Nicole Bergot

Science students find perspective by studying COVID-19 through the lens of anthropology, religion

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 18:21:56 +0000

Science students find perspective by studying COVID-19 through the lens of anthropology, religion

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 02/08/2021 - 13:21

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Offered by the departments of anthropology and religion, a "Plagues and Peoples" course has proven popular among U of T undergraduates – including those who are studying sciences (photo by Martin Schutt/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Nicole Bergot

Topic

Our Community

Coronavirus

Anthropology

Faculty of Arts & Science

Religion

Undergraduate Students

Shaili Shukla, a third-year ��߲ݴ�ý student studying health and disease, and genome biology, never imagined she would land in a class offered jointly by the department for the study of religion and the department of anthropology.

That is until she spotted “Plagues & Peoples: From Divine Intervention to Public Health” in the calendar.

The course, offered by the Faculty of Arts & Science, has attracted nearly 100 undergraduate students – including many in the sciences who, like Shukla, signed up to learn more about one of the biggest stories of their generation.

“I was like, ‘Wow,’” Shukla says. “It’s not often that the thing you are studying is actually happening. There are so many different aspects to [the pandemic] – the social and religious is one part and then the medical.

“Together they all give such a rounded holistic view of this topic.”

Pamela Klassen, a professor in the department for the study of religion, and Janelle Taylor, a professor of anthropology, say the course was very much a reaction to world events.

“We felt like the study of religion and medical anthropology together have a lot to offer people to make sense of this huge, tumultuous thing we are all living through,” Taylor says.

Friends for over two decades, the two professors merged their expertise. They wove together a curriculum that offers a historical, anthropological and religious perspective that compares pandemics from the bubonic plague and cholera to the 1918 flu epidemic, looking at how diseases impact society and how they change culture and politics.

“What does it mean to live through a world historic pandemic?” Klassen asks. “We are thinking about how stories matter for the course of a pandemic. We are asking students to observe what they see around them and consider how religion and culture shape the ways that epidemics reveal inequity as well as bring about solidarity.”

One assignment – a first-hand account of the pandemic – gave Klassen and Taylor a revealing look at their students’ lives. “It was truly humbling to realize the variety of experiences; reading about the front-line workers in hospitals, vet clinics and in retail, and also reading about the students who had lost family members,” Klassen says.

For Shukla, the chance to reflect on her personal experience was poignant. She is a pandemic support assistant at Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital. Working with the hospital’s elder life program, she offers companionship to help prevent delirium in elderly patients.

“I help them cope with the loneliness of being in a hospital with no visitors,” she says, adding that the combination of her real-life experience, her science education and the “Plagues & Peoples” course has given her a multidimensional understanding of the pandemic.

“I think it is amazing to see how humans react no matter which time period we are in. This course is showing me how human behaviour shapes how a pandemic progresses.”

Taylor believes a holistic understanding of the pandemic is essential, particularly for science students. “My hunch and hope is that the pandemic has made it obvious that we have to understand the social side of health,” she says. “Are people and society organized enough to mount a coherent response or not? Will people observe the rules and laws and abide by them or not?

“These are all social decisions that people are making that have huge impacts.”

For Klassen, the pandemic offers an opportunity to examine how religion is fundamental to how societies function.

“Historically we know that plagues or past pandemics have been profoundly shaped by religious practices, including the ways people feel obligated to help one another,” she says. “Even from the earliest days of this pandemic, we’ve seen that questions of ritual have posed real challenges for people and their families: how family and friends gather for a funeral or a wedding; how parents welcome a child into the world. These rites of passage have all been a challenge during this pandemic.”

The chance to learn about pandemics through the lens of religion and anthropology helped Shukla see a light at the end of the tunnel.

“It’s really hopeful,” she says. “There is an end. People did cope with it and they got through it – and we will, too.”

U of T prof puts students' well-being into the syllabus

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 15:49:30 +0000

U of T prof puts students' well-being into the syllabus

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 01/29/2021 - 10:49

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Frances Garrett, an associate professor in U of T's department for the study of religion, employs an emerging method called trauma-informed teaching to address students’ well-being (photo by William Pocock)

Nicole Bergot

Topic

Our Community

��߲ݴ�ý

Cell and Systems Biology

Faculty of Arts & Science

Mental Health

Religion

Sila Usta, a third-year student at the ��߲ݴ�ý who is studying cell and systems biology, says she knew she was going to enjoy one of her electives – a course in the department for the study of religion that explores Buddhist practices of manipulating the body’s breath.

