UNews - Women Scholars' Speaker Series

Women scholars to explore issues related to death in four-part virtual series

trevor.kenney — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 15:42:36 +0000

The Women Scholars’ Speaker Series (WSSS) will tackle an especially prominent, albeit difficult, theme in 2021-2022, examining issues related to death throughout a four-part virtual series.

The series of online panels and presentations will engage participants with the latest research around pressing and multifaceted topics including discrimination, equity, death and labour.

The opening event is Tuesday, October 19, 2021, when a panel presents, Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Death, Dying & Grief, inviting researchers, artists and educators to discuss various topics including memorialization, the materiality of death, ecological approaches to death and dying, death in popular culture and performance.

“Bringing together a multitude of insights and perspectives on death, dying and grief feels all the more urgent in this time of COVID-19,” says Mia van Leeuwen (Faculty of Fine Arts, drama), WSSS co-Chair and one the presenters, along with Rebecca Many Grey Horses (Educator, MA in Jurisprudence in Indian Law) and Dr. Jennifer Otto (Department of Religious Studies).

In November, Dr. Tara Mehrabi of Karlstad ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, Sweden, will present Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab.

Two more talks follow in the new year, including a January presentation, Death in the Age of Rationality: Playing with Death in Popular Amusement, and a concluding talk in March, Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Death, Dying and Grief: Closing Panel.

The Women Scholars’ Speaker Series was initiated in 2002 and is dedicated to engaging the community with female scholars and their exceptional contributions to academic research.

For more about the Women Scholars’ Speaker Series, visit the web page.

Women Scholars’ Speaker Series Event Lineup 2021-2022

Tuesday October 19, 2021
7 to 8:30 p.m. (via Zoom)
https://uleth.zoom.us/j/92722112562

Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Death, Dying & Grief: Opening Panel
Rebecca Many Grey Horses
Dr. Jennifer Otto
Mia van Leeuwen

Tuesday, November 16, 2021
12:15 to 1:15 p.m. (via Zoom)
https://uleth.zoom.us/j/91338149041

Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab
Dr. Tara Mehrabi, Karlstad ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, Sweden

Tuesday, January 25, 2022
6 to 7:30 p.m. (via Zoom)
https://uleth.zoom.us/j/97307656022

Death in the Age of Rationality: Playing with Death in Popular Amusement
Joanna Ebenstein, Creative Director of Morbid Anatomy

Tuesday, March 29, 2022
6 to 7:30 p.m. (via Zoom)
https://uleth.zoom.us/s/95751335357

Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Death, Dying and Grief: Closing Panel
Barbara J. King
AGLENNCO, MFA

Women scholars in the spotlight as popular speaker series goes virtual

trevor.kenney — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 15:38:33 +0000

The Women Scholars’ Speaker Series (WSSS) will open its 19th season in the virtual space this week, continuing to give a voice to outstanding women researchers and the ground-breaking work they are doing in the research community.

Drs. Amandine Pras and Athena Elafros, along with PhD student Grace Brooks (McGill ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ) and undergraduate student Monica Lockett (U of L) are examining gendered experiences of discrimination and microaggression in the recording studio.

“We are very excited to present the Women Scholars’ Speaker Series: Virtual Edition. Through a series of online panels and presentations, we invite everyone to engage with the latest research around pressing and multifaceted topics including discrimination, equity, death and labour,” says Mia van Leeuwen, a professor in the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s Faculty of Fine Arts and a WSSS organizer. “We may be at home, but we can still stay connected through our shared interest in engaging with ideas.”

The first session of the new season is titled, Gendered experiences of discrimination and microaggression in the recording studio, and will be presented Wednesday, October 7 at 1 p.m. Drs. Amandine Pras and Athena Elafros, along with PhD student Grace Brooks (McGill ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ) and undergraduate student Monica Lockett (U of L), will discuss results from an international online survey of recording engineers, producers, and studio assistants' experiences of discrimination and microaggressions within the recording studio. They will explore their findings and how they highlight significant and systemic gender inequalities within the recording field.

The WSSS was launched in Fall 2002 by Dr. Shelly Wismath, dean of the School of Liberal
Education. Its focus is to highlight local, national and international cutting-edge scholarship by researchers who identify as women, and provide a venue for under-represented voices in academic research.

Dr. Julie Young, Tier II Canada Research Chair in Critical Border Studies and assistant professor in geography and environment is also organizing this year’s WSSS sessions. She says the series continues to have a dedicated following and by moving online could attract an even broader audience.

“Over the course of the last 19 years, the WSSS has been a great platform for researchers to present their work and stimulate conversations about some very important issues,” she says. “Not only is the series valuable for faculty members by giving them an opportunity to speak about their work, it allows the community to engage with that work and gain an understanding of the activities ongoing here at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ and throughout post-secondary.”

The second session of the WSSS, ‘The Letters’: EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) and Tracing Work in the Academe, is scheduled for November 5, 2020 at 7 p.m.

This seminar is organized by the Support Network for Academics of Colour Plus (SNAC+), funded and co-sponsored by the WSSS and the Alberta Human Rights Commission's Human Rights Education and Multiculturalism Fund.

To learn more, visit the Women Scholars’ Speaker Series web page.

Women Scholars’ Speakers Series simplifies research with only 1,000 Words

trevor.kenney — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 18:24:25 +0000

The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge Women Scholars’ Speakers Series takes the ten hundred word challenge in the upcoming panel discussion How We Came to Study The Things We Do.

Inspired by a panel held at the American Association for Physical Anthropology called Communicate Your Science Using English’s Ten Hundred Most Common Words, “the challenge aims to improve science communication in a jolly way,” says series co-chair Dr. Louise Barrett (psychology).

“The idea is that you explain what you do using only the most common words in the English language, forcing you to avoid jargon, and offering the possibility for some inspired renaming of things,” explains co-chair Dr. Josephine Mills (art). “Examples from the AAPA sessions include, ‘Dogs go places they are not from and eat weird animals in their homes: Reasons for fewer weird animals’, or my favourite, ‘The relationship between the soft pink things and the hard white things.”

During the panel discussion (Wednesday, Nov. 22, 7 to 9 p.m. at the Dr. Foster James Penny Building), five speakers from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge take the challenge: Christine Clark (new media), Dr. Liz Galway (English), Dr. Habiba Kadiri (math), Darlene St. Georges (education) and Dr. Amy Shaw (history).

Each speaker will create a maximum three sentence description of what they do in their research using only the ten hundred most common English words.

“You can’t imagine my relief that ‘art’ is in the ten hundred words,” laughs Mills. “But art gallery is not. So my example if I were on the panel would be something like, ‘I want to understand better how people, especially if the people who come to see the art come from many places, think and feel about art that was made now when they go to the places that show this art. The places that give the money to make these plans want us to say how we know that our plans work, but these places do not have very good ways to understand how we know when the places that show art have done a good job.’”

The panelists are then able to use their full vocabulary to provide a 10-minute talk about how they came to work in their field.

How We Came to Study the Things We Do is free to attend, with a cash bar available. For more information on the Women Scholars' Speaker Series, check out their list of events.

UNews - Women Scholars' Speaker Series

Women scholars to explore issues related to death in four-part virtual series

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