Research details education’s role in independence fight

A Sahrawi child studies in her refugee camp’s school, located in one of the driest, hottest places in the world, Tindouf, Algeria. Apart from algebra, history and cell division, she encounters desert winds, oppressive heat, and raging sandstorms that threaten to blow off the school’s roof.

Thanks to her education, however, she and many like her may grow up to form the next generation of activists and civic leaders looking to bring freedom to the Sahrawi people.

For nearly 15 years, Anthropology professor Randa Farah has tracked the Sahrawi, often living among them for months at a time to better understand their lives and struggle for independence. An upcoming paper describes her time with the Sahrawi and their recent efforts to fight for freedom and sovereignty.

“Education, for them, is one of the means to gain national consciousness and attain self-sufficiency in the camps.” Farah explained. “In the Sahrawi view, education and the ability to manage the refugee camps autonomously are important, and where the camps have become a place to prepare for future independence.”

Morocco has occupied two-thirds of Western Sahara – which the UN classifies as a Non-Self-Governing Territory – since the mid-1970s, a period of time that fell almost immediately after the end of century-long Spanish colonial rule.

After a war that lasted 20 years and saw significant causalities on both sides, a 1991 ceasefire was established and upheld until today. During that time, the people of Western Sahara hoped they will finally be able to vote in a referendum on self-determination. No vote was held.

During the 1970s, Canada was among the first countries to join the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara – known by its Spanish acronym (MINURSO). That group was established specifically to oversee a referendum on the future of Western Sahara, first planned for 1992. The stalemate continues.

In November 2017, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres appointed Colin Stewart of Canada as his Special Representative for Western Sahara and Head of the MINURSO.

Currently, almost 165,000 Sahrawi, displaced during the war, live in refugee camps.

Over the years, they not only formed a government in exile – the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) – but also prioritized education as a strategic policy to eradicate illiteracy. SADR is an official member of the African Union and there are more than 80 countries worldwide which have or still recognize SADR.

“Educated refugees could better serve the causes of liberation and nation-building,” Farah said.

The camps have two secondary schools with limited resources. Many students go abroad to finish school and, if they choose, attend university. For years, countries like Algeria and Cuba, and European non-profit organizations have provided humanitarian aid, including in education and the health sector.

Many Sahrawis, thus, had free education and basic health care. Most of the schools in the camps go up to Grade 6, after which most students attend Algerian schools to complete their secondary education. A number of them have scholarships to enroll in universities in countries that support the Sahrawi cause, including Cuba.

However, Farah expalined, Sahrawis have taken the lead in how to deploy aid for the development and in the interest of the Sahrawi population. Indeed, the Sahrawi leadership refused to allow the humanitarian regime to usurp their political voices, or their autonomous decision-making.

“Sahrawi refugees are not ‘recipients of aid,’ but actors who take the reins to carve their future direction,” Farah said.

Today, there are thousands of Sahrawi doctors, teachers and social scientists across the globe.

“What they achieved in this harsh environment in the camps, such as the eradication of illiteracy (the illiteracy rate was over 90 per cent) in a relatively short period of time, was an effective way to show the world that they are more than capable of building and managing an independent Western Sahara,” Farah said.

The argument, as one Sahrawi told her is, “If we could administer a nation-state in the harsh desert environment with very little resources, we can manage even more effectively with resources and in our own territory.”

But lately, due to the failure of the international community to fulfill the promise of a referendum on independence, many feel that years of education may be going to waste.

During the war, students who would come back to camps would volunteer as doctors, nurses, teachers and so on, and many joined fighters at the front. In the first few years, Sahrawi youth believed the war would end and they would be returning soon to Western Sahara.

Now, there is only ceasefire and a seemingly permanent exile.

“What does an exiled nation do with a growing educated population in the middle of a harsh desert where even shrubs find it hard to grow?” Farah asked. “How does it take care of their social and economic needs with no resources, and yet maintain a collective national will to fight for freedom?”

In more recent years, a number of young people moved to Europe, especially to countries like Spain, seeking to find work and send remittances to their families in the camps. Many are urging the leadership to return to armed struggle, since negotiations only seems to entrench Morocco as an occupier of Western Sahara.

“Since a Canadian is today the head of MINURSO, which was initially established to oversee the UN-promised referendum, I hope we will play a role in turning the promise to a reality,” Farah says.

The Sahrawi fight for a right to call Western Sahara home goes on.

“The desert is never really empty. We see it as ‘empty’ because we are used to the urban clutter, but for Sahrawis it is alive and full of things that they see much more clearly than we do.”

Researcher looking to re-frame Detroit images

In a gritty photo of Detroit, Suzy Lake’s back is turned to the viewer as she photographs an empty lot where her great-great uncle’s house once sat. In the foreground, between the observer and the American-Canadian artist, a passing cyclist throws a questioning look as if to ask, “Why are you in my city photographing its ruins? What are you looking at?”

“And there it is – Detroit and its people looking at Lake looking at them,” explained Visual Arts graduate student Jessica Cappuccitti.

Earlier this summer, her McIntosh Gallery exhibition Welcome to Detroit: Suzy Lake and Orlando Ford was a curated collection of Lake’s photographs of Detroit and featured snippets from filmmaker Orland Ford’s documentary about his city, Where the Heart Is.

Detroit continues to struggle to regain its footing after more than a decade of economic troubles. Many residents left during economic tough times. Those who stayed behind slowly rebuilt and maintained what remained – a neighbourhood park, the corner grocery store, the community barbershop.

Even so, outsiders continue to view Detroit as a city of empty and broken ruins. This is view – looking at those who look at Detroit – is what intrigued Cappuccitti.

“People living in Detroit talk about outsiders coming in, fascinated in their ruins, photographing their city,” Cappuccitti said. “But they do not actually make contact with communities or engage with them in any way.”

She noted how pictures, videos and even news stories have made a spectacle of decay and poverty.

Works like 1093 Seyburn, Gustav Schneider, 1915, 2014/16 and Where the Heart Is highlight the quest of two artists who have spent years trying to counter Detroit’s stereotypically negative image by highlighting communities and talking to people.

Lake was born and raised in Detroit. She moved to Montreal in the late 1960s but regularly visits her hometown. Ford is a Detroit native.

“Their work spoke to each other really well,” Cappuccitti said, because both put people back into pictures and brought their issues to light. Ford’s documentary gave a voice to Lake’s pictures.

Cappuccitti’s exhibition offered viewers an opportunity to understand how these images – some of Detroit’s decay and others that capture people with smiling faces and open arms – shape ideas about the city.

Her exhibition was also a cautionary tale about city planners and policy-makers who manage revitalization projects, but ignore the richness of communities already present.

Welcome to Detroit: Suzy Lake and Orlando Ford also hit closer to home.

In Canada in the past decade, more than 25 per cent of manufacturing jobs have vanished from once-booming industrial heartlands such as Hamilton and Windsor. Much like Detroit, each city is also experiencing renewal. Young professionals are moving into Hamilton to escape Toronto’s rising rent and property costs. Windsor is focused on reviving art and culture.

Cappuccitti hopes revitalization projects don’t ignore the communities already present.

“You don’t forget the old when bringing in the new,” she warned.

“Everyone loves a nice neighbourhood and fancy coffee shops, but people who are already living in Detroit also want nice things – running water, electricity, garbage disposal, and working streetlights, for example.”

City officials and private companies often overlook run-down neighbourhoods during revitalization projects because they do not fit in with the image of what a new and improved city should look like.

Cappuccitti mentions “quiet revitalizations” – a term she borrows from Lake – taking place in Detroit neighbourhoods and communities.

