The Problem with Words: Performance, Poetry and Politics

Three Leading Scholars of Green College, all recently appointed faculty members at UBC, reflect on words that preoccupy them in their chosen genres of documentary film, criticism and poetry. By sharing, screening, and reading, they demonstrate how problematic words activate their critical and creative pursuits. And they invite the audience members to consider which words have motivated their life’s work.

David Gaertner shares work from his forthcoming book, The Theatre of Regret: Troubling Reconciliation in Canada, reflecting on reconciliation as what novelist Cherie Dimaline identifies as “a sound like an echo turned inside out.”

Shannon Walsh screens segments from her new documentary film Illusions of Control, pondering ways our collective attachments affect how we perform the present during environmental and personal crises.

Ian Williams reads from his current poetry project, Word Problems, which uses the register of mathematical word problems to mitigate some of the blurriness of ethics.