Tag Archives: 2019

Year in Review – Top 10 UVicSpace Downloads

January 7, 2019

Are you curious about what items in UVicSpace garnered the most eyeballs this year? We sure were. In keeping with end of year retrospectives, here are the top 10 accessed articles in UVicSpace for 2019.

Top 10 UVicSpace downloads for 2019

(From 2019-01-01 to 2019-12-17)

Downloads           Title
32022 Global corruption : Law, theory & practice   (stats)
27699 PLC Programming for A Water Level Control System: Design and System Implementation   (stats)
18359 Inspiring the adult music learner: focus on adult cello beginners   (stats)
18096 The Benefits of Risky Play and Adult Influence in Children’s Risky Play   (stats)
13876 Project-based learning through the eyes of teachers and students: Investigating opinions of PBL in adult ESL   (stats)
12944 Gender, the brain and education: do boys and girls learn differently?   (stats)
12584 Indigenous ways of learning, being and teaching : implications for new teachers to First Nations schools   (stats)
11018 Dams in the Tigris Euphrates river basins   (stats)
10956 The black prairies: history, subjectivity, writing   (stats)
9602 Dialogic Approaches to Teaching and Learning in the Primary Grades   (stats)

To keep the ball rolling here are more reviews and reflections on the year that was in scholarly publishing; check out the CARL newsletters, Academica Group’s Top Ten, the Michael Geist blog and be sure to visit The Scholarly Kitchen and The Chronicle of Higher Education websites too.

The copyright and scholarly communications team would like to wish readers and contributors to UVicSpace a great year!

 

UVic Author Celebration Feature: Infidels and the Damn Churches by Lynne Marks

The annual UVic Author Celebration is coming up as part of Ideafest. Join us as we celebrate authors from the UVic community who will read from their latest works.

When: March 7, 2019
Where: UVic Bookstore
Time: 2:00-4:00pm

The author panel includes: Jason M. Colby (History), Patrick Friesen (Writing), Bill Gaston (Writing), and Lynne Marks (History). Jim Forbes (Director of Campus Services) will host and Jonathan Bengtson (University Librarian) will moderate.

This week, we will highlight the books written by members of the author panel.

Infidels and the Damn Churches: Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia by Lynne Marks was released by UBC Press in 2017 and won the 2018 CLIO Prize for British Columbia from the Canadian Historical Association.

About the Book

British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon from the 1880s to the First World War.

Drawing on archival records and oral histories, Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settler women who tried to hang onto their faith in an alien land. White, working-class men often arrived in the province alone and identified the church with their exploitative employers. At the same time, BC’s anti-Asian and anti-Indigenous racism meant that their “whiteness” alone could define them as respectable, without the need for church affiliation. Consequently, although Christianity retained major social power elsewhere in Canada, in BC many people found the freedom to forgo church attendance or espouse atheist views without significant social repercussions.

This nuanced study of mobility, gender, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into BC’s distinctive culture and into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.

This book will hold broad appeal for students and scholars of social history, cultural history, BC and Canadian history, religious studies, women’s studies, immigration and migration studies, Asian studies, and labour and the Left.

About the Author

Lynne Marks is an associate professor and past chair of the Department of History at the University of Victoria, where she teaches gender history, the social history of religion, and Canadian history. She won the Marion Dewar Prize in Women’s History in 2012. Her first book, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario, won the 1996 Floyd S. Chalmers Award for the best book on Ontario history.

Praise for the Book

“British Columbia is in the vanguard of a secularizing trend that is afoot across the Western world… As Lynne Marks demonstrates in her impeccably researched book, this phenomenon is deeply rooted in the province’s history.” — Denis McKim, Douglas College, Canadian Journal of History, 53-3

“This is an important book for anyone who wants to understand the secularizing trends in the Pacific Northwest, whether in Canada or the United States, and increasingly in the rest of their societies.” — Randi Jones Walker, Pacific School of Religion, Pacific Northwest Quartlery, Volume 109, Number 2

“Infidels and the Damn Churches addresses a glaring omission in the history of Canada’s West – the role of religion and religiosity (and, in this case, irreligion and irreligiosity) in the formation of a settler society.” — Alison Marshall, author of Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada

“This is the finest historical study yet done on the culture of atheism and non-religionism in the late modern Western world. It explores the origins of modern secularity in the most secular part of North America. Marks excels in moving from the micro study of individual families and small communities up to cities and the nation. This is a path-breaking work.” — Callum G. Brown, author of Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s

UVic Author Celebration Feature: Just Let Me Look at You by Bill Gaston

The annual UVic Author Celebration is coming up as part of Ideafest. Join us as we celebrate authors from the UVic community who will read from their latest works.