One of the first assignments was to go for a walk outside while listening to an audio recording about the class readings.

“It pushed me out of the house,” Usta says. “The simple act of getting out of my chair and away from the screen gives your mind a break. I needed that.”

Walking with an audio file was not a random, one-off assignment from Associate Professor Frances Garrett, who teaches the course, called “Biohacking Breath.” With her students’ mental health top of mind, Garrett says she is very deliberate about how she teaches and employs an emerging method called trauma-informed teaching to address students’ well-being, putting nearly as much emphasis on that as the academic curriculum she covers.

“Learning happens when people feel safe,” Garrett says. “If students are suffering then they’re not remembering and processing information.”

Trauma-informed teaching does not diminish academic rigour, says Garrett. “They have to write and think and read and do assignments,” she says of her students.

Usta agrees. “It’s not a bird class,” she says. “There is a lot of reading – it’s hard.”

In addition to class assignments based on theories of human anatomy and physiology, as well as Buddhist approaches to philosophy and medicine, Garrett has her students observe their bodies and emotions, track their moods and submit written reflective journals.

“Trauma-informed teaching offers a different style of class and set of assignments, so they’re able to learn better. It's about effective learning,” Garrett says.

The approach is becoming more common among educators who recognize that their student's mental well-being is essential to their success in the classroom.

“There is a relationship between mental health and learning,” says Dawn Shickluna, who graduated last year with a PhD from U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “We can’t underestimate the power of feeling safe and seen and heard in our learning environments.”

Drawing on the growing body of neuroscience research that examines how people learn, Shickluna says “the experience of trauma can affect our ability to be present, and to learn.” She adds that being aware of – and addressing – the effects of trauma through choice, voice and collaboration fosters an environment that helps students participate in learning.

At a time when mental health is an ever-growing concern, Shickluna stresses that trauma-informed teaching is more necessary than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing relations of colonialism, the prominence of white supremacy and anti-Black racism among many other forms of systemic oppression are all taking a toll on a student population that finds itself isolated and spending more time than ever on screens, Shickluna says.

“Trauma is so prevalent and it's not visible to many people as such, so we often don’t know what our students are experiencing.”

Garrett says the approach has been a success in her class, and that she is designing more of her courses to directly address what students are going through.

“Students in my class this semester are expressing how grateful they are to be learning more about racism and anti-racism, for example,” she says. “These topics are responding to student needs right now.

“I generally get good reviews [from students]. But not like this. I've never had so much positive feedback.”

Thing theory: U of T course explores how objects shape people

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 16:01:32 +0000

Thing theory: U of T course explores how objects shape people

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 01/11/2021 - 11:01

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The Royal Ontario Museum is one of several museums students will visit virtually in Erin Vearncombe’s course on Museums and Material Religion, which explores objects and their meanings (photo by Keith Beaty/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Nicole Bergot

Topic

Our Community

Academics

Faculty of Arts & Science

Religion

Undergraduate Students

��߲ݴ�ý students taking Erin Vearncombe’s course on Museums and Material Religion are set to learn all about the world of “things” – and how they shape us.

With a focus on museums and their collections, Vearncombe hopes students will begin to look more crticially at objects, what makes them meaningful and who gets to decide their meaning.

Vearncombe earned her PhD from U of T’s department for the study of religion in the Faculty of Arts & Science and was a lecturer at Princeton University for five years before returning to U of T as a faculty member.

An assistant professor, teaching stream, in the Faculty of Arts and Science’s Writing-Integrated Teaching (WIT) program, Vearncombe develops resources to support undergraduate writing and communication – and is co-authoring a book for HarperOne called  After Jesus Before Christianity on early Jesus communities in the first two centuries CE.

Nicole Bergot of the department for the study of religion recently spoke to Vearncombe about her new course what students can expect.

Can you give me an overview of the course?

At its core, this course considers our human interactions with things. We are profoundly shaped by the things around us. We may think we’re above the world of things, but, really, things influence us every day in ways of which we’re not even conscious. Things have their own lives: past, present and future. We’ll be considering “thing theory.”

What is thing theory?

