Breanne Oryschak presents the final Free Queen’s class of the semester on “Making Sense of Cinema: Looking beyond Plot and Character for Meaning in Film”

This lecture will survey basic film theories that push the moviegoer to consider aspects of film production and composition, which inform and inflect a movie’s meaning beyond issues of storyline and characterisation. This class will consist of an introduction to film theory, a screening of a short film, and a discussion whereby students can practice applying newfound theoretical concepts to the short film shown.

Biography: Breanne Oryschak is a 3rd year PhD student in Queen’s English Department. Her research interests include Restoration and Eighteenth-century literature and contemporary world cinema. Her particular focus is on the theoretical, political, ethical, and social dimensions of satire in performance, be it on the stage or the screen. Plus, she absolutely just loves movies.

This lecture examines representations of Palestine in North American popular media and film. We will discuss how Palestine has been constructed, as well as why there is a pervasive silence surrounding who the Palestinians are culturally and politically. The aim of this lecture is to facilitate a discussion of why Palestine is typically represented in a negative manner and to question how international stories are developed in the news.

Dana’s Biography: Dana Olwan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English. She is working on a dissertation that examines the marketing and reception of Arab women’s novels in North America. She is active in groups with social justice agendas like Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights and the Ontario Public Interest Research Group.

Wail’s Biography: Wail Qattan is a PhD student in the Department of English. He has studied at many universities in Egypt, the USA and Canada, but has primarily learned his theoretical and critical thinking skills from people decidedly outside the academy. Some of Wail’s more fortunate employment opportunities have been in guerilla theatre, with artists’ cooperatives, NGO’s that promote a one-state solution in Israel/Palestine, and as a voice for radio documentaries. Wail’s current research, and planned dissertation, is on the making of the border that divides México and the USA.

Susan Cahill and Carla Taunton present “Performing Culture: Gender, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs”

This seminar investigates the ways in which identities were constructed, promoted, and maintained on behalf of those who were silenced due to their gender, race, and/or class. Including issues of imperialism, colonialism, power relations, and constructions of the Other(s), our discussion aims to explore how certain marginalised communities were exploited in order to legitimise the expansion, power, and wealth of the British Empire in the nineteenth century.

Susan’s Biography: Susan Cahill is a PhD Candidate in Visual and Material Culture at Queen’s University. Her main areas of interest include contemporary craft, gender, and globalisation. Susan’s current project focuses on a Southeast Asian organisation – Carol Cassidy and Lao Textiles – and how this company constructs its identity through exhibitions and displays throughout North America and Europe.

Carla’s Biography: I am a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University in the Department of Art and an alliance member of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. I am interested in local arts communities and I am a board member at the Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre. Recently, I graduated from Carleton University in 2006 with a MA in Canadian art history. My MA thesis, “Lori Blondeau: High Tech Storytelling for Social Change” explores performance art as a vehicle negotiating indigenous decolonization. Currently my research interests are indigenous performance art, contemporary indigenous visual culture, interventions and activism in the arts, as well as globalization theory

Ian Johnston presents “Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Reading Renaissance Drama”

This lecture will examine the historical context of Shakespeare’s, as well as his contemporaries’, drama, and explain how to use that context to better understand these plays. Shakespeare’s plays in particular will be considered in the context of a vibrant, competitive, as well as cooperative play writing environment. This lecture will also examine some of the language of Renaissance plays in an effort to help the casual reader or viewer of Renaissance drama interpret internal cues that have been lost over time.

Biography: Ian Johnston is in the fourth year of his Ph.D. and has had a long love for drama, both Renaissance and contemporary. Currently he is teaching a course on Shakespeare’s later plays. His dissertation is a trans-historical project on power and sexuality’s relationship to political ideology.

Don’t let that new “Graphic Novel” section in your local bookstore fool you: we’ve been using sequential art to talk to each other for at least a thousand years. Comic narrative is a system of communication that represents time and space on the one-dimensional surface of the page. It is appropriate, then, that comics predate most modern languages, and are read and understood in virtually every part of the world. The way we move through a comic narrative is so intuitive that it can be difficult to recognize the incredibly sophisticated process of negotiation we are carrying out — not only with regard to space and time, but also between words and images, concrete objects and abstract concepts. This lecture will outline some of the basic formal properties of comic narrative, and trace the evolution of the comics medium up to the present day. We will spend most of our time looking at North American comics from the beginning of the Twentieth Century onward, a period in which comic literature has been explicitly bound up with the economy of mass culture, and we will consider several titles — everything from the “classics” to the obscure and forgotten, from the wildly popular to the staunchly independent.

