Vancouver Institute

RIOPELLE AND MUSICAL IMAGINATION

When: Where: P.A. Woodward Instructional Resources Centre, UBC’s Point Grey Campus, 2194 Health Sciences Mall, Vancouver.

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Mr. Blair Thomson

Composer and teacher, Conservatoire de Musique, Montréal

Mr. Thomson is an accomplished composer and orchestral arranger, celebrated for his recent 75-piece composition for orchestra and choir commemorating the centenary of Jean-Paul Riopelle, which was recorded and premiered by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM) in 2022.

His work spans orchestral, ensemble, theatre, dance, opera, musical theatre, and film and television compositions. He has crafted over 250 arrangements for orchestras and ensembles, including the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Cairo Symphony Orchestra, CBC Radio Orchestra, I Musici de Montréal, l’Orchestre symphonique de Québec and the OSM. His notable commissions include compositions for Musica Camerata Montréal, Pentaèdre, Quatuor Claudel, l’Orchestre Métropolitain and the OSM. In 2014, his “La Symphonie rapaillé,” based on Gaston Miron’s poetry, won the prestigious Félix award for the category “Reinterpretation,” and his arrangements for Half Moon Run with the OSM in 2017 were lauded as groundbreaking.

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LEGACIES OF ALLOTMENT: SETTLER LAND PRIVATIZATION AND THE DISMEMBERMENT OF INDIGENOUS NATIONS

Dr. Daniel Heath Justice, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, is a leading scholar in Indigenous cultural and literary studies. His research explores questions of nationhood, kinship, and belonging, with a growing focus on intersections between Indigenous literatures, speculative fiction, and other-than-human peoples. His latest work is the co-edited anthology Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege (2022). His book Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018) received the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Award for Subsequent Book published in 2018, and the 2019 PROSE award. In recognition of his contributions to Indigenous literary studies, Dr. Justice was awarded the UBC Killam Research Prize in 2015, and in 2010 the Ludwik and Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize at the University of Toronto. Other publications include Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (2006), and The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (2014).

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CHASING SHADOWS: CYBER ESPIONAGE, SUBVERSION AND THE GLOBAL FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY

Ronald Deibert is a global expert in digital technology, security, and human rights, known for his groundbreaking work on cyber security. His latest book, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (2020), based on his Massey lectures, won the 2021 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. He is also the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of The Internet (2013), along with numerous influential articles, chapters, and reports on internet censorship, surveillance, and cybersecurity. Dr. Diebert’s work has earned prestigious honours, including the University of Toronto’s President’s Impact Award (2017), Foreign Policy’s Global Thinker Award (2017), the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award (2015), the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity (2014), and the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom in Canada Award from the Canadian Library Association (2014). He co-founded and was a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor projects.