UNews - PUBlic Professor

Peacock presenting a big picture view of Alberta's future

trevor.kenney — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 18:14:06 +0000

Describing himself under the broad umbrella of “philosopher of science,” it is no wonder that Dr. Kent Peacock’s perspective of the world is big picture in nature. With one foot rooted in science and the other in philosophy, he examines the world’s problems through a very wide lens.

For much of his career, the environment has been Peacock’s point of focus and as the world approaches what many earth scientists have dubbed a new geological epoch, Peacock is continuing his studies from that big picture vantage point. On Thursday, Feb. 16 at 7 p.m. at Lethbridge City Hall, Peacock will present that picture as the February speaker in the PUBlic Professor Series.

Dr. Kent Peacock presents Alberta in the Anthropocene on Thursday, Feb. 16 as the latest PUBlic Professor Series lecture.

Alberta in the Anthropocene is the talk title and while that might be a new term to the general public, the Anthropocene has become quite common among earth scientists who have measured the effects of humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels and forecast dire consequences if new forms of energy are not identified and utilized.

“At some point in the last few hundred years, humanity started to be such a major influence on the climate and the whole ecology of the planet that we’re not just bit players anymore,” says Peacock.

With a population of 7.3 billion people that continues to grow, enabled by energy that is still largely reliant on fossil fuels (80 to 85 per cent), the science indicates that model cannot continue. Peacock knows this, and therefore he is now asking what can be done and how we can transition to other, more sustainable forms of energy.

A native of southern Ontario, he can’t pinpoint particularly where his interest in the environment began, noting only that he enjoyed the visits to his aunt’s farm as a child and always found the environment, soils and farming fascinating. He schooled exclusively at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto and while in graduate school, taught a course on environmental philosophy. Once he delved deeper into that literature and learned more about the greenhouse effect and the ozone hole, his interest in climate change issues was sparked.

A hot button issue if there ever was one, especially in oil-dependent Alberta, he’s quick to say what he won’t broach during his PUBlic Professor talk.

“What I’m not going to do, and it’s really tempting but it would be a mistake, is spend the time refuting all of the arguments raised by climate deniers, because it’s a waste of time,” he says. “And it would be very easy to stand there and rant about Donald Trump for 40 minutes too, but I want to try and get people to look at the big picture – that’s my job as a philosopher.”

He describes fossil fuels as finite resources that have grown incredibly inefficient over time.

“Back in the good old days you could stick a pipe in the ground near Leduc and oil would start squirting out. You had a 100-to-one net energy ratio. The tar sands today, they are at best a five-to-one ratio. It’s just a terrible way to produce energy and without even looking at the climate change factor, fossil fuels are going to become obsolete because people are finding better ways to produce energy,” he says.

Change is coming, and Peacock is trying to get us to look at the bigger picture of how best to respond to that change.

“I’d love to see Alberta, and particularly southern Alberta, become a centre for innovation and renewable energy,” he says.

He describes the newly-introduced carbon tax as a push to get people away from fossil fuels. For the plan to truly work however, there must be sufficient pull to other forms of energy.

“The pull is the incentive to move to other things,” he says. “When all of a sudden the average person can afford an electric vehicle that costs one-third as much to run as a gasoline vehicle, that’s a powerful pull away from fossil fuels – so let’s find a way to facilitate that.”

Peacock says there are currently no subsidies offered to consumers who wish to buy electric vehicles, nor are there enough recharging stations on the roads.

“This is where the government could provide some leadership but to do that, they have to admit they are ultimately going to be off oil and that’s really hard to say in Alberta.”

Peacock has been broaching these tough topics for years and it’s likely to make for a lively PUBlic Professor.

“I’m really looking forward to it,” he says. “I enjoy talking about what I work on and I’m really excited about engaging the audience in the discussion.”

For more on the PUBlic Professor Series, visit this link: http://www.uleth.ca/artsci/public-professor.

Nugent honing critical thinkers through lessons on history

trevor.kenney — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 16:47:06 +0000

At first glance, it seems difficult to see how the study of a religious movement in 16th century Scotland is relevant in today’s society. Spend a couple of hours with ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge history professor Dr. Janay Nugent (BA ’95) and the relevance will soon come into focus.

Nugent, the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s 2016 Distinguished Teaching Award winner, will delve into the history of Scotland in this month’s instalment of the PUBlic Professor Series at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2017 at Lethbridge City Hall. She will present Converting a Nation: family, religion, and Calvinism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland.

