What’s On at Trent University
Upcoming events include the Symons Seminar Series & the North at Trent lecture
Every week new and exciting things are happening at Trent University. Come and be inspired through a range of events, public lectures, panel discussions and debates, all open to the community. Here’s what’s on at Trent University this month:
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Extreme Forms of Aging and the Cultural Construction of Age in Life Narratives
Time: 3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Location: Alumni House, Champlain College
About: Julie Velton, Ph.D. candidate from Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, will speak on 'Extreme Forms of Aging' and the Cultural Construction of Age in Life Narratives. This series is a space for discussions about research-in-progress and other ponderings.
Symons Seminar Series
Time: 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Location: Bagnani Hall, Traill College
About: Join us to hear Sophie Goldberg (M.A. Candidate, Anthropology) and Maggie Boothroyd (M.Sc. Candidate, Environmental & Life Sciences) present their research. The Symons Seminar Series showcases graduate students presenting their research at a level understandable by the entire academic community and the public.
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Mobility, migration and human-animal interactions among the Hokkaido Okhotsk: Triangulation from stable isotopes
Time: 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Location: Life Health Sciences/DNA Building room B104
About: Professor Ben Fitzhugh from the University of Washington is an archaeologist whose research examines human-environment interactions in coastal hunter-gatherer societies in the North Pacific using a diverse range of methods and in collaboration with scholars working in ecology, geology, climatology, oceanography, and ethnography. Major themes explored in his research include the influence of human colonization on island ecosystems, investigating the natural and cultural forces driving changes in human subsistence economies, and human vulnerability and resilience to environmental variation. Dr. Fitzhugh has conducted long-term field projects in the Kodiak Archipelago of Alaska and the Kuril Islands in the Russian Far East and he has taken a leading role in the international effort to raise awareness about the destruction of archaeological sites in northern environments caused by recent warming and the importance of these sites for contextualizing long-term environmental variation.
Fire in the Library: Arctic warming, coastal erosion, and the catastrophic loss of scientific and cultural understanding
Time: 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Location: Great Hall, Champlain College
About: The North at Trent 2017 Lecture Series wraps up with Dr. Ben Fitzhugh director, Quaternary Research Center & Associate Professor, Anthropology at the University of Washington. Arctic and subarctic regions contain numerous archaeological sites where organic preservation is spectacular due to the cold climate. In addition to artifacts left by past humans, these sites contain ‘archives’ of plants and animals often in deep chronological sequences and spanning millennia. Well-dated archaeological faunal samples subject to morphological, isotopic, and genetic methods shed light on long-term ecosystem evolution in the context of climate changes more extreme than any recorded in the instrumental and historical records of recent centuries. New techniques make it possible to examine changes in productivity, food web dynamics, stock structure, population bottlenecks, extinctions, and population range shifts that can be compared to other records of climate and environmental change.
Melting Ice, Melting Records: Glaciers and the Amplification of Climate Change
Time: 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Location: Room 105 Scott House, Traill College
About: This talk focuses on artworks that center on the figure of the melting glacier as a symptom of climate change and foreground how the fact of its melting makes climate change immediately felt on a human scale. The figure of the melting glacier not only publicizes a kind of directional politics with specific goals in mind (curb global warming to 2°C), but also channels a more open-ended aesthetic sensibility that relies on an analogy between the mortality of human beings and the glaciers themselves. In the broader research project, glaciers are unstable aesthetic indexes given that they both “store” time and release it, and are themselves variably recorded across media. In the process, glaciers are becoming part of an environmental narrative surrounding the amplification of climate urgency through contemporary art.
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Peterborough Regional Science Fair 2017
Time: 12:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Location: Science Complex and Chemical Science Buildings
About: Each year, students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 display their projects in biological, physical, engineering, and computing sciences. The experience is an invaluable stepping stone for many who go on to pursue successful careers. The 48th Peterborough Regional Science Fair is taking place on Wednesday, April 12, 2017. This is a day-long event that concludes with an awards ceremony scheduled for 3:30 p.m. in Wenjack Theatre at Trent University. The top winners will win trips to compete at the Canada Wide Science Fair at the University of Regina, May 14 – 20, 2017.
Kate Weersink, media relations & strategic communications officer, Trent University, 705-748-1011 extension:6180 or kateweersink@trentu.ca