More Than Words

In her first talk, Dr. Pimlott pointed out how language can be seen as an integral to civilization; yet, it can equally be the undoing of civilization. Ancient Greek philosophers saw “democracy” as a flawed system of governance because, in part, it produces a potential source of its own destruction in the “demagogue”. Democracy enables a demagogue to come to power through emotional appeals to “the poor” or “the mob” and, thereby, bring about democracy’s destruction, as we have seen in recent times in countries, such as Hungary and Turkey. The 21^st century return of “culture wars” has been accompanied by the rise of demagogues, euphemistically referred to as “populists”, since at least 2015. In “Words as Weapons”, I will examine the most recent developments of this 21^st Century “Kulturkampf”, in which the demagogic rhetoric is mobilized and communication weaponized via culture wars and moral panics. Since we will have witnessed the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election less than a month earlier, I will include a few examples of the 45^th President’s use of demagogic rhetoric. However, this talk will begin with a very brief historical overview of the rise of “Political Correctness” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before closely examining the ways in which words have been weaponized by a former US president, and in recent moral panics about free speech and transgender issues.

For most animal species, vocalizations are instinctual and not socially learned. The only known exceptions to date include a small group of mammals – humans, whales and some seals, elephants and bats – and some birds including songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds. Recent advancements in the field of bioacoustics ─ the science of how animals use sound to communicate ─ have revealed that many birds communicate in highly sophisticated ways. This presentation will focus on why and when birds sing and on some of the probable motivations for their songs: the desire to claim and defend territory and attract mates is a powerful stimulant for vocalization. Female birds often play a major role in determining what, and how, male birds vocalize. I will explore how birds learn to sing, noting that for some species the songs are inborn and innate. But for other bird species, the songs must be learned in stages over a period of considerable time and only after much practice, similar to the manner in which children acquire speech. The mysteries of the dawn chorus, a sublime avian phenomenon heard every day at least somewhere on the planet, will be highlighted. Champion singers ─ those with the most complex songs, or the largest repertoire, or the marathon performers ─ will be identified. Humans shape the physical environments in which birds sing and have profound impacts on the types of avian soundscape that we experience.

From Hollywood to local classrooms, Generative AI seems to be everywhere these days and it’s always controversial. But can it help us unlock news ways of doing research, even in conventional disciplines like history? In this talk, historian Mark Humphries shares his research on fur trade families to show how artificial intelligence can be used to re-examine old historical problems in new ways. Going beyond programs like ChatGPT, Humphries explores (and demonstrates) how generative AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google actually work behind the scenes and reflects on their often overlooked strengths and sometimes overemphasized limitations. He argues that although much of the media discussion is focused on “chatbots” the most revolutionary aspects of the technology have little to do with these one-on-one, “conversational” interactions. Instead, by demonstrating how they can be deployed at scale to speed up the research process to examine thousands of handwritten documents in only a few minutes, Humphries invites us to consider how AI may change the face of history and the social sciences more broadly in the months and years to come.

At a basic level, surveillance is about certainty. Or a desire for certainty.

As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, electronic media presents itself to us as an extension of the central nervous system. We trust what these tools tell us because they function as prosthetics, gathering details from far away and presenting that data to us instantly. It is because of this apparent seamlessness that we trust these technologies as much as we do. When they’re working as expected, the signals and sleek boxes of plastic and wires that allow us to navigate the world beyond our reach appear to be benign. And this is where we start to run into problems.
People develop surveillance technologies, people use these technologies, and, in the end, people determine what these technologies are telling us. Whether it happens to be a jury viewing closed circuit television in a criminal trial or facial recognition software linking the image of someone captured on camera to an existing security or social media profile, the algorithms and software that produce these results are built by human beings and they are fallible in the same way human beings are.
This matters for us because electronically produced images have become ubiquitous in our culture and they are still a key component of surveillance and the positive identification of people. The more we trust these technologies the less we question them. This is not to say that these tools are unreliable in the abstract, but it is clear that some healthy skepticism is important considering the stakes. It is no longer debated with any seriousness whether surveillant images should exist or not. What is open to interpretation is whether this means that a primary modality of establishing fact has left the confines of the courts and the lab and surfaced in the forms of the CCTV camera, the smartphone, and the drone. The proposed talk will look at visual culture and digital and electronic technologies in the contexts of security and surveillance.

