Lansdowne Lectures
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Item Full fathom 5000 : The expedition of HMS Challenger and the strange animals it found in the deep sea(2025-10-16) Bell, GrahamThe Lansdowne Lecture tells the story of one of the great voyages of history. The circumnavigation made by HMS Challenger had momentous consequences: not only uncovering a whole new range of animals whose existence had never before been suspected, but also kick-starting the exploration of the oceans. It was the first to explore the deep sea it was not even known for sure whether any animals could survive in the perpetually cold, dark waters of the abyss under a crushing pressure. The voyage settled this question for good by capturing the strange and bizarre creatures that live a kilometre or more below the surface of the sea.Item Lecture by Tony Feher, Visual Arts(2004-11-17) Feher, TonyItem On the importance of good beginnings(2025-10-07) Thayer, ZanetaThe idea that stress can influence our health has become well accepted. But did you know that stress experienced in early life, including by your parents before you were born, could also impact your health? This talk will describe case studies of how parental and childhood exposure to traumatic experiences, such as residential schools and genocide, can affect individual health and wellbeing. While these early experiences are significant, our research shows these outcomes are not set in stone. We will discuss concrete actions that we can take as a society, as friends, and as individuals to support healing and improve everyone’s health and well-being.Item Remembering, restorying, and reclaiming in the wake of erasure(2025-09-13) Ambo, Theresa Jean; Stewart, Kelly LeahWhat becomes possible when remembering histories are led by Indigenous communities and accountable to Indigenous homelands? Drawing from California-based examples, this lecture offers a guide for how the decolonial practices of remembering, restorying, and reclaiming can reimagine archival work, institutional accountability, and public memory by centering Indigenous knowledge, sovereignty, and ceremonial care to construct prosperous Indigenous futures.Item The human conceptual system(2005-03-16) Barsalou, Lawrence W.Item Social movements and conflict change(2005-03-22) Siegel, RevaItem Stayin’ alive: A practical look at the business of being a dramatist(2005-03-11) Ledoux, PaulItem Oxygen and the rise of animal life on earth(2005-03-24) Falkowski, PaulItem The gift in the animal: Hunting, human-animal relations and exchange theory in anthropology(2006-02-27) Nadasdy, PaulItem Social science and policy-making: Perspectives in sociology(2005-03-10) Dickinson, HarleyItem Old-growth forests, owls, and conservation paradigms(2005-01-27) Franklin, Jerry F.Item Invasive species, novel ecosystems and no analogue futures : challenges for restoration theory and practice(2008-05-22) Hobbs, RichardItem Archaeology of intangibility monumentality in Cameroon(2012-02-07) David, NicholasItem Desistance is dead, long live desistance?: Can a 1990s theory be relevant for a world in crisis in 2025(2025-05-15) Maruna, ShaddOver the past three decades desistance from crime has become one of the most popular areas of study in criminology. Emerging out of life course and developmental criminology of the 1990s, the study of desistance stood in sharp contrast with the obsession in late 20th Century criminology in identifying “superpredators,” “psychopaths,” and other persistent or “career criminals.” Desistance research also challenged rehabilitation models and inspired strengths-based mutual aid work among people in prison and on probation. It was the right theory for the right moment in criminology in many ways. However, desistance research may have outlasted its relevance in the current political climate. As it became mainstreamed, desistance research has been rightly criticized for being too individualistic, ignoring the structural/political factors impacting individual journeys.Item Transgender & gender-diverse children & youth's development & psychological & brain health: A biopsychosocial perspective(2025-06-11) VanderLaan, DougDespite unprecedented societal and scientific interest in the needs of transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) children and youth, substantial inequities remain. Attention towards this topic tends to be concentrated on Euro-American and clinical populations, resulting in failures to consider large segments of the TGD population in Canada and globally. A multi-disciplinary, multimethod program of cross-cultural and community-focused research sheds light on TGD children and youth who are often overlooked in Canada and in Thailand. With a biopsychosocial framework in mind, a series of studies elucidate the interplay of biological, cognitive, and sociocultural factors in TGD people’s identity development as well as their psychological and brain health. Collectively, these studies point to a need for macro-level changes to address systemic barriers as well as future avenues for improving TGD children and youth’s well-being.Item Collaborating with the immune system to treat antibiotic-resistant superbugs(2025-04-23) Nizet, VictorThe Department of Biochemistry & Microbiology presents the 2025 Lansdowne Lecturer Dr. Victor Nizet, Distinguished Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Israni Biomedical Research Facility. This public lecture is titled “Collaborating with the Immune System to Treat Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs”.Item When do state-dependent local projections work?