As the teaching of history in Canadian universities seeks to incorporate decolonization, anti-racism, and truth-telling, the work of how to realize these commitments in practice remains emergent. As a Nuu-chah-nulth and a White settler co-teaching team, we delivered a 12-week undergraduate history course at the University of Victoria (UVic) that focused on these commitments. In so doing, we treated relationship and responsibility as essential parts of the work of teaching history at a Canadian university.
This post is an introduction to the series Tomorrow’s Historians: A Reflection on the Graduate Student Experience By Katie Carson and Tiffany Chénier In a pervasive climate of anti-intellectualism and cuts to humanities programs, the decision to pursue a degree in history is an existential one. It is not uncommon for prospective students applying to PhD programs to receive “The Talk.” It… Read more »
By Sarah Kittilsen As a tour guide, I answer a lot of questions. Some are related to the tour itself, but many are not. Guests ask about my life just as much as, if not more than, they ask about the history of Montreal. I wasn’t surprised, then, when a woman turned toward me one summer morning and asked, “So,… Read more »
The report section defending EDI measures ably illustrated how “EDI is a condition for research excellence.” Notably, the witnesses and briefs (if not the committee report itself) pointed to research that demonstrates the importance of diversity in health sciences and increased novelty, productivity, and impact in diverse research teams. Reading the pro-EDI section, indeed, highlights just how little the anti-EDI section gestured to research findings, despite witnesses’ repeated protestation that EDI is not evidence-based.
By Jim Clifford It is never fun to watch friends argue. Generative AI has created multiple fractures across our universities and the community of historians. The stakes are high and we are all dealing with the repercussions. I spent a few weeks in August rebuilding my second-year course for the third time. Two years ago, I swapped the traditional research… Read more »
talkie’s poor representation of history is a side effect of a larger problem. The model was conceptually built as an experimental tool to see if language models can accurately predict the future, also known as “forecasting.” The blog post assertively claims the models predictive capabilities, yet is devoid of evidence enabling researchers to reproduce their experiment. The version that could serve serious research is gated behind compute, and is the same version released with no guardrails at all.
Nastasha Sartore Earlier this year, over forty people logged in to Zoom to attend a CHA webinar titled “Generative AI and the Practice of History.” Introduced as a “show and tell” for AI tools and strategies, the webinar included a panel of three expert historians who each presented on a distinct topic related to agentic AI, the tech that’s been… Read more »
Felicia Gabriele The expression, “May you live in interesting times,” seems on its face, pleasant enough. Resembling a well-wish, its sunny exterior deftly cloaks the dark, cavernous depths within. To live in interesting times, is quite simply, to be cursed. To teach American History in interesting times, is, well… akin to having a staring contest with the evilest of evil… Read more »
By Andrea Eidinger Roundup, noun: The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd edition, Online edition, 2005 The very first “roundup” appeared on Unwritten Histories on April 24, 2016. My original idea was that there was so much cool stuff being published online, and more people needed to know about it. The first one was 650 words long. Little did I imagine that… Read more »
By Stephanie Pettigrew When I first started my PhD in 2013, I left a very comfortable, established community of support in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, made up of friends I had known since middle school, of family. I had a general sense of knowing my community and being known by it. When I arrived in Fredericton, I found myself not… Read more »
