This year’s DARE recipients produced meaningful work across all disciplines offered in LA&PS. Over the summer, each student played an integral role in coordinating projects that added valuable scholarly inquiry to the social sciences, humanities, and professional studies.

Each recipient was awarded $5,000 and paired with faculty members to explore urgent research subjects, including health care, work policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital data collection practices, issues impacting diaspora communities and more.

To commemorate the experiences from this year’s competition, LA&PS developed a virtual gallery showcasing each student and the DARE Project descriptions of the instructor-led research objectives.

“DARE is a wonderful opportunity to nurture mentorship and collaboration between instructors and students,” says Ravi de Costa, associate dean of Research & Graduate Studies. “This year’s research projects demonstrate the range and quality of the work taking place in LA&PS. Our faculty is dedicated to supporting creative and impactful work across all of our disciplines, and the DARE competition continues to expand on these efforts.”

For the award recipients, the projects serve as key stepping stones to future endeavours – whether in their respective fields beyond the university setting or continued academic research. Through their reflections, many of this year’s winners cited the unique hands-on experience as their favourite aspect of the process.

Fourth-year political science student, Kiana Therrien-Tomas, was pleased with the practical skills she acquired.

Looking back on the time spent working with Department of Politics Professor��Simone Bohn��on a project titled, “Collaborating with the state: a double-edged sword? The Brazilian Women’s Movement under the Workers’ Party administrations,” Therrien-Tomas explains, “this experience has��been��a great addition to my learning and professional development. It is an��honour��to receive this award.��I can now��proudly��state that I have taken part in all stages of the research process, and apply��the knowledge gained from��this experience towards the completion of my undergraduate degree and my��endeavours��in law school.”

Fourth-year Disaster and Emergency Management student, Tiana Putric, echoed these positive sentiments when detailing the experience working with Department of Communication & Media Studies Professor Jonathan Obar on the DARE project, “The Future of Big Data: Understanding Digital Service Data Retention Policies and Implications for Online Privacy.”

“DARE��was a transformative experience that left me with several new skills and insights,” said Putric.��“I gained experience collecting, analyzing, and summarizing��data��retention policies and contracts from global digital service providers, learned how to evaluate policies against privacy laws and normative regulatory philosophies, and contributed to the��data��retention body of knowledge.”

In congratulating this year’s recipients, LA&PS Dean J.J. McMurtry was delighted to see how far the award has come.

“This competition offers an excellent opportunity for students to examine, discover, critique and create with leading researchers in their fields,” he said. “Over the past four years, DARE has exemplified the truly diverse and global scope of the research being done in LA&PS. Once again, our students have exceeded expectations.”

The 2021 DARE gallery can be viewed on the��LA&PS website.

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The book, titled ¡SABÍA QUE NO SABÍA! and written in Spanish, is co-authored with Juan Carlos Aguirre and was published in 2021. The English translation is titled I Knew I Didn't Know.

The book discusses contemporary global issues and social phenomena such as culture, modernity, globalization, immigration-emigration, social inequalities, development, diversity, North-South relations and personal world views. It is a conversation on contemporary life, organized in five sections: reflections on the beings that we are; culture, generations and gender; interrogations about development; progress and modernity; and other worlds.

"The issues covered by the book echo critical conversations between two intellectuals and interactive sociological analysis on contemporary global issues and social phenomena," says Llambías-Wolff.

"We have tried to contribute in a more open and user-friendly language, by adding 160 footnotes for extra information. In this sense, we have considered the 'sociological imagination' of Wright Mills, who valued the relevance of everyday life to sociological perceptions."

Critical thinking, says Llambías-Wolff, starts with questions and though reflecting has never been an easy task, it is even less so now in these times of "intoxicating" levels of exposure to information.

The book focuses in on cultural understanding and cultural diversity, which Llambías-Wolff describes as a strength of 91��ɫ.

