No. 492 - November 2, 2022

  • Coming Events:

    - FIMSWrites - Fall Edition
    - Organizing Your Research with Zotero (Citation Management 101)
    - The Desert Remembers Itself as the Sea: Manifesting Multiple Worlds
    - A Snapshot of Community Engaged Learning in Canadian Universities
    - THE AUTOCRATS ARE AT THE GATE!: And we're busy watching cat videos
    - MMJC Open House Recruitment Event
    - Value, Values, and Visibility: Public Value Conflation in the Mobile Dating Industry

  • Important Dates:

    - Monday, October 31 - Friday, November 4, 2022 - Fall Reading Week (Undergraduate)
    - Monday, October 31 - Friday, November 4, 2022 - MLIS Research Week
    - Wednesday, November 2 and Friday, November 4, 2022 - Staff and Leader Fall Learning Days

  • Awards & Accomplishments:

    - Alberth Sant ́Ana
    - Dan Smoke
    - Mary Lou Smoke
    - Sam Trosow

  • Publications & Presentations:

    - Alissa Centivany
    - Edward Comor
    - Giada Ferrucci
    - Heather Hill
    - Selma Purac

  • In the Media:

    - Anabel Quan-Haase
    - Dan Smoke
    - Mary Lou Smoke
    - Sam Trosow

  • Additional Activities of Note:

    - Maris Grewe
    - Megan Palmer
    - Paulette Rothbauer
    - Kendall Sturgeon

  • News from the FIMS Graduate Library:

    - Organizing Your Research with Zotero
    - Board Games Night

  • Next Issue:


Coming Events


FIMSWrites - Fall Edition
Every Wednesday
9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Check your Western email for the link (or contact Pam McKenzie)
Do you expect to have assignment, story, article, report, thesis, and/or book writing deadlines coming up in the Fall term? Does having other people writing around you help keep you on-task? Then join us for FIMSWrites, an informal initiative to provide some solidarity in the sometimes-solitary writing process. What it is: a group of people sitting silently together working on their individual writing projects for 25-minute Pomodoro sessions, with short breaks between and a longer mid-morning coffee, snack, and socializing break. What it's not: a writing tutorial or workshop. Open to FIMS faculty and grad students who have writing to work on.

Organizing Your Research with Zotero (Citation Management 101) 
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Attend in person: FNB 3010
Attend online: Register to receive Zoom link
Presented by Heather Campbell. To register, contact fimslib@uwo.ca. 
Open to FIMS students, faculty and staff. This hybrid session will explore the advantages of reference management tools. Beyond quickly generating citations, reference managers allow researchers to construct a library of references, notes, and files in one place for quick retrieval. While there are many reference mangers to choose from, this workshop focuses on Zotero. After registration, you will receive instructions for how to download and install Zotero (continue reading).

The Desert Remembers Itself as the Sea: Manifesting Multiple Worlds
Thursday, November 10, 2022
5:30 p.m.
Conron Hall (UC 3110)
Blending documentary witnessing with poetics or fiction, Anna Friz creates transmission and media art works that consider multiple narratives on contested sites and systems, such as the fog line on the central coast of California or the industrialised desert in northern Chile. Site-specificity gives method: for instance she engages with elemental media and forces of perceptual uncertainty characteristic of the desert like the prevalence of mirage, the ambiguity of sounds and their sources, and distortions of scale and distance, in order to de-totalize extractivist narratives of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (continue reading).

A Snapshot of Community Engaged Learning in Canadian Universities
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Register to receive the Zoom link.
Presented by Hannah Argiloff, Amala Poli (Arts & Humanities), Sarena Akhter, Giada Ferrucci, Chloe Bissell, Basil Chiasson and Sandra Smeltzer.
Description: Community engaged learning (CEL) is a unique experiential learning (EL) approach that sees students engage in a project, developed collaboratively with a community partner, that has mutually beneficial outcomes. Non-profit and community-based organizations are co-educators and co-mentors in this praxis-oriented process, bringing to the table their invaluable experience and expertise. The first of its kind in Canada, Western is developing a CEL Hub in the newly acquired 450 Talbot Building to bring CEL activities, classes, and events into the London community (continue reading).

