The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, invites applications for an appointment at the rank of Full Professor or senior Associate Professor in the area of sustainability to begin July 1, 2013.
The Okanagan campus of UBC is located in Kelowna, British Columbia, one of Canada’s most ecologically diverse and threatened areas, in a place that provides access to wilderness, agricultural and urban-rural interface zones. The campus has significant initiatives in environmental studies, ecological research in the sciences, and indigenous studies, as well as being home to the Okanagan Sustainability Institute. The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies brings together creative and critical disciplines and offers opportunities for interdisciplinary studies at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Along with several individual sustainability-related research projects, the Faculty houses Lake Publishing, the Centre for Culture and Technology, and the Centre for Indigenous Media Arts, all of which engage in sustainability research.
We are looking for a scholar or scholar-practitioner with a distinguished record of accomplishment related to cultural and environmental sustainability that can complement current work being done in the Faculty in the areas of ecocriticism, ecopoetics, community-based research, or new media. The successful applicant will be able to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in one or more of our program areas (English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Art History, Cultural Studies, Creative Writing, Visual Arts and New Media, or Interdisciplinary Performance) as well as develop new curriculum in his/her area of expertise. The successful candidate will be willing to work with researchers across the campus and within the Faculty on sustainability- focussed projects. The applicant’s research may be rooted in either creative practice or critical scholarship, but that research should ideally complement and extend the capacity of faculty and graduate students in both areas. We would welcome applications from scholars or scholar-artists who demonstrate an engagement with indigenous epistemologies.
Minimum requirements are the terminal degree in the individual’s discipline, either a PhD or an MFA degree. The individual should have post-secondary teaching experience and a significant reputation in scholarly research and/or research-creation.
The successful candidate will contribute to the development of a growing graduate program and be interested in working in an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary environment.
Candidates must include with their letter of application:
• curriculum vitae
• a portfolio of examples of recent scholarly publications and creative work
Applicants should also arrange to have at least three confidential letters of reference sent to the email address below. Teaching evaluations and samples of student work would be useful to the committee.
Please send letters of application, CV, portfolios, and reference letters electronically to:
recruitment.fccs@ubc.ca
Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, FIN 323
University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus
3333 University Way
Kelowna BC
V1V 1V7
For any inquiries, please contact Nancy Holmes, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies, at 250-807-9369 or nancy.holmes@ubc.ca.
Review of applications will start on November 1, 2012.
All positions are subject to funding.
Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Website: http://www.ubc.ca/okanagan/creativeandcritical/welcome.html
This weekend I finally got to watch Batman: The Dark Knight Rises. My husband and I had the theater to ourselves at 11am on Sunday.  Less than a month ago, Steve Rust had posted about the shootings at a Batman screening in Aurora. While I did think of this recent horror, the quiet of a summer Sunday in rural Pennsylvania was beguiling of a world at peace.
This notion of peace was shattered by hearing that while Hollywood mayhem ensued on screen, another type of mayhem was unfolding in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Now we know the name of the man who went on his shooting rampage at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and we know that six people are dead.
In the surge of media attention that yet another senseless massacre has generated, a recent NYTimes’ headline reads, Wisconsin Killer Fed and was Fueled by Hate-driven Music, and a follow-up article similarly points to music as an influence in Wade M. Page’s actions: Hatecore Music is Called White Supremacist Recruiting Tool.
Such headlines say something about media–both about the way it portrays, reports, and tries to make sense of tragedy and on the ways it can/might influence our behaviors.
As most communication scholars and studies articulate, influences via media are anything but straightforward.  There was obviously a lot more than music that made Page commit the hate crime he did. What those reasons are might or might not be revealed via the various news stories that play out. But two additional articles caught my eye. These are an A.V. Club review of Batman by Scott Tobias and Matthew Goodwin’s recent Guardian story.
In addition, The L.A. Times quotes and critiques President Obama’s statement: “terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching to examine additional ways that we can reduce violence.â€
As we soul-search, we also grieve.
ASLE-sponsored panels at Conference on Communication and the Environment (COCE)
June 6-10, 2013. Uppsala, Sweden
Deadline for submission: August 15, 2012.
Literary and communication studies have much in common in their ecocritical explorations, with scholars intersecting in sub-disciplines such as media studies, rhetoric, pedagogy, and risk communication. This call invites proposals for papers for two ASLE-sponsored panels that engage various intersections. The first panel focuses on oral and literary texts, while the second engages cinema, new media and other visual texts. Â Each asks specifically for topics that correspond with the themes of the COCE 2013 conference, Participation Revisited: Openings and Closures for Deliberations on the Commons.
