Past Events
UBC Emeritus College Conversations - January 12, 2021
climate change: A Conversation
Seeking to encourage and sustain engagement among Emeritus College members and a wider audience, when even moderately-sized in-person gatherings are impossible, the UBC Emeritus College invites you to join one of our upcoming conversations on a topic of broad and current importance. Convened every month, on the Zoom platform, conversations will be interactive and moderated. They will begin with three short presentations from Emeritus colleagues, offering different perspectives on the chosen topic. After a short discussion among panelists, audience members will be invited to join the conversation.
In December 2020, as the world celebrated the development of COVID-19 vaccines, Greta Thunberg observed that we are speeding in the wrong direction on the climate crisis: “we are facing an emergency and we are not doing nearly enough.” Bringing together a prominent climate scientist, a well-known analyst of risk and decision-making on environmental and energy questions, and a concerned citizen, a humanist committed to raising awareness of the climate emergency wherever possible, this conversation will offer information and perspective on the science behind the crisis as well as insight into the commitments that will shape thinking, actions, and expectations moving forward.
Panelists will be available for further discussion in “break-out rooms” after the conversation.
Panelists
Douw Steyn
Professor Emeritus of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (2015)
Douw Steyn, ACM, FCMOS is active in the fields air pollution meteorology, boundary layer meteorology, mesoscale meteorology, environmental science and interdisciplinary science. His research involves measurement and modelling studies of regional air pollution, especially in regions with complex terrain. He has published more than 100 scientific papers in the international peer reviewed literature. He is an Accredited Consulting Meteorologist, and has provincial, national and international consultancy experience in his areas of expertise, and has provided expert testimony in numerous court cases and appeal board hearings in British Columbia.
Tim McDaniels
Professor Emeritus of Community and Regional Planning (2017)
Tim McDaniels, a Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, has worked for decades on risk and decision making in environmental and technology contexts.
Bill Winder
Assistant Professor Emeritus of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies (2020)
Bill Winder describes himself as the Candide of this group, having had little contact with climate-related issues in his area of specialization, French language instruction and Digital Humanities. He has recently joined other grassroots activists whose raison d’être is to act on the climate crisis (in their language of choice).
Bill Winder can be found beside the red arrow in the picture.
Moderator
Margery Fee
Professor Emerita of English (2017)
Margery Fee, FRSC, held the David and Brenda McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2015-2017) to work on early Indigenous oral and literary production. Recent publications are Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat (2015), Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America (2016), co-edited with Dory Nason, Polar Bear (Reaktion, 2019) and an edited collection of Jean Barman’s essays, On the Cusp of Contact: Gender, Space, and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia (Harbour, 2020).
Privacy and Consent to Recording
Please note that this event will be recorded via Zoom and posted publicly. The recording may contain attendees’ names and images. We recognize that this may be undesirable for some participants. If you do not wish for your name or image to be used in the video, please leave your video turned off during the event. You may also change your name to something generic like “Participant” or “Anonymous” in the Zoom meeting room by selecting yourself from the participants list and editing your name. By registering for this event and clicking the Zoom link that will be emailed to you, you consent to being recorded. If you do not want to participate in the live session, the recording will be posted at a later date to our YouTube channel.
Tuesday, 12 January 2021 - 2:00pm to 3:30pm
Travel Group December 17
Don and Lorna Blake will present "Pre-Covid Spanish Holiday: Barcelona, Madrid, Granada and the Basque Country". They will present highlights of a three week trip to Spain that took in in some of Spain's major urban attractions capped off by a week in the hills of the Basque Country.
If you are currently not on the email list of the EC travel interest group and wish to receive our mailings, please contact Paul Steinbok at psteinbok@cw.bc.ca.
A zoom link will be sent out 2 days before each meeting.
Thursday, 17 December 2020 - 3:00pm
Photo Group December 2020
The suggested theme for (at least one of) your photos is “Looking in or out”. Please send 3 or 4 photos to richard@rhspencer.ca
Processing images
For this meeting, you are invited to send 2 versions of one of your 3 photos, one showing the image as it came from the camera, and the second showing the image after processing in Photoshop, Lightroom, or whatever software you use. “Processing” might be simply cropping the original, or it might be much more extensive. We would like you to briefly discuss the changes you made, and why you made them. Submitting 4 photos, including both an original and a processed image, is completely optional – don’t feel you have to do this unless you want to.
If you would like to join, please contact Richard Spencer for the zoom-link at richard@rhspencer.ca
Friday, 11 December 2020 - 4:00pm to 5:30pmCouncil Meeting - December 9
The Council will meet online.
Wednesday, 9 December 2020 - 10:30am to 12:30pm
Retirement Income Options and the UBC Faculty Pension Plan
A Special Session for Retired UBC Faculty/Librarians
Webinar with Lorraine Heseltine, UBC Faculty Pension Plan
This session is open to anyone who is / has been a member of the Faculty Pension Plan and will include:
1. FPP retirement income options:
- FPP Variable Payment Life Annuity (VPLA)
- FPP RRIF/LIF-Type payments
- What is changeable after your initial decision? Not changeable?
- The pros and the cons
- What does everyone else do?
2. FPP Investment Options:
- Where to find fund information.
- How can members manage their investments?
- What about fees?
3. Transferring funds in and out of the FPP
4. Managing your account on the Sun Life website
Speaker: Lorraine Heseltine, is a Member Services Specialist in the UBC Faculty PensionPlan. With over 25 years of experience in the pension industry, Lorraine provides key services to UBC plan members prior to and throughout their retirement. She welcomes communications from retired faculty and librarians who are current and former members of the UBC Faculty Pension Plan.
Moderator: Dr. Anne Junker, UBC Emeritus College
For background, you may be interested in Update from the UBC Faculty Pension Plan Board: Investment Priorities During the Continued Coronavirus Pandemic
This webinar will not be recorded.
Tuesday, 8 December 2020 - 10:00am to 11:15am
Virtual Common Room Dec 4
Connection and camaraderie are foundation stones of the UBC Emeritus College.
College members are connected to our university by a number of threads that can be as slender or robust as we make them individually. These connections bring a parcel of benefits to us all, from library and email access to support for continuing scholarly activities. But interpersonal connections and the camaraderie that stems from familiarity, shared experiences and interests, and trust are also vital to a happy retirement, and precisely because they are less institutional, they are more vulnerable to attenuation in this time of COVID-19, when it is difficult for us to meet in person in groups of any size.
To combat this, we are opening a Virtual Common Room for Emeritus College members. It will be open – on Zoom – in term one, from 3:30 to 5 pm each Friday afternoon from September 18th to December 4th. Participation will be capped at 20. There will be no agenda. The intent is that you drop in (as some might once have to the Faculty Club of yore) to see who is there and share thoughts and conversations. One week we might talk about books – or about how the Canucks (almost) won the Stanley Cup; another about global affairs or the challenges of exercising during a COVID winter. Just show up and join in. Make new acquaintances, meet old friends, and (if you will) raise a glass to postretirement life (secure in the knowledge that you don’t have to drive – or cycle – home).
Register in advance for these meeting (at any point in the term).
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. There is no commitment to attend regularly or frequently. But only those who register as above will receive instructions for the Zoom meeting We will send an email reminder with registration details every couple of weeks.
I look forward to seeing you on my screen.
Graeme