When: March 7, 2019
Where: UVic Bookstore
Time: 2:00-4:00pm

The author panel includes: Jason M. Colby (History), Patrick Friesen (Writing), Bill Gaston (Writing), and Lynne Marks (History). Jim Forbes (Director of Campus Services) will host and Jonathan Bengtson (University Librarian) will moderate.

This week, we will highlight the books written by members of the author panel.

Just Let Me Look at You: On Fatherhood by Bill Gaston was released by Penguin Random House in 2018 and is a finalist for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize.

About the Book

Sons clash with fathers, sons find reasons to rebel. And, fairly or unfairly, sons judge fathers when they take to drinking.

But Bill Gaston and his father could always fish together. When they were shoulder-to-shoulder, joined in rapt fascination with the world under their hull, they had what all fathers and sons wish for. Even if it was temporary, even if much of it would be forgotten along with the empties.

Returning to the past in his old fishing boat, revisiting the remote marina where they lived on board and learned to mooch for salmon, Bill unravels his father’s relationship with his father, it too a story marked by heavy drinking, though one that took a much darker turn.

Learning family secrets his father took to the grave, Gaston comes to understand his own story anew, realizing that the man his younger self had been so eager to judge was in fact someone both nobler and more vulnerable than he had guessed.

Warm, insightful, and often funny, Just Let Me Look at You captures every father’s inexpressible tenderness, and the ways in which the words for love often come too late for all of us.

About the Author

Bill Gaston came to the UVic Writing Department in 1998 following a dozen years in the Maritimes, mostly at UNB, Fredericton. There he was Director of the Creative Writing Program and, for a time, editor of Canada’s oldest literary journal, The Fiddlehead. He’s also lived in Toronto, Winnipeg and France, and spent his formative years on the slopes of North Vancouver. He worked at the usual struggling-writer jobs, typically in universities but also in group homes — but the most exotic of these jobs were fishing guide, swamping for a cat at a logging show and playing hockey in the south of France. For decades he’s led a more settled existence in Gordon Head, where he resides with writer Dede Crane. He is the author of seven novels and seven collections of short fiction, as well as a book of poems and a memoir, Midnight Hockey. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and twice for the Governor General’s Award. His most recent novel, The World, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Praise for the Book

“Under Gaston’s quiet prose lies an ocean of pain and hard truths. Unsentimental and yet deeply poignant, his memoir will resonate with anyone who wanted more from a father than he could give.” —Trevor Cole

“This book isn’t just for fathers, sons or those who fish…as a mother and daughter who does not fish, I nonetheless related to Bill’s longing to understand the person who had raised him and helped shape his world view. A beautifully written memoir about the complex layers that exist between parent and child and the drive to find peace with our childhood ghosts.” —Cea Sunrise Person, author of North of Normal

“I was heartbroken in the first five pages. Bill Gaston kicks and punches holes in the walls of time and recounts the battle between father and son, a battle that defines us whether we like it or not. For everyone who fights ghosts and knows they’re never going to win, but keeps trying.” —Tom Wilson, author of Beautiful Scars

“Bill Gaston’s unflinching courage shines through in his latest memoir, planting him firmly alongside other such top-shelf soul searchers as Mary Karr, David Adams Richards and Nick Flynn. Heartbreaking, hilarious and admittedly haunting, Just Let Me Look at You is a timely and timeless reclamation story, poignant and auspicious, written with heart.” —Joel Thomas Hynes, author of We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night

UVic Author Celebration Feature: Songen by Patrick Friesen

The annual UVic Author Celebration is coming up as part of Ideafest. Join us as we celebrate authors from the UVic community who will read from their latest works.

When: March 7, 2019
Where: UVic Bookstore
Time: 2:00-4:00pm

The author panel includes: Jason M. Colby (History), Patrick Friesen (Writing), Bill Gaston (Writing), and Lynne Marks (History). Jim Forbes (Director of Campus Services) will host and Jonathan Bengtson (University Librarian) will moderate.

This week, we will highlight the books written by members of the author panel.

Songen by Patrick Friesen was released by Mother Tongue Publishing in 2018.

About the Book

The poems in this new collection move like swifts. They alight, but only briefly, before their smooth lifts and hair-trigger turns take us places we had not expected to go. Each poem, one sentence long and separated by commas, tracks the movement of the mind. Occasionally using words and phrases from Middle English and Low German, the poems touch on musical influences, the changes in language over the centuries and on the dissolutions, dilemmas and inevitabilities of old age. A beautiful body of work; the poet at his finest.

About the Author

Patrick Friesen, formerly of Winnipeg, now lives in Victoria. He writes poetry, essays, drama, song lyrics and text for dance and music; he has also co-translated several Danish poetry books with P. K. Brask. He has collaborated with various musicians, choreographers and dancers and has recorded CDs of text and improv music with Marilyn Lerner, Peggy Lee and Niko Friesen. He was short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award In Poetry in 1997, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in BC in 1998 and 2003, the Griffin Poetry Prize (a co-translation with Per Brask of Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments by Danish poet Ulrikka Gernes) in 2016, and the Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence in Poetry in 2016. He received the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award in Manitoba in 1996 and the ReLit Award for poetry in 2012. In 2018 his play A Short History of Crazy Bone was staged by Theatre Projects Manitoba.