“They are more sustainable than corporate-driven rejuvenations because it is driven by people, rather than capital,” she said.

When speaking to Cappuccitti, Ford told her he wanted the documentary to be truthful, not necessarily positive.

In Where the Heart Is, people who live or used to live in Detroit share their experiences and tell stories of being from Detroit. “Detroit must not forget the people who have been there all along,” Ford said in the documentary.

Detroiters, Cappuccitti added, have no problem with outsiders coming into the city and making it their home.

“It’s about coming into the city with an understanding that there are people here who have been here sticking it out when the going got rough, when streetlights went out and other municipal services got cut. People here want to be acknowledged, seen and heard.”

What tell-all crime reporting says about us

Imagine being accused of a crime ­– or being found guilty of one.

Depending on where you live, your future may be determined by what – and how much – the news media says about you.

While researching crime reporting across the globe, Faculty of Information & Media Studies professor Romayne Smith Fullerton found North American media coverage of crime differed significantly from that of European news outlets.

She details these differences in Naming Names: A Comparison of Crime Coverage Rituals in North America and Europe, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. The book’s contributing research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Co-written with Maggie Jones Patterson, a journalism professor at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, the book looks at how journalists make ethical decisions related to crime coverage in 10 capitalist democracies across both continents.

In Sweden and Holland, for instance, journalists usually choose not to name or divulge any details concerning the accused or the convicted person – not because it’s the law, but because they want to protect innocent family members and ensure the accused’s presumption of innocence.

“Historically, people in Sweden see someone accused of crime as a member of their own community who made a bad life choice,” Smith Fullerton said.

While the practice is under pressure because of changing immigration patterns, easy access to names on the Internet and increased media competition, media in these countries routinely offer little information about the accused.

In Canada and the United States, it’s a different story.

North American journalists often give public and private details of accused individuals or those convicted of crimes. There are exceptions; in Canada, newspapers are not permitted, by law, to identify minors or alleged sexual assault victims.

“But once people are charged,” said Smith Fullerton, “journalists usually tell as much information as they can find about an accused’s family, children, former partners, mental health background and so on.”

Smith Fullerton hopes the book will help start a conversation among journalists, academics, law enforcement officials and policy-makers about long-overdue questions. How do journalists shape, or are shaped by, the public’s perception of justice and privacy? In an age where globalization sometimes flattens all differences, does it matter if journalism everywhere takes on the American ‘tell-all’ style?

“Because we live in a capitalist society where competition can drive news content, coverage of victims and perpetrators can tend to the sensational,” Smith-Fullerton said.

The public, she believes, has failed to “consider its own responsibility in producing criminals, and to have serious discussions on how we ought to treat people who are charged and convicted.”

The past does not excuse the crime, she added, but can help explain social and economic circumstances – documented childhood abuse, for example – that may lead to these behaviours.

Unlike crime reporting in countries like Canada and United States, journalists in Sweden and Holland, for example, “try to encourage conversations with the public that are more about issues, rather than people’s names and what they did,” Smith Fullerton said.

These attitudes may also reflect the society of those countries.

For example, Sweden’s population has, until recently, been relatively homogenous in ethnicity, religion and culture; this has given them a stronger sense of community and, in crime, a sense that convicted criminals can be rehabilitated and restored to the community, she explained.

“If everyone knows who you are and what you did, how could you be accepted back into society?” Smith Fullerton asked.

North America, in contrast, is a land of immigrants, a cultural mosaic of different cultural values and beliefs.

Success stories are rarely framed as a collective victory; instead, they are lauded as individual grit overcoming extraordinary difficulties.

“But if you fail, you also fail on your own,” Smith Fullerton noted.

She credited a Dutch journalist with providing a pithy summary of these differing attitudes.

“He said, ‘In America, everyone has the right to make a million dollars. In Holland, everyone has the right to start again.’”

New study shows working‐age Canadians unwilling to change jobs and locations hurts economy

A new economic model developed at Western University calculates the cost of reallocating working‐age Canadians (20-64 years old) from one industry to another and shows that an unwillingness by many to relocate or change careers really hurts the economy and leads to high unemployment regionally and nationally.

The study, which was led by Western Economics professors Simona Cociuba and James MacGee, rings a deafening warning bell at a time when Canada’s manufacturing sector is shrinking and service industries are on the rise.

“Older workers are unwilling to move across industries in search of job opportunities,” says Cociuba, a macroeconomics expert in Western’s renowned Department of Economics. “They are often raising families and have roots in the place they live. For many, re‐training for new skills is time‐consuming and costly.”

Cociuba and MacGee developed a novel economic model that uses worker characteristics – including age, skills and willingness to move – to calculate how costly it is to reallocate workers from one industry to another. Since young workers (20‐34 years old) typically lack industry‐specific skills, they are more willing to move industries. This means that economies with a larger share of young workers are more dynamic and find it easier to respond to changes in regional industry employment.

“Discussions regarding the mobility of workers and unemployment are important in the face of aging populations,” says Cociuba.

This is particularly relevant because Canadians are having fewer children, which means fewer young workers will be entering the workforce in the near future. Seniors already outnumber the young in Canada and this gap is expected to continue growing.

Cociuba has two suggestions to help mitigate the adverse effects of an aging population: provide incentives to encourage people to move to areas where industries are growing and create policies to attract young, skilled working immigrants willing to move.

Canada is not the only country confronting these challenges, of course. Many of the world’s top economies, including China, Germany and Japan, face even larger demographic changes.

Immigrant and refugee youth turn to Western Music to cross borders

Six months ago, some of them had never picked up a musical instrument.

Now, a multicultural, seven-member music ensemble composed of immigrant and refugee youth will perform a concert as part of this year’s London Fringe Festival.

Led by Gabriela Ocadiz Velazquez, a graduate student in Western University’s Don Wright Faculty of Music, a youth group from London’s Cross Cultural Learner Centre will perform ‘What YOUth Can Do’ at the Palace Theatre at 10 p.m. on Saturday, June 2.

The musical youth group is believed to the first-of-its-kind in London.

“Music can sometimes bring us together without having to use words,” says Ocadiz Velazquez, who has volunteered her time with the youth group, all of whom attend high school in the surrounding area, since last September.

Community music programs help immigrants and refugees – many of whom face language barriers, employment problems and social isolation – build bridges and connect with society.

“Many members of the group have left a terrible environment. Music helps them find their voice,” Ocadiz Velazquez says. “As a music teacher, I am simply helping make that transition a bit easier.”

At Western, Ocadiz Velazquez studies immigrant and refugee youth who participate in community music programs. Her work will help better understand their experiences, the problems they face in a new environment and how music can often sustain them through difficult times in life.

The youth group chose all of the songs, a diverse collection of covers and original compositions, for their musical performance.

“I wanted to give them complete freedom to pick songs that were meaningful for them,” Ocadiz Velazquez says. “Your past and the place you come from does not always have to define you. They are building a new community on their own now.”

Ocadiz Velazquez says it is now critical to secure support and funding from the provincial government for community music programs like hers, which is aimed at immigrant and refugee re-settlement.

Study: School cliques don’t always click

Lynne Zarbatany watches video footage of children playing with a remote-controlled helicopter. She sees some children share the remote, others grab and cling to it jealously, even a lone child sits in a corner.

Will the Psychology professor be able to help “chronically victimized kids” like the one in the corner – often ignored, occasionally picked on, yet paradoxically, still part of social circles? Her work is helping parents, teachers and counsellors better understand how groups – or peer cliques – of children interact with one another, what compels some to bully others, and develop more effective ways to prevent it.

