Book Launch for: Shirin and Salt Man /  by Nilofar Shidmehr
ISBN 978-088982-246-7 • 160 pp • $17.95 • pb • April 2008 • Poetic Novella
Shirin and Salt Man is a novella in verse, which tells the story of a young modern day Iranian woman, Shirin. She is an ordinary girl from Kermanshah born before the Islamic Revolution, who imagines herself to be an incarnation of princess Shirin, depicted in the ancient Persian classic Shirin and Khosro. At first she tries to shape her life to that of the myth, but later decides to change her destiny and become the author of her own story. She leaves her husband and runs away with the Salt Man, a 1700 year old mummy on display at the Iranian National Museum in Tehran. The poems form a compelling narrative of the life of a contemporary Iranian woman whose voice has been muted by Khosro, her fundamentalist and traditional husband. In an environment where the dominance of men is written in stone and where only men have the authority for fashioning and telling stories, Shirin reclaims a place for herself as a lover and teller of stories. She re-enters life through cracks of narrative to invent Shirin anew, one whose life-path radically diverges from that of her namesake, Shirin of Nezami’s story. She digs out Farhad, the mythical lover of princess Shirin, who has now become the Salt Man, from under the dust and stones of history and she gives him another opportunity to love her. In transforming Salt Man to another Farhad, Shirin creates a new history—one shaped and narrated by a feminine voice.

Biography
Nilofar Shidmehr was born and raised in Iran, and has lived in Canada since 1997. She holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and is currently working on her PhD at the Center for Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education. Nilofar is the translator of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye (Vistar Publishers: Tehran, 1997, reprinted in 2007). Her work has been featured in both Iranian and Canadian literary magazines, including Descant, A Room of One's Own, West Coast Line, Galleon, and the Shahrvand, a widely-read Iranian newspaper published in Toronto and Vancouver.Nilofar believes the way to understand the dilemma which is Iran, is through reading and connecting to the intimate stories that reflect Iranians’ lives. She is hoping that, through her writing, she can share these insights with her readers.

June 3rd, 2008

Even in these postmodern times identity continues to be the site of intense work on the part of youth and scholars. This symposium explores new ways of looking at youth as phenomenon, thinking about youth activity and identity formation, examining linkages with cultural policies and/or other forms of civic pluralism, so as to better understand contemporary realities of young peoples lives and future directions of youth studies.

• Program of Events

This town hall served as an exploratory and planning meeting on multiculturalism and related discourses and brought together UBC faculty and graduate students from such research areas as multiculturalism, anti-racism, interculturalism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, cultural studies, social cohesion and identity/identification politics. The purpose of the town hall was to share research projects and interests, plan activities, identify potential collaborators in multiculturalism and related discourses.   In addition to the general discussion that took place, the town hall featured three guest presenters:  Professor Peter Seixas, Canadian Research Chair and Director of the Centre for Study of Historical Consciousness, who spoke on his current SSHRC project, “Benchmarks of Historical Literacy.”  Karen Rolston and Jack Lee from the Centre for Intercultural Language Studies, who  discussed  “town/gown” work, and Yvonne Brown, who presented on “African and Diaspora Literature for Children Project.

This presentation addressed the increasing visibility of animals in contemporary image culture.  Berland argued that it is ironic and poignant that such images are so closely aligned with the signs and practices of technoculture.  Her presentation examined some of these images and commented on them as pedagogical events conveying paradoxical messages about the relationship between human beings and nature.  Specifically, Berland focused on the relationship between young people and cell phones, a subject of interest to corporate planners, educators, and parents alike, with a growing body of research emerging to address it.  In order to do so, she took as her starting point the current advertising campaign using pictures of animals to market cell phones and other mobile digital communication devices. Her strategy was to resituate the relationship as a form of triangulation: human, animal, phone. Why do young people connect to animals via phones, or to their cell phones via pictures of animals? What are the implications of this ménage a trois?  She offered a “reading” of this campaign and then proceeded to critique the limits of such analysis. Her central argument was that teaching and learning in cultural studies needs to elaborate and complicate its perimeters to accommodate the challenges of both cell phone culture and environmental crisis.

