Rescheduled - Sabbatical Talks: Dr. Lynne Milgram and Dr. Charles Reeve

Thursday, January 23, 2020 - 3:00pm

Please join the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies for two sabbatical talks:

“Social Entrepreneurship, Specialty Coffee Production, and Transnational Trade in the Northern Philippines”
Dr. Lynne Milgram

3:00 P.M. - 4:00 P.M
While the fair-trade-certified coffee movement created advantageous terms for producers, its perceived inadequate concern for higher quality and its uneven producer-vendor relations have given rise to social entrepreneurial initiatives marketing more directly-traded, specialty coffee. The latter’s practice champions business transparency, high quality, and sustainability. As these enterprises expand, however, questions arise regarding the extent to which operations can scale up from their start-up premises and still maintain quality standards and a social justice mandate to engage socioeconomic infrastructure change for producers?
Engaging these issues, this paper analyzes new northern Philippine Arabica coffee enterprises that employ “fairly traded” practices. I argue that while social entrepreneurs have established more equitable terms for their local and transnational trade, people’s subsistence needs can challenge enterprise sustainability. By shortening commodity chains, paying higher prices, and providing cultivation training, Philippine social entrepreneurs have enabled farmers’ engagement in alternatives to conventional mainstream and fair trade markets. Yet, Philippine farmers’ lack of income diversity, weak government support, and competition among traders for limited supplies, can frustrate entrepreneurs’ efforts. Given coffee culture’s growing third wave, I explore whether Philippine entrepreneurs’ timely initiatives might still resolve these push-pull tensions to yield an industry for, and more responsive to, stakeholders needs.
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“Artists, autobiography, auto fiction”
Dr. Charles Reeve

4:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M.
An “embarrassment,” Paul de Man said. “Disreputable” and “self-indulgent.” He was speaking about autobiographies, and no doubt his assertions would intensify if he focused specifically on artists’ autobiographies, given how that sub-genre doubles down on unreconstructed Romanticism. Omissions, misrememberings and outright lies notwithstanding, though, artists’ autobiographies have been popular ever since the Vita of Renaissance sculptor Bevenuto Cellini was unearthed and published in 1728. If anything, as Julie Rak shows, autobiography enjoys more popularity now than ever before—and artists’ accounts contribute robustly to that popularity. Why? What launched that interest in the first place and what sustains it now?

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University, 100 McCaul St., Room 258 (George Reid Wing)
Website: 
https://www.facebook.com/events/432007204130130/
Email: 
folas@ocadu.ca
Cost: 
Free
Poster for Sabbatical Talks: Dr. Lynne Milgram and Dr. Charles Reeve

Sabbatical Talks by Dr. Bill Leeming and Dr. Selmin Kara

Tuesday, March 26, 2019 - 3:00pm

Please join the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies for two Sabbatical Talks: “Extending the Meaning of “Genetic” in Medicine in Canada and Mexico to include ‘Related to Chromosomes and Genes’” by Dr. Bill Leeming and "Cinematic Life in the Anthropocene" by Dr. Selmin Kara.

Tuesday, March 26th, 2019

3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

205 Richmond St. W., Room 320

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Dr. Bill Leeming

Extending the Meaning of “Genetic” in Medicine in Canada and Mexico to include “Related to Chromosomes and Genes”

My talk describes work completed during my sabbatical in 2016-17, including collaborative work with Dr. Ana Barahona of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. I begin the talk by exploring how medico-scientific reporting of chromosomal anomalies using karyotype cytogenetics permitted scientists in a wide range of fields to manipulate and extend the meaning of “genetic” in medicine from “heredity” to include “related to chromosomes and genes.” I then go on to show how the adoption of cytogenetics in Canada and Mexico unfolded against strikingly different backgrounds in clinical research and health care delivery.

Dr. Selmin Kara

Cinematic Life in the Anthropocene

This talk presents an overview of one of the book chapters I completed during my Sabbatical. In recent big-budget science-fiction films such as Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) and Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), the search for restoring or expanding sustainable life (which are necessitated by the climatic events that threaten human survival) require characters to interact with and maintain various forms of manmade closed ecosystems in outerspace. These ecosystems (ranging from small-scale life support systems comprising of a few species of edible and oxygen producing plants within the larger enclosures of space ships to grand-scale generation ship habitats that simulate entire biomes) initially establish a vision of life as a machinic-systemic artefact, which can be isolated and engineered through technological means. Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018) also engages with the trope of closed ecologies in the making (this time located on Earth and colonized by nonhuman forces) yet moves toward weird realism as an aesthetic proper to depicting the ultimate strangeness and unknowability of life under the extant conditions of climate change. In exploring the scientific and weird cinematic realisms in these films, my talk tracks the ways in which the 21st century film has responded to the question of life in the Anthropocene, locating it on a spectrum that shifts from extreme certainty towards extreme uncertainty.

Venue & Address: 
205 Richmond St. W., Room 320
Email: 
folas@ocadu.ca
Cost: 
FREE
Image 1: A close up of a scientist seated at a desk and looking up from his work. Image 2: Still from Annihilation (2018)