Sue Goyette is a poet and novelist who will share from her poetry collection Ocean when she is featured at the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series on March 8 from 7 to 10pm at 206 Accolade West Building. (Please note the event was originally scheduled for March 1, but postponed due to weather).

Ocean, Goyette’s fourth poetry collection, published in 2013, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2014.

The collection navigates through physical and metaphorical relationship to the ocean, specifically Goyette’s perspective from living near the North Atlantic via the port city of Halifax.

Goyette is the recipient of the 2008 CBC Literacy Award in poetry for her poem “Outskirts.” A collection later published using the same name won the 2012 Atlantic Poetry Prize.

She has also had several nominations for her work, including the 1999 Governor General’s Award, the Pat Lowther Award and the Gerald Lampert Award for her first book of poetry, The True Names of Birds. Her first novel, Lures, published in 2002, was nominated for the Thomas Head Raddall Award.

Goyette resides in Halifax, but was born in Sherbrooke, Ont., and was raised on Montreal’s south shore in Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville.

She currently teaches at Dalhousie University, and was previously a faculty member of the Maritime Writers’ Workshop, the Banff Wired Studio and the Sage Hill Writing Experience.

The Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series, presented by the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LAPS), brings Canadian writers to campus for an up-close and personal event.

The final event in the series is:

March 15 – Aisha Sasha John, Thou

For more information, email gailv@yorku.ca or leslie@yorku.ca.

Denielle Elliott will be the guest speaker at the next Tubman Talks event when she presents “The Kemron Cure: Pharmaceutical controversies and Moi’s politics in Kenya, 1989-1993” on Thursday, Feb. 25, at the Harriet Tubman Institute from 2:30 to 4pm.

This paper is part of a series that examines the life’s work of Kenyan scientist Davy Koech. In 1990, at the African AIDS Conference in Kinshasa, Koech announced he and his colleagues had discovered an effective strategy for the management of HIV – a drug they called Kemron.

The results suggested that oral interferon alpha proved effective in treating HIV. The drug was nationalized and politicized by former president Daniel arap Moi (amidst demonstrations demanding multiparty democracy, arrests and deaths) and the media erroneously reported that Kenyan scientists had found a “cure” for AIDS, damaging the scientific reputation of Koech and creating a scientific landscape that was marred by suspicion, corruption and mistrust.

This paper aims to disrupt the ways in which African science and African scientists are imagined by retelling the Kemron story, specifically by examining parts of the story left untold, and by taking seriously contradictions and inconsistencies in the memories and archival record.

The Kemron Cure is a case study that forces us to consider postcolonial anxieties in science and racial tensions in “global” research. It highlights the sociopolitical nature of scientific evidence of clinical trials.

Elliott is a cultural anthropologist specializing in Africanist anthropology, the politics of medicine, and the social study of science and technology. Her work at York U explores the intersections of govermentality, spatiality and therapeutic technologies in East Africa

She is currently working on two related projects: a social history of Koech and his contribution to nation-building in postcolonial East Africa; and a collaborative project exploring the KEMRI 6 court case in Nairobi – a project that examines the entanglements of constitutional reform, transnational medical networks, the politics of race and precarious labour.

She is a founding member of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, an interdisciplinary cyber-collective dedicated to new scholarship fusing visual, literary and performing arts, social theory and ethnographic research.

For more information on the Tubman Talks series, visit tubman.info.yorku.ca.

During the latest instalment of the Canadian Writers in Person series on Feb. 9, author Colin McAdam visited York University to read from latest novel, A Beautiful Truth. York teaching assistant Dana Patrascu-Kingsley sent the following report to YFile.

The award-winning writer Colin McAdam visited York University on Feb. 9 to read from and talk about his latest novel, A Beautiful Truth (2013). 

A Beautiful Truth follows the life of Looee, a young chimpanzee who is adopted and raised by a couple living on a farm in Vermont. After many years of living and communicating with humans, Looee is taken to a research facility in Florida, where he is first subjected to medical research and then joins a group of chimpanzees living in captivity. The novel depicts ape behaviours and modes of communication from the perspective of the humans and of the chimps themselves. The book helps us imagine the chimpanzees’ world, and see its similarities to and differences from ours.

McAdam spoke about becoming fascinated with chimps when, after watching documentaries about them, he realized how alike humans and chimps are. One of the biggest differences between humans and chimps, with whom we share more than 98 per cent of our genetic material, is our appearance, said McAdam. Books dispense with appearance though, and he builds empathy by inviting the readers to immerse themselves fully into their world. This is why he said that he wanted to write A Beautiful Truth from the perspective of the chimps. “This project stripped away language and emphasized body language as the main aspect of communication,” said McAdam, noting that this makes us more aware of how similar our modes of communication are.