"It is what we do best at 91��ɫ; however – and unfortunately – we still have some non-conscious bias," he says. "Living in a global world should not be just a cliché sentence, but a true intellectual involvement."

Llambías-Wolff says another lesson learned from the research for this book is to better comprehend Voltaire, when he said that discord is the great evil of humanity and that tolerance is its only remedy.

To celebrate the launch of the book, there will be a virtual event scheduled in the upcoming months, as well as a workshop to be organized in Madrid in 2022.

For more, click��.

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Titled "Child Welfare and Youth Homelessness Prevention in Canada," the webinar will examine pandemic responses to homelessness across the nation. In response to the pandemic, some provinces and territories have placed temporary moratoriums on transitions from care. These measures have opened up opportunities to rethink what transitions should look like for youth moving forward. Youth who have had some type of involvement with child protection services over their lifetime are at increased risk of experiencing homelessness, and advocates have long argued more needs to be done to support young people during these times of transition.

Drawing upon emerging research and perspectives from the frontlines, attendees will learn about the long-term solutions that are needed to support youth when transitioning from care, ensuring no young person is prematurely forced out of care. The question that will be addressed is: How can we build on some of the recent promising developments to collectively rethink our approach to child protection?

Join Melanie Doucet, PhD social work and MtS Scholar with Lived Experience, senior researcher and project manager at the Child Welfare League of Canada and researcher with the Centre for Research on Children and Families at McGill University; Michael Ungar, founder and director of the Resilience Research Centre and Canada Research Chair in Child, Family and Community Resilience; and David French, managing director of A Way Home Canada, in a rich discussion on how to stop the pipeline of young people from the child welfare system into homelessness through focusing on well-being instead of keeping young people in survival mode.

To register for this Zoom event, visit .

Audience members will also learn about the innovative research and knowledge mobilization work of Making the Shift at 91��ɫ U, a youth homelessness social innovation lab with a mandate to make the shift from managing the crises of youth homelessness to a focus on prevention and housing stabilization.

Making the Shift is a Network of Centres of Excellence at 91��ɫ U, under the co-leadership of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness (91��ɫ U).

Courtesy of YFile.

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Proximities: Experiments in Nearness��(University of Minnesota Press)��is co-edited with��, who is a professor of Romance Languages & Literatures at Bowdoin College in Maine.

Today, disciplines and fields move consciously proximate to one another, in conversation and growing together. Books in the Proximities series think proximately, that is, in disciplinary tandem, about the relationships within and between the arts, literature and science, as well as how scholarship can best be in active dialogue with communities and the world around us today, and in the future. The series not only thinks across disciplines, but thinks about the continuities and crossings themselves, interrogating how and why their disciplinary proximities matter.

Proximities publishes work that is crafted with nearness in mind: human nearness to one another and the world around us; nearness to one another’s thoughts; to our written and unwritten pasts; to critical trends and crises; to our futures ahead. This kind of scholarship powerfully catalyzes awareness of what it means to work interdisciplinarily by challenging assumptions about disciplinary thinking from the outside in, and the inside out.

This new series is presented in collaboration with the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, an academic organization with members across disciplines, including the sciences, engineering, technology, computer science, medicine, the social sciences, the humanities and the arts. Cocchetto currently serves as president of the organization.

Cecchetto studies critical digital theory, sound and experimental media. He is an associate member of the graduate programs in Humanities and Film, as well as the 91��ɫ/Ryerson joint program in Communication & Culture; he is also a faculty associate with Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology and co-organizes the Tuning Speculation conferences and workshops as part of The Occulture.

Cecchetto’s published works include the monographs Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture (co-authored with The Occulture; Bloomsbury, 2017), Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and the forthcoming Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press, 2022). In addition to Proximities, he is a series editor of the para-academic Catalyst book series (Noxious Sector Press).

Faculty members who are interested in submitting a proposal to��Proximities��can contact the editors at��dcecchet@yorku.ca���ǰ���asaiber@bowdoin.edu��with a short description of your book project.

