2012-2013 Series
Faculty Seminar Series 2012-2013!
“The Fire: Modern Forensics, Old Fashioned History, and the Destruction of Parliament, February 1916”
Was it "set and well set" as the Ottawa Fire Chief believed, or an accident as the Dominion Police concluded? What can modern fire forensics and old-Fashioned historical digging tell us about the Parliament Fire and what it meant in wartime Canada?
“Do Marketing Media Have Life Cycles? The Case of Product Placement in Movies”
This article examines the economic worth of product placement in movies over a time span of forty years (1968-2007). The authors find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the year of the movie release and the returns associated with product placements. Overall, the results reinforce the notion that marketers find it increasingly difficult to get their message across using traditional media, and underscore the need for the marketing industry to reinvent itself when new tactics lose their luster. Additional empirical regularities are discussed.
“Playhouse Manuscripts from Shakespeare’s Time”
We are fortunate to have some twenty-one texts of plays containing notes for their stage production in and around Shakespeare’s time. And we also have a few players’ parts and a few backstage plots or schemes of plays charting the traffic of actors on and off the stage. These documents have been under scrutiny and debate by scholars for about a century. My talk would briefly address this history of reception of these manuscripts but would chiefly concentrate on what we can learn about performance of plays in Shakespeare’s time from analyzing the texts marked up for the stage.
“Communication at End-Of Life”
The presentation will present the results of a qualitative study that explored end-of-life communication between loved ones. For deaths that are expected, and for those where there is time for families to prepare for death, communication is vital. How and what loved ones communicate to one another can have profound bereavement implications, and can dramatically influence the meaning that people find in death and loss. The unique features of end-of life- communication will be discussed, along with a dialogue on the remarkable lasting impact these conversations can have on people’s lives.
“What is evidence? An Ethnographic Account of Chinese Medicine Practitioners’ Constructions of Appropriate Evidence Bases”
Preliminary results of a pilot project exploring how Chinese Medicine providers in B.C. and Ontario construct “evidence” of effectiveness and safety of their practices reveal a broader conceptual framework beyond the ongoing emphasis on a single, bio-scientific evidence base to assess the validity of any therapeutic modality. The implications of more encompassing types of evidence bases are considered to shed light on a truly symmetrical and integrative health care system in which the contributions of different epistemologies meet diverse health care needs.