This presentation addressed the increasing visibility of animals in contemporary image culture.  Berland argued that it is ironic and poignant that such images are so closely aligned with the signs and practices of technoculture.  Her presentation examined some of these images and commented on them as pedagogical events conveying paradoxical messages about the relationship between human beings and nature.  Specifically, Berland focused on the relationship between young people and cell phones, a subject of interest to corporate planners, educators, and parents alike, with a growing body of research emerging to address it.  In order to do so, she took as her starting point the current advertising campaign using pictures of animals to market cell phones and other mobile digital communication devices. Her strategy was to resituate the relationship as a form of triangulation: human, animal, phone. Why do young people connect to animals via phones, or to their cell phones via pictures of animals? What are the implications of this ménage a trois?  She offered a “reading” of this campaign and then proceeded to critique the limits of such analysis. Her central argument was that teaching and learning in cultural studies needs to elaborate and complicate its perimeters to accommodate the challenges of both cell phone culture and environmental crisis.

How can the media play a constructive role in promoting the creation of a multicultural nation? This talk drew on Ang's extensive publications on cultural studies, audience reception and multiculturalism, as well as her practical experience as a researcher working with Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) to develop a pedagogy based on an understanding of multiculturalism that extends beyond identity politics and political correctness. In Australia and elsewhere, SBS broadcasting practice suggests that relations among nations, media, and multiculturalism have to be engaged as sites of contestation at the levels of the social, the educational, and the cultural.

In this keynote address paper, Dr. Wright explores the phenomenon of cross-cultural and interface marriage in Canada and the United States. In particular, Dr. Wright challenges the assumption that cross-cultural and interfaith marriage is a new phenomenon. Instead, Dr. Wright argues that there is a long history of mixed relationships and biracial offspring in Canadian and BC history. But Dr. Wright does agree that today there are several differences in the current phenomenon: people of different backgrounds meet more easily now due to increased diversity in neighborhoods and workplaces, mixed raced couples are more accepted both by their families and by society, and "mixed raced" is more frequently and easily claimed as an identity.

This paper focused on how changes in access to technology have facilitated new conditions for young people to shoot, cut and mix multimodal texts, and the emergence of the Internet as ’home theater’ for a global audience has enabled youth to communicate across borders and across the street. Using a cultural studies approach to youth and media, Dr. Hoechsmann argues that differing conceptions of audience -  incorporated into the act of media creation - produce different outcomes, that there are strong residual communicational and cultural elements in contemporary “participatory” media production, and that as young people are drawn into new forms of media practice, they draw substantially on a pre-existing repertoire of cultural meanings. Dr. Hoechsmann contexutalized these claims in relation to his research on Web 2.0 applications, community youth media organizations, school-based media education and youth participation in the traditional new media. Go to media to view his presentation.

This paper focused on how Australian multiculturalism and associated political discourses and policies have undergone substantial changes in emphasis and direction in the last decade compared to the previous decades under the liberal-nation federal government.  In particular, the paper outlined the nature of these changes and their implications for ethnic minorities and multicultural education as well as for co-existence in a harmonious society.  The paper also addressed the shift in emphasis on multiculturalism as compared to Australianness (citizenship).

This presentation explored Asian-Australian perspectives on Indigenous Reconciliation in Australia, providing both an overview  of the colonialist legacy of White Australia that continues to sustain a problematic relationship between Indigenous- and Asian-Australians, and a discussion on how Indigenous Australians have sought to publicly reclaim their humanity and sense of dignity .  Specifically, the presentation did this through an analytical interpretation of interviews with informed and active Australian citizens who identify themselves as signifying the complex and differentiated admixture of Asian-Australians.