According to Statistics Canada, one in three youth are bullied – 85 per cent of whom are bullied in front of others. A 2015 UNICEF report revealed Canada has one of the highest incidences of school bullying among the Top 29 most industrialized nations in the world.

Children who are bullied throughout their school years generally have lifelong physical, mental and financial problems. They are also often considered loners and encouraged to seek the company of peers.

But, as Zarbatany is finding out, this may not always be a good idea.

Ten years ago, Zarbatany, with colleagues Wendy Ellis and Xinyin Chen, began using a seemingly simple solution to better understand bullying – put children in a room and record their interactions.

Eight schools in Ontario – including more than 1,000 children from Grades 4-8 – participated in the study, which began in 2008 and took two years to finish. These videos, comprised of hundreds of hours, are a treasure trove of behavioural data unlike anything else in the world right now.

Zarbatany and her colleagues have spent more than eight years studying and analyzing them.

Researchers are convinced peer groups – voluntary groups of three-to-10 members who share similar interests – shape each member’s behaviour and personality. But they have struggled for decades to understand how it happens.

Previously, scholars relied on surveys from parents, teachers and children themselves to “get a sense of what’s going on.” But survey data does not provide a close-up view of how peer groups interact with one another.

Thanks to Zarbatany’s videos, researchers, for the first time, can peek into how peer groups behave with each other in natural settings, and try to understand, as an example, how group dynamics can lead to bullying. For example, Zarbatany found almost 90 per cent of victimized children in her study were in peer cliques – but they were more of social outcasts, and treated less than equals.

“Some victimized children may have been hanging on to the clique rather than hanging out,” she said.

What are these children to do? Leaving cliques might seem obvious, but victimized children often don’t have alternative cliques to join.

Zarbatany cites the example of Alex Libby, one of the subjects in the documentary, Bully. In response to his mother’s concerns about perpetrators who victimized him on the school bus, Alex asked: “If you say these aren’t my friends, then what friends do I have?”

One way, she suggests, is to develop prevention and intervention programs that increase positive group interactions – self-esteem, for example – and reduce negative behaviour such as aggression and antisocial behaviour.

“Bullying is often motivated by the desire to be cool and show off to peers,” Zarbatany says. “Intervention should create opportunities for kids to be cool and show off without hurting others.”

Book finds solution in cooperation, conversation

As in many towns, there’s a skateboarding park in Teslin, Yukon, where children and teenagers play. The one in Teslin, however, was jointly built by the Teslin Tinglit Council – a Yukon First Nation government – and the municipality.

“Both communities came together to foster an environment of cooperation,” explained Political Science professor Chris Alcantara.

The park is just one of many examples of First Nation and municipal governments in Canada working together every day to improve their communities spotlighted in Alcantara’s book, A Quiet Evolution: The Emergence of Indigenous-Local Intergovernmental Partnerships in Canada. The book was written with co-author Jen Nelles, a Hunter College urban affairs and planning professor.

The book examines the reasons for success of hundreds of partnerships and agreements between both groups in Quebec, Ontario and Yukon.

“There has been a lot of ink spilt on the relationship between federal and provincial governments and First Nation communities,” Alcantara said. “And yet, there are agreements and partnerships that exist between First Nation communities and municipalities, and nobody knows anything about it.”

The agreements vary in their scope. In standard service-sharing agreements, for example, municipalities agree to provide services such as fire protection, ambulance and garbage collection to First Nation communities in exchange for fees.  Both also sign communications agreements where each party agrees to meet with each other between one and four times a year to discuss common issues.

Alcantara’s work will provide a potential toolkit of ideas-that-work for building bridges between First Nations communities and federal and provincial governments in Canada.

“As a non-Indigenous scholar, it is not my place to tell Indigenous communities how they should value or not value different forms of co-operations,” he said. “The book simply provides a framework for scholars and policy-makers to think more effectively about cooperation and encouraging partnerships.”

Alcantara hopes A Quiet Evolution will encourage federal and provincial governments to fund incentives, programs and agreements that involve First Nation and municipal governments together, rather than support them separately.

Municipal governments are usually based in cities, towns and villages, and take care of things like libraries, parks, sanitation, roadways and parking. However, they have limited powers and receive authority from provincial governments.

“People focus on federal and provincial governments when they want change since these institutions have power and authority,” Alcantara said. “People ignore municipalities thinking they are unimportant.”

A Quiet Evolution says otherwise – municipalities, in fact, are actively working with First Nation governments. They have frequently been more successful than their bigger counterparts in “finding meaningful ways to cooperate over a variety of issues” concerning both groups.

“Provincial governments, with few exceptions, are not particularly engaged in encouraging these types of relationships,” Alcantara said. He has found, however, an “increasing appetite on how to foster and facilitate these agreements” at the municipal level.

Success often lies in how they are discussed and written.

Alcantara found some municipal-level agreements were “much more progressive” than federal or provincial ones.

“Municipal governments are more willing to accept First Nation titles and their right to self-governance, and recognise that First Nation people were here first since time immemorial,” he says.

But, there are hurdles amidst these success stories. Racism towards First Nations communities, for example, often hinders progress. Frequently, municipalities are uncertain of their legal powers, including what they can and cannot do when they form agreements with First Nation governments.

One of the best ways to solve these problems – talk to each other.

“You don’t always have to look to politicians or policy-makers,” Alcantara said.

Every citizen, he adds, plays a crucial role in fostering connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens.

“Reach out to your neighbours and try to build relationships with other communities.”

Research looking for love in all the right data

Love lies broken in Lorne Campbell’s office.

It has been deconstructed into thousands of data points on Excel sheets and transformed into code that coldly blinks from a computer screen.

Campbell, a Psychology professor, is giving one of our oldest, most primal urges a 21st-Century twist – combining big data and computers to understand love.

Despite the thousands of studies on interpersonal interactions, little of the research has been truly interpersonal. Instead, they ask individuals to list preferred qualities in their partners.

“None actually track participants as they transition into new relationships and then assess how those relationships develop,” explained Campbell, who hopes to understand better how humans build and maintain relationships.

His research will start off in a similar way as it records each participant’s list of preferred qualities in a partner.

But this is where similarities to other studies end.

Once participants form relationships, he will ask their romantic partners to evaluate themselves. By doing this, Campbell will be able to compare if the participant’s idea of an ideal partner matches how the partner views himself or herself.

He will also track couples for the first six months of their relationships to see how they are faring.

“We plan to ask both partners questions about relationship activities, perceived satisfaction with the relationship, and optimism regarding the future of the relationship,” Campbell said.

He plans to have at least 1,000 participants in the study, which will mean a lot of data for each couple over six months and tons of computational resources. In the process, his work will help understand how a relationship develops, and more importantly, will predict its chances of success.

The field of relationship psychology is currently split into two camps. In one, love is seen as truly blind, where we cannot predict with whom we fall in love. In the second, it’s believed we deliberately choose partners according to our preferences.

It is impossible to predict how relationships, marriages or even friendships will last, based on the field’s vague conclusions to date.

“A better understanding of how relationships form will help us better understand people’s well-being,” Campbell said. “Relationships extend beyond love to friends, family and social networks.”

His work about human connections comes at a time when loneliness and alone-ness, a lack of meaningful relationship with others, is on the rise in Canada.

According to 2016 figures from Statistics Canada, 28 per cent of households have only one person living in them, a record high. About 40 per cent of marriages now end in divorce, and couples are having fewer children. The highest at-risk groups are the elderly, due to their lack of mobility and dwindling social networks.