Dr. Janay Nugent's love of history was established early, sparked by a grandmother well versed in the history of her British ancestors, and then nurtured at Kate Andrews High School.

“It’s about trying to understand how identities are formed,” she says. “We’re studying this so-called irrelevant topic from the past, but it shows how governments and churches begin to shape identities. If they can influence people to change their faith, which is something people hold very close, then that is very relevant to the modern world.”

A Coaldale-born, Kate Andrews High School product, Nugent earned her bachelor’s degree from the U of L before venturing to Ontario where she completed her master’s and PhD at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Guelph. Her love of history was established early, sparked by a grandmother well versed in the history of her British ancestors, and then nurtured in high school. And while she began her post-secondary career as a psychology major, it took just one history class and what she calls an amazing group of U of L history faculty to get her hooked.

“I like history because it’s all about developing arguments and winning arguments and I like to do that,” says Nugent with a chuckle. “History was a good place for me.”

At Guelph, her focus turned to Scotland, inspired by a master’s supervisor who understood her preference for social, cultural and religious history and a desire to get into the lives of the people she studied. When introduced to the moral church courts and the seemingly unbelievable mission of Scottish Parliament converting an entire nation to Calvinism from Catholicism, Nugent found a research focus that has been central to her scholarship ever since.

“Most of my research has been driven by this question of how can you make an entire population convert its religion?” she says. “All the work I’ve done since 1995, when I started my master’s, has been building towards trying to begin to answer that question outside of the official story of the church itself.”

It is neither a simple nor straightforward question and it has allowed Nugent to pursue a number of different research avenues, and yet they all tie back to the original query.

A champion of liberal education, Nugent strives to impart upon her students the idea of creating global citizens who are broad thinkers when tackling the issues of today.

“A liberal education allows students the ability to really begin to process questions and problems that exist in our communities from a much broader perspective,” she says, challenging those who question the usefulness of history and humanities studies. “History teaches you the multiple contributing factors to how we got to where we are today. If you’re going to actually have successful solutions to problems, you’re going to have to understand the complex contributing factors, which often are very historical.”

Nugent is enthused by the opportunity to present as part of the PUBlic Professor Series, and while she is the presenter, she fully expects to learn a great deal from her audience.

“I find it’s a great opportunity for me to take the questions I give to my students out to the community to see how they begin to develop perspectives,” she says. “The questions that people ask me are often things I might not think of so, it’s just like the classroom, it’s a learning experience on both sides.”

PUBlic Professor Series spawns a spinoff

caroline.zentner — Thu, 22 Dec 2016 20:53:05 +0000

Although Faculty of Arts & Science professors could be labelled serious, scholarly types by day, the occasion of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s 50th anniversary has given them a reason to have a little fun while still imparting their knowledge.

The PUBlic Professor Series: 5-Minute Edition, is designed to showcase the diversity of research interests within the Faculty in an entertaining format. Each of 10 professors will have five minutes and a maximum of 15 PowerPoint slides to do a presentation on their research. The slides will automatically advance every 20 seconds, requiring the speaker to keep pace.

“After five minutes is over, I’m cutting them off,” says Dr. Kevin McGeough (BA ’96), a U of L geography professor and moderator of the event. “That makes it fun because there’s a kind of panicked element to the presentation. It’s especially fun for professors because we’re not known for being concise in our comments. That lightning-fast approach makes it interesting for people to watch.”

The professors who have agreed to participate include Dr. Jay Gamble (English), Dr. René Barendregt (Geography), Dr. Sergio Pellis (Neuroscience), Dr. Ute Kothe (Biochemistry), Dr. Omar Rodriguez (Modern Languages), Dr. Jennifer Copeland (Kinesiology), Dr. Janay Nugent (History), Dr. Locke Spencer (Physics), Dr. Maura Hanrahan (Native American Studies) and Dr. Hillary Rodrigues (Religious Studies).

“One of the things we’re looking for is that these research presentations be of interest to the public and to people who aren’t specialists in the area of expertise,” says McGeough. “That matches the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s liberal education approach where we have all sorts of different disciplinary backgrounds and we all contribute to a larger conversation.”

McGeough has some experience with the format from a session he participated in at an event hosted by the U of L Faculty Association. He has a few tips for his colleagues who’ll be participating.

“Talk quickly, have a sense of what you want to say before you get up there and pick your slides well. If you lose track of where you are, good slides can cue you to get back on track or find a new track to go down,” says McGeough.

