TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2025

May It Have a Happy Ending - Book Launch
Hybrid Event  |  12:30 - 2:00pm PST  |  JOIN ONLINE
Geography Room 229, Geography Building  |  1984 West Mall

Dr. Minelle Mahtani will speak about her intimate and blisteringly honest memoir about mothers and daughters, grief and healing, and finding your voice in a conversation hosted by Associate Professor Juanita Sundberg.

About Dr. Minelle Mahtani
An Associate Professor at GRSJ, Dr. Mahtani also has Associate appointments at UBC with Geography and Journalism, as well as the Chair, Canadian Studies. She held the role of the Senior Advisor to the Provost on Racialized Faculty where she supported the recruitment and retention of racialized faculty.

Dr. Mahtani is the author of Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality (UBC Press) and is one of the editors of Global Mixed Race (NYU Press). In addition to her academic work, Dr. Mahtani has a long history in journalism, having been a former national television news journalist at the CBC and previously a journalism and geography professor at University of Toronto. She hosted Sense of Place, a radio show at Roundhouse Radio, which won four awards over the course of three years on air.

She was a finalist for the 2024 National Magazine award for her piece on the Tragically Hip, Canadiana, and Ruthie Gilmore. In 2022, her essay Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers was a gold Digital Publishing Awards winner from the National Media Awards Foundation

About Juanita Sundberg
Dr. Juanita Sundberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research brings the insights of feminist political ecology and the sensibilities of ethnography to bear on the politics of nature. Dr. Sundberg's work seeks to foster conversations between more-than-human geographies, critical Indigenous studies, and critical theories of race and ableism in relation to climate change and extinction in settler colonial societies in the Americas.

Her current project examines the environmental dimensions of United States' border security policies in the United States-Mexico borderlands, with a specific focus on protected areas like national wildlife refuges.

This is hybrid event hosted in GEOG 229 and on Zoom.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 2025

Adventures in Translating the Ming Dynasty Book of Swindles
In-Person Event  |  12:30 - 1:30pm PST  |  FREE
C.K. Choi Building, Room 120  |  1855 West Mall, Vancouver

Join the co-translators of More Swindles from the Late Ming, Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea, as they share the challenges they faced during the translation process and their advice for scholars.

About the event
The Book of Swindle (1617 preface) is said to be the first Chinese collection of stories about fraud. Addressed primarily to traveling merchants of the late Ming era, the work offers eighty-odd tales of swindles attempted and accomplished, most of which are followed by an author’s comment that drives home the lesson for the traveling businessman. The work’s combination of alarmism about endemic bad faith in society and got-to-hand-it-to-‘em acknowledgment of the con artist’s skill chimes with certain concerns our own age. The Book has been translated into English as The Book of Swindles (Columbia, 2017) and More Swindles from the Late Ming (Columbia, 2024).

While mostly written in simple classical Chinese, the original work presents a host of challenges for the scholar-translator. The Book has multiple titles. The table of contents don’t match the contents. Entire stories are missing from some copies. Multiple stories share traces of a common, obscure, origin. Other stories drop in a word or two of local slang. Printer errors abound. Here and there appear unmarked puns, allusions, subtexts, and intertexts. Translations of the work into modern Chinese mislead. The author, Zhang Yingyu, is an enigma. In this talk, co-translators Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea will talk about how they identified and navigated these and other challenges, and share wise, wise words for scholars treading into similarly perilous terrains.

About the speakers
Bruce Rusk is a cultural historian of China who studies the Ming (1368–1644) through mid-Qing (1644–1911) periods. His work focuses on textual studies, literary culture, writing systems, and the history of trust and authenticity. He is an associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Christopher Rea is a literary and cultural historian whose research focuses on the modern Chinese-speaking world. He is a Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.

This talk is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 2025

Lind Speaker Series - the bomb: Smriti Keshari & Eric Schlosser
In-Person Event  |  6:30pm PST  |  GET TICKETS
RBC Theatre, Chan Centre  |  6265 Crescent Rd

Join the conversation with filmmaker Smriti Keshari and writer Eric Schlosser at the Chan Centre's RBC Theatre for a talk about the bomb exhibit.