Courtesy of YFile.

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Professor Regina Rini, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition and core member of Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA), has a way of raising previously unimaginable moral questions that cut to the heart of things. She has done it again, this time in the esteemed��Times Literary Supplement. Her article, “The Last Mortals,” was released to a global audience in May 2019.

Rini starts with the supposition that biomedical advances could mean eternal life in one hundred years’ time. She then delves into the most troubling moral dilemma in this scenario: What happens to the generation prior to the lucky cohort with eternal life? What happens when these folks, the last mortals, come face to face with the immortals and fully realize the gravity of their loss? Their anguish, she imagines, would be acute.

“My aim is to show that dying is worse for the last mortals than for earlier generations. The advent of immortality actually worsens the lives of those who fall closest in never reaching it,” Rini explains.

Rini is the perfect person to dive deeply into this issue. Her work analyzes research from the social sciences, especially cognitive science and sociology, and through this lens, she determines then investigates key philosophical questions. She believes we cannot understand our individual moral decisions without also understanding how we relate to those of others.

Biomedical breakthroughs have got us this far

In the article, Rini first reminds us of the ever-expanding lifespan of Western civilization: If you were born in 1900, your lifespan was, on average, 47 years; if you were born in 1950, it was 68; if you were born today, you could possibly expect to see your 100th birthday. The human lifespan has so expanded that if you are currently under the age of 40, then you can plan to meet young people who will live to see the year 2157, Rini says.

This would be, of course, the result of consistent biomedical advancements, including vaccinations, new cancer treatment, transplants and much more. Medical research is also shifting from acute conditions, such as the flu, to chronic conditions including heart disease and diabetes – getting to the root of some of today’s most common causes of death. Furthermore, aging is largely determined by genes, which can be manipulated, Rini points out. This opens another avenue for a limitless lifespan.

Rini ferrets out the most disturbing moral question

Now comes the hard part. Rini considers the situation, the possibility of mortality, and ferrets out the most disturbing moral question within it. She asks: “What if this [eternal life] all happened sooner rather than later?” She throws out a date – 100 years from now – and suggests that anyone alive in 2119 is likely to live for centuries, even millennia, possibly forever. (One caveat of immortality is that, given statistics about deathly accidents, sooner or later all “immortals” would eventually die in some form of an accident.)

But what about those who just about make it to this hypothetical date of 2119, when immortality is possible? Rini elaborates on this conundrum: “What would it mean to realize that you very nearly got to live forever, but didn’t? What would it mean if we were increasingly forced to share social space with young people whose anticipated allotment of time massively dwarfs our own?”

The agony of nearly making it to eternity, when surrounded by those who’ve effortlessly achieved this simply by the date they were born, is profound. She elaborates: “It’s one thing to imagine whippersnappers coasting into the next century. It’s another to know many will see the next millennium. The proportions are terribly imbalanced, and their distribution arbitrary. This is a sure recipe for jealousy. The last mortals may be ghosts before their time, destined to look on in growing envy at the enormous stretches of life left to their near-contemporaries. In one sense, it will be the greatest inequity experienced in all human history.”

What does immortality mean, and do we really want it?

Switching gears to consider the life of the immortals, Rini next considers if an endless life is something that people would genuinely want. In most fiction works, this is shown to be boring, tedious and meaningless. The film “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray is a good example of this, as the lead character repeatedly wakes up to the same, inescapable day.

Rini also points out that if no one died, rampant overpopulation would certainly affect quality of life in a catastrophic way. Here, she unearths the fundamental human predicament: We may want to live forever, and do things to extend our lives, like eating right and not smoking, but the question of whether eternal life would be a blessing is unclear.