THE AUTOCRATS ARE AT THE GATE!: And we're busy watching cat videos
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
4:30 p.m.
Attend in person: Conron Hall (UC 3110)
Attend online: Zoom Webinar
Carol Off is the Fall 2022 FIMS Clissold lecturer. Everyone is welcome.
Description: The next few years could actually determine whether democracy lives or dies.
Autocrats and illiberal politicians are poised to take --or to hold --power in dozens of countries around the world.
What defenses do we have? With disinformation rampant on social media, with no shared understanding of what is factual or truthful, with a breakdown in trust in our civil society we are in precarious times (continue reading).

MMJC Open House Recruitment Event
Thursday, November 17, 2022
12:15 p.m.
Attend in person: Broadcast Studio (FNB 3050)
Attend virtually: Zoom link TBA
If you know anyone who might be interested in enrolling in the MMJC program in 2023, point them in the direction of this open house. Faculty and staff will be on hand to answer questions and discuss the program details. The MMJC program considers students from a wide variety of academic backgrounds for admission.

Value, Values, and Visibility: Public Value Conflation in the Mobile Dating Industry
Thursday, November 17, 2022
4:30 p.m.
Attend in person: FNB 4130
Attend online: Zoom
Presented by Meghan Voll, Media Studies PhD student.
Abstract: Today, an app exists for everything, from delivering relevant news headlines, to finding you your most compatible partner. Mobile dating applications are platforms that act as intermediaries, instituting our world and realities, according to certain ways of being. In common to these platforms is their notions of value, such as accessibility, ease of use, and privacy. Widely popular intermediaries like these structure public discourse, conflating private interests with public ones (continue reading).


Important Dates

- Monday, October 31 - Friday, November 4, 2022 - Fall Reading Week (Undergraduate)
- Monday, October 31 - Friday, November 4, 2022 - MLIS Research Week
- Wednesday, November 2 and Friday, November 4, 2022 - Staff and Leader Fall Learning Days


Awards & Accomplishments

Alberth Sant ́Ana, an international student from Brazil who studied at FIMS for a year in 2019, was awarded the UFMG de Teses award for Best Thesis in the Postgraduate Program of Information Science, Edition 2022. Alberth  accepted his award at a ceremony at the Federal University of Minas Gerais on October 20. While at FIMS, Alberth was supervised by Jacquie Burkell and made connections in the Library and Information Science and Health Information Science programs, as he explored men's health information practices.

Elders Dan Smoke and Mary Lou Smoke, hosts of the long-running radio program Smoke Signals, accepted honorary degrees from Western University at Convocation on Friday, October 21, 2022. The Smokes have a long-standing relationship with FIMS and Western and were nominated for the honor by Associate Professor Paulette Rothbauer. 

Associate Professor Sam Trosow was elected as Ward 6 Councillor for London City Council during the October 24 municipal election. Trosow campaigned on issues including community safety, housing affordability, sustainable development and inclusivity and defeated incumbent Mariam Hamou.


Publications & Presentations

Assistant Professor Alissa Centivany has the following panel presentation coming up in December:

Michelle Kaczmarek, Alissa Centivany, “Repair Imaginaries: envisioning and enacting better relations in imperfect worlds”, panel organized for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S ‘22), Cholula, Mexico, December, 2022.

Professor Edward Comor published the following:

Edward Comor, review of Harold Innis on Peter Pond: Biography, Cultural Memory, and the Continental Fur Trade. W.J. Buxton (ed.) in University of Toronto Quarterly Vol 91 No 3 (August 2022), pp. 324-327.

Media Studies PhD candidate Giada Ferrucci published an article titled "Canadian mining project in Guatemala opposed in local vote over environmental conerns" in The Conversation on October 27, 2022.

Associate Professor Heather Hill co-authored a paper titled "Teaching to Respect Intersectional Neurodiversity in LIS Classrooms and Practice" that was presented at the ALISE Annual Conference 2022 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (October 24-26).

Professor Hill also co-authored the paper "Authority is constructed and created... but not by you," presented at ALISE 2022.

