on an audio project which will give listeners the opportunity to dive deeper into these contemporary issues alongside each guest speaker. These recordings will be launched in the Winter Term.

Tina Chen, Vice-Provost (Equity), says, “By placing learning in public spaces and in short presentations, I hope the Public Classroom Initiative will remove barriers for learning with each other as members of the UM community. I am looking forward to seeing staff, students, and faculty from a range of units, lived identities, and positions attending. I believe that learning together, embracing complexity and broadening our understanding across challenging topics is the foundation for dialogue that can take us beyond polarization.”

Injichaag: My Soul in Story: Anishinaabe Poetics in Art and Words

When: Monday, Jan. 27 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers (4000-1120 Grant Ave.). And a special event co-hosted by the UM’s Institute for the Humanities will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 28 from 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.in the St. John’s College Common Room and will feature professor Warren Cariou, director of the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture.

About the book:

Injichaag shares the life story of Anishinaabe artist Rene Meshake in stories, poetry, and Anishinaabemowin “word bundles” that serve as a dictionary of Ojibwe poetics. Meshake was born in the railway town of Nakina in northwestern Ontario in 1948, and spent his early years living off-reserve with his grandmother in a matriarchal land-based community he calls Pagwashing. He was raised through his grandmother’s “bush university,” periodically attending Indian day school, but at the age of ten Rene was scooped into the Indian residential school system, where he suffered sexual abuse as well as the loss of language and connection to family and community.

This residential school experience was life-changing, as it suffocated his artistic expression and resulted in decades of struggle and healing. Now in his twenty-eighth year of sobriety, Rene is a successful multidisciplinary artist, musician and writer. Meshake’s artistic vision and poetic lens provide a unique telling of a story of colonization and recovery.

The material is organized thematically around a series of Meshake’s paintings. It is framed by Kim Anderson, Rene’s Odaanisan (adopted daughter), a scholar of oral history who has worked with Meshake for two decades. Full of teachings that give a glimpse of traditional Anishinaabek lifeways and worldviews, Injichaag: My Soul in Story is “more than a memoir.”

About the authors:

Rene Meshake is an Anishinaabe Elder, visual and performing artist, award-winning author, storyteller, flute player, new media artist and a Recipient of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Kim Anderson is a Cree/Métis writer, a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Relationships, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph. She has published six books, including Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings and Story Medicine, and Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration.

Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West

When: Friday, Jan. 31 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers (4000-1120 Grant Ave.) And a special event co-hosted by the UM’s Institute for the Humanities will be held Friday, Jan. 31 in Rm. 409 of the Tier Building from 2-4 p.m.

About the book:

While cities like Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Saskatoon, Rapid City, Edmonton, Missoula, Regina, and Tulsa are places where Indigenous marginalization has been most acute, they have also long been sites of Indigenous placemaking and resistance to settler colonialism.

Although such cities have been denigrated as “ordinary” or banal in the broader urban literature, they are exceptional sites to study Indigenous resurgence. The urban centres of the continental plains have featured Indigenous housing and food co-operatives, social service agencies, and schools. The American Indian Movement initially developed in Minneapolis in 1968, and Idle No More emerged in Saskatoon in 2013.

The editors and authors of Settler City Limits, both Indigenous and settler, address urban struggles involving Anishinaabek, Cree, Creek, Dakota, Flathead, Lakota, and Métis peoples. Collectively, these studies showcase how Indigenous people in the city resist ongoing processes of colonial dispossession and create spaces for themselves and their families.

Working at intersections of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, urban studies, geography, and sociology, this book examines how the historical and political conditions of settler colonialism have shaped urbandevelopment in the Canadian Prairies and American Plains. Settler City Limits frames cities as Indigenous spaces and places, both in terms of the historical geographies of the regions in which they are embedded, and with respect to ongoing struggles for land, life, and self-determination.

About the authors:

Heather Dorries is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning and the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto.

Robert Henry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary.

David Hugill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University.

Tyler McCreary is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University.

Ahmed’s lecture will draw on interviews conducted with staff and students who have made complaints within universities that relate to unfair, unjust or unequal working conditions, and to abuses of power such as sexual and racial harassment. Her lecture will frame complaints as a form of diversity work: the work some have to do in order to be accommodated. Such work, she argues, is so tiresome and bureaucratically cumbersome that many complaints often end up being about the system. As such, her lecture will explore the significance of how complaints happen “behind closed doors,” and she will argue that doors are often closed even when they appear to be opened.  