Rini’s article in the��Times Literary Supplement��is an accessible and hugely compelling read. She pushes through to the nucleus of moral questions, effortlessly drawing from a repertoire of thinkers from Greek philosophers Epicurus and Diogenes to the Roman Stoic Seneca, from feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir to J. R. R. Tolkien [Lord of the Rings], with an interesting fictional tangent about Sigmund Freud and an iPhone. Rini is an exceptional philosopher and thinker who, with everything she writes, takes readers on a veritable roller-coaster ride of highly charged moral dilemmas.

To read the article “The Last Mortals,” visit the��. To learn more about Rini, visit her��.

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at��; watch our new��, which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the��, a glimpse of the year’s successes.

By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ,��muellerm@yorku.ca

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Cinema & Media Arts Professor Brenda Longfellow will be presented with the AMPD Research Award in recognition of her outstanding work.

An accomplished documentary filmmaker, Longfellow’s films have been screened and broadcast internationally. She recently launched the interactive web documentary Offshore, funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada, and co-directed with Glen Richards and Helios Design Lab. Offshore can be viewed at .

As part of the research celebration, Longfellow will present a keynote talk and screening of her latest film,��Offshore. In her talk, titled “Petromelancholia: Offshore, Digital Activism and the Representational Challenge of Ecological Disaster,” Longfellow will speak about the interactive documentary. The film explores the next chapter of oil exploration, taking viewers hundreds of miles offshore and thousands of feet below the ocean floor where the hazards are immense, but the profits are bigger. Offshore exposes the catastrophic consequences when something goes wrong.

The presentation and lecture will take place in the Mirkopoulos Theatre, 004 Accolade East Building, Keele Campus. A reception will follow in the CIBC Lobby.

Offshore is the latest production in a storied career. Longfellow’s work has won a slew of prestigious awards, including: the Audience Award for Best Experimental Film for Dead Ducks at the Santa Cruz Film Festival (2011); a Bronze Remi Award for Weather Report at the Houston Film Festival (2008); Best Cultural Documentary for Tina in Mexico at the Havana International Film Festival (2002); a Canadian Genie for Shadowmaker/ Gwendolyn MacEwen, Poet (1998); and the Grand Prix at Oberhausen for Our Marilyn (1988). Other films include Gerda (1992), A Balkan Journey (1996) and Carpe Diem (2010).

She has also published articles on documentary, feminist film theory and Canadian cinema in Public, CineTracts, Screen and the Journal of Canadian Film Studies. She is a co-editor (with Scott MacKenzie and Tom Waugh) of the anthology The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (2013) and Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women Filmmakers (1992).

All are welcome to attend.

Courtesy of YFile.

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Eric Armstrong

Theatre professors are no strangers to the limelight, but for one 91��ɫ academic, Eric Armstrong, the cool factor is off the charts. He created the accent for a constructed language called Belter, used in the white-hot sci-fi television series “The Expanse,” set 200 years in the future. This new language, developed by linguist Nick Farmer with the assistance of Armstrong as dialect/accent coach, mashes up six existing languages.

The American series, the third season of which airs 2018, has a captivating premise: Humans have colonized the solar system and Mars has become a military power. One social class has not fared well in this world. The new language belongs to this group of people, called Belters, who survive by scavenging materials in a particular Asteroid Belt.

In this Q&A with Brainstorm, Armstrong�� ̶ ��who teaches voice, speech, dialects and Shakespearean text at 91��ɫ�� ̶ ��talks about the new language and the television show that are taking centre stage in his career.

Q: How did this gig on “The Expanse” transpire?

A: One day, I got a call from my agent, asking if I knew anything about made-up languages in science fiction shows. I have to admit, I’m a bit of a nerd. I had read a lot about what are called ‘con langs’ or constructed languages in the press, most notably due to “Game of Thrones.” Dothraki and Valyrian are two made-up languages in that show.

When I was brought in to speak with the show creators, they could see that I knew what I was talking about, even though it was a ‘first’ for me.

