Entering UBC in the BFA program, Erica Baker was set on visual arts. It wasn’t until she took first-year classes in Political Science and Women and Gender Studies that she began to reroute her academic journey. Erica discovered the First Nations Studies Program, which allows her to take an array of social sciences courses and learn about BC history. “Majoring in First Nation Studies and minoring in Visual Arts is a great way to balance two things I love,” said Erica.

When her first nation signs its first-ever treaty, Stephanie Charlie wants to be there. “I want to help my community,” says Charlie, a graduating UBC Arts student and member of Cowichan Tribes, one of Canada’s largest First Nation communities, located in Duncan on Vancouver Island. “That is why I plan to run for councilor in our next election.

The University of British Columbia welcomes Gage Averill, a world renowned ethnomusicologist, as the new dean in the Faculty of Arts, beginning July 1, 2010.

For twelve students this summer, the classroom is going global. When course work meets citizenship, the result is Sociology 435. The course integrates regular classroom-based teaching with experiential learning, connecting theoretical knowledge to everyday practices and encouraging students to be responsible citizens globally and locally.

Students Travis Allan and Bryn Runkle use their training in the Social Sciences in their jobs as research assistants in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems.

Where carbon cash flows, and international intrigue coincide, there you will find Arts undergraduate students Travis Allan and Bryn Runkle. Hailing from the International Relations Program and the Department of Economics respectively, Travis Allan and Bryn Runkle are using the skills they’ve learned in Arts to help an agricultural sciences professor study some of the implications of the Kyoto Protocol. “Other faculties don’t always have people with the skills we learn in Arts,” says Runkle. “The fact that we are in Arts allows these professors to tap into different sources of expertise.”

After searching for research opportunities on campus, Allan and Runkle secured positions with Professor Katherine Baylis, a professor of food and resource economics who teaches in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC.

Baylis says she had never hired undergraduates as research assistants before meeting Allan and Runkle. But she was quickly impressed with the skills of both students. “I was very lucky with both Travis and Bryn,” she says. “Very good students, very intelligent.”

Coffee and Carbon Training

Under Baylis’s guidance, Allan and Runkle have taken part in several long-term research projects over the past year, exploring subjects ranging from the legal acrobatics of the softwood lumber dispute to the actual fairness of Fair Trade coffee. More recently, they’ve been studying a process known as carbon trading, one of the procedures put forward by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As Allan explains, carbon trading allows a company emitting less than its quota of greenhouse gases to sell “credit” to another company that is exceeding theirs.

It might be very expensive for a factory owner to make the necessary structural changes to reduce emissions in his own plant, says Allan. By the rules of the carbon trading system, however, he could pay a farmer to adopt low-till plowing methods, which keep more greenhouse gasses trapped in the soil. The result would be the same overall reduction in high-atmosphere emissions, at a potentially much lower cost.

The process becomes more complicated in cases where the companies engaged in trading are based in different countries and governed by different laws. It’s this type of study that depends on Allan and Runkle’s backgrounds in political science and international economics. “A lot of the time it’s trying to sleuth down information in terms of what the governments are doing, because it’s not necessarily transparent,” says Allan. “When you’re looking at governments, it’s not as cut and dry as just saying, ‘Oh, we have strong property rights.’ or ‘Oh, the law says this.’”

“My International Relations and Political Science training has been really invaluable at providing me with deeper insights.”

Realizing the Relation between Research and Arts

Before they began working, however, neither Allan nor Runkle were sure there was a market for these kinds of skills in a research position. “I thought research was only something that Science students did,” says Allan.

But having developed a rapport with a number of professors during their third year, Allan and Runkle began asking around to see if any them would hire undergraduates to do research work. After several months of trying, both students succeeded in obtaining research positions with Baylis, and have been working with her ever since.

Allan and Runkle agree that the skills they’ve developed doing research for Baylis will be of great use to them in their further studies; Runkle in his Economics Honours degree at UBC, and Allan at the University of Toronto Law School.

In giving advice to undergraduate students looking for research work, Baylis suggests taking the initiative and approaching professors directly. “Going in and asking and being a bit proactive about it is useful, because most of the time money comes from grant applications, and professors don’t necessarily think to request specific funding unless they’ve been approached,” says Baylis. “Totally believe in yourself,” adds Runkle.

Sending valentines may not be the most obvious method of political campaigning, but it was one of the ideas adopted by the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in their campaign for the vote.

Cait McKinney (BA English Honours, ’06) came across these witty and pointedly political historical records as part of a research project completed for the English honours seminar she took in her final semester of study at UBC with Professor Mary Chapman.

Political Persuasion

The valentine cards, sent to anti-suffrage American congressmen and President Thomas Woodrow Wilson on Valentine’s Day 1916, are personally tailored messages that used tongue-in-cheek rhymes and cartoons to advocate for suffrage. McKinney’s project and website includes reproductions of the previously unpublished valentines accompanied by critical annotations and an essay.

Working With Experts

To compile it, McKinney worked closely with the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum in Washington, DC, dedicated to the evolving role of women and their contributions to society through the continuing story of women’s pursuit for equality. Museum staff helped McKinney track down some of the valentines, and also scanned these for the project. The Sewall-Belmont House recently featured McKinney’s website in their online newsletter, a publication that reaches more than 2,500 readers.

“I wanted the students to experience, even vicariously, the thrill I have when I go to the archives and snoop around and find things,” says Professor Chapman, who taught the research-based seminar on American suffrage print culture. Prior to teaching the course, Chapman had conducted research in Sewall-Belmont House archives.

Primary Research A Great Learning Opportunity

“Most of the research that we get to do as undergrads is a new take on things that have already been done,” adds McKinney, who welcomed the opportunity to tackle research involving primary sources and then present her findings using the web. “Dr. Chapman wanted us to explore how we could use the Internet as a tool for letting other people gain access to either research that has not gotten a lot of attention, or is in danger of effectively going out of print,” McKinney says. “That’s particularly a big issue when you’re talking about women’s history because sadly there’s still not a lot of money devoted to publishing this kind of stuff,” she adds.

When McKinney first signed up for the honours seminar, she thought studying the suffrage movement would be a drag. Her original research gave her the chance to find an angle that interested her — the valentines and their representations of female sexuality. “It’s an example of how suffragists were really cunning in the way that they formed their arguments and eventually managed to win the vote by appealing to men on their own terms,” said McKinney. “They’re playing with the male idea of woman-as-object to be sexually conquered —they’re throwing it back in their critics’ faces. That’s why these valentines are so subversive and so effective: because they take the argument that was always thrown at feminists during that time period — that women were to be controlled and used by men and were not suited to voting — and make it their own.

More about McKinney

McKinney was a well-known undergraduate at UBC — she edited the AMS Insider, the student planner that is distributed to students every year. She also worked at the wellness centre as a peer educator and was active with the UBC Film Society as advertising manager and social coordinator. While she has plans to get back to school to pursue graduate studies in cultural theory, in the long term, she plans to continue doing what she’s doing now — writing with a youth focus. She currently works as a writer and researcher for Free The Children in Toronto, an international charity that seeks to raise awareness of global poverty amongst youth, and empower young people to realize that they can have an impact on the world.

By Alexandra Chu, BA ’07 in English Literature and a minor in History.