Please note this event is sold out.
What: Free public lecture by Sara Ahmed, “Closing the Door: Complaint as Diversity Work”
When: October 2, 2019, 5-7 p.m. 
Where: West End Cultural Centre, 586 Ellice Avenue
Monetary or book donations for the 2SQTBIPOC Library encouraged 
Accessibility Information: There is a small lip at the front entrance of the event space. Inside, there is a wheelchair lift. ASL will be provided at the event.
Gender-Neutral Washrooms: There are two gender-neutral washrooms, and both have an accessible stall.

Ahmed is a former professor of race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), and On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012). Her most recent writing can be found on her blog: feministkilljoys.com. 

This event is presented by the Margaret Laurence Endowment Fund held jointly by the Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba, and Gender and Women’s Studies at Brandon University; the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities; the Centre for Research in Cultural Studies at the University of Winnipeg; and QPOC Winnipeg.

Read more about the presenters.

In the Winnipeg debut of their play, The Local Sky Tonight, two of Canada’s best-known performance artists, Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan, explore the human experience of wonder and the ways it can lead to belief in an unseen order. In science, that invisible order might include the invisible forces of nature, like gravity. In religion, we encounter supernatural power. While artists like Dempsey and Millan, for their part, invent powerful new ways of seeing that furnish fresh perspectives on the world in which we live.

Whimsically playing a rabbit that hi-jacks a traditional planetarium show, Shawna Dempsey, reads the star charts, imaginatively re-mapping the heavenly canvas upon which we cast our beliefs. The Local Sky Tonight explores narratives that help humans situate ourselves in the vastness of space, from the sciences of astrophysics and nanophysics, to stories drawn from astrology, mythology and literature. Models of organizing the universe are examined, as is the position of the hero/explorer. Why, the rabbit asks, is Ulysses considered a hero and Alice in Wonderland a nonsense tale? What is more appropriate than wonder?

The University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities (UMIH) has helped to bring this performance to Winnipeg audiences at the Gas Station Art Centre in downtown Winnipeg. The performance (approx. 45 minutes) offers an added twist: it will be followed by a discussion of the cosmos and the imagination featuring a panel of local scientists, artists and thinkers. Panelists include Katrina Dunn (Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba), Helga Jakobson (transdisciplinary artist), Vesna Milosevic-Zdjelar (Department of Physics, University of Winnipeg). The moderator will be Serenity Hee-Jung Joo, Director, UMIH.

Sunday, February 3
7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Gas Station Art Centre, 445 River Avenue

Tickets
Tickets available on Eventbrite.
$5 for students (by donation), $10 general admission (by donation). No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

About the artists
Collaborators since 1989, the Winnipeg-based duo of Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan are among Canada’s best-known performance artists. Their humorous, provocative, and acclaimed work has been described as “one of the high points of contemporary Canadian artistic production” (Border Crossings Magazine).

About UMIH
The University of Manitoba Institute of the Humanities was established in 1990 to foster research and scholarship in the Humanities at the University of Manitoba, to promote cross-disciplinary research in the Humanities and to help obtain external funding for Humanities research. Located in the Faculty of Arts, the Institute addresses the needs and interests of researchers in a broad range of subject including literature and languages, film and visual culture, philosophy, history and religion, and also the literary, philosophical, theological and historical aspects of the social and physical sciences, mathematics, the arts and professional studies.

All events take place in UMSU University Centre.

Throughout the day, students, academics, and administrators will take turns reading the entirety of Mary Shelley’s famous novel. This is expected to take approximately nine hours to complete. Film adaptations of Frankenstein will play throughout the day. Students and the public will be given the opportunity to place a vote on art collages created by School of Fine Arts students. Prizes will be awarded to the top three posters. Popcorn and Frankenstein-themed snacks and drinks will be served.

An invitation has been extended to high school English classes to attend the events and participate in an interactive workshop with Dr. Michelle Faubert and Dr. Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square, Shelley researchers and experts in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media. To participate in the field trip workshop that has been designed to incorporate with the English curriculum, schools may contact Dr. Jones Square.

