One of the first things you notice about Gabrielle Kind and Mitch Hawes, two young broadcasting graduates based out of Victoria, is their indefatigable enthusiasm. It’s a characteristic that is crucial for anyone branching out into the media field today. Record low profits, audience fragmentation and changing cultural trends have seen radio’s allure dwindle in the age of satellite and streaming music channels.
The nuances might be different between Canada and America, but the major crises of journalism today are the same: media concentration, fair Internet access, corporate co-opting of government and human rights for all people. These themes reverberated through the discussions at the latest National Conference for Media Reform in Boston, MA from April 8-10.
Canada’s 41st election has gone viral. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites have become platforms of debate during #elxn41 and voter engagement has exploded.
Paul Noble flicks through news feeds on his phone during the 45-minute bus ride to work in Sidney. He’s reading stories about Arab youth who, formerly alienated and jaded by the hypocrisies in their societies, are inspired to fight for a better life for each other.
The music industry is faltering. Bands don’t know if a life of rock-and-roll is a viable economic future to pursue and newly established, grassroots record companies are finding it hard to pick up the slack. The only people seeing marginal success are our favourite industry antagonists: the major record labels.
Most of us are isolated from the deaths that take place to sustain our lives, through providing us with food and other resources, and so our first exposure to them can inspire a crisis of conscience. We try to build an ethical framework, and we use it either to justify the taking of lives or reject it as unethical.
Three UVic poets are poised to publish their debut books of poetry this April. Chelsea Rushton, Neil Surkan and Sarah Burgoyne are all current or former UVic students, and they all share a passion for the written word. But they couldn’t be more different.
The house I grew up in had spaghetti sauce stains on the kitchen ceiling. They were put there when my mom dropped a pot of the stuff on the floor just before dinner one evening.
The Pacific salmon emerges into life in the river, a sacred place of birth and death separate from the majority of the creature’s sentient life, which is spent exploring the wildest remaining ocean in the world.
In an age when people live their lives online, it’s hard to imagine what role an oral storyteller has left in the world. But Richard Wagamese, an Ojibwa from the Wabaseemoong First Nation in northwestern Ontario, is showing students at UVic that storytelling may be all we have left.
Egypt, the cradle of human civilization, has lately become better known for political turmoil than for its pyramids.
A young man walks down the steps of a brown building. He looks at the sign pointing towards the door: Men’s Trauma Centre. The man has no cuts, scrapes or bruises. In fact, he’s clean cut and wearing a business suit. He makes eye contact with no one, but goes straight to the receptionist.
As I enter the dimly lit room, my senses are overwhelmed. A heavy red carpet, larger than the windowless room, lies in a heap around the floor corners.
In a move many see as being counterintuitive to all environmental common sense, a Canadian-based non-profit group, the Fur Council of Canada (FCC), has launched a campaign claiming that animal fur is eco-friendly. Anti-fur advocates, however, are arguing that this claim is not only false, but irresponsible as well.
At the top of Beacon Hill Park, waves lap against the seawall as the bagpiper gnaws gently on the haft of his tenor drone pipe. Every joint in the pipes is wound with hemp twine, acting as a seal between the ports in the bag — called the stocks — and the pipes themselves.
Jessy Anna sits in a quiet corner of the urban farm where she is a volunteer, sipping herbal tea. Cooped chickens cluck under a plum tree. This idyllic little farm sits just two blocks from one of downtown Victoria’s soup kitchens. Her cat, Kody, strolls out of the growing leeks, rubs her way by Anna and climbs the nearby tree. A ladybug lands on Anna’s wrist, rests briefly beside a ladybug tattoo before flying off. Anna, a single mom in her mid-30s, happens to be an anarchist.
Luke Carmichael still drives the car he bought for $500 while he was living in the woods near Jordan River, trying to cope with debilitating nightmares and other symptoms of undiagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTS).
“I’m not a feminist,” I told my best friend, Ellen, indignantly as we sat on her porch sipping wine one summer evening.
The one and only time I used Plan B emergency contraceptive, I was 20 years old.
Dan Savage wishes he could have spoken to Justin Aeberg or Billy Lucas or Cody Barker or Asher Brown or Seth Walsh or Tyler Clementi. These teens were all harassed by homophobic bullies and all killed themselves in recent weeks.
