Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Richard Florida is comin' to town
On May31- June8 UBC in Vancouver will be hosting Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences conference. Most presenters will be of the academic variety and will no doubt be spewing jargon left and right (stuff I personally love), but it is worth a look.
One of the saddest aspects of our society is our level of civic engagement. Time and time again it is the same crazies that come out to the type of lectures that inform our policy. It is so important that citizens are there to represent the peoples' voice. Policy doesn't come from nowhere- there are academics and experts whose research informs political actors. A lot of research is good and a lot of research is bad. But most importantly, a lot of good research is misinterpreted and used as justification for neoliberal policy. Subsequently, bad research and misinterpretation of good research is used to justify policy documents such as Project Civil City that takes a clear 'broken windows theory' approach (a theory that makes lay-sense, but is all correlational with no real proof or statistical evidence that physical maintenance and image of a city afffects crime rates etc).
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October 17 (Wednesday) is the pre-conference workshop and tour day, the conference itself gets going on the 18th and runs through the 20th (Saturday). We have over 200 papers in over 80 sessions during the three days. Three keynote speakers will inspire and challenge your thinking about the internet. A welcome reception and a Friday evening banquet promise to entertain as well as inform you.
Keynote speakers are Henry Jenkins from MIT and Cory Ondrejka, CTO at Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life.
Our special guest for the conference will be Eric Joisel. Joseph Wu, who is a member of our local origami club, will also be here, as will Robert Lang.
We are planning to offer morning and afternoon workshops on Friday, November 9, and plenty of classes for all levels on Saturday and Sunday, November 10 and 11. There will be an informal early-bird recepton on Thursday night (November 8), an official opening reception on Friday night, and a wonderful entertaining banquet on Saturday night.