“One day, I got a call from my agent, asking if I knew anything about made-up languages in science fiction shows. I have to admit, I’m a bit of a nerd. I had read a lot about constructed languages.” – Eric Armstrong

Q: How did your career lead up to this position as dialect/accent coach on a hit television series?

A: I trained to be an actor and worked professionally in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal for about five years. I always felt an attraction to teaching voice. 91��ɫ had an MFA program in this field. One of my mentors was David Smukler, Canada’s foremost voice teacher at the time, who started the voice teacher diploma program here at 91��ɫ. I completed this program, then worked freelance for a year. And from then on, I’ve had full-time voice teaching jobs in Canada and the United States. I returned to 91��ɫ [as a faculty member] in 2003.

“Our acting classes at 91��ɫ are diverse; and that diversity motivates me to teach in a way that is inclusive… That’s very rewarding.” – Eric Armstrong

One of the jobs that I took early on teaching was at Brandeis University [Massachusetts] where I was the speech and accents teacher – a narrower niche in the voice teaching field. I felt a little underqualified, so I took the time to do further research. I started to coach professionally in the theatre in Boston. That got me on the path. After that, I went to Chicago, where I started to work on film and television on a much bigger scale. My first film coaching job was with the [British actor] Tom Wilkinson, who had just been nominated for an Academy Award.

Q: Belter is comprised of Chinese, Japanese, Slavic, Germanic and other languages. What was it like developing the accent for this fabricated language?

A: Belter is a creole, a combination of languages. Nick Farmer, creator of the Belter language, studied creoles and used the structure of many creoles to create a new creole. English is at the core of Belter. But he took many of these other languages that you referenced as ingredients.

To begin with, he created a basic dictionary. For this, he turned to different languages for the source words, then undertook a transformational process to create phonological rules. [Phonology is the study of how sounds are used in language. This includes how sounds interact with each other.]

So, Nick handed me the phonological rules [for Belter] and gave me some samples of what Belter sounded like. As I ‘auditioned’ for the show – really, it was more like an extended interview – ��I took those sounds and developed an overall feeling of the language.

At first, Belter felt like Jamaican, also a creole. But we didn’t want it to be exclusively one thing; we wanted it to feel global. So, I took elements from Chinese, European and English accents, and salted them in to the recipe as a means of counterbalancing the Jamaican accent. As a result, Belter seems familiar… but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Later, I was surprised to find out that a Singaporean accent sounds quite a lot like Belter.

Q: What’s next for you at 91��ɫ?

A: I’m currently working on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)-funded project on developing accent resources for the Indigenous performance community, which is underserved. This is a mandate I created for myself. For far too long, accent resources have primarily targeted mainstream actors. The industry is dominated by people who look like me, and I would like that to change.

Our acting classes at 91��ɫ are diverse; and that diversity motivates me to teach in a way that is inclusive… That’s very rewarding.

To learn more about the television show, visit the space.ca . To read an interview with Armstrong in Wired magazine, visit the . Armstong’s credits are listed in the Internet Movie Database, . For more information about Armstrong, visit his .

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at , watch the and see the .

By Megan Mueller, manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

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Author Mona Awad opened this year’s Canadian Writers in Person series with a riveting presentation about writing out emotional experiences.

An alumnae of 91��ɫ, Awad continued her studies, earning an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and an MScR in English literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her writing has appeared in���ѳ����ɱ��Ա��’s,��The Walrus,��Joyland,��Post Road,��St. Petersburg Review, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and English literature at the University of Denver, where her thesis project will be a novel.

During her visit to 91��ɫ, Awad discussed her debut novel,��13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, which came out in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for the 2017��Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

Awad told the audience that the earliest conception of this book dates back to her second year as an undergraduate student at 91��ɫ, when she heard a recording of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg reciting the poem Howl in a class she was taking. Haunted by the emotional rawness of that poem, she started thinking about exploring her own emotional experiences in her writing. First, she wrote a three-page long poem about aspects of her life as a fat girl, and although the emotions it conveyed felt true, she was still left longing for a way to explore these experiences more in depth.

