Local and Global Engagement

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 McKinney’s project and website includes reproductions of the previously unpublished valentines accompanied by critical annotations and an essay.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.

As a directed studies project in the First Nations Studies Program, Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault recently completed What I Learned in Class Today, a film documenting the responses of nine students to intentional and unintentional occurrences of racism.

Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault say their video project began as a vent session in a course they were taking with First Nations Studies Professor Linc Kesler.

“We would start the class by telling stories about classes we were in,” relates Crey, a recent graduate of the program.

The stories, she adds, were a way of dealing with some of the offensive and ignorant statements they had heard about Aboriginal people — not on the street, but right in their classes at UBC.

“They were kind of funny, they were, of course, kind of absurd,” Crey says of the remarks of some UBC students and professors.

The statements were profoundly hurtful, often for no other reason than the fact that non-Aboriginal students sometimes forget that in talking about the historic challenges faced by Canada’s First Nations, they are talking about issues that Aboriginal students among them have experienced themselves.

Noting a pattern, Kesler observed that it would be a good idea to gather the stories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students alike.

That suggestion lit a fire under Crey and Perreault — both senior undergraduate students at the time. They were highly interested in developing a resource that would help fellow students and faculty discuss sensitive inter-cultural issues without hurting, or alienating people.

As a directed studies project in the First Nations Studies Program, Crey and Perreault recently completed What I Learned in Class Today.

Video, they discovered, was a perfect medium, especially for getting uncomfortable first-person experiences out in the open.

They’ve screened a preliminary version of the video at several forums, including UBC’s Realities of Race conference in March 2007. In each case, audience members have been struck by the honesty of the students, who express their stories in their own words.

“You read a report, you can look at statistics, but actually being faced with students at UBC right now who are experiencing these things is pretty powerful.”

Dara Kelly is one Aboriginal student interviewed in the film. A member of the Fraser Valley Le’qa:mel First Nation, Kelly was in an English class with a focus on Aboriginal authors last year when one student prefaced a group discussion by asking why Aboriginal people were so “screwed up.”

For Kelly, that comment felt like a slap in the face, and in the film she candidly discusses why she finds the remark totally unacceptable.

“At the same time, when that kind of incident happens, it’s almost so shocking, or unbelievable, or hurtful that nobody says anything, and nobody knows what to do,” she says.

That’s one of the reasons Crey and Perreault created the video in the first place — the aim is to talk about these discussions, and to acknowledge that these aren’t just difficult for Aboriginal students.

People may recognize that something is racist, or insensitive, but not know what to do, or say, underscore Crey and Perreault.

Crey and Perreault say they intend to widen the scope of the project and add more interviews, as well as related classroom material, to accompany the film.

With the broad goal of removing an institutional barrier to Aboriginal post-secondary education, they plan on crafting their project to make it a resource for teachers at UBC and other institutions, something relevant to larger, multi-ethnic audiences.

“This video is here and it’s available,” Perreault says, “so let’s start talking about it instead of not talking about it, or talking about it in the hallway after class.”

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By Bryan Zandberg (BA, 2006, in French and Spanish). Bryan is a former editor with The Ubyssey.

While many students spend their summers backpacking through Southeast Asia, Lisa Davidson traveled to Cambodia for an entirely different reason — she wanted to learn about children’s rights and labour, not from a textbook, but in the flesh.

UBC Postdoctoral Fellow Stefan Dollinger is taking English students out of the classroom and placing them into the lab as he heads the revision of the Dictionary of Canadianisms.

The project will be the first of many to come out of the Canadian English Laboratory and aims to provide an updated version of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP2). Published in 1967, the first edition was not consistently maintained, leaving it outdated. Dollinger hopes to update the Dictionary while adding new entries from the last 40 years. 

The team behind the second version of the Dictionary of Canadianisms has already discovered several new “Canadianisms”, or words and phrases that are unique to Canadian English. There are even some examples of words that originated on the UBC campus.

They’ve found that the oldest citation of the word “creamo” dates back to a 1925 version of the Ubyssey newspaper. Similarly, the drink “Brown Cow” was traced back to a 1976 edition.

Dollinger, who is involved in many research projects with the Canadian English Laboratory, hopes for the success of the Dictionary to be widespread. He aims to make the Dictionary available to Canadian universities and libraries to ensure the general public has access.

The Canadian English Laboratory employs many volunteer and paid student workers, including third year English honours student Sam Chung, and fourth year English Language student Cicily Cooper.

“I’m a research assistant in the Canadian English Language Lab,” Cooper explained, “We ‘harvest’ citations from periodicals we get through huge databases and find words that are Canadianisms.”

“I’ve even found some from the 1700s and 1800s!” Chung said. “We enter the words into the Bank of Canadian English and that’s pretty much it.”

Chung and Cooper both got involved with the project after taking Dollinger’s English 229 class on Canadian English words. Students in the class were asked to research Canadian words for a project; those that did well were given the opportunity to volunteer or work with Dollinger in his lab. Dollinger tries to include some work with the Bank of Canadian English in most of his courses.

Cooper and Chung excelled in their positions and were given paid part-time positions for the summer.

In addition to working with the Dictionary, Chung and Cooper were able to present their research at the Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Conference (MURC) last year. They were part of a five person student research team that worked with Dollinger to create a presentation for the conference. Their panel was one of only two groups presenting research in English, which Chung thinks is a shame.

“People have a mentality that research is exclusively reserved for sciences,” Chung said, “MURC was predominantly Science students with the odd Arts students who were mostly from Psychology.”

“I really want to see more Arts students presenting!”

Chung cites Dollinger’s help in the MURC as invaluable, and is grateful for the close relationship they have developed.

“He taught me everything step by step; he’s really caring.” Chung said, “The thing about Professor Dollinger is that he uses students as instruments of research so you’re not just working under him, you’re working alongside him.”

“I’m very indebted to him,” Chung added.

Cooper enjoys being a part of something that hasn’t already been studied in a classroom.

“As an undergrad you rarely feel like you’re a part of something new and different,” Cooper explained. “That’s what’s cool about being in research. I’m finding things that haven’t been found before.”

“I think it’s helped me realize all the opportunities that are out there and feel less limited. Doing this research has made me see there’s more than I can imagine!”

By Meghan Roberts (BA 2008, English Literature and International Relations).