On Tuesday, April 12, UBC Language Sciences held its launch event in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Over 50 of our faculty and graduate student affiliates were welcomed by the LangSci steering committee, met our visionary donor, and engaged in lively discussion about this exciting new UBC initiative.
As well, we were joined by guests from the Faculty of Arts, the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences, and the office of the Vice-President, Research and International.
The afternoon began with remarks from the people behind the initiative. Janet Werker of the Department of Psychology welcomed everyone and talked about the various inspirations behind the initiative. She also introduced the Language Sciences pan-university course which is currently being developed.
Marietta Hurst, the visionary community donor whose support helped make UBC Language Sciences a reality, spoke about the importance of language and her hopes for the initiative, including the rolling out of the course to both students and the community.
Bryan Gick of the Department of Linguistics talked about the development of the initiative to date on both the research and teaching fronts, as well as the international push to promote language sciences research within the Universitas 21 (U21) group of universities.
Sid Fels of the Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering talked about the future of both language sciences research and the initiative itself, and even enlisted Siri into the discussion.
After the opening remarks, Language Sciences Coordinator Jennifer Abel introduced an activity for the affiliates, in which they would take on the role of students in the proposed language sciences course and come up with interdisciplinary projects they could pursue as part of the course. After that, they would transition to taking the perspective of mentors for those students in helping them to develop and refine their projects.
The affiliates got right into the activity, coming up with some fascinating ideas for projects (doing a DNA fingerprinting analysis of folklore from different towns, anyone?), as well as important questions as to how the course would be organized and the projects evaluated.
The afternoon was a great success, with new connections being made, new ideas being generated, and a lot of excitement for this new initiative being shown. We look forward to seeing you all at our next event!