Readings will be selected from provocative works, such as Jean Baudrillard's In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Paul Virilio's Speed and Politics, Kroker and Weinstein's Data Trash, J.G. Ballard's Crash, and William Gibson's Neuromancer. Such questions have been asked over time, in different places, and had many different answers. To Canadians, identity is a puzzling and challenging matter. We have a French Quebec and an English Canada, yet we also see ourselves as a multicultural society. It illuminates the Canadian experience, by looking at Canada's history but also by stepping outside, using the creation and breakup of Yugoslavia to explore identity, culture and nationality and to give students new perspectives.
Sources range from histories to literature to the experience each participant brings to the seminar.
This seminar will focus on the challenge of responding to contentious environmental issues in Canada. In the first half of the course, we will look at stakeholder participation in environmental issues. The emphasis in the first half will be on how these stakeholder groups work together, or against each other, in responding to these environmental issues. Methods of consensus building and conflict resolution will be explored in order to form effective responses to these issues. In the second half of this course, creative and interactive approaches will be used to examine four Canadian environmental challenges.