Humanities and Social Sciences
Seasonal Sociology announced as a 2021 PROSE Awards finalist
Social, Cultural & Media Studies (SCMS) Professor Emeritus Dr. Elizabeth Dennis recently co-authored a book chapter in Seasonal Sociology with colleague, Alison Thomas, from Douglas College. On January 21, Seasonal Sociology was announced as a 2021 PROSE Awards finalist in the Social Science Textbook category.
Taylor Breckles, an English Honours student at UFV, had a book chapter published in Explorations in Humor Studies: Humor Research Project on January 1, 2020 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
“The book is a general collection of essays that deal with various elements of humour in language,” said Breckles.
Helping high school students navigate racial identity
Anecia Gill, Socio
logy BA 2017
By creating an anti-racism mentorship workshop that she intends to deliver at Abbotsford high schools this fall, Anecia Gill was able to combine her passions for social theory and her hometown.
Gill’s family has lived in Abbotsford for over 100 years and she feels a strong connection to this place. She is also drawn to sociology thanks to her mother, who took a degree in the same field and had all of her old textbooks on the family bookshelf. Gill completed her own Bachelor of Arts in Sociology at UFV this spring and in her final year she created the workshop in a directed study with Dr. Katherine Watson.
Inspired by critical race theory (DuBois, Fanon), which outlines the complexities of non-white racial identity, she wanted to help young people in Abbotsford navigate this complicated terrain.
“The root of this is the racism they face,” she says. “I’m hoping that I can help explain . . . and legitimize their experiences so that they can better understand themselves and how they fit within society.” Gill notes that when people have theoretical knowledge and vocabulary, they can better articulate their experiences and advocate for themselves within their communities.
Schools, she says, have had a long history acting as gatekeepers for legitimate knowledge, so offering an after-school workshop that attempts to critique power structures seemed like the ideal place. Her intention is for the program to help decolonize and validate non-white identity by legitimizing and supporting the lived realities of non-white students, in particular, Indo-Canadian youth, whom the program targets.
She admits that she can’t teach high school students the ins and outs of critical race theory in five days, but she wants to spark their interest. And in doing so, she hopes to give youth some helpful tools to understand and negotiate their racial identity.
For a taste of what students will learn, check out Gill’s course outline:
Day one: Cultural hegemony and power knowledge – Gramsci and Foucault
Day two: Critical Race Theory – Du Bois and Fanon
Day three: Brown experiences of racism – Said
Day four: Intersectionality of race and gender: a critique of imperialist feminism
Day five: Wrap-up discussion
Dr. Rocksborough-Smith, a sessional faculty member in UFV’s History department, holds his newly published book Black Public History in Chicago at the University of Illinois Press book exhibit on April 12, 2018.
What did you do?
“This is my first book. It represents nearly ten years of archival and oral history research from my PhD studies through my early years as a history instructor at UFV (2013-present). It focuses on how black Americans, many of them school teachers in Chicago, used public history projects to engage with struggles for civil rights and citizenship over the middle decades of the 20th Century. These projects included things like curriculum reforms for public schools, local history organizations and societies, and efforts to build museums and institutions, like the DuSable Museum of African American History – which is alive and well today. For my research, I was very fortunate to interview the now deceased founder of the DuSable Museum, Dr. Margaret T.G. Burroughs, who is considered an artistic and cultural icon of 20th Century Chicago and especially its African American community. I am thankful for all the support I received from UFV History Department colleagues and associates over the years as well as colleagues at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, where I have also taught.”
What’s next?
“My primary research interests include the study of late 19th and 20th Century United States history, urban studies, and histories of race, religion, and empire in the Atlantic world. In particular, my future work will continue to look at how local and public history methods can help to uncover these aspects of the past, particularly in cities like Chicago which became almost “laboratories” for how the “modern” North American city evolved. Currently, I am working on a new project about how white Catholic liberals engaged in anti-racism in the 1950s in northern U.S. cities like Chicago. Indeed, many North American cities became the site of successive immigration of Catholic Europeans over the early decades of the 20th Century and I am fascinated with how these groups on the one hand experienced discrimination themselves but came to in turn discriminate against black Americans and other people of color who moved to the city.”
“I am excited to be returning to teach as a LTA history instructor with UFV. In the courses I have been privileged to teach here, I have learned a lot from my students who are deeply engaged in local issues in the Fraser Valley community as well as global issues of significance, such as the forces that have given rise historically to developments like Brexit or the current presidency of Donald Trump. I’m particularly excited to be teaching a new course on Populism in America (History 396Q), which looks at the ways populism has informed American political culture from the administration of Andrew Jackson through the present.”
Dr. Rocksborough-Smith sits on a panel at the Organization of American Historians in Sacramento.
What Did She Do?
The College of Arts’ Dr. Lenore Newman, a Canada Research Chair in Food Security and the Environment and faculty member in the Department of Geography and the Environment, embarked on a speaking tour of Australia (February 2018) to discuss the subject of farmland’s role in food security.
While in Australia, Dr. Newman spoke at a variety of events and toured several innovative farms and not-for-profit organizations, which included:
She also made guest appearances on several radio and podcast interviews:
What’s Next?
Dr. Newman made a number of connections on the Australian tour, which could result in the following future collaborations: sharing data, co-writing a paper, developing a case study in Melbourne with a role for students, and working with the City of Greater Bendigo.
