RibRaft was exhibited at Le Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec (Montreal) housed in a former 19th century Gothic Church.
Graduation is just one chapter in several charting Laura Endacott’s relationship to Concordia.
Back in the 80s, Endacott took an aptitude test and the results were incontrovertible. “They told me the only thing I could do was go into the arts,” she said. It was not the obvious choice for someone with a working class background, but Endacott followed the advice.
She was one of 10 students accepted into Concordia’s Inter-related Arts program, a precursor to today’s interdisciplinary studies. “It was a way to work in all disciplines, without being limited by the boundaries of each individual discipline,” she said, adding that this was not a sanctioned choice at the time, when pursuing a specific field of study was expected. But her great success in the program, and high marks, suggested that the aptitude test was on the mark.
Endacott continued her education formally and informally. “I did my own art history course visiting galleries and museums throughout Europe.” She did a Graduate Diploma in Communications in the early 90s. And she started a family.
Her eclectic background gave her strong knowledge of fibres, and computers, a combination that had Concordia calling her to teach in the mid-90s.
As a teacher, she got her students involved directly in the community, perhaps most remarkably in a partnership with the Old Brewery Mission that had students working with the residents to design and produce Dream Screens to provide both privacy and a personal touch to their beds.
By then, she was a student in the Special Individual Program. She has again earned high marks in a program that borrows and builds on a combination of disciplines. She was one of six admitted the year she applied.
I like in-between spaces, and not always doing the same things,” said Endacott. “I need to produce with my hands and my mind.”
Source: Concordia Journal
A community member makes a contribution during a community media event in Nebbi town, Northern Uganda (Photo credit: William Tayeebwa)
While working as a journalist at the Daily Monitor, Uganda’s independent daily newspaper, I covered the armed conflicts in the African Great Lakes region and experienced first hand the profound and devastating impact of war. During my travels to the DR Congo as well as Northern Uganda, I realised that during war, not only humans suffered, but the countries’ fauna and flora were not spared either. I also witnessed how war provided an avenue for local, regional and international predators to exploit national resources thus creating even more reasons for disgruntled groups to take up arms; thus creating a vicious cycle of violence.
During graduate school in 2001-2003 at the University of Oslo, Norway, I offered a course (JOURN 104:War and Peace Journalism) that made me ponder deeply the role mass media play in triggering conflicts through spreading misinformation and fomenting inter-group hatred. In Norway, I was also introduced to the peace-journalism model promoted by TRANSCEND Peace University of Professor Johan Galtung. What I learnt then is reinforced by a doctoral course at Concordia University code-named “Coms 878: Communication, Conflict and Peace”.
The case studies for my doctoral project respond to how the mass media, particularly radio, can be harnessed to deliberately privilege the voices of peacemakers outside of the conventional mold that often fronts political and official elite sources against each other.
In historical counterpoint to the role Rwanda’s Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) played in the escalation of the 1994 genocide, this doctoral research project seeks to investigate the role amnesty radio programming has played in the management of an armed conflict between the Ugandan government forces and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) that has been going on since 1987 claiming thousands of human lives and displacing up to 1.6 million into squalid displacement camps.
Radio Wa 89.8 FM, “Our Radio” in the local Luo language, based in conflict-prone Lira District, has since 2002 been running the “karibu” (Swahili word for welcome) weekly talk-show calling upon LRA rebels to disarm and return home under the 2000 government amnesty.
In December 2003, another radio station, 102 Mega FM, based in neighboring Gulu District, also started a weekly program called “Dwog Paco”, meaning in the Luo language ‘Come Back Home’. Each talk-show has also led to the emergence of listening clubs, where ardent fans congregate regularly to collectively listen and discuss the issues raised on the talk-shows.
Given the significance of radio in Africa, the project will interrogate the journalistic practices and values valorized by the two programs that could be replicated by the mass media in conflict-prone Africa. Further, on a continent like Africa with still strong oral cultures, what can such interfaces between radio and public avenues, such as the listening clubs and/or roundtable discussions (ebimeeza in the Luganda language), offer and how does that translate into real communal action towards peace-building? Ultimately, how do other dialogic modes of communication, in this case the listening clubs and/or roundtable discussions feed back into broader conventional discursive media formats such as the radio talk shows?