The Unruly Salon series shows the power of persons with disabilities to represent their own experiences as a valued part of humanity, humans, being together across borders of many kinds. The Unruly Salon consists of performances by scholars and/or artists with disabilities as knowledgeable, capable, and self-empowered actors, speaking back, staring back, performing out loud, joyfully and in community with all other peoples. This series combines artists and scholars from a range of performance arts, media and interdisciplinary endeavors to create a dialog at UBC not just ‘about us’ but with us. There are seven scheduled Salons this semester. Each Salon will culminate in an informal reception offering presenters, artists and audience an opportunity to discuss ideas raised in presentations. The intent is to facilitate interactive and innovative dialogs and methodologies, leading to further international collaborations for disability arts, culture and scholarly programme development at the graduate and undergraduate levels at UBC.

The Unruly Salon series shows the power of persons with disabilities to represent their own experiences as a valued part of humanity, humans, being together across borders of many kinds. The Unruly Salon consists of performances by scholars and/or artists with disabilities as knowledgeable, capable, and self-empowered actors, speaking back, staring back, performing out loud, joyfully and in community with all other peoples. This series combines artists and scholars from a range of performance arts, media and interdisciplinary endeavors to create a dialog at UBC not just ‘about us’ but with us. There are seven scheduled Salons this semester. Each Salon will culminate in an informal reception offering presenters, artists and audience an opportunity to discuss ideas raised in presentations. The intent is to facilitate interactive and innovative dialogs and methodologies, leading to further international collaborations for disability arts, culture and scholarly programme development at the graduate and undergraduate levels at UBC.

Abstract:  Gramsci once said that the soviet revolution was a revolution against Marx' Capital , because Marx's book had become the book of the Bourgeois scientists. The same thing may have occurred with the forms of social critique, which, forty years ago, denounced the mythologies of the commodity, the fallacies of consumer society, and the empire of the spectacle. They were supposed then to unmask the machineries of domination, so as to provide those who fought against them with new weapons. Apparently they have turned to exactly the contrary: a nihilist wisdom of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence of anything with anything, of anything with its image and of the lie of any image. I will try to analyze the mechanism of this reversal and to trace it back to the original tension between the logic of social and cultural critique and the logic of emancipation.

Bio: Jacques Rancière is Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Paris VIII where he taught from 1969 to 2000.  He continues to teach, as a visiting professor, in a number of Universities, including Rutgers, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. His work has been translated into 14  languages, and has been subject to numerous special issues, symposia and critical commentaries. His latest titles to appear in English translation are Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy (1998), Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003), The Philosopher and his Poor (2004), The Flesh of Words (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics (2005), Film Fables (2006), and The Hatred of Democracy (2007).

Abstract:  While post-modern theories of globalization declare the end of the local (e.g., Appadurai), Professor Peña's talk will present an alternative theory of transnational place-making and re-inhabitation. Place and place-making, he will argue, have decidedly more significance today as localized communities resist all aspects of the neoliberal enclosure of the "commons."  Dr. Peña will discuss his collaborative research with the South Central Farmers Feeding Families, a grassroots organization that established the largest urban farm in the United States and is now involved in a regional campaign for food democracy.

Bio: Devon Peña is Professor of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, and an activist in the environmental justice movement. His book, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border won the "1998 Outstanding Academic Book" award of Choice Magazine and the American Library Association. The book is a study of women workers and their struggles against capitalism and environmental destruction in the maquiladora industry of Juarez, Mexico. His most recent book is Mexican Americans and the Environment (2005, University of Arizona Press). Peña is adjunct professor with Women's Studies, the Center for Water and Watershed Studies, Latin American studies, Program on the Environment, and the
Institute for Public Health Genetics.