Biography: Mark Streeter is PhD student in the English Department at Queen’s University. As a young person, he wrote and drew his own superhero comics. Later, when he became an adult who still wrote and drew like a six-year old, he decided to criticize comics instead of trying to make them. His current project involves the figure of the vigilante in Modern American literature and early comic book superheroes.

Scott Rutherford helps make meaning of “liberation” in Canada during the Cold War by examining the period between 1945 and 1975. His lecture discusses how a wide array of actors imagined liberation by simultaneously drawing from their own local experiences while conceptually linking to a politics of global dissent. Through an examination of newspapers, journals, and visual media, we will spend time discussing the public debates that occurred around “revolutionary moments” in Canada. From armed occupations to campaigns against nuclear weapons, by discussing public challenges to the Canadian state, and the debates and responses to them, we can unravel how “liberation” significantly shaped Cold War Canada.

Biography: Scott Rutherford is a PhD candidate in the History department at Queen’s University.

6:30-8:30pm in Dunning 12. Please note there is no class Mon Feb 18th due to Family Day and Reading Week.

What does modern-day luxury tourism have to do with the legacy of European imperialism? This lecture will focus on a section of Jamaica Kincaid’s essay A Small Place as an introduction to contemporary post-colonial critiques of the tourist industry and to post-colonial writing strategies.

Biography: Vee Blackbourn is a doctoral student in the English Department at Queen’s. Her dissertation focuses on the legacies of apartheid in contemporary South African fiction.

Cheryl Cundell: “How beautiful is That?”

Using examples from the works of Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney, the class outlines some of the conventions, forms, and rhetoric of Early Modern sonnets in order to provide a context for understanding the ambiguities of meaning in Shakespeare’s sonnet 130.

Biography: Cheryl Cundell is a Ph.D. student studying late-twentieth-century Canadian literature that evokes late-eighteenth century British exploration writing. Her Master’s thesis is on Hamlet.

The Free Queens Winter course will be presented by Queen’s University Graduate students. You can access details about each week of the course here: http://www.queensu.ca/freequeens/?page_id=7 .

On Monday January 28th, 6:30 pm in Dunning 12, Andrew Stevens presents “Calling for resistance: Union organizing and the globalization of information technology employment”

This lecture looks at the nature of call centre employment, an important part of the broader information- and knowledge-based industries, and how this sector is being shaped by corporate globalization, offshoring, and technological change. The lecture also examines the conditions of work within call centres, such as the degree of workplace surveillance, management control, as well as related physical and mental stress. As a response to these realities, the lecture looks at forms of resistance that take place at local and collective levels, with an emphasis on the potential for increased unionism within the sector and greater solidarity between workers and worker organizations. With StarTek (an American-based outsourced call centre firm) being a major employer in Kingston, this lecture has some regional significance.

Biography: Andrew Stevens is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and is researching the political economy of outsourcing, offshoring, and the call centre industries in Canada and India. His Master’s level work looked at Marxist and anarchist theories of organization.

ACCESIBILITY - There will be hearing aid devices available at the lectures for those who need them. If you have any other accessibility requirements please contact freequeens@sgps.ca or 613.533.2924 and they will do our best to ensure those needs are met.

To register interested participants may contact the Equity Office by phone or email at (613) 533-2563 and equity@post.queensu.ca. Drop-ins are also welcome to Room 12 Richardson Hall, University Avenue. Registration will be conducted on a first-come first-served basis with a waiting list. THis is a free, non-credit course that anyone may take.

Course lecture topics include:

* An Introduction to Gender & International Development
* Social Justice, Women & Engineering
* Demystifying Care-giving & Work Contradiction
* Guy Things: Boys & Men Learning & Doing Masculinities
* The space of Feminist Freedom: Ressentiment, Politics & War
* Women, Gender & Music – What are the Connections?
* Women & Poverty

This course will run Monday evenings from January 29th - March 26 2007 between 6:30 - 8:30 PM. The full schedule is available at the Free Queen’s website: http://www.queensu.ca/freequeens/