The PUBlic Professor Series: 5-Minute Edition is scheduled for Friday, Jan. 13 at 2 p.m. in B756 ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ Hall. McGeough says the event will be informal and people are welcome to drop in on the session even after it’s started.

“We especially hope that alumni will come and experience this event. This will be a fun way to spend the afternoon,” says McGeough, adding everyone is welcome to attend.

Morgentaler revels in the beauty of literature

trevor.kenney — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 22:35:43 +0000

Dr. Goldie Morgentaler will never pass up an opportunity to discuss the works of Charles Dickens. Given the opportunity to present as part of the PUBlic Professor Series of community lectures, she sought to address a topic close to her heart – the importance of the written word and how it continues to influence society. Through Dickens’ classic novella, A Christmas Story, she’ll do just that.

A true lover of books and the written word, Morgentaler is fearful books are being left behind in today’s fast-paced digital world.

Dr. Goldie Morgentaler examines Dickens' classic novella A Christmas Carol in the latest PUBlic Professor Series lecture.

“It does scare me. I wanted to do this talk precisely because this is a very important facet of our education and we shouldn’t let it sort of slip into oblivion,” she says of the written word.

Morgentaler’s love of reading was cultivated early in life. She discovered Dickens’ work as an undergraduate student while on a work study program in New York City. Alone and on a meagre student budget, reading helped her pass the time.

“I was pretty lonely and there was this book shop right across the street from me, so I spent a lot of time there,” she says. “It happened to be right around the anniversary of Dickens’ death, so there was a lot of stuff out on him. I had never read him before, just vaguely heard the name, so I picked up Great Expectations and I loved it. From there, I just read everything that I could.”

Since then, Dickens has become somewhat of a life’s work. Morgentaler, who has been at the U of L since 1997, teaches 19th-century British and American literature, as well as modern Jewish literature. She is the author of Dickens and Heredity and of numerous articles on Dickens and Victorian literature. She is a past president of the Dickens Society and a current member of the Dickens Quarterly Editorial Board and the Dickens Society’s Board of Trustees. She is currently at work on an essay about Dickens and dance for a volume of collected essays on Dickens and the Arts to be published by Edinburgh ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ Press.

Also a literary translator, mostly from Yiddish to English, Morgentaler has translated much of the work of her mother, Chava Rosenfarb, the great Yiddish novelist, who was given an honorary degree by the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge in 2006.

When choosing a topic for PUBlic Professor, Morgentaler knew she needed a title that would resonate with a public audience and A Christmas Carol, in the lead-up to Christmas, was a natural fit. Of course her talk, How Dickens Invented Christmas and Why it Matters, will likely open some eyes to the classic story we think we already know.

“I wonder how many people have actually read A Christmas Carol. Or have they just ever seen it on stage or gone to a movie?” she asks. “The problem with not actually reading the story is he’s such a wonderful writer and you miss all the puns and all the fun he has with language. Reading is a different experience.”

It’s that experience she doesn’t want to see lost on a young generation. While Dickens will live on in some way, shape or form because his work has entered the public consciousness, what she doesn’t want lost is the actual literature itself.

“What worries me is that people know the story but they don’t know it from Dickens,” she says. “They know it from television or from Scrooge McDuck or something like that, and my students, sometimes they are surprised because the actual story is a little bit darker than they realize. It grew out of Dickens’ outrage at the social conditions of his time.

“A Christmas Carol is easily digestible, so that’s part of its popularity and why it persists today, but there are a lot of great writers who are not read anymore, and that’s a shame.”

Morgentaler’s PUBlic Professor event takes place Thursday, Nov. 24 from 7 to 9 p.m. at City Hall.

Prairie view opens new research frontier for Golsteyn

trevor.kenney — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 22:19:37 +0000

Although his work is focused on one of our generation’s biggest diseases, Dr. Roy Golsteyn (BSc ’84) is honed in on the smallest of details to help bring it to its knees.

Golsteyn’s biological sciences lab has had its sights set on cancer for years and with a uniquely southern Alberta approach, is breaking new ground in finding chemicals that may lead to new cancer treatment drugs.

Dr. Roy Golsteyn is confident that the chemical properties of plants growing in the coulees of southern Alberta will lead to new cancer treatments.

“Cancer is a big disease and the way I was trained, was to really find out precisely what is wrong when a disease takes over, simply because if you know what’s wrong, you can find a way to fix it,” says Golsteyn. “I’ve always loved biology and trying to understand how human cells divide. In our work, we’re testing new chemicals to see if they have anti-cancer properties and then trying to understand how cancer cells respond to them.”

