Category Archives: Activism
Knowing the Land Beneath Our Feet: UBC’s Indigenous Histories and Presence
Every day, thousands of UBC students pass by a totem pole that comes from the depths of Viner Sound near the former Ḵwiḵwa̱sut̓inux̱w village of Metap. Hockey players at Thunderbird Arena haul their gear past a duck depicted in mid takeoff, crafted with the copper-leafed remnants of an old Volvo car.
Clearing the Fog: A retrospective on lessons learned from campus activism
Trigger warning: sexual assault, violence, racism A Timeline of Violence, Sexism, and Student Activism at UBC Vancouver (2013): April 19th/2013: “Stranger in the dark” sexual assault reported on UBC Vancouver campus May 19th/2013: Another “stranger in the dark” sexual assault reported; goes unreported to the campus community Sept 7/2013: CBC News reports Sauder School of […]
Every Year is the Year of Feminism
A week ago today, The Terry Project hosted a BARTalk that sought to assess how feminism fared in 2014. Panelists Lucia Lorenzi (PhD candidate in the English Literature department), Jarrah Hodge (blogger at Gender Focus) and Scott Anderson (professor in the philosophy department) discussed the events that gave feminism major media coverage over the past […]
Sexual Assault Awareness Month Launches at UBC
January is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) at UBC, an initiative spearheaded by the University and the AMS. Access & Diversity and the AMS Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC) are taking the lead in organizing and running events during SAAM, in partnership with many other campus organizations. All throughout January, members of the UBC community […]
The Net: Leelah Alcorn and the Virtual Traces of Identity
Content Warning: suicide, transphobia, transmisogyny I. At some point during the winter break I got an idea to write a column about the Internet. It may have been simply because, like most people, having more free time means I’m on the Internet more, but regardless, it felt like something that needed to be looked […]
University wake-up call: petition demands closure of mining institute
Originally published at Stop the Institute. VANCOUVER, BC – Over 1000 individuals and civil society organizations are signatories to a letter petitioning coalition universities to dissolve the mining, oil, and gas think-tank headquartered at UBC. Among the signatories are professors Glen Coulthard (UBC), David Suzuki (UBC, emeritus), Stephen Collis (SFU), Stephen Brown (U. of Ottawa), […]
Photo Essay: Vigil for Phuong Na (Tony) Du
On November 22, at the intersection of Knight Street and 41st Avenue in East Vancouver, Phuong Na (Tony) Du was shot dead by Vancouver police. He was unarmed and had been tapping a fence with a piece of wood. Witnesses say that he was shot within a minute of the police arriving on the scene, sparking the hashtag […]
UBC-hosted mining institute a threat: an open communiqué for directly affected communities
Introduction Critical analysis of the limited information that’s been released over the last year and a half from the Canadian International Resources and Development Institute (CIRDI), hosted at UBC in coordination with Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the École Polytechnique de Montréal (EPDM), leads to some damning conclusions. CIRDI is a mining, oil, and gas […]
#ReasonsToResist at UBC: Fossil Fuel and Mining Investments
When mining companies like Goldcorp use the auspices of “Responsible Mining” to invest millions into our Mineral Research Deposit Unit, our Earth Systems Science Building, or a Women in Engineering initiative, the University and its students become indebted to companies and industries wholly designed to profit from the continued destruction of our environment. SFU doesn’t have a Goldcorp Centre for the Arts out of the generosity of a mine manager’s heart. UBC’s Goldcorp Inc. Teaching and Learning Wing isn’t an investment in students’ futures as much as it’s an investment in Goldcorp’s future. These are institutional investments to secure the field-specific knowledge base and specialized labour necessary to expand resource extraction.
I Lowered My Hands to Write This
“He was the leader of the pack for my [children]. He was meek. He was humble. He was tall. He was a man. He loved dogs. He loved people. He loved anything that had life in it; a plant. And that’s why I can’t understand why that happened to my child.” – Lesley McSpadden, Michael […]