Given the significance of social-networking and knowledge-sharing technologies, the discourses of the research process will be, as ethically permitted, digitally captured and catalogued in multimedia formats (text, photographs, audio, and video) in the region’s official languages (English, French and Swahili) to later constitute an interactive, free but secured open information resource hosted by selected regional universities for the benefit of local and international journalists, students, researchers, and social activists working on issues of human rights and social justice particularly in African Great Lakes region.
Looking for “points of interest” in the Owens River Valley, Southern California. Personal archive, May 2007
As I pedaled my way across Canada some years ago, I was drawn to peculiar features along my way, from lonely boulders to industrial dams and moose monuments. By arresting my gaze on seemingly insignificant, banal or downright unpleasant facets of the landscape, where natural processes stratified alongside human traces in a most intricate palimpsest of dirt, rain, wind, words, desires and displacements, I gradually developed a sensibility akin to that of a small American research center, whose realm of study centers on land-use patterns.
“Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived”, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is a non-profit research organization that “aims to improve the collective understanding of the human/land dialectic.”[1] In what director Matt Coolidge calls “anthropogeomorphology,” the landscape is studied for the tangible clues it provides on human nature, by deciphering the contradictory traces that are being left in the physical environment.
Using the comfortable and familiar formula of the bus tour to carry their public to remote and intriguing places, CLUI mimics the very institutional frames it tends to study in the landscape, namely interpretive panels, photo spots, tourist information centers, leisure infrastructures and scientific societies. Whether embarking on one of the Center’s bus expeditions, navigating their Land Use Database or simply browsing through one of their “guidebooks,” the public is repeatedly brought to stumble on land use anomalies and/or banalities that they had grown accustomed to or came to neglect.
In this respect, CLUI’s environmental consciousness is akin to social ecology, delving into society’s manifold character in response to the ecological crisis, rather than stepping away from it in favour of a dichotomized view of nature versus culture. Indeed, the Center rather emphasizes the predominant role of human intervention in the configuration of what is usually considered ‘untamed nature.’ Undermining collective fantasies of pristine nature, CLUI insightfully shows that no matter how natural an environment may look, no place is entirely fortuitous in its unfolding.
If CLUI sometimes ventures out far, it leaves with the purpose of charting the pervasive influence of our value systems, discernable on the land from elusive traces to massively gouged marks. By doing so, CLUI reminds us that the decision to preserve nature or to exploit it is a humanized decision in any case—a bias we can hardly avoid and should learn to recognize.
[1] See their mission statement at www.clui.org.
James Gavin and Madeleine Mcbrearty are launching a program to provide accreditation to those who want to become life coaches.
Life coaching gets academic credibility
A professional development program directed toward certification as a personal and professional coach is being launched at Concordia. Applied Human Sciences Professor James Gavin says that for a number of reasons, it’s about time.
Life coaching is only about 15 years old, but it’s one of the fastest-growing industries in North America and Europe. By way of illustration, Gavin and his colleague Madeleine Mcbrearty googled "personal coaching" several times during coaching workshops in 2006, and found that the phrase went from 46 million to 55 million hits over a six-month period.
It is still relatively unregulated — anybody can hang out his or her shingle as a personal coach — so coaching is still somewhat suspect as a profession. But big businesses such as Bombardier have had coaches on staff for years. Now universities are catching on to the fact that it deserves serious academic attention.
"It’s only in the past five years that universities have expressed keen interest in the field," Gavin said. "There are about 250 schools teaching coaching in North America, and about 95 per cent of them are private; a lot are dot-com [online]. Now universities are seeing it as way to attract new students, and some are pursuing it as a serious academic area. The University of Sydney, for instance, has a doctoral program in coaching psychology."
From about 1992 to 2002, Gavin said, coaching carried the taint of New Age, The Secret and flamboyant management guru Anthony Robbins. Now there’s research, scholarly writing, and a sound academic understructure. Gavin and Mcbrearty plan to attend the first international academic conference on the subject in Dublin in 2008.
Whatever its current name, life coaching has a long history. It has roots as varied as sport psychology, management development and the broad field of psychotherapy.
Gavin earned his doctorate in psychology at New York University, and has some 40 years of experience as a clinician and organizational consultant. His clinical and academic focus has always been on helping people achieve greater personal effectiveness rather than on mental illness, and this focus is strongly represented in his perspectives on the training of coaches.
Madeleine Mcbrearty, who will teach the program with Gavin, holds two MAs from Concordia and is close to completing her doctoral studies in the SIP (special individualized program) with an emphasis on health-related change processes.