Across the Atlantic, too, British Prime Minister Theresa May recently appointed a Minister for Loneliness to tackle the growing issue of social isolation across all age groups in England.

Campbell’s work will provide mental health practitioners, couples counsellors and psychologists with a more detailed and nuanced understanding of relationships than ever before, and help them provide better-quality interventions.

Paper trail uncovers rich history of Middle East

There’s good, present-day reason to study the economic history of the medieval Middle East – and that would be today’s economic realities in the region.

“There is currently no up-to-date economic history of the medieval Middle East informed by the new economic theories and methodologies in economic history,” Maya Shatzmiller explained. “Economists, economic historians and the general public cannot understand past and present Islamic societies without it.”

During the past 30 years, the History professor has painstakingly pored through economic data, administrative accounts, legal documents, cultivation and taxation ledgers used by administrations and individuals throughout the Middle East and North Africa – spanning 7th to 13th centuries – tracking economic indicators such as commodity prices, cost of living, national income and wages.

(Data from the Measuring the Medieval Islamic Economy project is available online.)

Shatzmiller’s recent essay, The Adoption of Paper in the Middle-East, explores the region’s economic history during that era. Unlike the prevailing outlook in her field, it depicts an economic history of medieval Islamic societies that shows a booming, vibrant economy, with sustained economic growth and higher standards of living.

And one of the main themes of her work – humble and unassuming paper.

“Paper’s effect on medieval Islamic economy was nothing short of groundbreaking,” said Shatzmiller, the world’s leading economic historian of pre-modern Middle East and the 2018 Hellmuth Prize for Achievement in Research.

“Paper documents boosted literacy, made long-distance trade and economic transactions easier and helped enforce law across vast distances by writing down laws and court documents.”

Many believe the root cause of Islamic extremism to be the Middle East’s failure, since medieval times, to achieve economic growth and lift people out of poverty – a situation they believe, worsened by Islam. Some economic historians speculate Islam is economically inefficient and the Middle East is, therefore, doomed to live in perpetual underdevelopment.

Shatzmiller’s work is helping change that perception.

Her research on the economic achievements of the medieval Middle East will be crucial to challenging a 21st-Century society grappling with its understanding of Islam. A significant portion of the population believes Islam to be historically intolerant and the Middle East being in eternal, perpetual conflict.

“Unlike medieval Europe, Medieval Islamic society was an ethnic mix that was tolerant of diversity, and had high incomes and standards of living,” Shatzmiller said.

It also meant a booming economy. Shatzmiller found that in Baghdad, for instance, people bought imported spices, precious stones, fancy foods, and exotic animals from every corner of the world.

“High standards of living meant that goods, including fine garments and writing material like expensive papyri, were constantly in demand,” she explained.

In response, farmers began to plant textile crops like flax to meet the demand for fine garments like linen. It proved to be a fateful decision.

By the beginning of the 11th Century, Arabs had perfected making paper exclusively out of linen rags. Linen’s raw material, flax, was more abundant than papyrus plants. Paper-making became cheaper resulting in the price of books declining sharply in the 11th and 12th centuries.

“The ease with which paper documents travelled guaranteed better business for merchants, tighter bureaucratic control, and increase in literacy,” Shatzmiller said.

It also helped the medieval Middle East build bridges with Europe by translating ancient Greek philosophical texts and sharing and transmitting discoveries in medicine and mathematics. Many historians consider this infusion of knowledge into Western Europe as the precursor of Renaissance and the scientific revolution.

Beneath it all, as Shatzmiller has discovered, was a diverse, religiously tolerant medieval Middle Eastern society that harnessed technological innovations and shared it with the world.

Labour laws historically out of tune with musicians

In 2010, pop musician Kesha began an ultimately failed three-year legal fight with her two producers, Lukasz Gottwald and David Sonenberg, over exclusive rights to her singing services and song catalogue.

“The question that never comes up was, ‘What does she want?’ The court does not care. Her preferences, her desires had no role to play in this argument,” explained Matt Stahl, a Faculty of Information & Media Studies professor.

Norms of labour litigation suggest Kesha can be treated as a legal object, something – not someone – to be fought over like property.

These norms, also applicable in general cases of professional employment, can suppress wages, limit competition and prevent sellers of services from free access to other markets. They limit employee bargaining power by effectively giving employers property rights over their employees.

But these modern laws, as Stahl recently discovered, have more than six centuries of legal history behind them – traceable to 14th-Century Europe and The Great Plague.

Stahl’s research journey began when he stared examining labour laws surrounding Kesha’s case and took him through archives full of court cases related to exploited opera singers, black sharecroppers in the American South and possessive baseball managers.

He recently presented his research in a conference paper, We Are All Kesha: How Women’s Musical Labor Transformed Employment in the 19th Century, and How It Continually Rehearses Employment’s Servility. The paper traces the origins of how labour laws have historically been used to exploit the careers of numerous female musicians, His work helps scholars and students of music better understand the role of law in the music industry.

So far, a “lack of resources, energy or attention towards labour law in music” means most popular-music scholars are unaware of its ongoing importance in shaping the careers of professional musicians.

Kesha’s case is strikingly similar to another case more than 150 years ago.

In 1853, two opera producers, Benjamin Lumley and Frederick Gye, were in court fighting over the exclusive rights to the singing services of Prussian opera singer Johanna Wagner. “The court considered the claims of two opera promoters and did not care in the slightest about Wagner’s preferences,” Stahl said.

The court’s final decision prohibited Wagner from performing for any producer other than her original one, Lumley.

“The 1853 case created the very possibility for two employers to sue each other over another employee without employee’s intentions mattering,” Stahl said.

But the case had a legal precedent.

In the mid-14th Century, the Great Plague wiped away one-third of the working population, including labourers, farmers and servants. As labour became scarce, workers began to boost their prices and landowners would often poach labourers from other landowners by offering workers more money.

Eventually, the ruling classes passed laws that prevented landowners from luring workers away with the promise of better pay. If they failed to comply, landowners could sue each other over the ownership of workers, labourers and servants.

Nobody cared about workers’ opinions.

Four centuries later, in the Lumley case, the 14th-Century precedent would classify Wagner, a professional opera singer, as a servant.

Stahl is certain Wagner’s gender was also pivotal in the outcome of her case.

“Victorian male supremacy considered Wagner, a woman, more like a servant than a formally equal contracting individual and professional,” he said. “When the Lumley court defined Wagner as a servant, they cut the legal ground for equality and subjectivity out from under workers of all kinds.”

He believes this case “is an extraordinarily important moment in Anglo-American social relations.”

Soon after, American courts embraced the Lumley case.

“It was applied first to similar cases of women performers, through the end of the 19th Century, then to former slave sharecroppers, whose employers wanted to lock them in servitude and prevent other owners from poaching them,” Stahl said.

Finally, by the turn of the 20th Century, baseball team owners – rich moguls of a profitable sport – used it to prevent valuable players from being hired away with better offers from other teams. At that point, this norm of employers owning employees’ contracted labour went mainstream.

The Wagner case highlights the special symbolic role musicians have in our culture, he said, and represents an ironic contrast with their legal status.

“We have embraced this idea of musicians as some kind of representative of freedom and self-expression,” Stahl said. “If we see Kesha achieving the goal of singing her own songs in the ways she wants to without being subject to this kind of control, then we may see her experiencing the values our liberal society – relationships of choice, not domination.”

Following flow of ideas reveals mass media roots

No matter if making connections across the centuries, or just around the corner, Genevieve de Viveiros’ exploration of a 19th-Century French novelist has led to 21st-Century insights about the spread of ideas and the place of her community in the world.