Schedule of Events

8:30 am – 5:30 pm – Reading, movies, poster competition and snacks

Where: The Gallery of Student Art, Room 105 & Room 521 AB

(Movies will be paused between 11:00 am and 12:00 noon for the high school student workshop.)

Poster competition winners will be announced at 12:45 pm.

9:45 am – 10:15 am – Trivia games and prizes

Where: The Gallery of Student Art, Room 105

What: Trivia games will be played, with the opportunity to win Frankenstein-themed prizes such as mugs, tote bags, and water bottles.

11:00 am – 11:30 am – High School Field Trip Workshop

Where: Room 521 AB

What: Dr. Michelle Faubert and Dr. Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square will deliver an interactive workshop on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) to the high school students in attendance. Dr. Faubert will discuss Romantic science, with reference to vitalism, animism, and electricity, and Dr. Jones Square will discuss the novel’s engagement with otherness and ostracism as well as the profound influence Frankenstein has had on our present-day thinking about science, literature, and ethics. Students will be asked a series of questions, and a group discussion/debate will ensue. Questions will be provided to teachers in advance to help prepare students for the workshop and/or to help incorporate into the classroom curriculum.

This event is sponsored by the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities, the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, the School of Art, the Faculty of Arts and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Established in 1990, the UMIH fosters research and scholarship and promotes cross-disciplinary research in the Humanities and allied Social Sciences. It regularly offers creative, thoughtful, and timely programming both on and off campus showcasing outstanding research from doctoral students to senior professors from the University of Manitoba and across the globe. While the Institute is located within the Faculty of Arts, it serves the entire Humanities constituency in the University and the general community through activities including event workshops, colloquia and lectures, research clusters and affiliates, an annual conference, an annual graduate fellowship and the hUManities blog.

As Director, Joo, along with the Institute’s Board of Directors, helps to steer the annual research focus and the selected programming. In 2018-19, the UMIH research clusters will focus on two subject areas: Collecting, Citing and Curating and the Health Humanities. This year, UMIH is supporting four research affiliates and has scheduled a full slate of programming including the continuation of the Arts of Conversation and Futures in the Humanities series. Joo is looking forward to the exciting year ahead, continuing the commitment to support Humanities research conducted at the UM, to bring renowned researchers from around the world to Winnipeg and to connect Humanities research with the greater public community.

“I am a firm believer in the powers of culture and cultural literacy in helping to transform the world for the better.”

Joo, Associate Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, has been with the University of Manitoba since 2007. She holds a PhD from the University of Oregon and a BA summa cum laude from Louisiana State University. Her research and teaching interests include ethnic American literature, speculative fiction, critical race studies and queer studies. Joo’s current research project is on racial futures. She explains, “for politically marginalized populations, culture is the site at which their dreams, desires, and demands for a more just world are articulated. I’m drawn to texts by writers and artists of colour who are critical of capitalist notions of progress and development and dare to imagine alternative futures of resistance, survival, and flourishing.”

When not on campus, Joo volunteers with the Prison Library Committee, Queer and Trans People of Color (QTPOC) Winnipeg, and serves on the board of the Plug-In Institute for Contemporary Art. “My work is driven by a commitment to public humanities,” shares Joo. “I am a firm believer in the powers of culture and cultural literacy in helping to transform the world for the better.”

Support UMIH with a gift.

Sign up for the hUManities blog by emailing umih@umanitoba.ca.

The panel included David Watt, associate professor in the department of English, film, and theatre and Director of the Institute; Jennifer Watt, assistant professor in the Faculty of Education; Gretchen Derige (MA/15); and Katie Leitch (MA/16). The idea for the panel came about from David Watt’s idea to have a Harry Potter reading group on campus, which involved Derige and Leitch during their graduate studies. Derige says that when asked by Watt if they would like to join the reading group, “we both said yes before he even finished talking.”

Opportunities such as this are an important part of the social fabric of programs in the humanities, which provide students with knowledge that can take them in many directions. The panel provided the public and the panelists with new ways of appreciating the books that were and still are so loved. Leitch says that her education “provided me with additional skills to appreciate and understand all literature in a new way, but most importantly, it provided me with a network of people to share my love of stories with.”

