Events
Upcoming Event: Birthing Paradox: “Modern” Midwives and White Settler Reproductive Futurity”
Join us for a talk with Dr. Annie Menzel, Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Date: Thursday, March 23, 2023
Time: 1:00 to 2:30 pm
Location: ART 103
Free lunch will be served! All welcome!
ABSTRACT
Despite its countercultural origins, which aimed to reclaim birth from alienating and violent obstetrical practices, contemporary home birth midwifery is most accessible to affluent white consumers least impacted by medical harm. Even as Black and Indigenous birth workers enact transformative community care practices, midwives of color face systemic barriers; moreover, midwifery training has often replicated colonial and racial hierarchies. I argue that this paradox derives from the white homebirth movement’s originary investments in white settler reproductive futurity: the unspoken imperative to preserve US whites’ entitlements to property, family, health, and wealth from generation to generation. In this article, I examine two key phenomena of 1970s and 1980s: training clinics on the US/Mexico border and home birth manuals. These reveal deep contradictions between white midwives’ radical care practices and their amnesia about the reproductive violence at the heart of colonization. Moreover, experiences of birth trauma among these midwives seems to have authorized them to partake in colonial dispossession themselves, asserting entitlement to Indigenous birth practices as a sort of primal commons in the name of recovering natural birth for all.
This talk is organized by the Science and Technology Studies (STS) Reading Group, with funding from the Public Humanities Hub Okanagan.
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Fire + Water: Creative and Critical Perspectives: A day of workshops, storytelling, and creative combustions on the theme of fire + water in the Okanagan watershed and beyond. Read More…
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Practical Maters Series. Read more…
Upcoming events
Past Events
Conversation with Amira Rose Davis
October 7, 2021
Join us for the first talk of the Anti-Racist Thought and Activism in History Speaker Series, with Amira Rose Davis. Amira Rose Davis is an Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at Penn State University, where she specializes in 20th Century American History with an emphasis on race, gender, sports and politics.
Date: October 7, 2021
Time: 10 am to 11 am
Location: Zoom. Register here.
PCI Speaker Series talk
October 19, 2021
Dr. Megha Sharma Sehdev on Sonic Involutions of Law and Kinship in Delhi
Date: October 19, 2021
Time: 11:00 am to 2 pm
Location: Zoom. Join here.
Anti-Racist Feminisms Speaker Series– with OmiSoore Dryden
October 20, 2021
OmiSoore Dryden is the James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University, and Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health & Epidemiology, in the Faculty of Medicine. Her research focuses on the complicated realities of life, as lived by Black people, including those who are queer, trans, and gender non-conforming. Her primary focus in this research is on the politics of blood donation and theorizations of blood. Read more about her here: omisooredryden.com
The Anti-Racist Feminisms Speaker Series is supported by UBC’s Anti-Racism Initiatives Fund, and by the Department of Community, Culture, and Global Studies.
Date: October 20, 2021
Time: 12:30 to 2 pm
Location: Zoom. Register here.
FRINGE NATURES: A walkshop “in case you wanted to save the world…”
October 22, 2021
Join us for a collective and reflective exploration of a short stretch of rail trail near UBCO campus. Beginning with a brief collaborative reading of the poem “In case you wanted to save the world” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, this walk invites deep curiosity about who, and where, we are, and what the heck we are doing here. We will meet at Carney Pond platform (on the rail trail just south of John Hindle Rd). This walk is hosted by The Feel-ed Lab . All Feel-ed Lab events strive to be feminist, anticolonial, queer, and accessible spaces!
Date: October 22, 2021
Time: 3 to 4:30 pm
Location: UBCO, outdoor walking paths. Register here.
UBC Okanagan STS Reading Group
October 29, 2021
The UBC Okanagan STS Reading Group is pleased to offer another year of meetings! The theme for 2021/22 is Reproductive Technologies (poster attached) and for our first meeting we will be discussing the theme of human capital, with readings by Lucy van de Wiel and Michelle Murphy.
Date: October 29, 2021
Time: 2:00 to 3 pm
Location: Zoom. Join Here
Conversation with Rinaldo Walcott
November 18, 2021
Rinaldo Walcott joins us as part of the Anti-Racist Thought and Activism in History Speaker Series. Rinaldo Walcott is an Associate Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the Director of Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. As an interdisciplinary black studies scholar, Walcott has published in a wide range of venues. His articles have appeared in journals and books, as well as popular venues like newspapers and magazines. He often comments on black cultural life for radio and TV.
Date: November 18, 2021
Time: 10 am to 11 am
Location: Zoom. Register here.
PCI speaker Series: What Great Settlement? Federal-Provincial Conflict and the Peace River Project, 1956-1972
the PCI Speaker Series presents Dr. Daniel Sims, a member of the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation and Associate Professor of the Department of First Nations Studies University of Northern British Columbia.
Date: Nov. 30, 2021
Time: 11 am to 12 pm
Location: Zoom. Join here.
Conversation with Devyn Spense Benson
December 2, 2021
Benson is a historian of antiracist movements across the Americas and the Caribbean at the University of Kentucky. Her research and teaching interests sit at the intersection of Africana Studies and Latin American history, with a focus is on race and revolution in Cuba.
Date: December 2, 2021
Time: 10 am to 11 am
Location: Zoom. Register here.
Conversation with Sita Balani and Gargi Bhattacharyya
December 9, 2021
Sita Balani is a scholar of queer postcolonial cultural studies and critical theory teaching at King’s College London. Balani is the author of Deadly and Slick: How Sex makes Race in Postcolonial Britain (Verso, 2023). Her work asks how colonialism has shaped contemporary Islamophobia and other forms of racism, and her writing poses important challenges about conviction, identity, and responsibility.