McAdam said that it was very important that the behaviour and mode of communication of the chimps backed by documented fact. To research this novel, he read about the ape language studies, about sign language and symbolic languages taught to chimps. He also researched some of the medical research projects that involved chimps, and met survivors of these projects at the Fauna Foundation (a chimp sanctuary near Montreal). Meeting the chimpanzees in person allowed him to learn how they smell and act, what they sound like, what they look like, and how they interact with humans.

Politics, friendships, jealousy, territoriality are things contained in novels and McAdam saw all of these themes were present in the chimpanzees’ world, without the words. He said he wants to help us see ourselves as a species of apes. “This is a book about us finding some humility,” he said.

As the review in The Guardian says: “Brilliantly riffing on the apeness of humans and vice versa, the beautiful truth of McAdam’s novel is complex, subtle and intensely moving.”

McAdam’s first novel, Some Great Thing (2004), won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for English language fiction. His second novel, Fall (2009) won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A Beautiful Truth won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for English language fiction. 

On March 1, Sue Goyette will be coming to York to read from and talk about her collection of poems Ocean. Readings are free and open to any member of the public. For more information, contact Professor Leslie Sanders at leslie@yorku.ca or Professor Gail Vanstone at gailv@yorku.ca. All readings are held Tuesdays from 7 to 9pm in 206 Accolade West Building, Keele campus.

A new lecture series organized by Founders College will kick off on Feb. 24 with a talk by Professor Mauro Buccheri.

The “In Defense of the Liberal Arts” lecture series is a three-part series that aims to address the  marginalization of the liberal arts in postsecondary education.

On Feb. 24, from 4:30 to 6:30pm, Buccheri will present a lecture titled “Do the Liberal Arts need a new Humanism?”. It will take place in 305 Founders College.

In this inaugural lecture, Buccheri, master of Founders College, will focus on  how the way we experience life in our society depends on our idea of humanity, humanism and its history. The talk will look at what it means in the contemporary world to be human, and therefore, of how we are to live together here and now.

This lecture series will focus on the liberal arts as the foundation of our democracy and civil society,  by presenting the research of three Founders College Fellows:  Professor Buccheri, Professor Uwafiokun Idemudia and Professor Pietro Giordan.

For more information, call the Office of the Master, Founders College, at 416-736-5148.

McLaughlin College will host an event to mark social justice and Black History Month on Feb. 24 from noon to 2pm in the Junior Common Room, 014 McLaughlin College.

“UN World Day of Social Justice & Black History Month Celebrations” will feature a panel of guest speakers who will touch on social justice as the root of thriving, peaceful coexistence among different nations.

“We uphold the principles of social justice when we promote gender equality or the rights of indigenous peoples and migrants,” reads the description scribed by the UN for the 2016 theme for World Day of Social Justice. “We advance social justice when we remove barriers that people face because of gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, culture or disability.”

David Leyton-Brown, master of McLaughlin College and professor of political science at York University, will be the event moderator. He will introduce panellists, including:

• Alvin Curling, former speaker of the Ontario Legislature, MPP, Canadian Envoy to the Dominican Republic, and educator, who will take the broader international perspective and consider developments in various parts of the world;
• Zanana Akande, former MPP, former educator and school principal, who will address the issue of carding;
• Debbie Douglas, executive director for the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI), who will discuss immigration and refugee matters, and how agencies are coping with new demands on the resettlement sector in Ontario; and
• Olivia Chow, distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University, and former MP and city councilor (Toronto), who will focus on how to mobilize social action for positive constructive change in Canadian society.

Each speaker will be limited to about 15 minutes, and the event will close with a Q&A.

Light refreshments will be provided.

The event is co-sponsored by the Office of the Master, McLaughlin College, and the School of Public Policy & Administration.

For more information, contact Vicky Carnevale at vcarneva@yorku.ca, ext. 33824.

A podcast infrastructure designed as a writing teaching tool is now available for other professors to use in their instruction.

Founded and managed by Writing Department Professor Stephanie Bell, From Scratch Media is a podcasting infrastructure that will help connect student voices with listeners.

“Podcasts are incredibly useful teaching tools,” Bell explained. “They allow students to untangle complicated academic research and concepts for a knowledgeable but popular audience. The process of crafting clear, compelling, listener-friendly discussions can really test students’ grasp of a subject, and its significance.”

Recently, Bell made her podcasting website available for other professors to use. As a writing instructor, she is impressed by the extent to which podcasts teach effective writing. They’re powerful teaching tools, she said, because they force students to think about the listener.

After four years teaching writing using podcasts, Bell has found they prompt students to act like expert writers.

“Once they understand the project at hand,” she said, “students start asking all the right questions: What will listeners find interesting about this issue? How should I organize the story to help them follow along? How can I show them that I’m reliable? That my information is credible? What counter arguments might they think of?”

Bell is encouraged by this shift, and says when students begin to figure out guidelines from the writing context, they gain independence from teachers and textbooks and make a huge leap towards becoming expert writers.

One of the major issues student writers must learn to navigate is integrity, and Bell has been surprised by her students’ engagement with issues of copyright and citation.

