Coming soon to a Wal-Mart near you
Much has been said about Wal-Mart’s impact on “Main Street,” but a visiting Fulbright Scholar is studying the retail giant’s relationship with the North American media. Michael Dorsher, 2008-09 Fulbright Scholar Visiting Chair in Media at McGill’s Institute for the Study of Canada will deliver a talk entitled “The Wal-Marting of Canada’s Media: How Canada’s Largest Company Stifles Its Most Influential Industry” at the Canada-U.S Fulbright Lecture.
Dorsher comes to McGill from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he has been a journalism professor since 2000. He is the co-author of “Controversies in Media Ethics” and author of several entries in the “Encyclopedia of Journalism”; both books are due out in 2009. In collaboration with colleagues from McGill and Manitoba’s Brandon University, Dorsher will conduct the first comprehensive, systematic study of how new media and traditional media organizations in Canada have covered Wal-Mart, North America’s largest employer, in contrast to the U.S. media. He also will examine how Wal-Mart has responded to the media in both countries.
Canada-U.S. Fulbright Lecture – “The Wal-Marting of Canada’s Media: How Canada’s Largest Company Stifles Its Most Influential Industry:” Wednesday, April 8, 4:30 p.m.; Faculty Club. RSVP’s are encouraged. For more information, call 514-398-2010.
The push for IP reform
Media@McGill, the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy present a free public lecture by renowned intellectual property advocate and Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) James Love on “NGO efforts to reform the World Intellectual Property Organization.” Whether you’re in development studies, art history, communications, sociology, law, business, or any other field that depends on access to knowledge, culture, education, the Internet, medicines, or even land, you will find something of interest in this talk.
Aside from his KEI duties, Love is also the U.S. co-chair of the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) Working Group on Intellectual Property, chair of Essential Inventions, an advisor to the X-Prize Foundation on a prize for TB diagnostics, and a member of the UNITAID Expert Group on Patent Pools, the MSF Working Group on Intellectual Property, the Stop-TB Partnership working group on new drug development and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards. He advises a number of UN agencies, national governments, international and regional intergovernmental organizations and public health NGOs, and is the author of a number of articles and monographs on innovation and intellectual property rights.
James Love: NGO efforts to reform the World Intellectual Property Organization; Tuesday, April 7; 5:30 p.m., room W-215, Arts building. For more information contact Tammy Jean White at 514-398-8371.
Repath docs: Visions and visionaries
Canadian artist Brion Gysin had a dream and he wanted you to have one, too. Hoping to create a new medium through which humans could experience life, he invented the dream machine, essentially a 100-watt light bulb, a motor, and a rotating cylinder with cutouts that Gysin thought could produce a “drugless high” and stimulate creativity in those who stared into it. Through interviews with and profiles of Gysin and some of the dream machine’s more famous devotees, like Kurt Cobain and William Burroughs, Director Nik Sheehan’s 2007 documentary FLicKeR asks crucial questions about the nature of art and consciousness, and imagines a humanity liberated to explore its creativity in complete freedom.
Architect Michael Reynolds is a visionary of a more practical, but no less radical, nature.
Thirty years ago, he imagined a home that heats itself, that provides its own water, that grows its own food, needs no expensive technology, recycles its own waste, and has its own power source – and set out to build it. The subject of the 2007 documentary Garbage Warrior, Reynolds has been fighting ever since to bring his concept to the public. He believes that in an age of ecological instability and impending natural disaster, his buildings can – and will – change the way we live.
FLicKeR (April 5) and Garbage Warrior (April 19), Super Science Documentary Films; Sundays; 4 p.m. Redpath Museum; Auditorium; 859 Sherbrooke St. W. Free with a donation to the Museum. For information visit www.mcgill.ca/redpath/whats_on/documentaries or contact Ingrid Birker: 514-398-4086 ext. 4094 or email ingrid.birker@mcgill.ca
It’s sign-up time for the spring Minis!
A pair of McGill Mini programs get underway in the coming weeks.
The Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology is offering a six-week lecture series for the public, taught by dynamic professors who want to share their passion for teaching. Mini-EdPsych 2009: Learning, Knowing, Thinking, Healing runs every Thursday evening from April 23 to May 28, 2009. The series kicks off with a lecture entitled Literacy: The future of teaching the world to read, by Dr. Robert Savage. Registration deadline is April 23.
The McGill Mini-Music series will take place every Tuesday evening from 6 to 7:30 p.m. April 28 to June 9, 2009 at the Schulich School of Music’s Tanna Schulich Hall. Prof. Douglas McNabney, Chamber Music, Department of Performance, delivers the opening lecture on Haydn: Patriarch of the String Quartet. On May 5, Prof. Lloyd Whitesell, Musicology Area, Department of Music Research, discusses the Music of Joni Mitchell. Space is limited. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis. Register now.
McGill minis: For more information visit www.mcgill.ca/edu-ecp/miniedpsych or
Coming soon to a Wal-Mart near you
Much has been said about Wal-Mart’s impact on “Main Street,” but a visiting Fulbright Scholar is studying the retail giant’s relationship with the North American media. Michael Dorsher, 2008-09 Fulbright Scholar Visiting Chair in Media at McGill’s Institute for the Study of Canada will deliver a talk entitled “The Wal-Marting of Canada’s Media: How Canada’s Largest Company Stifles Its Most Influential Industry” at the Canada-U.S Fulbright Lecture.
Dorsher comes to McGill from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he has been a journalism professor since 2000. He is the co-author of “Controversies in Media Ethics” and author of several entries in the “Encyclopedia of Journalism”; both books are due out in 2009. In collaboration with colleagues from McGill and Manitoba’s Brandon University, Dorsher will conduct the first comprehensive, systematic study of how new media and traditional media organizations in Canada have covered Wal-Mart, North America’s largest employer, in contrast to the U.S. media. He also will examine how Wal-Mart has responded to the media in both countries.
Canada-U.S. Fulbright Lecture – “The Wal-Marting of Canada’s Media: How Canada’s Largest Company Stifles Its Most Influential Industry:” Wednesday, April 8, 4:30 p.m.; Faculty Club. RSVP’s are encouraged. For more information, call 514-398-2010.