On Thursday, Oct. 20, 2016, Golsteyn will present as part of the PUBlic Professor Series, detailing how his lab is utilizing the unique plant species of southern Alberta in its quest to find chemicals with anti-cancer properties. Flower Power: A Scientific Search for New Medicines in Prairie Plants begins at 7 p.m. at Lethbridge City Hall, the second of this year’s PUBlic Professor events.

“It is an astonishing fact that, even in the 21st century, we are only beginning to realize that plants from the Alberta prairies contain chemicals of medical importance,” says Golsteyn.

Born and raised in Lethbridge, he admits he never gave the coulee slopes much thought in terms of them yielding cancer-fighting chemicals. After completing his Bachelor of Science at the U of L, Golsteyn went overseas, completing his PhD studies and taking a job in the French pharmaceutical industry. He married a fellow scientist, Dr. Sophie Kernéis-Golsteyn, and they eventually made their way back to Lethbridge, he setting up shop at the U of L and his wife at Lethbridge College.

Having worked in France and gained an appreciation for the way in which they look at plants and their potential healing properties, Golsteyn began to eye the plants outside his office window in a new light. He also fell into conversation one day with a First Nations guide at Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, on a random trip to show off the area to foreign students working in his lab.

“We started talking about how First Nations people have used these plants for years and it just seemed to click, we thought this could be interesting,” says Golsteyn, who continues to work with the First Nations community.

He’s had some early successes, namely with the Buffalo Bean, which showed very early in the testing phase that its natural compounds exhibited anti-cancer activity. His lab has now begun a new round of tests on the Brown Eyed Susan, and created a plant library for the area’s native plant species. The pharmaceutical world is taking notice.

“We’ve learned that scientifically this area is very interesting,” he says. “You can look anywhere on the planet but what makes southern Alberta most interesting is that there really is a competition in the coulees. There are very few plants out there and there once were a lot of animals to eat them, so those native plant species have developed a toxicity level that’s allowed them to survive and that’s not common. They were pushed to make chemicals so they would not be eaten and that’s the stuff that’s making this project work.”

It’s a personal quest for Golsteyn, who says he’s of the age where he knows many people who are ill and struggling with cancer. He also understands the frustration that exists in the public sphere as years of research have been devoted to finding cures for the various forms of the disease.

“We are making progress, we really are,” he says passionately. “I’m familiar with the frustration though. I think at times we oversell the research in our labs but at the same time, there’s a huge pressure to oversell it. You have to get out there and say your research is awesome so that you can keep working on it and I think people are getting frustrated with that.”

Golsteyn says great strides have been made in eradicating the disease, specifically in forms of leukemia, but that much more work needs to be done.

“The successes that are out there, they’re from people doing very careful, good science. That’s what we’re doing too,” he says. “We’re not saying just take this miracle plant and it’ll work. We’re saying there are chemicals in this plant that are very interesting, they’re new, we’re running them through some very interesting tests and seeing what happens. But I’m very optimistic.”

Golsteyn speaks with conviction, tinged with hope, that the good science he was trained to perform will yield the results he, and everyone affected by this disease, desire.

PUBlic Professor series promising another stellar lineup

trevor.kenney — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 15:53:50 +0000

Surely the ancient Maya never predicted their downfall, nor did the Roman Empire foresee its society coming to an end and yet they both vanished into history. What can we learn from these civilizations and how can it relate to the normal we know today?

Dr. Kevin McGeough (BA ’96) of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Department of Geography will explore these topics when he presents ‘I met a traveller from an antique land’: The Archaeology of Progress, Decline and Collapse at the first PUBlic Professor series event of the fall semester. The free public talk is set for Thursday, Sept. 22 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Lethbridge City Hall.

Dr. Kevin McGeough opens the series on Thursday, Sept. 22 discussing the lessons of archaeology.

McGeough says that the ability of archaeology to offer insight about long-term change is one of the major contributions of the discipline to society. He also sees the PUBlic Professor series as an important vehicle to share his research work.

“It’s part of what I think is our obligation as professors,” he says. “We can’t always make our research accessible in ways that are meaningful but we should always be trying to do so and archaeology is one of those disciplines that is evocative and garners a lot of public interest and imagination. So we need to think about that and do our best to communicate our work back to everybody.”

PUBlic Professor is beginning its third year in the current format. Born out of the great success of the Public Professor newspaper column co-edited by Drs. Dan Johnson and James Linville, the current series offers free public talks in a pub-style setting. Intended more as open forums than lectures, PUBlic Professor evenings provoke questions and open dialogue.