My earlier work analyzed "the antinomies of posthuman thought," in the attempt to define a more productive relation between informational systems and material embodiment. This talk builds on that analysis in order to define a set of specific problems in theorizing the status of racial formations within technoculture contexts. What happens to race when the normative is no longer identical with the natural, as occurs under conditions of technosociality? When technological denaturalization becomes a social norm, what different consequences are there for race, gender, and sexuality? This talk addresses these questions through David Tomas' concept of "technicity" and its relation to ethnicity. I ask what difference it would make to Tomas' theory of technicity if it were grounded in an African-American text like Samuel R. Delany's 1984 science fiction novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, rather than William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Delany's work offers an alternative to a dominant narrative of technicity and technosociality as inversions of the relation between nature and culture and as involving the replacement of ethnicity by technicity, rather than a more radical displacement of the oppositions structuring these terms. Thomas Foster is a Professor of English at the University of Washington, and the former director of the Cultural Studies Program and an adjunct faculty member in Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He is the author of The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. This talk forms part of his current book project, which is focused on the expropriation of cyberpunk convention by writers and artists of color and is tentatively entitled Ethnicity and Technicity: Race, Nature, and Culture in the Cyberpunk Archive.(http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/F/foster_souls.html)

The Unruly Salon series shows the power of persons with disabilities to represent their own experiences as a valued part of humanity, humans, being together across borders of many kinds. The Unruly Salon consists of performances by scholars and/or artists with disabilities as knowledgeable, capable, and self-empowered actors, speaking back, staring back, performing out loud, joyfully and in community with all other peoples. This series combines artists and scholars from a range of performance arts, media and interdisciplinary endeavors to create a dialog at UBC not just ‘about us’ but with us. There are seven scheduled Salons this semester. Each Salon will culminate in an informal reception offering presenters, artists and audience an opportunity to discuss ideas raised in presentations. The intent is to facilitate interactive and innovative dialogs and methodologies, leading to further international collaborations for disability arts, culture and scholarly programme development at the graduate and undergraduate levels at UBC.

This conference, on the theme "Literature For Our Times", addressed the role and function of literature in the twenty-first century through keynote speeches, paper presentations, panel discussions and literary readings. The program commenced with a reading and commentary by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott on the evening of August 17, 2007. There were keynote speeches on the mornings of August 18 -22nd, followed by concurrent sessions and panel discussions till the evening of August 22, 2007. Highlights of the conference included a keynote address by CCIE Advisory Board member, Professor Henry Giroux, and a reading by and a question/answer session with acclaimed Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Professor Thiong'o also gave a keynote address, in which he explored the importance of translation in fostering new kinds of literary communities among marginalized voices. His keynote was followed by a response paper, given by CCIE Director, Professor Handel Kashope Wright. Both Professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o's keynote and Professor Handel Wright's response paper are forthcoming.

n this talk, Paul Wangoola discusses the field recordings of Shawn Hall. The two choirs associated with Mpambo and which were recorded by Shawn Hall during a visit in 2004 and samples will also be played. Paulo Wangoola, Nabyama (Founder-President) of the Mpambo Afrikan Multiversity, a recently established and village-based institution of research and higher education dedicated to the revitalization of African Indigenous Thought and Spirituality. The Mpambo campus is located in Isegero, Iganga in Busoga, Eastern Uganda. As part of the work of Mpambo, there is both an Mpambo traditional music and dance group and the Ebanguliro Afrikan Spiritual Choir. A national office is located in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.

This symposium brought together African delegates working on the front lines of the HIV/AIDS  pandemic.  The purpose of the symposium was to enable delegates to connect with UBC students and faculty around specific projects and initiatives.  The symposium also provided an opportunity for participants to discuss potential partnerships and future funding initiatives, as well as explore how models for social change in their own communities could be applied elsewhere.  The symposium included four panelists, as well as remarks by Her Excellency Ms. Motseoa Senyane, the High Commissioner of Lesotho to Canada.  The four panelists were: Meisie Maaroganye (Community Leader, Evaton West Community Development Forum in South Africa), Lerato Legoabe (Project Coordinator, Girls’ Net), Agnes Pareyio (UN Person of the Year in Kenya, 2005), and Sipho Mamba (formerly from Swaziland’s diplomatic services, AIDS orphans care). The symposium also featured remarks by the Lesotho High Commissioner to Canada, Ms. Motseoa Senyane, who spoke of the pressing need for a clearer and much more unbiased image of Africa. A video-stream of High Commissioner Senyane's comments can be found at the following YouTube feed: Clear words from a Lion