Indigenous knowledges weave wholism, interconnectedness, and relationships into all aspects of Indigenous ways of seeing, being, knowing, and doing. When one understands that they exist in an interconnected web of life, they may see how taking care of oneself is intimately connected to taking care of all of one’s relations. These relations not only mean human beings, but also the plants, trees, flyers, swimmers, crawlers, animals, land, water, sky world and all else in creation.
Through their Indigenous identities, Kelly (songcarrier) and Al (firekeeper) will share through stories, song, and fire what they have learned about how these knowledges are experienced within ceremony and healing. Since 2002, Kelly has brought Indigenous song into ceremonies, community events, and within a federal prison; not only for the purpose of singing, but as a means to invite spirit and healing and convey connectedness and movement to relational ways of being. For over 15 years Al has learned sacred teachings of the fire and how fire is present at all Indigenous ceremonies. Having been firekeeper at many ceremonies and gatherings, including a federal prison, Al has learned how spirit of the fire is connected to the spirit of the fire within oneself. Kelly and Al are deeply committed to facilitating the ignition of the Fire Within through song and ceremony as a means to help incarcerated Indigenous women and Two-Spirit individuals move toward healing and balance in their lives.
While colonization has violently impacted Indigenous peoples and intergenerational trauma is experienced by many Indigenous peoples in Canada (and around the world), it is through returning to Indigenous knowledges and cultural teachings that balance and healing within oneself and all one’s relations becomes possible.

Navigating the often-overwhelming amount of information we now encounter on a daily basis has never been more difficult. The rise of AI, social media, and vast amounts of information has resulted in a culture where information is spreading faster than many of us can keep up with. From fake news, conspiracy theories, memes, and innocently shared headlines, misinformation has become the defining problem of our era. Threatening democracy, our ability to trust each other, and even our health, how we share information has truly become a crisis. What is misinformation – how has it changed, and what is the science telling us, and what can we do when traditional fact checking and debunking no longer work?
This presentation will cover what misinformation is, the history of misinformation, contextualize it within the information landscape, and briefly discuss how AI has shifted things further. I will also briefly examine what we can do to begin to work with the system that exists, how to navigate information overload, and discuss how communication has changed.

In the 1880s photographers began to promote the use of the camera to determine placing in sport, predicting there would never again be a tie or dead-heat. Such proclamations were based in the belief that the mechanically-produced image could solve the inadequacies of human vision and produce irrefutable visual evidence. Today, advanced photo-finish systems divide the second into 10,000ths yet ties and dead-heats remain common from local races to the Olympic Games. How can this be? This lecture offers a history of the photo-finish as both a technological and human problem. It explains why, despite more than a century of technological advancements, we are no closer in 2024 to eradicating the dead-heat than we were in the 1880s. And it also explains why we won’t stop trying.

“In the beginning was the Word…” This line from John 1:1 captures the origins of human civilization. What we see around us would have been inconceivable without language as the means to imagine our world first, before building it. Language provides humans with the primary, if not only, way that we come to know and understand—or misunderstand—the world. Many people assume that words are just part of a system for naming various objects, things and beings we encounter. But no two words have the same meaning; some can provoke strong feelings or even incite violence. Thus, it is critical to understand how words make meanings to prepare us to resist manipulation by others, and to recognize that meanings do shift as contexts shift; some communities adopt or adapt words in ways that are different to dictionary or commonly understood meanings. The use of figures of speech, tropes or “conceptual metaphors” have been particularly helpful for enabling abstract thought on one hand, and yet enabling the manipulation of people on the other. In this talk, I will focus closely on “news” and how it remains one of the primary means of communication through which most of us come to know the world. Through our examination of the language of news, we will see how words shape our biases and our “reality”. As the opening talk for this series, “Wor(l)ds in Common” will introduce you to how language uses us even as we use it.