“In four years and over 200 student podcasts, we’ve had no plagiarism and many lively debates about oral attribution and copyright,” she said.

The success of the course hinges on meaningful, collaborative assignment design. The podcast project encourages instructor involvement throughout the research process, and students feel a sense of purpose as they create a project for their classmates and the broader podcast-listening public.

But, the podcast assignment has also underscored just how difficult it is to teach writing.

“Most students have no idea what a podcast is when they begin the course, and here I am expecting them to produce one,” Bell said. “I think this is an interesting lesson for instructors who assign traditional academic essays. It’s easy to forget that students could be just as unfamiliar with our expectations for academic papers as they would be with something like a podcast.”

After four years, Bell’s class podcast show has become a home for do-it-yourself student podcasting.

To inquire about From Scratch Media or teaching with podcasts, contact Bell at stepbell@yorku.ca.

Ontario’s LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or questioning) communities are experiencing barriers to adequate home care, according to the results of a five-year research project co-investigated by York University.

School of Social Work Professor Andrea Daley and School of Nursing Professor Judith MacDonnell will share this information, and other results, when they reveal the outcome of their research-based collaboration on Feb. 19 at the LGBTQ Home Care Access Event.

During the event, the researchers will fill gaps in home care research knowledge and will disclose issues faced by members of the LGBTQ community who receive care at home.

“Our study is the first comprehensive Canadian data on LGBTQ access to home care and to our knowledge the first data anywhere on LGBTQ access in this sector,” says MacDonnell. “Despite improved awareness of LGBTQ people in Canada and the development of human rights policies over the last decade, LGBTQ communities continue to face health inequities and barriers to finding responsive and relevant care.

“In fact, many avoid care because they anticipate they may face hostility or providers who lack knowledge about their health issues. There are implications for increased mortality and morbidity.”

Home care is defined as any form of care received in the home, whether formally or informally. Formal care could be arranged through a community support or social service agency, and informal care could be provided by family, friends or community members. Care services may include personal care, preparing meals, laundry, house cleaning, meal delivery, shopping, transportation to medical appointments, home safety assessment and physiotherapy.

Daley and MacDonnell found that one in three home care providers reported that, as far as they were aware, they had never worked with an LGBTQ client, and 90 per cent of home care service providers had never received continuing education while employed in home care that focussed on a client’s sexual and/or gender identity as it pertained to high quality care.

Additionally, 40 per cent of LGBTQ service users were not aware of their local Community Care Access Centre (CCAC).

“The existing research literature on diversity and access in home care has largely taken a cultural competency approach that, despite its limitations, does not consider or include LGBTQ communities and their experiences,” says Daley. “We can think of the ‘home’ as taking on great significance as a place where queer people can ‘do’ their identities and relationships with a greater level of freedom. In stating this, we imagine that the latitude for ‘freedom’ within LGBTQ homes and the potential for self expression and affirmation is likely affected by the discriminatory reactions and unpredictable support, including overt hostility, that LGBTQ people often anticipate and may experience during interactions with service providers.”

Melissa St. Pierre, a post-doctoral visitor, worked extensively with Daley and MacDonnell during the full duration of the project to coordinate various phases and determine key findings.  Co-investigators for this project include researchers from McGill University’s School of Social Work, McMaster University’s School of Social Work, Rainbow Health Ontario and the Toronto Central Community Care Access Centre, with funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

“The importance of our research also lies in the community-based approach taken to explore home care access for LGBTQ communities,” says Daley.” Our research process brought together members of and allies to LGBTQ communities in Ontario and with varying relationships with home care-related organizations.”

The research team, she adds, worked very closely with two advisory committees throughout the duration of the project that included LGBTQ community members from Northern Ontario and regions east and west of Toronto, as well as LGBTQ and ally service providers and home care administrators.

The Feb. 19 event will bring service users, providers, decision-makers and other stakeholders together to learn about the core research findings of the project. An interactive panel discussion and Q&A will be held on the significance and implementation of these findings. The panel will include a trans senior, a home care administrator, a CCAC administrator and an LGBTQ-focused research and policy coordinator.

Daley and MacDonnell hope their findings will lead to better education and training of care providers, improve policies and programs and promote agencies and services to become more inclusive, and affirm sexual and gender identities and expressions.

“We have developed a user-friendly home care Access and Equity tool to assist service provider organizations in moving towards LGBTQ-inclusive home care,” says MacDonnell. “As we have undertaken the research and shared findings with diverse LGBTQ communities, service providers and decision-makers/policy makers over the last five years, it is clear that there is significant interest across stakeholder groups in taking steps to improve care for LGBTQ home care service users, care givers, their chosen families and communities of care.”

The LGBTQ Home Care Access Event will be held from 2 to 4pm at 519 Church Street Community Centre. RSVP by emailing lgbthome@yorku.ca. For more information on the project, visit the LGBTQ Home Care Access Project.