“It’s a forum that has proven to be very popular and we’re excited to have Dr. McGeough open another series of what promises to be outstanding presentations,” says Dr. Craig Cooper, Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science. “I think that people will once again be very intrigued by the scholars we have lined up for the year and the variety of topics that will be discussed.”

McGeough is a U of L alumnus who went on to master’s and doctoral studies at Harvard and the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Pennsylvania respectively before returning to teach at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ in 2003. He’s been in Lethbridge ever since and has conducted field work throughout the world, including extensive research in the Middle East.

His work looks at how people use archaeology to make arguments about the present, how this is both legitimate and can also be cause for concern. He has also studied archaeology and its presentation in films and media.

McGeough’s talk is the first of the six-part PUBlic Professor series that will run through March 2017. The full schedule follows:

Sept. 22, 2016 – Dr. Kevin McGeough (geography & archaeology) – ‘I met a traveller from an antique land’: The Archaeology of Progress, Decline and Collapse
Oct. 20, 2016 – Dr. Roy Golsteyn (biological sciences) – Flower Power: A Scientific Search for New Medicines in Prairie Plants
Nov. 24, 2016 – Dr. Goldie Morgentaler (English) – How Dickens Invented Christmas – and Why it Matters
Jan. 26, 2017 – Dr. Janay Nugent (history) – Converting a Nation: Family, Religion and Calvinism in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Scotland
Feb. 16, 2017 – Dr. Kent Peacock (philosophy) – Alberta in the Anthropocene
Mar. 23, 2017 – Dr. Stacey Wetmore (chemistry & biochemistry) – DNA Damage, Repair and Disease: How Computers Can Help Us Understand

Free appetizers and bar service will be available at each presentation. Seating is limited and people are urged to attend early. No RSVP is required. For more information, visit the PUBlic Professor series web page.

For more on Dr. McGeough’s work, visit this feature story.

McGeough uncovering lessons from our past

trevor.kenney — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 21:58:05 +0000

Dr. Kevin McGeough (BA ’96) relishes his fall semester Archaeology 1000 class more than any other. He also realizes it comes with the unique pressure of living up to the expectations of his eager first-year students.

“I love it because these are people in their first semester of university, and if they signed up they probably always wanted to take archaeology,” says McGeough. “So it’s easier for me in some ways than other professors because people have already bought into this subject as being interesting. I have the job not to lose them as opposed to catch their attention.”

Dr. Kevin McGeough kicks off this year's PUBlic Professor series on Thursday, Sept. 22.

Archaeology is inherently interesting, associated with a certain cool factor propagated by films and media and McGeough is happy to take advantage of that to discuss his research and what it can teach modern society. He will open the popular PUBlic Professor Series on Thursday, Sept. 22, 7 p.m. at Lethbridge City Hall by presenting, ‘I met a traveller from an antique land’: The Archaeology of Progress, Decline and Collapse.

“It’s part of what I think is our obligation as professors,” he says of public outreach initiatives such as PUBlic Professor. “We can’t always make our research accessible in ways that are meaningful but we should always be trying to do so and archaeology is one of those disciplines that is evocative and garners a lot of public interest and imagination. So we need to think about that and do our best to communicate our work back to everybody.”

His outreach involves some myth busting, breaking down false impressions people may have of the discipline.

“I think the biggest misconception is the importance of the artifact to archaeology and that comes from films and television where people are depicted as desperate for acquiring the artifact. And really, the artifact is just one small piece,” says McGeough.

He describes the opening scene from the original Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the hero navigates a series of hair-raising traps and barriers in order to recover a gold idol.

“For an actual archaeologist, the gold idol wouldn’t really be that interesting at all, rather all the traps and the whole context that surrounds the idol is what’s really interesting to us,” he says. “It also comes from a museum context where people have probably experienced archaeology and where artifacts are often treated as pieces of art. But the thing itself is meaningless if you don’t have the full context.”

A U of L alumnus, McGeough went on to master’s and doctoral studies at Harvard and the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Pennsylvania respectively before returning to teach at the U of L in 2003. He’s been in Lethbridge ever since but has conducted field work throughout the world, including extensive research in the Middle East.

He sees archaeology as much more than digging up the past.

“Our contribution is we have evidence for this vastly huge sum of the human past,” he says. “It’s not only the actual data but also all the models that come out of us thinking about the past, how things have changed, advanced, progressed. We haven’t always been this way, what we see today hasn’t always been normative, so that shifts the focus. You have this longstanding change over time mixed with an understanding of other experiences and you begin to realize our way of life hasn’t always been, nor will it continue as we expect it might.”