While delving into the Western Archives and Research Collection Centre, the French Studies professor pulled out an 1892 playbill from the Grand Opera House in London – an ancestor of the Grand Theatre – advertising a play by Émile Zola. The unexpected find was yet another clue into de Viveiros’ exploration of how culture, ideas, opinions and news traveled across Europe and North America during the 19th Century.

“This is the period when mass media truly originated,” de Viveiros said. “And Zola was a pioneer in using mass media to his advantage. He used it to popularize not only his literary works, but also his opinion pieces in newspapers on various political and social issues.”

Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was born April 2, 1840 in Paris, France. He published his controversial first novel, La Confession de Claude, in 1865 and continued his journalism career while publishing novels. As the founder of the naturalist movement, Zola also published several treatises to explain his theories on various topics, like art. He died in 1902.

In the 19th Century, a booming book industry, due to innovative advances in printing technology, meant affordable books and newspapers. As a result, education and information became more accessible to the masses, especially women.

Zola’s writings created a stir and pushed the boundaries of realism, with vivid descriptions of human emotions and societal class differences, but also graphic accounts of bodily functions like childbirth, sickness and pregnancy.

He became one of the most famous celebrity authors of the era. His works were widely translated and read all over Europe and North America. In fact, many of his novels were illegally copied, translated and pirated.

Many of his novels were also adapted into plays, a popular way to communicate works of literature. While a controversial practice among the literary elite, it was wildly popular with audiences, de Viveiros explained. Touring theatre companies would often do a circuit of different cities and his plays were some of the most popular.

Through Zola and his contemporaries – like Honoré de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas – de Viveiros charts the spread of ideas, opinions and news all over Europe and across the Atlantic.

“Mass media in the 19th Century changed and influenced culture and communication in Europe and North America,” de Viveiros said. “Understanding these patterns of change in the past will help us better understand how information, in the form of social media and ‘fake news,’ for example, is shaping opinions and culture now.”

But de Viveiros’ work is also uncovering a little known depiction of 19th-Century London, Ont. – one with a vibrant and dynamic cultural scene.

She recently found, in the Western Archives, letters and diaries of families living in London that regularly mention attending plays and music recitals, many of which originated in Europe – including Zola’s.

“London was a very important Victorian-era Canadian town and a part of the cultural circuit around the Great Lakes area,” said de Viveiros, currently exploring archives in Toronto and Montreal to see if Zola’s plays travelled across other Canadian cities.

Funny bone offers serious insights into personality

Research linking humour styles and psychology suggests your responses to a joke may provide insight into your personality.

Management and Organizational Studies professor Julie Aitken Schermer, in the first work of its kind, recently showed a person’s genetics, plus the environment around them, might influence the relationship between who they are and what they find amusing.

In other words, you inherit a particular sense of humour from your parents. But your classmates, work colleagues, and individual experiences ultimately shape your humour style.

Schermer’s research linking psychology and humour has serious implications.

“It’s the self-deprecating humour style that I am particularly worried about,” she said.

Schermer was one of the world’s first researchers to uncover the link between excessive self-deprecating humour and suicidal thoughts, anxiety, depression and borderline personality disorders. Her new work could help counsellors, psychologists, therapists and clinicians treat mental illness in Canada using humour.

“They could benefit from being more aware of the functions of humour in their patients’ lives and how maladaptive humour plays a role in their psychological dysfunctions,” she said.

As importantly, Schermer’s work reduces the stigma of mental illness by helping to uncover possible biological and environmental explanations for linking humour and mental illness.

Apart from self-deprecating humour, maladaptive humour can also be characterized as aggressive humour and bullying, which often provide devastating experiences for Canada’s school-going youth. According to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, about 14 per cent of Ontario’s high school students indicate a serious level of psychological distress.

Self-deprecating humour often becomes a coping mechanism for bullying.

Schermer plans to work on developing tools school psychologists and academic counselors can use that delve deeper into what patients find funny and use positive humour styles that help ease personal stress and enhance interpersonal relationships.

She hopes these potential psychological tools can also help students cope with mental illness.

“Cognitive behaviour therapy rarely looks at humour as a problem-solving tool,” Schermer said. “Instead, counsellors and psychologists tend to focus on what individuals want to complain about.”

People are more likely to admit, ‘Yes, I find that funny,’ than to speak negatively about colleagues – what they laugh at can speak volumes about how they conduct interpersonal relationships.

Counsellors, therapists and clinicians might also be able to help some patients by using humour as a tool to appreciate something funny and lighthearted around them.

“If you are having a hard day, you can either fixate on the negative aspects and criticize yourself, or you can tell yourself something funny and lighten up your own personal mood,” Schermer said.

Researcher: Activism changing museums for better

For years, Canadian Indigenous communities were allowed little say in how their cultural representations – artifacts and paintings, for example – were displayed in the country’s museums. With few Indigenous curators on staff, museums often kept items taken from communities and displayed them with no regard to permission, context or, in many cases, accuracy.

Taking place in stark contrast to the celebrated exhibits were many public and behind-the-scenes protests seeking more respectful and sensitive representation of Indigenous societies; fewer controversial sponsorships; and, occasionally, the complete overhaul of museums.

In the first analysis of its kind, Visual Arts professor Kirsty Robertson’s upcoming book, Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums, traces the history and aftermath of protests, sit-ins and demonstrations in Canadian museums since the 1900s. The work is a culmination of more than a decade’s worth of archival research and interviews with protesters and museum officials; it is intended to help Canadians understand a rarely recognized aspect of museum studies and histories.

The provenance of Indigenous artifacts is one striking example.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have had a long history of collecting human remains and artifacts from Indigenous gravesites without permission and displaying them in museums. That practice stopped in the 1970s, a direct result of protests by various Indigenous communities. Since then, many of these remains have been repatriated to their communities.

One defining moment between Indigenous communities and Canada’s museums took place before the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Anishinaabe visual artist Rebecca Belmore sat immobile for two hours inside a glass case in minus-22°C weather – offering herself as an artifact. Her perch outside the Thunder Bay Art Gallery was in full view of the Olympic torch procession as it travelled west.

Belmore, the Lubicon Cree and Indigenous communities across Canada were protesting Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples – an exhibit of 650 Indigenous objects and artifacts – at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. Most pieces had previously been removed from Canada and had been stored in foreign museums. Spirit Sings marked the first time these objects would be returned and celebrated.

The exhibit was meant to showcase Canada as a culturally diverse nation. For the Lubicon Cree in Alberta, reality was far different.

They were living in poverty, crowded into ramshackle houses with no running water – on land that was part of ongoing land claims and was surrounded by hundreds of oil wells owned by multinational oil companies.

That Shell Canada and the provincial and federal governments funded Spirit Sings as a celebration of Canada’s welcome of Indigenous people represented “sheer and blatant hypocrisy,” Robertson said. “The Lubicon Cree protest was very significant and resulted in some major changes to how Canadian museums operated and changed their ways and attitudes towards Indigenous communities.”

In 1994, the federal government formed the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples as a response to Spirit Sings.

Now, for example, museums consult Indigenous communities and work with them when setting up exhibitions about Indigenous culture. Museums are also encouraged to hire Indigenous curators.

Robertson’s book also covers protests by settler and minority groups in Canada.

“In Canada, museums have frequently been sites of struggle and negotiation” and have long histories of colonial content that stereotyped or misrepresented a particular group, she noted.