Thing theory is based on the premise that humans don’t just create and use things – things create and use us, in big and small ways, too. Things allow us to do things – and they prohibit us from doing things. For example, if you look at the corset, which so many women had to wear throughout history, the corset as a thing actually changed the shape of human bodies in a permanent way. The corset limited what women’s bodies could do in space; they made it hard to breathe, you couldn’t do anything active, you couldn’t go for long distances – the corset created women in a lot of different social ways.

Things can even create human social and moral values. They can facilitate social transformation.

For example, a fabric called barkcloth, or “tapa,” has been – and continues to be – a very important part of sacred celebration in Polynesian cultures. When the London Missionary Society travelled to the region at the end of the 18th century to gather Christian converts, they encouraged Samoans in particular to adopt a form of Tahitian tapa garment called a “tiputa,” referenced as a “poncho” by missionaries.

The wearing of the tiputa was not meant to give an outward sign of an inner conversion, but rather, in a really important sense, to actually bring about conversion. The tiputa facilitated an embodiment of a specifically Christian concept of modesty, making this concept “possible.” Many traditional examples of the tiputa are now found in museums.

We’ve been shaped by our interaction with different kinds of things. Having the opportunity to think about how things have had this impact on humans is exciting to me – and I hope to my students.

What gets you excited about teaching this course?

I'm excited for all the opportunities to work with people in museum studies and religion, the diverse speakers who will be joining us and who will offer so many different perspectives on our interaction with sacred objects. Hannah Turner, a critical information studies scholar at UBC, will look at how we can use technology to decolonize museums and our interactions with spiritual objects: what happens, for instance, when we digitize artifacts, or use technologies such as 3D printing to represent and re-create sacred things?

Although we can’t go physically go the Royal Ontario Museum, we will go on virtual tours and talk to curators and educators there. One really exciting class will be a virtual tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MET) to get a behind-the-scenes look their current exhibition: Arte del mar: Artistic Exchange in the Caribbean.

Our main project, the big assignment for this course, will be the creation of our own museum catalogue, “Material Religion in Canada,” or maybe, “The Sacred Stuff of Canada” – we’ll work on a title together – using a new U of T app called Pressbooks. Students will choose an object they want to profile – something from a museum or even a Tim Horton's cup. We’ll embed images and soundbites to create a compilation and turn it into a digital book. The last class will be the book launch.

Students will be looking at artifacts that some communities consider sacred, which are often at the heart of many museum collections. How do you study these items?

One contentious debate that we’ll be exploring in the class has to do with the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles. They were originally part of the Parthenon temple complex in Athens before they were acquired by Lord Elgin and shipped to the British Museum, where they’ve been a major part of their collection for a long time.

But there’s ongoing debate about whether they should remain in the British Museum or whether they should they be returned to Greece, given they were a part of an important sacred structure there. We will be looking at this example from different perspectives as a way to lead us into questions about sacred objects in museums in Canada. Some scholars say they should stay in the British Museum and others say they should be returned to Greece. It’s not just an academic debate: it goes all the way up to Greek and U.K. governments.

We're asking questions about access: Who has the authority over these objects? Can they be bought and sold out of context? It’s about power, politics, economics and religion. All of these things are intertwined here. Provenance is a question not only about where objects come from, but about how they come from a particular place. These are exciting histories to explore, but they are also very fraught, often dubious and sometimes extremely difficult. The course will involve much lively conversation.

What would you say to a person who says, “I don’t need to take this course – I've been to plenty of museums?”

Many of us may have had the opportunity to go to museums in different places, but we don’t get to go behind the scenes. We don’t have conversations with the people who have helped procure objects from donors or who have bought them from individuals. We don’t talk to the curators who make decisions about how exhibits are put together, how objects are displayed, how galleries are constructed – all the logistics we take for granted.

We’ll look at what kinds of details go onto a museum label. There is such a small amount of space on a label. Who decides what information about an object is important or essential? Who gets to create that knowledge? Having conversations with the people who make these decisions, and thinking about why they've made these decisions will help us understand that these objects have their own histories and lives. We see such small parts of these lives when we visit these objects at museums.

As much as possible we will be talking with community partners involved in museums – educators and ambassadors and scholars – who will engage with us and offer diverse perspectives. We will speak with a curator at the MET, one of the most famous museums in the world.