He also looks at how people use archaeology to make arguments about the present, how this is both legitimate and can also be cause for concern. One need only look at today’s Middle Eastern issues, political conflict throughout the globe and even the curious politics of former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s pursuit of the long lost ships of the Franklin Expedition.

“It makes you ask, whose history is important? What was he saying politically about northern sovereignty, because it’s very strange for a leader of state to make an archaeological announcement?” asks McGeough. “When we are telling these narratives of the past, what are we embedding in there, what kind of politics are we arguing for, either overtly or subversively?”

McGeough’s PUBlic Professor talk is the first in this academic year’s six-part series that will also feature presentations from Dr. Roy Golsteyn (biological sciences), Dr. Goldie Morgentaler (English), Dr. Janay Nugent (history), Dr. Kent Peacock (philosophy) and Dr. Stacey Wetmore (chemistry & biochemistry).

All events are free and open to the public and no RSVP is required. Seating is limited and guests are encouraged to arrive early.

Bibby asks the questions that are on everyone's mind

trevor.kenney — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 16:02:01 +0000

Everybody has those “I wonder” moments but it’s safe to say that nobody has done more with them than Dr. Reginald Bibby.

The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge Board of Governors Research Chair and professor in the Department of Sociology has made a name for himself by asking Canadians the questions everyone seems to have on their minds. It has made the Bibby name synonymous with popular culture and solidified him as one of the country’s most respected and accessible sociologists.

Reg Bibby's name is synonymous with popular culture and is one of the country’s most respected and accessible sociologists.

“In a nutshell, my career has come from having the luxury in sociology, and through surveys, to be able to take a lot of things I have been interested in all my life, whether it’s faith or sports, and explore it on company time,” says Bibby, only half-joking.

He presented to a packed Lethbridge City Hall on Thursday night as the latest PUBlic Professor Series speaker, discussing Beyond the Gods & Back: The Return of Religion in Canada. It’s a topic that is close to Bibby, having grown up in a household where faith was a staunch family value. It even led him down a path towards the Protestant ministry but after earning his BA from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Alberta, and a BD (Bachelor of Divinity) from Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Bibby turned to academia.

“What happened along the way is pretty simple; the Baptists introduced me to higher education,” he says. “Particularly down in Louisville, a number of my friends were going on to grad school, which was something I’d never given a thought to previously. I was intimidated by the thought of university when I started, but it became a matter of using sociology to really provide a new way of looking at something that had been familiar to me my entire life. I valued faith and was interested in it but had no idea, until I was exposed to sociology, that there was another way of looking at it.”

He completed his master’s studies at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Calgary and followed with a doctorate at Washington State ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ. All the while, he began to carve out a reputation as somewhat of a know-it-all, not necessarily because he was smarter than everybody else, but because he had the data.

“I came back to Canada and I was at York ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ in 1974 and nobody had really ever done a comprehensive national survey of religion in Canada,” he says. “Looking back it was a big long shot in terms of cost and everything else but I pulled it off.”

To make it happen, Bibby needed to find funding support from a variety of sources, so he expanded the scope of the survey. He asked about drug use, opinions on marijuana, capital punishment, interpersonal relationships, racial intermarriage and so on.

“I assumed it would be a one-shot deal and that would be it but then I got the idea five years later to repeat the survey? So we did it again in 1975 and 1980 and it just evolved into doing surveys every five years.”

The result has created a series of snapshots of the Canadian psyche over the last 40 years that are now being carried out in partnership with Angus Reid. It has spawned 14 books, numerous monographs and some 100 journal and magazine articles. More than 160,000 copies of his books have been sold. He’s also one of the most quoted sociologists in the country.

“From the time I found the research to be of interest and importance to people outside of the academic community, a major goal of mine has been to make it readily accessible,” says Bibby.

It also allows him to do what he calls, “the fun stuff”, which is to dabble academically in the world of sports.

A lifelong Canadian Football League fan (he grew up in Edmonton but somehow found himself supporting the underdog Saskatchewan Roughriders), Bibby regrets not pushing harder for sports content in the early iterations of his polls.

“In the early surveys we were really reluctant to get into some things, such as sports, in part because ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ would never have respected it,” he says, his latest polling showing that CFL interest in Canada is on the rise. “The consensus was you could ask about major social issues in Canada but if you asked people how closely they followed the CFL, it would be deemed as fluff. I finally got over that but really didn’t incorporate sports until about 1990. That’s one of my real regrets. I’d give anything to have had something in there in 1975 about how closely we follow the CFL or NHL.”

