Author Archives: David Gaertner
Improving Online Instruction
As a final, “in-class,” assignment, the students in my knowledge dissemination course were charged with brainstorming 3 things they wished instructors would improve on in their online teaching. They were then asked to prototype a knowledge dissemination plan to best get that information to professors. They had 20 minutes. With their permission, I am […]
Job — Digital Pedagogies Facilitator (GAA)
Pay rate: $25 per hour Hours per week: 10 to 20 depending on availability Length of employment: Summer 2020 and potentially into Fall 2021 Application deadline: June 25, 2020 To apply: send your CV and cover letter to david.gaertner@ubc.ca Background: The Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS) is developing FNIS 100: Indigenous Foundations for online delivery. FNIS 100 […]
GRA to help develop a Place and Power requirement for the BA degree.
Pay rate: $27 to $32 per hour, depending on experience Hours per week: 10 to 20 depending on availability Length of employment: Summer 2020 and potentially into Fall 2021 Application deadline: May 15th,, 2020 To apply: send your CV and cover letter to david.gaertner@ubc.ca Background: The Faculty of Arts is attending to historical and institutional […]
Writing in Relation: FNIS 300—A Summary of Engagement
Dear FNIS 300, Thank you for all of your work and attention this term. FNIS 300 can be a challenging course, both for the students and for the instructor, because it aims to weave writing fundamentals (clarity, concision, summary, citation, etc.) together with theoretical approaches to writing as developed within, or alongside, Indigenous studies. We […]
#CovidCampus
Dear Colleagues, This is a short post summarizing some of the research I have done over the past few days in preparation to move my UBC classes online. I owe a debt of gratitude to all of the generous scholars who have posted materials on Twitter and elsewhere–most specifically Jacqueline Wernimont and Cathy N. Davidson […]
Recoding Relations: Dispatches from the Symposium for Indigenous New Media
David Gaertner and Melissa Haberl In June 2018, scholars, developers, artists, and community members from over twenty institutions and three continents gathered on the ancestral and unceded territory of the WSÁNEĆ, Lkwungen, and Wyomilth peoples to participate in the inaugural Symposium for Indigenous New Media (SINM). As part of the University of Victoria’s annual Digital […]
“the road to reconciliation is paved with g—dintentions”: Lack as Resistance in Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer
Joshua Whitehead’s inaugural book of poetry, Full-Metal Indigiqueer is a series of poems told through Zoa, a trickster figure rendered through the lens of technology. Whitehead combines the figures of the singularity, virus, and hacker into a narrator that inhabits and deconstructs the Western literary cannon and popular media culture by infiltrating and re-writing the […]
Indigenous Speculative Fiction Definitions & Questions
Below are definitions of Indigenous speculative fiction brainstormed at the end of term by students in English 373: Indigenous Speculative Fiction. You can read the syllabus for that class, including the reading list that these definitions are built from, here. We began the course with this simple definition of sf: Speculative fiction uses genre conventions […]
Strategic Plans for the Apocalypse: Critical Engagement with Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves
Groups of 4-5 Assignment Framework Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves ends with a new beginning. While capitalist-driven climate change is leading to the decimation of settler nation states (and the rapid decline of the settler population), French and his family are full of hope for the futures of Indigenous peoples—particularly now that Isaac, who holds […]
ENGL 373: Indigenous Speculative Fiction
Note: In the early marketing materials for this class I used a creative commons image of Marina Bay Sand and the Gardens by the Bay supertrees in Singapore. Using this image for a course like this erases Singapore’s own colonial history and the oppression of the Indigenous Malays. I have removed the image, but it may […]