Years later, she decided to tackle the topic in a novel. Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Awad organized her novel in 13 parts that allowed her to zoom in on a woman’s struggles with body image issues at different moments in her life. She said, “I wanted to bring the reader into Lizzie’s mind… I love stories that have a certain intimacy of voice.”

In 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Awad brings us into the mind of a woman who is deeply affected by the pressures of a society that values women primarily based on their appearance. Through her protagonist’s struggles, she invites us to consider what is lost when we embrace society’s beauty ideals and have obsessive relationships to food and to our own bodies.

A The Globe and Mail review of this novel points out, “Awad is an incredibly skilled writer, with a rare ability to construct tiny moments of both acute empathy and astonishing depth. She can also deftly shift from one viewpoint to another, expertly unveiling how a culturally mandated hatred of fat affects all of us to varying degrees. This is a book twitching with heavy anxiety, with a feeling of doom as its backdrop and it’s impossible not to be deeply affected by Awad’s prose.”

All readings are part of a degree credit course on Canadian literary culture offered by the Culture & Expression Program in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.��Readings are free and open to any member of the public.��Readings are held Tuesdays from 7 to 9pm in 206 Accolade West Building, Keele campus. On Tuesday, Oct. 3, novelist and playwright Anosh Irani will visit 91��ɫ to talk about The Parcel.

For more information, contact Professor Leslie Sanders at leslie@yorku.ca or Professor Gail Vanstone at gailv@yorku.ca.

Courtesy of YFile.

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B. W. Powe

Esteemed Canadian poet, novelist and essayist B.W. Powe is one of 91��ɫ’s treasures, bolstering this University’s strong literary tradition. A prolific writer, he has produced books that were championed by Canada’s leading publishers including Coach House, Guernica Editions and Random House.

Powe, who began at 91��ɫ in 1995, teaches courses on Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye and on Visionaries, and has helped found the Dead Tree Medium Theatre Group through the McLuhan Initiative at 91��ɫ.

Described by Toronto writer/editor Elana Wolff as “oceanic in intellectual breadth and interest, spiritual vision and pure, unshielded feeling,” Powe produced an engaging new volume of poetry: Decoding Dust (NeoPoiesis Press, 2016). It contains emotive themes of family and deep connections; it perfectly encapsulates life at a particular point in time – with grown kids and ailing parents – as well as the universal ‘stuff’ of life.

In this Q&A, he discusses his new book.

Q: Why did you write Decoding Dust?

A: The poems came from a desire to get close to the soul and sorrow, the heart of my family and heartbreak, shapeshifters and the garden of vision. I wanted the book to be a place of intensities, where many voices would speak.

Sometimes my desire was just to shape something beautiful. It may seem an odd thing to say, but if you’ve added beauty to the world, in the way a tree is beautiful, then I think you’ve done something. That’s part of what I wanted to do: leave a beautiful line on a page.

Q: What are the key ingredients to your writing process?

Decoding Dust. Reproduced with permission of NeoPoiesis Press.

A: Time, concentration, quiet, few interruptions, the cultivation of images and voices, a solitude that creates receptivity. Keeping myself open to atmospheres and the closeness of things, to the voices of soul yearning and transformation… This is what I hoped to get into Decoding Dust … an availability to dreaming true, letting the spirit speak.

One of the things I say to my creative writing students is, if you don’t like solitude, you’re in the wrong business. It’s a double-edged experience because the reverse of solitude is loneliness… and loneliness is one of the epidemics of our time. There’s loneliness and there’s heartbreak in the voices that inhabit Decoding Dust.

I call the creative environment that you need “the greening,” from Hildegard von Bingen’s word, viriditas. It means your space/time should have signals of encouragement, music, artwork, light, films, a spiritual-imaginative nourishment that allows you to make associations and imagine stories.