"Psychologists are likely to be critical of coaching, yet so much of the foundation of coaching is solidly based in psychological research,” Gavin said. “Of course, there are lots of questionable practices in coaching, but the field is doing a fabulous job of establishing standards for training and practice. We have to go beneath surface impressions of coaching to get to the current truth about the field’s validity.”
Gavin wrote a book on coaching in 2005 as part of his work to understand the field. He and Mcbrearty have also enrolled in coaching courses to identify practices that could be incorporated in the new program.
The Personal and Professional Coach Certification (PPCC) program costs each student $2,900 for two terms. It promises to provide a strong grounding in the basics, particularly personal and executive or managerial coaching, plus a practicum.
The program is being offered through Concordia’s Centre for Human Relations and Community Studies (CHRCS), which has for 45 years offered training, consulting, research and publishing services to groups and individuals on a self-financing basis. The Centre is based in the Department of Applied Human Sciences, where full-time faculty members and graduates of the department guide its programs.
An initial cohort comprising 18 MA graduates of the department and some faculty will complete the pilot program in December. The first public cohort began in late October. Applicants are expected to have an undergraduate degree and at least five years of related full-time work experience, such as in human resources or management. Some of the current students are already experienced coaches.
For more information on the PPCC program, please call ext. 2273 or contact the CHRCS at centreh@alcor.concordia.ca.
Source: Concordia Journal, November 8, 2007.
As an undergraduate geography student in Ireland, Monica Mulrennan (Geography, Planning and Environment) was taught that despite their ongoing interaction with water and wind, coastal areas were fairly static, only changing over long periods of time.
“There was a sense of dynamic equilibrium. Even after hugely destructive storms or massive tsunamis, coast lines were resilient and absorbed the impact of these events.”
In fact, coastal geographers now agree that these fragile areas can be irrevocably changed in extremely short periods of time. The tsunami that struck southern Asia in 2004, and Hurricane Katrina, which hit the southern United States in 2005, left dramatic changes not only on coast lines, but also on local economies and communities.
Mulrennan’s research shows that even longer-term events have impacts that are observable in one person’s lifetime. “Cree elders can point to pieces of coastline attached to the mainland that were offshore islands when they were children.”
Mulrennan’s work with the Cree is part of a SSHRC Community-University Research Alliances (CURA) grant (headed by Colin Scott at McGill) with the James Bay community of Wemindji.
Located at the mouth of the Maquatua River on the east coast of James Bay, the community used to be 40 km further south at Paakumshumwaau (Vieux Comptoir). In 1958, the community decided to relocate to Wemindji because the embayment at the old site was becoming too shallow to navigate.
“Coastal areas in the north are rising due to a phenomenon known as isostatic rebound,” she explained. During ice ages, the sheer weight of the massive ice sheets actually push land masses down. When the ice melts, the land bounces back at a surprising rate, geologically speaking; around James Bay the land is rising about one metre per century.
When land rises, water and coastlines recede. For the Cree, whose lives are intimately connected with the waters of James Bay, the impacts are significant. One area where changes are clearly identifiable is in the migration paths of geese, a key local food source.
“Eel grass beds die back, marshes dry up and the area becomes less attractive to migrating flocks,” said Mulrennan.
These changes are nothing new for the Cree. “The archeologists on our CURA team have found evidence 80 kilometres inland of camps from thousands of years ago which were clearly coastal at the time,” she said, adding that the Cree ancestors employed a number of strategies to counteract what would have been a life-threatening loss of food at the time.
“Crees continue to modify and adapt to this changing landscape, through, for example, the construction of mud dykes and ponds to retain coastal wetlands.”
Their latest strategy for coping with threats to the coast involves the CURA team in the establishment of a culturally appropriate protected area at Paakumshumwaau and adjacent watersheds.
“Beyond its unique and diverse ecology, the area is of major importance to the Cree hunting and fishing way of life, and the social exchange, oral tradition and customs that inform that way of life,” said Mulrennan. “We are working very closely with the Wemindji Cree to ensure it is protected.”
Relatively recent discoveries on Wemindji territory of kimberlite deposits, indicative of a significant presence of diamonds, have galvanized local commitment for the protected area. “The community has agreed to mining in some parts of its territory,” said Mulrennan, “in the hope that diamond mining can provide much- needed jobs and opportunities for this rapidly growing community.”