Both alumnae presenters noted that there were a great number of younger readers in the audience, the next generation of ‘Potter heads’ who might one day present their own panels after studying literature. Leitch notes that as she has grown older, one of her favourite things about the books is “how the story changes with me as I grow – as I move through different stages in my life, I connect with different characters and elements of the plot.” Jennifer Watt noted as part of her presentation that several students she has encountered in the faculty of education ascribe their own creativity and creative practice to being introduced to writing through Harry Potter.

Established in 1990, the Institute for the Humanities regularly offers this type of creative, thoughtful, and timely programming both on and off campus. While the Institute is located within the Faculty of Arts, it serves the entire Humanities constituency in the University and the general community. Activities include programs, research clusters and affiliates, events, an annual graduate fellowship, and the hUManities blog.

Derige and Leitch both completed masters’ of arts in the department of English, film, and theatre, and have remained in touch with many of their cohorts cultivating their interest in and discussions about literature. Opportunities such as this help to move knowledge about literature and media beyond the academy and into the public arena, opening the discussions to a whole new world and hopefully, future students.

In late October the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities, in partnership with the Faculty of Graduate Studies, brought Maren Wood and Jennifer Polk of Beyond the Professoriate to campus to deliver a series of workshops entitled “PhDs That Work: Finding Success in an Uncertain Job Market.” They were fantastic. Wood and Polk brought the necessary mixture of courage, tough-minded clarity, and informed compassion to this important but challenging subject. Their workshops combined a wide array of practical instruction and advice with an energizing message that emphasised the capabilities, creativity, intelligence, and skills PhDs possess (as well as graduate students more generally). The content of their workshops, in other words, was greatly enhanced by the tone of its delivery and the sense of optimism and community Wood and Polk created.

For those who were unable to attend, a couple of statistics provide a convenient way into two of the core messages of these workshops. The first comes from a recent report that indicates only 18.6% of employed PhDs in Canada are full time professors on the tenure track. By now, many will be familiar with this figure and know that it is of course an aggregate number so it can fluctuate depending on one’s discipline. For instance, in this author’s home discipline of history, the number is among the highest, at about 30%. But with 70% of history PhDs still left outside the ranks of the professoriate, even that can hardly be described as encouraging. While there is some variance then, the basic point stands and these numbers disrupt expectations. Despite their professional ambitions, the vast majority of Canada’s PhDs will not end up as full-time, tenure-track faculty. A professional life outside academia, then, is the norm, not the exception.

However disheartening this seems—and I know very well just how disheartening and personally damaging it can be—it is absolutely imperative that everyone gets really comfortable with this reality, be they graduate students, advisors, or university administrators, because life goes on.  Although challenging, no one dies from this. They adjust. In fact, once reoriented not only do those who move away from academia tend to find stimulating and fulfilling careers, they are often happier. There is good reason for all of this. While it is true that the creative and knowledge economies in Canada do not require many credentialed PhDs (an important point to which I shall return), they do need lots of smart, creative, disciplined, imaginative, aspiring people.

In other words, employers are hungry for exactly the sort of characteristics PhDs, (and other graduate students), tend to have well honed and in abundance. Consequently, and as was repeatedly stressed and shown throughout these workshops, with some strategic planning and re-orientation graduate students’ futures are still generally bright and exciting and full of dynamic potential. The trick is figuring out how to unpack one’s academic training and experiences and then align them with the needs of non-academic employers. Don’t be fooled. This can be deceptively challenging, and demands sincerity and commitment. So, the sooner one starts doing this the better. The good news is that one’s efforts here are typically well rewarded, both personally and professionally.

This brings us to the second main statistic that helps us unpick the challenges PhDs can have transitioning to non-academic employment, and that is that only 1% of Canadians have a PhD. That means, with very few exceptions, no employer is going to require a PhD as a necessary qualification for employment. Therefore a PhD degree alone is not going to open many doors. This point is not as obvious or innocuous as it should be. In fact, it can be downright disorienting and a source of deep resentment. It certainly runs counter to the prevailing culture of graduate programs, which have typically neglected the professional development of their students, leaving their professional aspirations to be shaped by their immediate environment, the research university. Thus, for want of anything more deliberate, strategic or realistic, graduate students are taught by their broader cultural surrounding to desire the jobs that are most scarce and statistically the vast majority of them will never get.