“I’m indebted to 91��ɫ’s English department for the encouragement to teach my courses – on Visionaries, on McLuhan and Frye. The courses are my children, in a way.” – B.W. Powe

Q: What writers inspired you to write?

A: When I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, I thought: I want to write. Then I read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River… Virginia Woolf’s The Waves… Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf… They were extraordinary books for me. I read McLuhan at an early age, and Sartre’s essays, Susan Sontag’s books. They inspired my essays.

The poets who spoke to me early on were William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud and William Butler Yeats. And song lyrics: I was a fan of Bob Dylan and The Who’s Pete Townshend. Patti Smith became another inspiring figure.

Q: Who are your favourite poets? What are you reading now? ��

A: Canadians, of course – I revere Anne Carson and A.F. Moritz – and many European, South American and Spanish poets. Rainer Maria Rilke, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado. I’m currently reading Rubén Darío. He’s Nicaraguan. I revere Federico Garcia Lorca and I’ve been translating his lyrics. It’s the way I teach myself Spanish. My wife is Spanish and she says that my translations are good. I think she’s being nice. I’m also reading Marilynne Robinson’s trilogy, Gilead, Home and Lila, novels I admire very much. I’m re-reading George Steiner’s After Babel on translation.

Q: Can you speak to 91��ɫ’s support for your work and how 91��ɫ fosters excellence?

A: There has been very strong support. Recently, 91��ɫ funded a theatre project by the Dead��Tree Medium Group, which will transform Decoding Dust into works for stage and video.

A great thing 91��ɫ has given me is time. I’m indebted to 91��ɫ’s English department for the encouragement to teach my courses – on Visionaries, on McLuhan and Frye. The courses are my children, in a way. I suppose they’re a little unusual in the curriculum, but they’ve been encouraged. That kind of support on 91��ɫ’s part has been remarkable. I should mention that [former] Dean Bob Drummond was very keen on having a creative/scholarly mix in the English department, which has been maintained here extremely well. I’ve found fine colleagues here too.

The other great thing about being at 91��ɫ has been my students. I’ve been blessed in attracting extraordinary students.

“The fact that 91��ɫ pays me to do this is one of the great gifts of the cosmos.” – B.W. Powe

Q: What’s the advice you would give a budding writer in your class?

A: Good luck! And courage, strength, stamina, inspirations and wisdom. Love what you do. Find the heart in it. Decoding Dust was another attempt to put the heart on the page. The first ultrasound we saw of our baby last week was of her/his heart. It was very moving. And I thought, well, that’s kind of what we’re doing here: trying to find a way to make the heart beat as loud as it can… to remind us how miraculous it all is.

I encourage students to set aside time and delve. Take a poem or a story, and read it over and over. You’d be amazed at how much awareness comes when you take time. I suggest: allow inspiration (from the Latin word inspiritus) to enter you. The second word I use is entheos, the Greek word for being filled with the Gods. It translates into our word “enthusiasm.” Another word is, again, “greening:” creating an environment in which awareness can deepen. The fourth word, duende, I’ve taken from the Spanish tradition. The word comes from Flamenco, meaning the rising to the moment.

It seems to me a spiritual crime to go into a classroom and dispirit people. You need to lift them. But it’s a two-way process: they inspire me, too. The fact that 91��ɫ pays me to do this is one of the great gifts of the cosmos.

For more information about Decoding Dust, visit the publisher’s . For more about B.W. Powe, visit his or his .

By Megan Mueller, manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

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Witnessing and engaging in a paradigm shift of epic proportions, Professor Gail Vanstone, director of the Culture & Expression program at 91��ɫ, is interested how the documentary is changing in light of new digital technology. How is this 100-year-old art form evolving into a different animal altogether − something enhanced or enriched; something that captures and reflects the marginalized and gives a voice to previously absent experiences; something profoundly aspirational?

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