We will engage in conversations with curators from small, local museums as well. We will talk to the director of a small museum in northern Ontario – the Muse | Lake of the Woods museum – about an exhibition focused on Shiibaashka’igan, the sacred jingle dress.

Put together in partnership with the Women’s Council of Grand Council Treaty #3 as well as Ahze-mino-gahbewewin/Reconciliation Kenora, the exhibition explores the ways in which the jingle dress, as a gift from the Gichi Manidoo/Creator, embodies dance, dream, family history and healing. The exhibition was also put together to raise awareness about missing and murdered First Nations women. So from scholarship to museum partners and educators on all different kinds of levels, we’ll be able to look deeply at those questions of ownership, heritage, authority and access.

What can this course offer students from other programs?

One of the major benefits of this course for students will be the opportunity to work with diverse forms of evidence in new ways. We will think critically together about visual evidence, material culture and our approach to objects; about how we look at an object, try to understand its past and present lives and make objects meaningful.

So often we work with text, but this course will give us the chance to work with material artifacts – like a pair of shoes, a sculpture. Students from many disciplines will get so much from this course. I can see it appealing to students from new media, publishing, visual media, the Faculty of Information, history, anthropology, art history, classics, Indigenous studies, the digital humanities program, Canadian studies, Caribbean studies, archaeology, material culture … the list is long.

'It's good coding': Computer science students drawn to classes on Sanskrit, a 3,500-year-old language

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 15:43:52 +0000

'It's good coding': Computer science students drawn to classes on Sanskrit, a 3,500-year-old language

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 12/04/2020 - 10:43

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Sanskrit inscriptions are found on the walls of Banteay Srey, a 10th-century temple in Cambodia (Konstik via Getty Images)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Religion

St. Michael's College

Libbie Mills, an assistant professor in the department for the study of religion in the ��߲ݴ�ý’s Faculty of Arts & Science, noticed something interesting this fall in her introductory Sanskrit class: computer science students.

The course typically attracts students majoring in the study of religion, who are learning the language to further their research into Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Reading through her class list, however, Mills found that of six of the 40 enrolled students were actually computer science majors.

“I'm always excited when there are students from an unexpected place,” she says.

The lingual connection between Sanskrit and computer science, it turns out, has been the subject of interest for quite some time. The first well-known publication that examined the relationship was in 1985, when NASA scientist Rick Briggs published a research paper in which he argued that the 3,500-year-old language was the best candidate for programming artificial intelligence technology – namely because of its adherence to rigid grammatical rules.

Paul Thomas, a fourth-year undergraduate student at St. Michael’s College who plans on majoring in computer science next year, says he has a proclivity for learning languages, but ultimately took the course because of its connection to coding.

“Sanskrit is a very computational language,” he explains. “It’s a lot of syntax, which is the structure of programming itself. Classical Sanskrit is an engineered language.”

There are nearly 4,000 rules recorded in the fourth century BCE grammar of Pāṇini, an ancient scholar of the language – and Mill’s approach to teaching it is methodical.

“I'm a nerd” she says. “I like mathy type things, and I teach in a bit of a sciencey way.”

She stresses to her students that this is not a typical language class, where after a few classes they’ll be able to casually practise what they have learned over coffee.

“It’s not conversational, there’s too much to learn at the beginning,” she says. “They must learn the characters and how words get put together. It’s mind-bogglingly awful at first.”

She starts with what she calls the building blocks – “the order of sounds we produce out of our mouths ... from the throat to palate to teeth to lips” – and enthuses over the “tidiness of the language”, where a few root words are the basis of the entire Sanskrit vocabulary.

“It's orderly,” Mills says. “If you know the systems for making words you can work backward to the root to understand the meaning of the word. It’s creative in an organized way. It is kind of amazing.”

Mills adds that she understands the affinity that computer programmers have with the language. “It’s good coding,” she says.

For Thomas, the strict grammatical rules of Sanskrit align well with the goals of computer programmers who are ultimately interested in the “question of how to create interface between computers and human languages.” He maintains that Sanskrit is well positioned to do so because of its algorithmic foundation. “Computers don’t understand linguistics, they understand rules,” he says.

In addition, the rigidity of Sanskrit makes it less likely that an artificial intelligence algorithm would misinterpret commands. The same can’t be said of a language like English, which is looser with its rules and where words have multiple meanings.

“In English, there are so many influences from different language streams,” Mills says. “It’s kind of a mess.”