The book also discusses protests by veterans against the Canadian War Museum, actions against homelessness at the Vancouver Art Gallery, interventions by Shoal Lake Nation 40 at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) controversial exhibit, Into the Heart of Africa, held in 1989.

The ROM apologized for Into the Heart of Africa, only last year. It is currently staging Of Africa, a three-year project with a number of permanent displays and temporary exhibits that showcase Africa’s diversity.

While the relationship between Canada’s museums and Indigenous communities and minorities has improved during the past several years, Robertson pointed out, “there are still bumps in the road.”

Currently, there are still too few Indigenous curators working in Canadian museums.

“Programs that have been established to bring Indigenous communities into museums are often subject to defunding when new governments come in,” Robertson said.

Work lends ‘voice’ to dementia patient wishes

Grant Campbell vividly remembers playing violin next to his mother’s hospital bed and how, for brief moments, song became the communication bridge between them.

“She would hear me play a familiar song,” he said. “Out of the fog of dementia, the lyrics would come back.”

When both Campbell’s parents were diagnosed with dementia, he thought, “Well, I must do research – it will make everything better. Unfortunately, it’s rarely that simple.”

The Faculty of Information & Media Studies professor’s research, which began with that personal quest 10 years ago, hopes to help dementia patients communicate their needs to their caregivers – from family members to professional support workers.

“I want to break through the isolation felt by individuals and families who are living with dementia,” he said.

Work such as Campbell’s will also be critical as federal and provincial governments shift funding and policy priorities to manage a growing population suffering from the disease. According to the Alzheimer Society of Canada, 1.4 million Canadians will be living with dementia by 2031.

Campbell focuses on how people manage when they can no longer find the right words.

“Society is increasingly dependent on technology,” he said. “If I need to live independently and keep a semblance of normal life, I need an interface that will continue to work, even after dementia takes hold.”

He combines his background in library and information science – describing, organizing and classifying information – to understand how to create state-of-the-art information systems, such as drop-down menus, that will be able to predict and adapt to the needs of people with dementia.

The software would be integrated into websites, smartphone apps and smart homes.

Even with a diminished ability to speak, these electronic interfaces would help patients call an ambulance, order groceries and contact caregivers. It would provide a level of freedom for patients and peace of mind for their family members.

Campbell will be interviewing professional caregivers, personal support workers, nurses, and therapists who work with dementia patients to help understand the specific design needs. He is also asking family members, in order to understand how they communicate meaningfully with loved ones.

And he will also speak with people in the early stages of dementia – seeking their stories about achievements and challenges in making themselves understood.

Campbell’s aim is to look for common communication patterns and themes, including speech and vocabulary.

He will describe, classify and organize these themes and use them to ‘train’ software programs to learn, predict and adapt to diminishing speech and vocabulary patterns of those with dementia. Based on a person’s language patterns, for example, the software could provide synonyms or help them construct sentences.

A recent study demonstrated that people with dementia group objects together in different ways during the progression of the disease. In early stages of the disease, some with dementia related carrots to other vegetables such as tomatoes and celery. Later on, they would relate carrots to rabbits and, eventually, to rockets because of their similar shapes.

Apart from forming the basis for designing predictive software, Campbell is using information from these interviews to augment existing manuals and guidebooks for caregivers.

“If we can enhance our understanding of why and how these breakdowns in communications are happening, we can help them better, cope with it better (as caregivers) and hang on to our compassion,” he said. “A lot of caregiving is made more stressful and difficult because caregivers cannot bridge where he or she is and where the patient is.”

As he continues to play violin – he is a volunteer for the Intergenerational Choir, a weekly music program run by The Alzheimer Society London and Middlesex, Sisters of St. Joseph and the Medway High School music program – Campbell still sees how people with dementia can communicate through the language of music.

Once, he recalled, a caregiver asked him to play for a bedridden patient in advanced stages of dementia. Initially, she was unresponsive, Campbell said.

Then he played Oh, What a Beautiful Morning from Oklahoma! with its lyric, “The cattle are standing like statues.”

And for this woman, locked in dementia for so long, a happy memory briefly returned, along with words to name the memory. She whispered to him: “Guernsey cows on my farm. We had Guernsey cows.”

Singers urged to be kind to their inner voice

Opera singer Bethany Hynes, a Don Wright Faculty of Music graduate student, asks her peers a simple question: what does your voice mean to you?

“Singers think about their voice a lot – how they function, how they sound and what it says about them as people,” she says. “It is a huge part of their identity.”

While the singing community does not openly talk about these intensely personal feelings, Hynes said there’s a growing need to acknowledge them and put them out into the open.

“Much like research in body image, I am trying to figure out how to get singers to have a healthy relationship with their voice,” she said.

Hynes is the world’s first researcher to explore different relationships between singers and their voices – she calls it the ‘voice image’ – and to provide a formal framework to link these relationships.

Collaborating with Western psychology professor Rachel Calogero, she is developing a study that includes formal and informal interviews with classical singers and opera singers at Western to find out more about their thoughts, beliefs and feelings about their voices.

“So much of their future, dreams and careers hinges on the question, ‘Am I good enough?’” Hynes said.

Often, singers and their voices are inseparable – which can be a source of pride and confidence and also lead to insecurity, and fluctuating feelings of self-worth.

Her research will be critical to helping singers cope better with praise and criticism alike.

Many artists view a critique of their performance as a critique of self: a poorly received performance translates to “I am a terrible and unworthy person,” Hynes said.

In many cases, music teachers are the sources of criticism because a part of their job is to help singers improve their singing through instigating change.

“Music teachers say, ‘these comments are about your voice, not you,’” Hynes added.

“For most singers, their voice is a part of who they are, and it is very difficult for them to separate the two.”

Hynes’s research will also help music teachers acknowledge these realities and vulnerabilities of students, and work through them by providing more sensitive and effective ways of guiding students.

Hynes will also explore the relation between image and stereotypes within the singing community, and how singers’ perceptions of their inner voice can affect both their external voice and inner peace.

In opera, for example, voice types are often linked to specific roles and personalities. Sopranos, for example, tend to play the part of a princess or a girlfriend or the “good guy.” Mezzo-sopranos, on the other hand, play the sidekick, witches and old women.

“These roles feed into stereotypes and they affect a singer’s identity,” Hynes said.

This is often further complicated by singers’ voices changing over the course of their careers, through vocal injury, illness or time.

For some, it may mean switching from a soprano to a mezzo-soprano – a huge change in repertoire and an equally big shift in identity and how others perceive them. Many singers find it difficulty to adapt, which affects their mental well-being and eventually, their careers.

“It is like throwing out your resume and having to build a new one,” Hynes said.

She hopes her pioneering research in voice image will provide “ideas, themes and vocabulary” she can apply to other circumstances, such as people who have undergone gender-reassignment surgery. For example, in some surgical cases, men successfully transition into women, but their voices do not go higher, which is often a traumatic experience.

“It feeds into damaging cultural stereotypes regarding women’s voices and it affects their self-worth and identity,” she said.

Researchers analyze peace with computer science

Words can play a critical role in turning dreams of peace into reality.

Researchers at Western have found this is particularly true for victims of the Colombian conflict, which ended in 2016 when the government and the country’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym, FARC), signed a peace agreement ending nearly six decades of violence and human rights abuses.

During this period, approximately 220,000 people, including 45,000 children, lost their lives. The Unique Registry of Victims in Colombia provides an official registry of victims of the armed conflict.

The final peace agreement stated redress for victims were at the core of the agreement.

But do the words of the peace agreement reflect both negotiating parties’ intent to focus on victims?