These themes include but are not limited to the following:
- How do cultural texts open (and close) possibilities for environmental engagements and public participation? And to what effect?
- How do socio-cultural conditions influence opportunities for texts to partake in public participation? In environmental engagements?
- How do cultural texts re-imagine the commons? And how do conceptions of the commons help (or hinder) how cultural texts are re-imagined?
We encourage papers that engage canonical texts in new ways. We especially encourage papers that speak to a cross-pollination of theoretical approaches across literary and communication studies. We are also keen to see papers that highlight non-canonical texts and those that spotlight marginalized publics.
Submission guidelines: Please send 150-200 word abstract with your name and affiliation to Salma Monani at smonani@gettysburg.edu by August 15, 2012.
Please share cfp widely.
(http://cstonline.tv/documentary-and-environment; see also program in previous post. )
Over the last century, oil has become a major source of energy around the world. As certain critics have noted, one of the related cultural implications is that the demand for oil has restructured the reality of our contemporary sociopolitical imaginary. While a majority of the world has gradually abandoned coal as a primary energy source, China continues to rely heavily on coal. Thus, coal mines remain a major industry in China, along with the related social issues that continue to threaten the national economy, the environment, and workers’ lives.
Recently, scholars have also proposed that modern humans should no longer be considered homo sapiens but rather homo colossus—beings who are equipped with a voracious desire for technology, and who require considerably more resources and space than pre-colossal humans. However, the portrayal of human bodies in Chinese independent documentaries on the coal mining industry displays a reality that is the direct opposite of homo colossus. In these documentaries, naked, animalistic bodies crawl like ants through the visceral underground mines and devastated environments above the ground.
In the documentaries, the human body is never projected as being merely the physical existence of a human being. It is always represented as being an embodiment of the living conditions and desires of the coal miners, their working environment, the ecological surroundings, and the economic and social relations at work at every level of society and the nation. This paper sets forth to investigate three related ecologies: material (environment), technological (human labour and mining machine), and social (the delocalized and deterritorialized capitalist power) through the representation of the bodies of coal miners in Chinese independent documentaries.
TAM Yee-lok, City University of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong University doctoral candidate selected to conduct ecocritical research in the U.S.
The Research Grants Council and Fulbright Hong Kong Scholars Awards 2012/2013 have been awarded to four doctoral research students of the University of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong Wenweipo (æ–‡î¡å ±) reports a recent announcement by RGC-Fulbright Hong Kong Scholars Program of four winning PhD candidates from the University of Hong Kong, to undertake 6 to 10 months academic research in the United States with a monthly grant of HK$12,000. CHU Kiu-wai, one of the winning candidates, is a second year doctoral student from the university’s School of Comparative Literature. His research in the U.S. will focus on aspects of ecocriticism in contemporary Chinese visual culture. He hopes to promote Chinese visual culture, particularly Chinese cinema, to academic circles in the west through which to increase their understanding of Chinese visual culture.
Promotion of Chinese Cinema to the West
CHU Kiu-wai is happy about his award as a junior Fulbright Scholar and will conduct his 10-month research from September at the University of Idaho. “I completed my master degree studies at Cambridge in England, have been undertaking doctoral research in Hong Kong and am looking forward to continuing my research studies in Idaho where both the university and the town are situated in a natural scenic environment from which I may gain new experience and understandings in the study of culture.â€
A central focus of Chu’s research concerns aspects of Chinese visual arts under the impact of globalization. He suggests that social and drastic environmental changes, such as damages to the urban fabric and pollution in China, have been the subjects of Chinese cinema and visual arts in recent years. He hopes to expand the application of ecocritical theories and analyses from its deep-rooted [focus in English literary works], to [a broader coverage in] recent Chinese cinema and arts. He also sees the course of his Fulbright tenure as an opportunity for him to promote the diversity of Chinese cinema.
Link to the original news article:
http://paper.wenweipo.com/2012/06/25/ED1206250008.htm
Juan Pablo Navarro is circulating the following survey. Participation is encouraged.
Title: “Survey to identify works and researchers/authors influential/important in the field of environmental communication.”
“The purpose of this survey is to identify the dominant approaches and most influential scientific contributions in the field of environmental communication in all continents from IECA members and other communication associations. The results will be used for doctoral research on environmental communication in Latin America.”
The survey closes on July 26, 2012.
Our hearts go out today to victims and families of last night’s tragic events in Aurora, Colorado. According to news reports, 12 people were killed and dozens injured by a lone gunman at a midnight screening of the latest Batman film.