(2022-09-07) Gonçalves, SílviaSílvia Gonçalves is a Professor of Economics at McGill University specializing in the development of bootstrap methods for the analysis of economic and financial data. Her current research topics include bootstrap inference for time series and spatially dependent data, bootstrap inference in the presence of bias, and estimation and inference of impulse response functions in nonlinear macroeconomic models. Professor Gonçalves currently serves as a Co-Editor of the Journal of Financial Econometrics and as an Associate Editor of the Econometrics Journal, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Time Series Analysis, and the Portuguese Economic Journal. She is an elected Fellow of the Society of Financial Econometrics and of the International Association of Applied Econometrics. Before joining the Department of Economics at McGill University in 2017, she was a Professor of Economics at the University of Western Ontario and at the Université de Montréal. She is a research member of CIREQ and CIRANO and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. UVic’s Public Lectures Series features accomplished individuals from a vast array of academic and research endeavours. As host of this lecture series, UVic continues its commitment to making a vital impact on people, places and the planet.Item Beyond imperial aporia: Taiwan and the Inter-Asia work in global transformations(2025-01-28) Wang, Andy Chih-MingIf colonialism is what made modernity, the American empire is the infrastructure of the present, the conditions of possibility that frame and organize the world and our knowledge of it. However, with the re-election of Donald Trump as the next American president who pledges to expel undocumented migrants, to erect a “tariff wall,” and to demand “protection money” from its allies, the American empire is now facing the possibility of its dismantling, a situation that while intellectually willing and jubilantly welcomed by some (the Arab World for instance), may sound like a bad news to others (such as Taiwan), given their worry about the other empire—China. The possibility of a dismantled American empire, and the threat of another emerging empire, creates an intellectual aporia, a political conundrum and a state of puzzlement, that constrains our understanding of the present and imagination of the future. How should critical humanities help us deal with this futurity by envisioning global transformation beyond the age of empire? Or is there room to reconfigure the meaning of empire for survival in the present? This lecture will address this weighty question by first offering a critical reflection on the political and intellectual conditions in Taiwan, as the island nation is gaslighted by both the threat of Chinese invasion and the worry of US abandonment so much so that the discussion of peace becomes unutterable. This “imperial aporia,” the inability to think beyond the terms of empire, particularly about and beyond China, is a serious problem in East Asia, but one not as heeded in the Asian studies of North America. The Inter-Asia cultural studies (IACS), a translocal intellectual movement and network that emerged since the 1990s, is an effort to address this problem. Reflecting on the work of the IACS collective in the last two decades, the lecture intends to explicate how it envisions global transformations through inter-referential methodology as a form of relational thinking and connective history, and how its translocal, translational alliance may generate solidarity and a new subjectivity against empire. Andy Chih-ming WANG currently holds the position of Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica (Taiwan). Additionally, he serves as the Chair of the Inter-Asian Cultural Studies Society. He is a prominent thinker in the Inter-Asian tradition, which spearheads placed-based collaborative research on interconnected questions of knowledge production, decolonization, the Cold War, and political movements in Asia. His articles have been published in renowned journals such as Contemporary Literature, Geopolitics, boundary 2, Amerasia, and positions, as well as in edited volumes, and translations. Currently, he is engaged in writing his second book titled Multiple Returning: Asian American Literature and Post/Cold War Entanglements.Item Religion and spirituality are not something we have (or do not have), they are something we do(2024-10-24) Hjelm, TitusOur commonsense ways of recognizing and talking about ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ are problematic. Looking at phenomena as varied as rock music, meditation, and the asylum process, I argue that religion and spirituality are not something institutions or individuals possess but are rather constantly co-created and recreated in human interaction. In this lecture, I reflect on the ways our conventional understandings of ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ sometimes hinder rather than help us understand the world.