About the Exhibit
Combining archival footage, animation, and a powerful electronic score by The Acid, this multimedia experience examines America's and humanity's dangerous entanglement with nuclear weapons. Inspired by the claustrophobia of missile silos and command centers, the exhibit envelopes audiences in a circular, floor-to-ceiling bank of screens interspersed with exposed wiring and circuit boards.

Described as "stunning, unique and dazzling" by Entertainment Weekly and "an abstract wonder" by the New York Observer, the bomb exposes the fragility and fallibility of the systems designed to manage these weapons, inviting reflection on their continued presence in our world.

the bomb exhibit kicks off the 2025 Phil Lind Initiative series and can be visited any time during opening hours of the AHVA gallery (12-4pm, Tue-Fri) from January 7?30. You can also join in for the gallery exhibit opening with artists on January 15 from 5-7pm at the AHVA Gallery.

About the Speakers
Eric Schlosser is a writer and filmmaker. His book Command and Control, a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in History, describes the challenges of managing America?s nuclear arsenal. His book Fast Food Nation (2001) helped to launch the modern food movement.

Smriti Keshari is an acclaimed Indian-American director and is an artist-in-residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the National Theatre in London.

Tickets available Thu Dec 19.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2025

3rd Annual John S. Macdonald Outer Space Lecture
In-Person Event  |  4:30 - 6:00pm PST  |  FREE
Frederic Wood Theatre  |  6354 Crescent Road, UBC

About Marc Garneau
Marc Garneau is a Canadian naval officer, astronaut, and politician who was the first Canadian citizen to go into space (1984). From 2015 to 2021, he served as the Minister of Transport, and he also served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2021.

In 1983 he was selected as one of the first six Canadian astronauts. He became the first Canadian in space when he flew aboard the U.S. space shuttle as a payload specialist in October 1984; on that flight, he operated several Canadian experiments.

About Dumitru Dorin Prunariu
Dumitru Dorin Prunariu is a Romanian pilot and cosmonaut who was the first Romanian citizen in space. He is also a former chairman of the UN Committee on the Peaceful uses of Outer Space.

Prunariu currently works as an expert within the Romanian Association for Space Technology and Industry ? ROMSPACE and as a member of the Board of the Romanian Space Agency. In May 1981, he accomplished an eight-day space flight on board Soyuz-40 spacecraft and Saliut-6 space station. He is also one of the founding members of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE). From 2011 until 2014, Prunariu was the elected president of ASE International, and since 2014 for 6 years served as president of ASE Europe. Since 2005 he is also a member of the ASE Committee on Near Earth Objects (NEO).

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2025

Start Making Sense by Dr. Steven Heine: Book Talk Event
In-Person Event  |  5:00 - 6:30pm PST  |  RSVP
Peña Room (Room 301), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre  |  1961 East Mall

Join Dr. Steven Heine at a book talk event for his new book, Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times.

About the Book
These days everyone feels on edge, panicked by climate change, political polarization, and artificial intelligence. Dr. Heine's field, existential psychology, uses the tools of science to study the kinds of questions famously asked by existential philosophers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Who are we? Why do we seek meaning? How do we connect with one another?

Drawing on decades of research, Dr. Heine provides scientifically grounded answers to these mysteries. He shows that humans evolved to seek meaning: our survival depends on our ability to make sense of an absurd world. Every day, we deploy an arsenal of psychological tactics to make and maintain meaning in our lives, from rationalizing our choices, to waxing nostalgic about the past, to defending our cultural worldviews. By understanding why and how we seek to make sense, we can live authentic lives in times that don't seem to make sense at all.

About the Author
Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Dr. Steven J. Heine is distinguished university scholar and professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on a few topics that converge on how people come to understand themselves and the world around them. In particular, he studies how people's cultures shape how they make sense of themselves and their worlds, how people strive to find meaning in their lives, and how people understand genetic causes.

He is the author of Cultural Psychology, the top-selling textbook in the field, and his research has been covered in outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Newsweek, and New Scientist. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

This event is free to attend. Please be sure to RSVP.