CTLT’s Aboriginal Initiatives department presents the next session in their popular Classroom Climate Series, How Do we Articulate Cyberspace (a landless territory) within the discourse of Indigenous Studies? on Wed 29 October from 1 – 3pm.
All too often there is a perceived gap between Indigenous peoples and technology. This imaginative fissure is symptomatic of a larger, fallacious belief that indigeniety and Indigenous cultural practices are products of the past. However, Indigenous knowledges and peoples are not only mobilizing technology, they are also shaping the way technology is being developed and utilized. In this session we will discuss the theoretical implications of cyberspace in the field of Indigenous Critical Theory and the intersections between tradition and innovation, examining Indigenous contributions to hardware and software development in the digital age. Participants will leave this sessions with a better sense of how to read, analyze and teach with Indigenous technology along with Indigenous new media examples they can use in class to break through the tradition/innovation divide.
Presenter David Gaertner is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia where he teaches and conducts research on Indigenous arts and literatures in Canada. You can find out more about him via his website here.
The Classroom Climate Series is a year-long program where faculty, teaching assistants, researchers, graduate students, and staff from all over the University have the opportunity to challenge their own assumptions about what they have learned about Aboriginal people, become more critically aware of their teaching and research practices, and learn more about how they engage with topics that challenge their own social location within the institution. It combines a series of mini-class lectures, interactive group activities, and one-on-one discussions, and as a result, participants gain skills to create a more clearly developed and informed approach to understanding and teaching about Aboriginal and other socially contentious issues in a curricular setting.
We highly encourage you to participate as part of your professional development! You can register via clicking the link above or here.
You can find out more about Classroom Climate via the wiki page at http://wiki.ubc.ca/Classroom_Climate