Tag Archives: Victoria

Featured Thesis: Investigating the intersection of urban agriculture and urban planning…in Victoria, Canada

An M.Sc. thesis in the Department of Geography, by Abdolzaher Ghezeljeh

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/11736

Abstract:

The world is home to predominantly urbanized populations that continue to grow. In an increasingly urbanized world, cities suffer from various challenges, including urban poverty and food insecurity, which result in unsustainability, health concerns, and crime increase. Many reasons affect urban poverty, including controversial government policies, an imbalance between existing resources and demands, and inefficient urban management and planning. Integrating urban agriculture (UA) into development policies can alleviate urban poverty and food insecurity in cities. Therefore, a line of research seems necessary to gain a better understanding of various ways to boost food production and improve sustainability in cities. To this end, the present study attempts to investigate the role of urban planning and governance in community gardens in Victoria to examine how urban planning and governance can support food production. A qualitative research method with semi-structured interviews and community mapping workshops were used within three groups of governmental, non-governmental, and residential actors in Victoria, Canada. Eighteen participants were interviewed, and eight participants took part in workshops held in the James Bay and Fernwood neighbourhoods. The three proposed research questions in this study were analyzed by thematic analysis using NVivo 10 software. The findings revealed that nine themes should be considered to improve food production in Victoria. The themes include improving UA economic efficiency, increasing awareness, gaining community satisfaction, effective landuse policies, productive partnership, improving the long bureaucratic procedure, offering grants, providing resources and facilities for gardeners, and changes in existing zoning bylaws. In addition, the findings of the workshops show that the City of Victoria plays the most crucial role in UA projects. Study results reveal that the compost education center, residents, and community centres should create an active partnership with the City towards improving community gardens.

To read more, visit UVicSpace https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/11736

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Featured Thesis: Chinese Religious Life in Victoria, BC 1858-1930

This M.A. History thesis details the religious interactions between traditional Chinese culture and Victoria’s mainstream society in the early days of the city.

Chinese Religious Life in Victoria, BC 1858-1930

by Liang Han

Abstract:

Between 1858 and 1930, Victoria’s Chinese immigrants brought their homeland religions to the Canadian city of Victoria BC. They experienced a broad range of challenges as they attempted to fit into the mainstream society. This continual struggle affected their religious lives in particular as they sought to adjust in ways that helped them deal with racial discrimination. As a result, Chinese folk religions, especially those emphasizing ancestral worship, became intertwined with local Chinese associations as a way of strengthening the emotional connections between association members. Some associations broadened their membership by adding ancestral deities or worshiping the deity of sworn brotherhood in a bid to create broader connections among the Chinese men who dominated Victoria’s Chinese community. At the same time, Christians, who practiced the religion of Victoria’s mainstream society, reached out to the Chinese, at first by offering practical language training and later by establishing missions and churches that focused on the Chinese. Many Chinese immigrants welcomed English classes and the social opportunities that churches provided but resisted conversion, as the discrimination they faced in mainstream society had left them sceptical about Christianity, which was seen as closely linked to the dominant Western culture. However, Chinese attitudes towards Christianity became more favorable after the 1910s, when the patriotism of Chinese immigrants led them to support revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen and his new Chinese government, which promoted Christianity as a symbol of modernity. In general, the Chinese in Victoria were not especially enthusiastic about religion, whether Chinese folk religion or Christianity, although women were generally more interested in religion than men. Although many Chinese pragmatically sought comfort and assistance from both religions, they followed Confucian orthodoxy in focusing primarily on daily life rather than religious life. At the same time, over the decades between 1858 and 1930 both Chinese folk religion and Christianity affected the Chinese community as this community adopted a mixture of Western and Eastern cultures, including religious elements from both cultures.

