The Banff School of Fine Arts and the Public University
PearlAnn Reichwein (Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport and Recreation)
The University of Alberta created the Banff School in 1933 to extend adult education as a means of equity and sustainability. Over its first four decades, the Banff School produced and circulated ideals of culture and liberal democratic citizenship that were intrinsic to the development of modern Canada. Alberta’s public institutions were enablers and innovators for a hopeful future.
How did public education and the Banff School of Fine Arts uplift the people? From the depths of the Great Depression to postwar prosperity, Alberta’s public university was integral to uplifting creativity and opportunity. Artists and students appeared in the postcard image of Banff yet also met challenges. An engine of nation building and tourism development, public education and public parks stimulated culture and capital.
A pandemic and climate crisis brings us full circle to reimagine and reinvent the arts and education as a way of seeing ourselves and our world anew. Current challenges suggest the importance of public institutions as this talk on the early Banff School and the public good presents.
Wednesday, Mar. 10, 2021
12:30–1:30 p.m.
Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Nature, Colonialism and the Responsibility to Revitalize Sociological Theory
Kari Marie Norgaard (U Oregon)
The negation of the natural world has been a building block of ‘modernity’ and central to the legitimization of colonialism. The failure to theorize the environment within sociology obscures power relations associated with colonialism and environmental degradation that continue to be highly salient for Indigenous peoples.
Uplift: Visual Culture and Sustainability at the Banff School of Fine Arts
PearlAnn Reichwein
Over its first four decades, the Banff School produced and circulated ideals of culture and liberal democratic citizenship that were intrinsic to the development of modern Canada.
Green Capitalist Realism, CO2lonialism, and the Urban Climate Insurgency
Ashley Dawson (CUNY)
Green Capitalist Realism is an incipient ideological legitimation for the new regime of accumulation the Biden administration seeks to construct. The eco-modernist tenets that undergird it are linked to intensifying forms of extractivism that Dawson terms CO2lonialism.
Environmental policy and governance
Kristof Van Assche
Description TBA
Degrowth
Panel feat. Joëlle Saey-Volckrick
Description TBA
We regret that in-person lectures have been cancelled throughout March and April, 2020.
The COP 101 e-conferences will continue as planned.
The Sustainability Council’s ongoing lecture series explores local and global perspectives on sustainability, equity and climate action. Hear researchers and practitioners from the University of Alberta and beyond in fields ranging from engineering to ecology, public health to poetry, native studies to nanotechnology.
| Date | Speaker | Time |
| Feb. 24 | Geeta Belas: Bridging the Gender Gap with Design | Noon–1 p.m. |
| Mar. 4 | Kari Marie Norgaard: Nature, colonialism and sociology | 3 p.m. |
| Mar. 10 | PearlAnn Reichwein: Banff School of Fine Arts | 12:30–1:30 p.m. |
| Mar. 24 | Ashley Dawson: Environmental Justice in Pandemic-era NYC | TBA |
| Mar. 31 | Kristof Van Assche: Environmental policy and governance | Noon–1 p.m. |
| Apr. 7 | Joëlle Saey-Volckrick: Degrowth | Noon–1 p.m. |
Steering Committee
The Sustainability Council’s Research Steering Committee guides the selection of speakers for this lecture series.