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  • Trevor 21:28 on 30 August 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    Frosh on a Boat 

    McGill kept me busy in Summer 2009 as I designed websites for both Rad Frosh and SSMU Frosh, the two orientations open to all undergraduates, regardless of Faculty.

    The theme for SSMU Frosh 2009 was inspired by a popular music video of the moment—one which I had never seen before, but I’m sure most of you were already digging it. I had to admit, it was a fun video. And I was excited to tackle the theme, to find something fun and juicy. But I’m on a Boat has one big problem. Most of what makes the video fun really has nothing to do with being on a boat. It’s more just about being super affluent.

    It would have been inappropriate to promote such classist images for an event which is meant to welcome all students into the university. So I basically pushed the video out of my mind completely. Now that I think about it, maybe we could have evoked the Beachcombers (massive CanCon points there). Regardless, I thought I would just focus on the actual boat, and place it in something tropical looking (the irony being that we were welcoming students to Montreal!).

    Since the SSMU is one of those rare McGill institutions that actually tries to be bilingual, this website had to be available in french as well as english. Rather than providing two separate sites, I decided to display both french and english content on a single page: english in the left column, french on the right. Since the website content was pretty static, I thought this was both easy and also showed a certain parity between french and english, which I appreciate.

    Another thing about this project: we had close to 2000 people registering online, and using paypal to cover their registration fees. If anything went wrong with the system, it would have meant more trouble than I had ever dealt with before. Fortunately, Drupal turned out to be a great choice for this site. While it can sometimes be a difficult beast to wrangle, in this case I was easily able to pull the site together using core components, and it handled the whole situation flawlessly.

    The coolest thing about this project is that, because I designed the logo along with the website, I got to see my work on all of the T-Shirts, Mugs, Tote Bags, and more! Physicality is so much cooler than digitality.

     

     

  • Trevor 15:37 on 3 May 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    Minjung Christianity Lecture 

    As part of my Teaching Assistantship with Dr Victor Hori, I prepared a lecture on Korea’s Minjung Theology.

    This is a topic I first learned about from Dr Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, during her 2006 stint teaching EAST 253. She spent several days on the subject, exploring the Minjung interpretation of millennium and han. As she explained it, Korea street protesters were using a mixture of Shamanic and Minjung Christian concepts and rituals to neutralise an antagonistic police presence, and to actualise an egalitarian, utopian space.

    This was the first time that I realised that the academic study of religion could be applicable to activism, and to my real world interests.

    My own lecture needed to take a different tact, since our final paper topic was designed around the concept of religious / cultural syncretism. So I concentrated on identifying elements of traditional east asian religion within Minjung Christianity.

    Nevertheless, I hope that I was able to share with the students some of the excitement that comes from realising the religious meaning behind what otherwise seems a purely political form of protest.

    Download the Lecture (MP3 | 39 MB | 45 min.)

    Disclaimer: please note that the banner image used for this post is not my own. It is a portion of the cover of one of the earlier, scholarly volumes on Minjung Christianity (South Korea’s minjung movement: the culture and politics of dissidence. Edited by Kenneth M. Wells)

     

  • Trevor 12:10 on 28 April 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Anti-Gentrification,   

    Chinatown Audio Tour 

    For the last several years, I have been leading semi-regular walking tours through the Montreal Chinatown. Depending on the group and my interests, it deals with themes of gentrification, immigration and labour discrimination, racism, and community-building.

    The original tour was designed and researched by a group of Chinese Canadian youth around 2003. They called it The Chinatown Project. Their work included interviews with community members, as well as building contacts with many Chinese organisations.

    I first ran the tour with my friend Zabrina Law, who is friends with one of the original members, James Yap. She has since left town, but I’ve continued adding new research to the tour document, and refining the presentation.

    I was most fortunate to have Josie Caro of CKUT Radio record my latest outing with a group of McGill students. David Koch and I later edited the audio into an ‘Audio Tour’ which was posted to the McGill Daily’s media blog. You can download the podcast, load it onto your portable audio player, and go for a guided stroll through this historic Montreal neighbourhood.

    Audio recorded by Josie Caro. Produced by David Koch and Trevor Chow Fraser.
    Download (27 MB :: roughly half an hour).

    Here’s a map to help guide your tour:

    View The Chinatown Project in a larger map

    Update: January 2013

    To help mark the release of « Être chinois au Québec », the documentary film starring my friends Parker Mah and Bethany Or, I’m digging into my archives and finally putting my notes for the Chinatown Project online. I can’t believe I didn’t do this earlier, but I’m excited to see if the spotlight Bethany and Parker shine on Chinatown can help bring the tour back to life.

    Chinatown Project 2.0 (2006–2010)

     

    • Hugh Grigg 11:26 on 23 December 2012 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks a lot for making this freely available online, really interesting stuff. I like these kinds of smaller-scale, local projects, and I think they’re perfectly suited to sharing on the Internet. I’m going to see if the Chinatowns near me have anything like this.

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