Praise for the Book

“Patrick Friesen is a wide-ranging artist, devoted to film, music and the stage, but poetry always has been, and always will be, his devoir and his duty. Songen is a haunting suite of 86 meditations on the complexity of life inside the words we use to describe ourselves.”
­— George Fetherling

“Patrick Friesen defies fashion and always sings. His language keeps invoking the condition of music: “any guile will do” as he hums an ode to the conjunctions, tunes for childhood and youth, jazz for death itself—on a ride cymbal with Max Roach. Friesen’s “voice/growing into landscape” maps the psychic territory in which we see the world.”
— Maurice Mierau

UVic Author Celebration Feature: Orca by Jason M. Colby

The annual UVic Author Celebration is coming up as part of Ideafest. Join us as we celebrate authors from the UVic community who will read from their latest works.

When: March 7, 2019
Where: UVic Bookstore
Time: 2:00-4:00pm

The author panel includes: Jason M. Colby (History), Patrick Friesen (Writing), Bill Gaston (Writing), and Lynne Marks (History). Jim Forbes (Director of Campus Services) will host and Jonathan Bengtson (University Librarian) will moderate.

This week, we will highlight the books written by members of the author panel.

Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator by Jason M. Colby was released by Oxford University Press in 2018.

About the Book

Since the release of the documentary Blackfish in 2013, millions around the world have focused on the plight of the orca, the most profitable and controversial display animal in history. Yet, until now, no historical account has explained how we came to care about killer whales in the first place.

Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean’s greatest predator. Historically reviled as dangerous pests, killer whales were dying by the hundreds, even thousands, by the 1950s–the victims of whalers, fishermen, and even the US military. In the Pacific Northwest, fishermen shot them, scientists harpooned them, and the Canadian government mounted a machine gun to eliminate them. But that all changed in 1965, when Seattle entrepreneur Ted Griffin became the first person to swim and perform with a captive killer whale. The show proved wildly popular, and he began capturing and selling others, including Sea World’s first Shamu.

Over the following decade, live display transformed views of Orcinus orca. The public embraced killer whales as charismatic and friendly, while scientists enjoyed their first access to live orcas. In the Pacific Northwest, these captive encounters reshaped regional values and helped drive environmental activism, including Greenpeace’s anti-whaling campaigns. Yet even as Northwesterners taught the world to love whales, they came to oppose their captivity and to fight for the freedom of a marine predator that had become a regional icon.

This is the definitive history of how the feared and despised “killer” became the beloved “orca”–and what that has meant for our relationship with the ocean and its creatures.

About the Author

Jason M. Colby is associate professor of environmental and international history at the University of Victoria. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, and raised in the Seattle area, he worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska and Washington State. He is the author of The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and US Expansion in Central America.

Praise for the Book

“This is an affecting book, personal and political all at once, and written by a scholar who has worked hard to recover and relay painful tales of the wild orcas that encountered humans and the humans that did the encountering. Nearly all those meetings began in panic and pain, most of it the whales’, though some of it that of the men who came to believe they were doing the wrong thing wresting these breathtaking animals from their world, to deliver them to our own–which has been changed by the resulting episodes of captivity and captivation.” — D. Graham Burnett, author of The Sounding of the Whale

“This fascinating history reveals what happens when humans became captivated by captive orcas. Colby poignantly locates the very origins of conservation in the tense, tender, and tragic relationships between humans and cetaceans. This finely textured social history of the Pacific Northwest opens up the story of how ‘killer whales’–once cast as deadly pests–became popular attractions and emotional, intelligent ‘orcas’.” — Daniel Bender, author of The Animal Game: Searching for Wildness at the American Zoo

“With Orca, Jason Colby takes readers on a riveting journey. In a matter of decades, the Pacific Northwest’s killer whales traveled from despised vermin to regional sweethearts. Their emotional passage revealed the true wildcard of wildlife management: navigating the swirling opinions of human populations. A timely book, Orca brings history to bear on a fraught relationship between two apex predators. Colby traces the rise in human affection for the whales but also the emergence of a cruel realization as audiences cheered captives’ performances in aquariums across the globe. Love and fandom could kill and maim as efficiently as fear and contempt. In the end, it’s unclear whether orcas benefited from the connection they forged with people.” — Jon Coleman, author of Vicious: Wolves and Men in America

Annual Author Celebration – March 7, 2019, 2-4pm

Author Panel:

Host: Jim Forbes, Director of Campus Services

Moderator: Jonathan Bengtson, University Librarian