Trevor Chow-Fraser

Updates from March, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  Trevor 14:42 on 28 March 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  Religion as Revolution Posters 

  While working as a Teaching Assistant in McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies, I was often in a liminal position: neither full-fledged graduate student, nor truly considered to be staff. But when it came to the graduate students’ annual conference, I managed to work my way into the organising committee without too much trouble. Sponsored by the Centre for Research on Religion, but organised by the grad students, the 2010 theme was too awesome to pass up: Religion as Revolution.

  I initially wanted to submit a paper for the conference. I am interested in looking at how religions can contribute to understanding, and perhaps dealing with the revolutionary change that world societies will undergo due to global climate change. Unfortunately, working two other jobs made the research impossible. I regret that. Especially, since, I think the conference ended up focusing more on epistemological and theoretical ideas, rather than examining social change as revolution.

  In any case, I did contribute to the conference by designing some outreach materials. In Fall 2009 I helped whip the Call For Papers into a nicely formatted, hopefully eye-catching, single page document. It went on to adorn many a grad lounge bulletin board across the North-East and Canada.

  Later on that winter, I designed some posters to promote the conference within Montreal, and at other key schools such as Université d’Ottawa and University of Toronto. The first posters I put together were inspired by one of keynote speakers: Johannes Wolfart. At the selection meeting, I had a vision of a giant, snarling wolf paired up with a bleeding, flaming heart. Wolfart was supposed to be a crowd pleaser, and I thought we could market him to get people to the conference.

  Later, we confirmed a second keynote speaker: Travis Kroeker. His name was, unfortunately, not as acutely evocative. But with the help of the ancient Sumerian alphabet, I managed to turn his name into a bestial, twinned diptych.

  In any case, these posters were deemed a bit too obtuse. So Julian Menezes and I buckeled down for a near interminable round of revisions, aiming to find the perfect image to adorn our posters. The problem was trying to accomodate the wide diversity of ideas that could fit within ‘revolution’, while also avoiding favouritism toward any one of the world’s religious traditions. In other words, we didn’t want to resort to projecting a merely Marxist image of revolution, when we were hoping to attract students interested in the Islamic Revolution, Wittgentstein, the Reformation, and more.

  Download the Call For Proposals

   

   

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  Trevor 19:18 on 6 October 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: CBC Radio 3 ( 2 )   

  Spotlight on CBC Radio 3 

  In the Fall of 2007 I took a class on the Canadian Broadcasting System. It was taught by Gregory Taylor, a McGill Doctoral candidate studying under Marc Raboy. The class was basically a defense of public broadcasting, and it certainly taught me a lot about the contemporary media landscape. Unfortunately, the internet is considered narrow-casting, despite the emergence of online television and extremely popular podcasts from the BBC, CBC and NPR. So we were not able to pursue some lines of thought as far as they could go. In any case, I loved the class.

  For my research project, I took the opportunity to study one of my favourite things in the whole world, CBC Radio 3. The research was so much fun! I got to dig through the archives of insidethecbc.com and trawled the internet for posts on Brave New Waves (and its hosts Patti Schmidt and Brent Bambury) and Nightlines (David Wisdom). In 2006, Anu Sahota, an MA student at Simon Fraser, wrote a dissertation on CBC Radio 3 which was very instructive. Even government documents dealing with media are (appropriately) stylish and well written. Everyone should check out Our Cultural Sovereignty, an incredibly readable report by the House of Commons’ Heritage Commitee.

  I even got to speak on the phone with Steve Pratt, CBC Radio 3’s Director! I emailed them with a few questions, and he volunteered to do a phone interview instead. He gave up a half hour or so, which I think was very accomodating.

  Although I did little primary research, I thought I would post the finished paper in case anyone with a similar love of CBC Radio 3 would like to check it out. The paper criticises CBC Radio 3’s move away from broader cultural journalism embodied by the R3 Magazine, and the lack of musical representation commensurate to the demands of the the Broadcasting Act. Specifically, I’m talking about 3.d.iii:

  [The Canadian broadcasting system should] serve the needs and interests, and reflect the circumstances and aspirations, of Canadian men, women and children, including equal rights, the linguistic duality and multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society and the special place of aboriginal peoples within that society

  As Canada’s public broadcaster, I believe that the CBC must do its best to embody the demands of the Broadcasting Act. When I wrote the paper, Steve Pratt was speaking about the website redesign. This morning, almost two years later the new website has finally been released! CBC Radio 3 remains as awesome as ever. But by and large, they have not yet taken the steps I think are required to be a premier public broadcaster in the digital age.

  Read my paper on CBC Radio 3 (PDF)

  Anu is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Anu 23:13 on 3 February 2010 Permalink | Reply

    Hello! I just came across this – thanks for using my work! I’m so glad it is not gathering dust. Feel free to contact me if you require additional research sources!

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  Trevor 15:37 on 3 May 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: East Asian Studies ( 3 ), Religious Studies ( 2 )   

  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)