Ask Bibby to put a value on his work and he says it really depends on what you define as value.

“If I were looking at one thing that you can call a contribution to society, it’s that we really have some of the best descriptive data on what has been happening in Canadian life going back to the 1970s,” he says. “You want to talk about serious issues, say what’s happened with women in the workforce since the late 1960s? We have gender data from the last 40 years; we can tell you how women were feeling at any particular point in time. Descriptively there is just so much stuff there in terms of what Canadians value, their major sources of enjoyment, the concerns they’ve had. In terms of getting a read on Canadian life, it’s a gold mine.”

So, the next time you have that “I wonder” moment, give Bibby a call – he’ll likely have an answer. And if he doesn’t, chances are he will carry out a new poll to find out.

Thrill of the find keeps Bubel digging

trevor.kenney — Fri, 26 Feb 2016 18:56:42 +0000

Dr. Shawn Bubel (BSc ’96) will readily admit she had an ulterior motive when she enrolled as a chemistry major for her undergraduate studies at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge.

It wasn’t as though Bubel didn’t enjoy chemistry; she was in fact very good at it, along with biology and physics. Most importantly, it had the ringing endorsement of her family and high school advisors. But Bubel knew that by coming to a liberal arts university such as the U of L, she could major in chemistry but also dabble in what she truly loved, archaeology.

Dr. Shawn Bubel revels in the opportunity to give her students the experience of uncovering the past.

“I always wanted to be an archaeologist but everyone told me that it wasn’t a real career and that I’d never get a job,” she says. “So, I started out as a chemistry major. At the end of my first year, I went to an archaeological field school in Israel and when I came back, I knew. As much as I think chemistry is very interesting, I love archaeology. Even though there wasn’t an archaeology major at the time, I did an individualized multidisciplinary major in archaeology, geography and anthropology.”

So began an academic career that has taken Bubel around the world. On Thursday, she presented the latest PUBlic Professor Series lecture at Lethbridge City Hall, Prehistoric Bison Hunters in Southern Alberta: Excavations at Fincastle Site.

Originally from Coronation, and then Fort Saskatchewan, AB, Bubel specifically chose the U of L for its liberal education focus but also because it offered the small campus experience that better suited her. Little did she know that after graduating with a BSc that she’d eventually find her way back as a faculty member following her masters and PhD studies.

“The faculty members at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge are wonderful. They are exceptionally supportive. When I was working on my PhD in Belgium, they gave me the opportunity to come back and teach here as a sessional,” she says, conducting her first summer classes in 1997 and eventually taking U of L students to Belgium on her field project in 1999 and 2000.

When a faculty spot opened up in the Department of Geography, she was hired on a term contract and before long, she applied for a tenure-track position and has been in the fold ever since.

There’s no denying Bubel’s love of archaeology and her unquenchable desire for discovery.

“When I was little, I dug up my entire backyard,” she says. “I just loved digging, anywhere, I didn’t care, just digging up the ground. I’d steal the spoons out of my mom’s cutlery drawer and I’d go outside and dig – all day long. Finally, I was cordoned off into one section of the yard and only allowed to dig there.”

Now, people call her to dig, as was the case at Fincastle. A noted kill site, the area was being looted by a local community member and the Government of Alberta was fearful that its treasures would be lost forever.

Bubel was brought in, and in 2003, her project began. Some 10 years later, more than 280,000 bone fragments were uncovered as well as one of the great oddities of her career – seven non-utilitarian upright bone features that would garner Bubel the second most viewed and shared story among Western Digs’ Top 5 Archaeology Discoveries in the American West of 2015.

She was excited to share some of that story with the PUBlic Professor crowd.

“It is really important to share our knowledge and information as broadly as we can and to include people in the community,” she says. “In archaeology, the more eyes and perspectives you have, the better the interpretation will be. I try to be as unbiased as possible, and to step away from my own preconceptions but you can’t do that completely. We are who we are. I always have First Nations students, community members and Elders on my Alberta projects because it is important to include their perspectives. We work together to try to figure out the story of the site. You can never do that completely, we don’t have a time machine, but you can certainly achieve a better interpretation of the past when more people study the information.”

She says there is great value in learning about the past.

“Archaeology reveals our stories; the things we’ve done, the challenges we’ve faced, the successes we’ve had,” she says. “If you do not understand where we’ve been, you cannot understand where we’re going. Choices are made based on who we are, and part of who we are is who we were. Archaeology offers insight into how we move forward.”