Western Modern Languages and Literatures professor Juan Luis Suárez and graduate student Yadira Lizama-Mué are using Natural Language Processing (NLP) – a computer science technique – to scan, read and analyze thousands of pages of drafts, documents and media releases about the peace agreement to answer this question.

“If victims are not in the centre, it is easy to exploit their rights and it leaves them vulnerable,” Suárez said.

A victim-centred approach focuses on empowering victims as engaged participants in the peace and justice process, and prioritizes their wishes, safety and well-being.

“Our research recognizes the significance of the Final Peace Agreement. Throughout the process, the parties showed a genuine interest in including the victims in the dialogue,” Suárez said. However, he warned the language used during the negotiations in Havana doesn’t reflect this intention as deep as the victims need.

Suárez and Lizama-Mué programmed NLP to count the frequency of certain words –“peace,” “conflict,” “victims,” and “justice,” as examples – and look for sentence patterns and themes around them. “We wanted to focus on the language around the ‘conflict’ and its inseparable terms, ‘victims’ and ‘justice’,” Suárez explained.

They found the agreement focuses little on victims, dominated instead by discussions of governance, national identity and legal processes.

“If complex and technical documents like peace agreements are not ironclad, every step of the future is a minefield,” Suárez said. “It becomes very easy for vested interests to destroy the agreement.”

The end result is victims themselves don’t reap any of the agreement’s benefits.

Suárez and Lizama-Mué’s work comes at a critical time in Colombia’s history. The country is counting down to presidential elections in May 2018, a mere 15 months after it officially ended the continent’s largest armed conflict.

“Alliances will define the future of the nation, and consequently, the future of peace implementation,” Lizama-Mué said.

Suárez and Lizama-Mué are the first researchers in the world to use computer science and artificial intelligence tools to study the language of peace and reconciliation in peace agreements and treaties.

Their work will help governments and international agencies like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court review peace agreements and treaties to ensure they focus on conflict victims and help those who need it most. In Canada, this is particularly relevant to documents produced by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Indigenous communities.

Given the complexity and duration of negotiations, peace agreements and treaties go through multiple drafts and revisions. The final agreement is often a complicated political and legal document.

“NLP is an economical and efficient way to automatically read these documents,” Lizama-Mué said.

Suárez wants future negotiating parties to test the content of documents they publish, to “make sure their public declarations and the principles that inspire the negotiations are really reflected in the language choices they make.”

Suárez and Lizama-Mué will forward these recommendations to the Colombian government with the results of their research.

They also combined NLP and Twitter data to track discussions about the peace process by analyzing three million tweets and hashtags by former FARC leaders, politicians, journalists and other Colombian citizens during the year-long negotiations in 2016.

“The discussions in 2016 were very polarized, but it is better to have war through words over social media than through arms in the battlefield,” Suárez said, pointing out the importance of having victims actively participate in the debates and discussions, which makes the peace process more participatory and effective.

He is cautious, warning: “When you sign a peace agreement, that’s when conflict ends but that’s not when peace starts.”

Climate change clues rest in taking London’s temperature

James Voogt is taking London’s temperature.

The tiny heat sensors his research depends upon hang unobtrusively on building walls and sit on rooftops. Some, attached to a research truck, roam the streets. On occasion, they are mounted to tall towers or on aircraft.

It’s a novel approach intended to help understand the degree of temperature swings in London over time. Voogt hopes to learn how the city is affected by climate change and offer clues for devising more effective strategies to deal with it.

“You can tell what the atmosphere is doing by looking at the surface,” the Geography professor explained. “Conditions in the lowest parts of the atmosphere are strongly influenced by characteristics of the surface. Because surface characteristics are so different in cities, this means they are able to create their own urban climate.”

Temperature readings of surfaces within the city are far more precise than those emanating from weather at the airport, for example, or from satellites spinning 35,000 kilometres above London. The data generated by these sensors will also help understand how urban areas influence the atmosphere above them.

Satellite sensors have limitations – they cannot capture the temperature variations of buildings, pavements and roads, each of which absorb and reflect sunlight in different ways, depending on their colour and material.

Voogt’s sensors provide a more complete picture of the temperatures of the complex, three-dimensional surfaces characteristic of cities. That information will help build more powerful computer models for accurate weather forecasting and climate-change predictions for cities.

Global warming will affect cities disproportionately, compared with rural areas. The concrete, asphalt and other construction materials used to pave roads and construct buildings readily absorb sunlight and raise local temperatures to a higher degree in cities. That warming effect in rural areas is often mitigated by vegetation and other natural features.

The dearth of data about climate change in urban areas has even been highlighted in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and Western Geography professor Gordon McBean for its work on climate change. That report noted, “urbanization is missing from climate model projections.”

Voogt recently participated in the first CitiesIPCC meeting in Edmonton in March.

In the coming years, cities will get bigger and more crowded, contributing to more extreme weather patterns, including intense precipitation and extreme heat waves and increased surface temperatures, he said.

In August 2003, for example, Europe had its hottest summer since 1540. For 10 days, heat waves swept through most major cities. Dehydration, hyperthermia, heat strokes and respiratory problems were blamed for the deaths of more than 70,000 people.

Climate change models predict that by 2050 such intense, week-long heat waves will become almost commonplace ­– striking Eastern Europe once a decade, and Western Europe once every 15 years. Across the globe, the number, duration and frequency of heat waves is projected to increase.

At the same time, cities are important sites of activity that drive more than 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. This means that cities are important sites both for climate change mitigation efforts, intended to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions, and climate-change adaptation, which can help cities cope.

In the specific case of London, Voogt’s research can identify ‘hot spots’ city planners and politicians can focus on in designing strategies to reduce temperature – planting trees or increasing the surface reflectivity, for example.

Music educator: Arts, music need political champions

The plight of music teachers has fallen on Ontario politicians’ tone deaf ears, a Western Music professor contends.

Despite ongoing public discussion about the importance of music education, many Ontario public school students will never get to experience the joy of music in their classrooms because of a decade-long drop in provincial funding designated towards music and the arts, according to Don Wright Faculty of Music professor Patrick Schmidt.

“We have no idea how music teachers are responding to these conditions and how are they living these experiences,” he said.

Schmidt is giving them a voice by conducting surveys and interviews with music teachers and arts supervisors across Ontario. He is asking them to share their experiences and stories on their current situation and the state of music education in Ontario.

Schmidt will eventually extend this research across Canada.

Multiple studies have shown music education is one of the most effective ways to foster creativity, communication and teamwork ­- key skills required to prosper in the 21st Century. Music training has also been tied to general academic achievement.

In a recent 10-year study, tracking more than 25,000 middle- and high-school students across the United States, students enrolled in music classes earned higher scores on standardized tests (reading, verbal and mathematics skills) compared to students with little or no music involvement.

While music teachers play a crucial role in cultivating that creativity, there is little information on their working conditions in Ontario’s public schools.

Anecdotal evidence suggests music teachers are asked to teach a variety of other subjects, which can leave them little time to devote to music instruction. They also have little freedom to pursue creative ways of teaching music to a new generation of Canadians.

“In a multicultural society like Canada, how do we create a space for multiple forms of music from a variety of new communities and immigrants?” Schmidt asked. “We need to encourage informal music learning where students learn from their peers and learn a wider repertoire of music that is meaningful to them.”

Schmidt also plans to speak to school administrators to understand how schools hire and allocate music teachers across school boards in urban, suburban and rural Ontario.

In many cases, smaller, rural schools cannot afford to hire music teachers, which leave children with less opportunity to learn an instrument or rehearse a choral piece. Schools in more affluent neighbourhoods, however, can purchase instruments and supplies and arrange for students to experience live performances. This geographic and economic divide can lead to a wide opportunity gap.