This is an area that makes Beyond the Professoriate and the work of Maren Wood and Jennifer Polk particularly welcome, as they help graduate student’s recognize the importance of identifying their broader professional interests, and developing them. A major part of that involves recognizing that for most people a PhD remains a largely unknown entity, and PhDs might very well need to adjust their professional outlook and job materials accordingly. In short, it is not about the PhD, it is about the skills; or as Wood and Polk put it, it is not about what you know, it is about what you do. Their core messages have the deceptively simple contours foundational insights so often do, and their workshops and advice were intelligently presented in accessible and energizing packages.

Beyond the Professoriate is designed to help graduate students now. Towards this end it is practical, actionable and student centred.  It demonstrates just how much can be done to immediately help our PhDs once we jettison the ridiculous (and remarkably recent) idea that the sole purpose and value of a PhD is to become a professor; encouraging our PhD students to freely and openly explore their professional options; and provide resources or opportunities for professional development.  We at the UMIH hope graduate students, graduate programs, and universities will all begin to make regular use of this fantastic resource.

On Thursday, the two presented the main findings and arguments of their work to a standing room only audience at the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities. They met with a smaller group the following day to talk about collaboration and collegiality. The idea for the book emerged from conversations between Berg and Seeber about their own struggles to manage the stresses and pressures of academic work in an era of what has been called the “corporatization” of the university. At a certain point, finding their conversations both encouraging and helpful in a practical sense, they decided to open up their discussions to a broader public in an effort to spark positive change and resistance to what they call the “culture of speed” in academia. Unlike many of the recent books and articles on the corporatization of post-secondary education, literature on which Berg and Seeber certainly draw in their own writing, their aim was not to induce further anxiety and hopelessness among faculty, but to return a genuine sense of agency to their colleagues.

Their title, The Slow Professor, and the manifesto the book promotes, takes as its point of departure the principles of various Slow Movements in food, architecture, urban planning, and other domains. These principles include working in a more deliberate and careful fashion (as opposed to just managing ones time “more efficiently” in order to get more done in a day) and taking pleasure in ones research and teaching. They argue that this taking pleasure is one of the most subversive things faculty can do, just as taking time to grow, prepare, and eat food with pleasure subverts the corporatization of agriculture and the ethos of fast food consumption. The work of Berg and Seeber is grounded in a wide and impressive variety of literature in education, psychology, sociology, ecology, disability studies, critical theory, and literature, and touches upon topics such as loneliness, shame, perfectionism, shared affect, humor, and many more themes. Berg and Seeber are also very witty women, in addition to being first rate researchers in their respective fields and courageous champions of the importance of university education to society.

One particularly humorous moment in their presentation (and book) was when they drew attention to the recommendations found in time management advice manuals for academics, suggestions that included getting up at 4 a.m. to write two hours before preparing children’s lunches and cooking the family breakfast, and slipping in reading on weekends while infants are napping, or when one’s spouse is driving the family to a BBQ. Audience members laughed knowingly at the absurdity of some of these suggestions as well as the tendency of many of us to attempt these kinds of strategies in order to meet increasing pressure to perform at a rate of output that is unsustainable long term. It was clear in the course of the discussion that the book and the presentation resonated broadly and deeply with audience members. Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber have certainly struck a chord among academics.

Their book, although written from a Canadian perspective and in part for a Canadian audience, has found a wide international readership. If UMToday readers are interested in learning more, they can tune into the Sunday Edition on CBC February 5^th, to hear the authors interviewed by Michael Enright.

Jessica Herdman, SSHRC Post-docotral Fellow

Herdman’s presentation highlighted the importance of musicking to both Jesuit and Indigenous ways of being, exploring the complex connections between the songs that were used by the Jesuits in their attempts at conversion, and Indigenous songs for healing. She went on to point out the challenges involved in pursuing such work in cultural history, given that songs are largely ephemeral and may not have survived for our consumption several hundred years later. In this research program, Herdman foregrounds how music-making had a critical role in colonial expansion – as both a space of creative misunderstanding and of intense cultural collision.

Herdman’s program of research is supported by the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities (UMIH) as part of its research affiliates program. This presentation forms part of the UMIH new research colloquium series, which showcases the important research going on at the institute. For more information on forthcoming events at the institute, visit their website at umanitoba.ca/institutes/humanities.