Assistant Professor Selma Purac presented a paper titled "The Transdimensional Terrors of Consumerism" at the Midwest American Culture Association conference, which was held in Chicago from October 14-16.


In the Media

Professor Anabel Quan-Haase joined Shaye Ganam on 630 CHED & 770 CHQR on October 28 to talk about Elon Musk's recent acquisition of Twitter and what it might mean for the platform.

Following the presentation of their honorary doctorates by Western University at the October 21 convocation ceremony, Dan and Mary Lou Smoke made a few appearances in the media. On October 21 they were interviewed on CBC Radio's London Morning with Rebecca Zandbergen as well as being featured in a short article on CBC's website titled "Broadcasters Mary Lou and Dan Smoke honoured for 3 decades of Indigenous radio programming." They also participated in a Q&A titled "Indigenous educators of the airwaves reflect on Western honor" that was published on the London Free Press' website on October 23.

Following his election as London City Councillor for Ward 6, Associate Professor Sam Trosow was included in a Western Gazette article titled "Meet your new London city council representatives" that was published on October 25, 2022.


Additional Activities of Note

Canadian Association for Information Science Backfile Proceedings Digitization Project:

Associate Professor Paulette Rothbauer is excited to announce that a project that she has been supervising to digitize the entire back file of the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science/L’association canadienne des sciences de l’information has been completed. With funding from CAIS/ACSI and the assistance of FIMS graduate students Maris Grewe (MLIS, 2022) and Megan Palmer (MLIS candidate), we have created open access to the full text of the printed proceedings from the first annual conference in 1973 to 1992. With thanks to Kendall Sturgeon in the FIMS Graduate Library for assistance with the scanners.

This is a unique collection of scholarly abstracts and conference papers that we hope will attract the attention of scholars and students with interests in the history of information, broadly conceived. We are missing the proceedings from 1989, 1991, and 1992 — if anyone has those sitting on shelf somewhere, please contact Paulette Rothbauer at prothba2@uwo.ca. The proceedings are hosted by the University of Alberta Libraries at: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/ojs.cais-acsi.ca/index.php/cais-asci/issue/archive. 


News from the FIMS Graduate Library


FIMS Graduate Library Presents…

Organizing your Research with Zotero (Citation Management 101) with Heather Campbell
Wednesday, November 9th, 12-1pm (FNB, 3010) or via Zoom* (you will receive the Zoom link after registration)

This hybrid session will explore the advantages of reference management tools. Beyond quickly generating citations, reference managers allow researchers to construct a library of references, notes, and files in one place for quick retrieval. While there are many reference mangers to choose from, this workshop focuses on Zotero. After registration, you will receive instructions for how to download and install Zotero.

Session outcomes:

  • Identify the many benefits of reference managers
  • Build your own library using Zotero
  • Use reference managers for proper citation practices

Heather Campbell is Curriculum Librarian for Western Libraries, and a curriculum specialist with Western’s Centre for Teaching and Learning. Heather is a long-time Zotero fan, even during her own time at FIMS, and continues to use it daily in her work as an academic librarian.

Please register in person at the Service Desk in the FIMS Graduate Library, or sign-up here.

Board Games Night
Wednesday, November 9th, 5-7pm (FIMS Graduate Library)

On the heels of a successful inaugural event in October, the Library is proud to partner with the MLIS Student Council to present our next ‘Board Games Night’ this coming Wednesday, November 9th from 5-7pm. This time, FGL staff have brought in a few of their favourite games from their own, personal collections for the FIMS graduate community to sample. Students, faculty, and staff from all of FIMS’ graduate programs are warmly welcome at this drop-in event. Join us as we broker, plot, race, strategize, and trade our way through two hours of fun!


Next Issue


The Grad Bulletin is your source for news, announcements, and events pertaining to FIMS graduate programs. Submissions from the FIMS community are always welcome and may be sent via e-mail to fims-communications@uwo.ca.

The next issue of the FIMS Graduate Bulletin will be published on Wednesday, November 16, 2022. The deadline for submissions is noon on Tuesday, November 15, 2022.