Last week was the first British Columbia Library Conference I’ve attended since 2013, right after I graduated from the UBC iSchool and started my first professional position at UBC. It was also my first in-person conference since 2019. Conferences always cause me a degree of existential dread and I have to be careful with my energy levels at them. I have a tendency to feel like I don’t belong in any group setting, which I once handled by being loudly extroverted, and now handle by limiting the number of sessions I attend and making sure I eat and exercise like a normal human. But it was nice to connect with a few old friends and colleagues, and several of the sessions I attended were excellent. Richmond is also becoming one of the cities in the greater Vancouver area I enjoy visiting the most, mostly for the food, but also for the long dyke walk along the river from the Airport out to Steveston.
UBC iSchool faculty gave an update on curriculum changes, and it was nice to chat with a few of the faculty and hear about how the program is evolving. Graduate programs are really one of the three pillars of our profession, along with workers and employers, and I think they could do more to promote change, especially with employers. I also really enjoyed a presentation by Jessica Whu Lee about the new EDI Strategies in Recruitement Toolkit which was engaging and programmatic.
I also escaped to do my favourite hike on the north shore one afternoon, the full Lynn Loop in Lynn Headwaters. Here are the boulders.
Links / Fragments:
A short list this week as I was travelling.
Decolonizing Teaching and Learning Through Embodied Learning
“What is important to point out is that relationships of power are never enacted merely in the form of intellectual encounters. Most intellectual encounters entail a confrontation of bodies, which are differently inscribed. Power plays are both enacted and absorbed by people physically, as they assert or challenge authority, and the marks of such confrontations are stored in the body”
“As with photography, today’s debates about AI often overlook how conceptions of human creativity are themselves shaped by commercialization and labor”
Liberating Our Homes From the Real Estate–Industrial Complex
“A unique twist central to the why of greigification is that the neutral gray colors are integral to this new post-digital kind of unreality. The more uniform the color, the easier it is to apply postproduction features without them looking contrived, and the easier it is to drop in virtual furniture, as the even, diffuse light enhanced by gray as a color helps soften the edges of the virtual furniture, blending them into “reality.” The light in these photos does not appear to come from any specific direction, so the weird shadows “cast” by 3-D furniture don’t seem too out of place. It is entirely possible thanks to the significant expenses saved by eliminating physical staging that greige might not be done with us, even though we seem to be done with it.”
“The internet is increasingly a set of protocols* for distributing people in physical space (among its countless other functions). That maps that Nunn describes are one such protocol, opening up new territory for smoother access in a global marketplace. Heightened consumer awareness of supply chains and the rise of e-commerce conceal the awkward fact that we are being guided toward our destinations as efficiently as our packages, increasingly optimized for this digital supply chain like shipping containers.”