Bubel often thinks back to her first field experience and that initial opportunity as an undergraduate student to get her hands in the dirt. It helped shape her life and it is an experience she likes to pass along.

“I know how my first field experience changed my world, so I want to offer that to my students,” she says. “To be honest, there is nothing better than watching them find something for the first time. It is an incredible atmosphere and it takes me back to the thrill of uncovering something that was buried for hundreds of thousands of years. It reminds me how much I love my job. Seeing their worlds open up – not just because of the archaeology but also the cultural experiences – is very gratifying.”

While the thrill of her first great find might be in the past, the next great discovery is always out there, and if we know one thing about Bubel, she’ll keep digging.

Jansen's devotion to political world, student engagement indicative of department

trevor.kenney — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 18:41:46 +0000

Dr. Harold Jansen has never been shy to profess his love for the political world, nor his desire to see the general populace more informed about and engaged by the democratic process.

It shaped his academic career, both as a student and then as a professor in the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Department of Political Science. It is also why he carried great expectations for what the digital revolution of the late 1990s might do for the political process.

As the new Chair of the political science department, Harold Jansen sees great potential in the U of L being able to offer an experience like no other school.

“Democratic politics is so much about communication and here we were at the beginning of a communications revolution,” says Jansen, who on Thursday presented the latest PUBlic Professor Series lecture at Lethbridge City Hall. “We convey our demands through communications, governments communicate to us and we mobilize coalitions of support or opposition based on communication and persuasion. It all requires communication, so any changes to those technologies are profound.”

Jansen and his fellow political scientists were hopeful that with greater access to information and direct contact with politicians possible, digital technology would enrich the practice of democratic citizenship. As he discussed in his presentation, it is now 20 years later, digital technology is everywhere, and yet there are few signs of a democratic renaissance.

“I had this initial burst of optimism and I think fairly early on in the research I realized this wasn’t suddenly going to rejuvenate democracy,” he says.

Jansen has been a political junkie since he can remember, fondly recalling that, as a seven-year-old, he asked his dad what were the differences between Liberals and Conservatives.

“It’s actually an analytical question and one which I have devoted an entire class to answering,” he laughs. “My dad had me write a letter to the NDP leader to find out and he never wrote me back – in fact Stephen Lewis still owes me an answer to that.”

Always fascinated with the machinations of the political process, that question was the first of many for Jansen. Rather than looking to influence or change the political world, he sought to understand how and why some parties won elections and others did not.

“I was never interested in running for office, rather I’d always been interested in understanding how it worked and why things happened the way they did,” he says. “It was natural for me to go on to graduate school with those questions, and by the end of my undergraduate degree, I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to do a PhD.”

A predilection to teach was something he discovered at King’s ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ College as an undergraduate student.

“It was such a small school, just 130 students, that I was able to work as a lab assistant as a second-year student and was able to teach tutorials very early on,” says Jansen. “That was really formative for me and really helped me to clarify what I was good at, what I liked and gave me experiences only graduate students got elsewhere.”

He’d go on to earn a master’s at Carleton ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ and return to Edmonton and the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Alberta for his PhD studies. But it was that early experience at King’s College that would set him up well for his role at the U of L, which he has enjoyed for 17 years.

“I’m really passionate about involving my students in research. Our department is small and that makes it difficult for us to do a lot on the graduate level but it does open up opportunities at the undergrad level,” he says. “Because of our class sizes, I’m able to bring research methods into the classroom and work with students one-on-one. That would not be the case at other research focused institutions in the country.”

As the new Chair of the political science department, a position he assumed following the retirement of Dr. Peter McCormick last year, Jansen sees great potential in continuing to carve out that niche for the U of L.

“Let’s make our undergraduate program innovative and give students something they can’t get anywhere else,” he says.

Jansen deeply respects the legacy McCormick leaves behind and is enthused about working with his colleagues to further the reputation of his department and the U of L.

“Peter was a tremendous mentor for me. I’ve always said I learned to be a political scientist in graduate school but Peter taught me to be a professor,” he says. “I’ve got a tremendous department here. You take the six faculty members I have and if you were to randomly grab six faculty members from any other department in Canada we would be as good as, if not better. I have nothing but amazing things to say about the quality of research and the care for students my colleagues provide.”

And what about that optimism that digital technology and social media could be the great catalyst to a new wave of democratic participation?

“It’s funny, the more I research social media, the less I find I want to use it.”

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