“The narrowing of schools means a narrowing of civic and empathetic capacities in our societies,” he said.

Ontario’s Ministry of Education acknowledges the crucial role of music and arts in shaping children’s creativity, leadership and problem-solving abilities.

Yet the push towards STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects can mean students are actively discouraged not to study music and the arts.

Schmidt said this comes at the expense of  deeper learning and understanding of other experiences.

“To build a cohesive, intelligent, and collaborative population requires an education that is not specialized, and schools are the best way to develop those qualities,” he said. “Schools should be places where people get to express and learn and develop themselves in multiple formats and ways. We are delimiting these possibilities very early on.”

Professor tracks medieval winds of (climate) change

The Middle Ages – spanning the 5th to 13th centuries – witnessed the rise of the Catholic Church, the spread of Islam and social and political transformation that laid the foundation for the Renaissance and modern Western civilization.

While greed, pride and curiosity brought about some of that change, Melitta Adamson argues food and climate change were the main drivers.

“Climate is rarely mentioned as a major factor in the food choices people made and the social and political upheaval that could result from climate change,” Adamson said.

The Modern Languages and Literatures professor and food historian is among the first scholars in her field to document how climate change, with its critical impact on food production, shaped the Middle Ages (or Medieval Period) through famine, disease and war.

Adamson’s paper, Climate Change and the Medieval Diet, is a timely reminder to governments, policy-makers and the general public that history may very well repeat itself and that the past holds lessons this generation can tackle in the future.

Scientists only recently have charted medieval weather data by studying ice cores, tree rings, pollen remains and ocean sediments. A warm period lasting from around AD 800 to 1300 was bookended by two cold stretches: one from the 6th to the 7th centuries, the other from the late 13thto the mid-19th centuries.

Adamson combined this data with her research in medieval food practices she found in contemporary writings, including medieval cookbook manuscripts, medical literature, household accounts, church records of wine production and grape harvests, and narrative texts describing people’s food habits.

Adamson attended the University of Vienna and received her PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto. She is widely recognized as the leading authority on medieval cuisine and cookery.

Her book, Food in the Middle Ages, explored how the common foodstuffs available, how and what they cooked, ate, and drank, what the regional cuisines were like, how the different classes entertained and celebrated, and what restrictions they followed for health and faith reasons. Drawing on a variety of period sources – literature, account books, cookbooks, religious texts, archaeology, and art – it provided fascinating information, such as on imitation food, kitchen humor, and medical ideas. Many period recipes and quotations flesh out the narrative.

Showed how food was a status symbol then, and sumptuary laws defined what a person of a certain class could eat – the ingredients and preparation of a dish and how it was eaten depended on a person’s status, and most information is available on the upper crust rather than the masses. Equalizing factors might have been religious strictures and such diseases as the bubonic plague, all of which are detailed here.

Adamson’s latest paper brings climate change into the discussion.

The first cold period (Late Antique Little Ice Age) from the 6th to the 7th centuries caused massive famines in Europe and Asia. With malnourishment making people more vulnerable to disease, epidemics left millions dead. During this time, Slavic peoples migrated to the eastern part of Europe, and people of central Asia to China, in search of pastureland, Adamson noted.

Meanwhile, a wetter climate in the Arabian Peninsula meant more vegetation and a better diet for humans and animals. This contributed to the rapid expansion of the Arab Empire.

In AD 711, Arabs landed in Spain. They brought with them Greek classics, and their knowledge of science and medicine, which would become critical in developing Renaissance Europe in the later centuries.

The Medieval Warm Period that started around AD 800 and lasted almost half a millennium reversed people’s fortunes in Europe. The changed climate meant more favourable weather conditions and an agricultural revolution that led to flourishing cities, booming trade and exploration. Norsemen settled in Iceland and Greenland and from there, reached Newfoundland and Labrador around AD 1000.

By the beginning of the 14th Century, Europe’s climate became more extreme, colder and stormier – a time known now as the Little Ice Age. Prolonged frost, storms and cold summers ravaged staple crops and resulted poor harvests, famines, disease and war.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, natural causes such as volcanic eruptions, changes in solar activity and natural fluctuations of greenhouse gases caused climate changes.

Adamson explained that recent climate change, especially since the mid-20th Century, is predominantly caused by man-made activities – and many parts of the world are also feeling its effects on food production.

Rediscovering Mexican art, one historical painting at a time

It has taken almost three centuries for Mexican painter Antonio Enríquez to capture the world’s attention. Until now, his paintings of 18th-Century Mexico have languished, forgotten, in places all across Guadalajara, the United States and Spain.

His works have been tucked away in old churches, have gathered dust in musty attics and have lain rolled up and unremembered in wooden boxes. Alena Robin, Western Modern Languages and Literatures professor and art historian, has spent the past five years searching for, and finding, them. She is the world’s first scholar to re-discover and study Enríquez’s work.

During Enríquez’s lifetime, Mexico City, then the capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain, was home to an active school of painting – and Antonio Enríquez was amongst its most prominent artists.

“My research participates in the trend of giving a voice to regional schools of painting,” Robin said. “Guadalajara was a well defined urban center in mid-18th Century.”

Robin’s upcoming book, tentatively titled Antonio Enríquez: A Forgotten Painter in mid-18th Century New Spain, is the first of its kind to bring Enríquez from obscurity into the limelight. Her work is reacquainting a new generation of students with their cultural heritage.

In studying Enríquez’s paintings, Robin is uncovering how society, geography and religion intersected in 18th-Century Mexico – which was then still part of the Spanish Empire – to produce a distinct artistic culture.

Robin’s work is adding to a growing body of scholarship that has only recently begun to explore 18th-Century Mexican art – a period when painters like Antonio Enríquez were breaking from traditional European schools of painting and developing their own distinctive, creative styles.

As one of the few art historians in Canada specializing in Latin American art, her research goes beyond academia. She is keen on bringing it into the public sphere. Few museums in Canada have Latin American art in their collections.

“This side of Latin American history and heritage is unknown and invisible,” Robin said.

She plans to expand her work on 18th-Century Mexican artists beyond Enríquez, and to work with museums across Canada to curate and exhibit Latin American art.

“There is a big move to promote Latin American art in Canada, and London is a big part of that movement,” Robin said, pointing to the Colores de Latinoamérica Exhibition at London’s Sunfest that has been organized by Latin Canadian artists for the past 12 years.

Artists in colonial Mexico would often emulate artistic styles of Europe. Enríquez, as she found out, took those traditional influences and created his own distinctive style.

“Enríquez’s paintings represent how local painting within Mexico itself was as significant as the use of European sources in creating new and vibrant compositions,” Robin said. “Eighteenth-century Mexican painters were trying to be creative and innovative in a market that required some traditional depictions.”

For a lot of people, tradition was closely associated with religion. For example, by studying Guadalajara residents’ manuscripts, books and wills, Robin found they would commission painters like Enríquez to make religious paintings because they wanted to ensure their souls went to heaven.

Enríquez also made many religious paintings for Guadalajara’s church, including portraits of various nuns and bishops.

Religion has always played a big part in Mexican society and culture but, as Robin points out, in 18th-Century Mexico, not everyone knew how to read or write.

“People had a Bible, but it was not accessible,” she said.

Enríquez’s paintings depicting images from the Bible provided a way to tell its story to people who were illiterate.

Robin plans to hold an exhibition of Enríquez’s works in Guadalajara and here in Canada.