Gargi Bhattacharyya is a sociologist at University of East London that has been writing about race, migration, and austerity for over two decades. Author of Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of reproduction and survival (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the Long War (Zed, 2008), Bhattacharyya examines economic vulnerability, poverty, and survival in the context of constructing race and empire.
Date: December 9, 2021
Time: 10 am to 11 am
Location: Zoom. Register here.
Living Things Festival
January 10 to 30, 2021
The fifth annual Living Things Festival will return to Kelowna this winter from January 10 to 30, 2021.
This year’s festival will be unusually unusual. As indoor public gatherings are severely restricted, we are presenting an outdoor projection – THE COLLECTIVE BODY – with dancers and musicians from across North America at the RCA from January 10 – 30; and a live streaming of animated short films for mature audiences, Objects on Motion, January 19 & 26. The organizers are still hoping to co-present a chamber opera, The Book of My Shames, with Opera Kelowna on the Kelowna Community Theatre stage with a very small audience, January 28 – 30.
The festival is organized by FCCS prof, Neil Cadger, and is financially supported by the City of Kelowna, the BC Arts Council, UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, Public Humanities Hub Impact Award, Heritage Canada and local businesses and individuals.
More about the festival line up and ticket information can be found here: www.LivingThingsFestival.com
The Phh-O Book Club
October 21, 2020
The Public Humanities Hub – Okanagan, in collaboration with African Caribbean Student Club, presents
Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, by Robyn Maynard.
Read the book and join us for a moderated virtual discussion on October 21, 2020 (Wednesday), 5:30 – 7:00 PM. RVSP here. Order your copy at Mosaic Books with a 15% discount by clicking the link and mentioning “UBCO Book Club”
If you have any further questions, email us at public.humanities.ok@ubc.ca. We look forward to welcoming you to our Book Club!
Researchers Event – Hosted by the Integrated Renewal Program (IRP)
August 27, 2020
UBC is moving to a new system and associated processes for HR and Finance in November 2020. Modernizing and simplifying processes and bringing them into an intuitive, integrated system called Workday will improve researchers’ access to real-time information and facilitate grants management.
Date: August 27, 2020
Time: 10 am to 12 pm
Location: Zoom. Register here.
PHH-O Awards Info Session
June 19, 2020
The Public Humanities Hub – Okanagan Awards Info Session is an opportunity for UBCO community members to learn more about applying for the Public Humanities Joint Fellowship Award and the Public Humanities Impact Awards.
We invite UBCO faculty members and graduate students to join us with their questions about these award programs.
The Info Session will be on June 19, 2020 (Friday) from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Register at https://awardsinfosession.eventbrite.ca.
The Zoom invite will be sent to the registered participants 24 hours before the actual event.
CANCELLED DUE TO TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS. Will be rescheduled at some later point.
To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture
March 14, 2020
Join the Public Humanities Hub – Okanagan, in coordination with the conference “Institutions of the Soviet Bloc: Print Culture, Higher Education, and Censorship in State Socialism,” for an afternoon with Eleonory Gilburd, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, and a discussion of her award-winning book “To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture.”
About the book: The Soviet Union was a notoriously closed society until Stalin’s death in 1953. Then, in the mid-1950s, a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes, acquiring heightened emotional significance. To See Paris and Die is a history of this momentous opening to the West.
Innovation Centre Theatre
460 Doyle Ave, Kelowna, BC V1Y 0C2
Date: 14 March 2020 (Saturday)
Time: 3-5 PM
This event is supported by:
The Department of Economics, Political Science, and Philosophy
The Reichwald Endowment Grant from the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies
The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada
CANCELLED DUE TO TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS. Will be rescheduled at some later point.
Institutions of the Soviet Bloc: Print Culture, Higher-Education and Censorship Systems
March 12-14, 2020
The symposium is multi-disciplinary and hosts distinguished guest speakers from Europe, Canada, and the US, who will debate recent challenges regarding the historiography of the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. The discussions will address the following overarching question: what are the limitations inherent in the totalitarianist model of truth in relation to the institutions of the former Soviet Bloc?
Unveiling the Nation: The Politics of Secularism in France and Quebec” by Dr. Emily Laxer (York University, ON)
March 11, 2020
part of “The Power, Conflict, and Ideas Speaker Series”
hosted by the Irvin K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Languages and World Literatures (FCCS)
Social Work Week: United by Diversity, Strengthened by Inclusion
March 15-21, 2020
hosted by the Okanagan Branch of the BCASW
Gender & Women’s Studies Celebrates International Women’s Day 2020
March 9, 2020
Celebrations kick off with the launch of the second issue of the Gender and Women’s Studies undergraduate journal, That’s What [WE] Said, followed by a talk and workshop from Hannah McGregor, Assistant Professor in Publishing at Simon Fraser University: “So You Want to Make a Podcast?”
March 10, 2020
Interview of Vancouver stand-up comics Maddy Kelly and Danika Thibault, and their stand-up comedy performances follow after.
Honouring Indigenous Writers – Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
March 9, 2020
hosted by the Innovation Library
ACTS29 Theatre
March 1, 2020
hosted by The Public Theatre Project
First Annual Meeting: Thinking Back and Looking Ahead
Join the Public Humanities Hub Okanagan for the First Annual Meeting to discuss the accomplishments from the past year, and to plan the activities in supporting research and outreach in the coming academic year.
Date: June 5, 2020
Time: 10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
Via Zoom link invite.