In celebration of Edmonton’s designation as the Cultural Capital of Canada for 2007, the city has been holding a number of special events, including a speakers series inviting experts from a wide variety of areas to offer their opinions on municipal life, arts, and culture. Roberta Brandes Gratz, an urban critic, journalist, and consultant based [...]
On Wednesday, May and I attended a lecture by Maher Arar at the Winspear Centre sponsored by the University of Alberta Political Science Department. I know it’s a formality at such events to have people of high academic ranking precede the main speaker to, in a sense, soften up the topical ground with grand introductions [...]
At a recent HIV/AIDS session I attended, each participant was asked who their inspiration was that brought them there that day. I can’t remember what my ultimate response was, but had I answered honestly, I would have said Stephen Lewis. At the time though, his name seemed much too cliché and pedestrian for that particular [...]
Sometimes an event is witnessed that shouldn’t be reduced to text because it deserves the sensory justice of an in-the-moment experience. This was one of those nights. My APT English professor first exposed me to the work of Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. It was my first brush with graphic novels, and [...]
I ventured out late this afternoon for another International Week session titled, “Gender, Education and the HIV/AID Pandemic in Rural Malawi.” Presenting were Dr. Anne Fanning, a retired physician, and Rachel Maser, who just recently returned from a ten-month volunteer stint in Malawi with Engineers Without Borders. Dr. Fanning began the session with a whirlwind [...]
After months of self-flogging as punishment for missing Stephen Lewis’s keynote address in 2006, I made sure to take time out of my regularly scheduled workday this afternoon to attend Ronald Wright’s opening lecture for the University of Alberta’s annual International Week. Wright’s address was excerpted from his award winning Massey Lecture, A Short History [...]