To read more, visit UVicSpace https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/11071

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Featured Dissertation – A City Goes to War: Victoria in the Great War 1914-1918

Dissertation of the Day*

A City Goes to War: Victoria in the Great War 1914-1918, by James S. Kempling (History)

Abstract:

This dissertation is a combined digital history-narrative history project. It takes advantage of newly digitized historical newspapers and soldier files to explore how the people of Victoria B.C. Canada, over 8000 kilometers from the front, experienced the Great War 1914-1918. Although that experience was similar to other Canadian cities in many ways, in other respects it was quite different. Victoria’s geographical location on the very fringe of the Empire sets it apart. Demographic and ethnic differences from the rest of Canada and a very different history of indigenous-settler relations had a dramatic effect on who went to war, who resisted and how war was commemorated in Victoria. This study of Victoria will also provide an opportunity to examine several important thematic areas that may impact the broader understanding of Canada in the Great War not covered in earlier works. These themes include the recruiting of under-age soldiers, the response to the naval threat in the Pacific, resistance by indigenous peoples, and the highly effective response to the threat of influenza at the end of the war. As the project manager for the City Goes to War web-site, I directed the development of an extensive on-line archive of supporting documents and articles about Victoria during the Great War that supports this work (http://acitygoestowar.ca/). Once reviewed by the committee, this paper will be converted to web format and added to that project.

To read more, visit UVicSpace https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/10987

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Networked Open Social Scholarship

Networked Open Social Scholarship

An INKE-hosted gathering

17 January 2017 | Victoria, BC, Canada

http://inke.ca/projects/victoria-gathering-2017

Proposals Due: 1 October 2016

Canada’s path to the widespread adoption of digital scholarly practices and principles has been challenging. Scholars, institutions, and their representatives struggle with ways to implement progressive Canadian open access and open source policies in ways that make sense for research professionals and society at large. Even in the national press, we hear about research libraries that cannot cope with for-cost access to publicly-supported research due to the rising cost of journals, books, and even digital scholarship. Other forums express concern about the lack of appropriate, national-level digital research infrastructure. Within this context, how can we work toward networked open social scholarship: the successful realization of robust, inclusive, participatory, and publicly-engaged digital scholarship?

Networked open social scholarship involves creating and disseminating research and research technologies to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of specialists and non-specialists in ways that are both accessible and significant. But how can we model networked open social scholarship practices and behaviour? What approaches to the development of workflows, tools, systems, technologies, publishing apparatus, protocols, policies, and initiatives best foster and encourage openness? How do we promote, record, archive, and study the evolving processes of engaging with data? How can we leverage existing resources in libraries and cultural institutions across Canada to provide regular opportunities for mentorship and training in core networked open social scholarship areas?

We invite you to join this discussion during our annual INKE-hosted researcher and partner gathering in Victoria, BC. This gathering will provoke conversation and mobilize collaboration in and around digital communication, especially electronic scholarly production, as well as issues of (open) access, partnership, dissemination, alternative modes and methods, and the shift from prototype to production. This action-oriented event is geared toward leaders and learners from all fields and arenas, including academic and non-academic researchers, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, librarians and archivists, publishers, members of scholarly and professional associations and consortia, open source practitioners and developers, industry liaisons, and other stakholders. Taking the success of past years’ INKE-hosted gatherings in Whistler as our starting point, we hope to simultaneously formalize connections across fields and open up different ways of thinking about the pragmatics and possibilities of digital scholarship.

Featured events include:

Lead presentations by Dr. Susan Brown (U Guelph) and Dr. Vincent Larivière (U Montréal)
Lightning talks, where authors present 4-minute versions of longer papers circulated prior to the gathering, followed by a brief discussion (papers may be  conceptual, theoretical, application-oriented, and more)
Show & Tell session, where presenters do digital demonstrations of their projects and / or prototypes
Next Steps conversation, to articulate in a structured setting what we will do together in the future

We invite proposals for lightning papers that address these and other issues pertinent to research in the area, or for relevant project demonstrations.

Proposals should contain a title, an abstract (of approximately 250 words, plus list of works cited), and the names, affiliations, and website URLs of presenters. Longer papers for lightning talks will be solicited after proposal acceptance for circulation in advance of the gathering. We are pleased to welcome proposals in all languages of our community; note that the chief working language of past gatherings has been English. Please send proposals on or before October 1^st 2016 to Alyssa Arbuckle at alyssaa@uvic.ca.

“Networked Open Social Scholarship” is sponsored by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) research group and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This gathering is organized by Ray Siemens, Alyssa Arbuckle, Jon Bath, Tanja Niemann, and Brian Owen, working with our Whistler Advisory Group: Clare Appavoo, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Chad Gaffield, Janet Halliwell, Brian Owen, and Sally Wyatt. Please consider joining us in Victoria for what is sure to be a dynamic discussion!