They’ve made it clear, however, that they want the protected area off-limits to mining. The Cree know all too well the short-term gains and long-term damage that tends to characterize such developments. The recent designation of the area as a biodiversity reserve represents a first step in securing protected area status and the possibility of moratoriums on certain development activities.
As such there is confidence that, like the diamonds to be extracted from other parts of Wemindji Cree territory, Paakumshumwaau may also “last forever”.
Source: Concordia Journal, October 25, 2007.
Robert James Panetta, PhD student and Louise Hénault-Ethier, MSc student sampling sediment from the bed of the St. Lawrence.
The St. Lawrence is arguably this country’s most economically important river, but it is much more than a waterway for international cargo boats.
Efforts to protect it have considerably improved its health in recent years, but the challenges are increasing. Climate change is inducing alterations of the global ocean that have resulted in warmer, oxygen-poor waters entering the St. Lawrence Estuary.
Some threats, such as dredging to facilitate commercial navigation and deterioration of the shoreline, are highly visible. But subtle chemical changes that cannot be perceived with the naked eye are buried deep below the surface.
Changes in land use as well as deforestation and intensive agriculture can lead to an input of fresh nutrients from runoff. Phytoplankton, consisting of microscopic algae, rapidly take advantage of this novel food source and bloom in the surface waters. When these micro-organisms die, they sink to the bottom of the water body.
When decomposer microbes break down this organic matter, they release carbon dioxide and consume oxygen. If the nutrient input is high enough, and the phytoplankton bloom reaches a great magnitude, oxygen consumption can reach a rate that can deplete the lower layers of a body of water. When oxygen levels become insufficient to support most animal life, the water is defined as hypoxic.
Over 200 hypoxic coastal zones have been identified around the world, notably the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay, which are now considered “dead zones.”
Several years ago, researchers discovered that the bottom water of the St. Lawrence Estuary between the Saguenay Fjord and Pointe des Monts was also hypoxic.
The Hypoxia Research Group, a multidisciplinary collaboration between scientists from Concordia, McGill, Université Laval, UQÀR, and the Institut Maurice-Lamontagne of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, is investigating this recent development to understand its origins and how it will affect the ecosystem as a whole.
With our growing awareness of global warming and fresh water protection, we need these specialized chemists to understand how nutrients cycle in ecosystems in order to better predict the future effects of climate change. Governments need sound scientific recommendations on the natural carbon cycles to plan for the recovery of the St. Lawrence Estuary.
Organic geochemistry is a relatively young field that aims to understand how the biological, chemical and geological processes interact.
Yves Gélinas, from the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, is a leader in environmental organic geochemistry. He and his group study natural aquatic ecosystems from a chemical point of view. One of their projects is the study of the hypoxic zone of the St. Lawrence.
Unlike their colleagues in the department, who for the most part can grow or synthesize the samples they study, these environmental geochemists need fresh samples collected directly from the environment.
In May 2007, Gélinas, together with PhD student Robert James Panetta, Denis Brion and me, spent a week on board the R/V Coriolis II, a 50-metre Canadian Coast Guard vessel converted into a research boat to navigate the St. Lawrence between the Île d’Orléans and the Cabot Strait.
The team collected numerous water and sediment samples, which will be analyzed in great detail in coming years to uncover the mysteries of the carbon cycle in this ecosystem and how it pertains to the oxygen diminution.
The group patiently filtered hundreds of litres of water sampled at different depths and geographic locations in the river to collect particles and dissolved molecules. They also tediously sliced, packed and labelled hundreds of vials of mud carefully collected from different depths of the riverbed. With their collaborators, they wish to provide the first 3D analysis of organic matter fluxes and sinks in the St. Lawrence.
These people passionately seek to understand their world better in order to protect it. The St. Lawrence is a jewel that deserves their expert attention.
Louise Hénault-Ethier has just completed her MSc through the Special Individualized Program. Her research was conducted partially under the supervision of Yves Gélinas. She is a founding member of the award-winning R4 Compost program.
Source: Concordia Journal, October 25, 2007.
Seeking Common Ground: Talk Radio for Peace- building in Northern Uganda
From the Ground Up: Indexical Landmarks and Other Points of Interest
Class Action
Mending the Coast Between People and Water
The Majestic St. Lawrence Under Threat
Page Title: Stories - Concordia University - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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Date Printed: Thu February 9, 2012
