Let’s Talk Humanities: Mining, AI, and Warfare

The global race for critical minerals is on, and leaders across the world argue that they’re essential for the clean energy transition and our digital future. A similar race is happening with artificial intelligence (AI).

But is there a darker side to critical minerals and AI that most of us are not aware of?

For the first program in this Let’s Talk Humanities series, we’re featuring Public Policy and Global Affairs professor M. V. Ramana, Geography professor Jess Dempsey, and Law professor Sara Ghebremusse.

Together, they’ll explore the social and ecological impacts of AI and mining, as well as the role of both minerals and AI in war and destruction—and why we should act.

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Let’s Talk Humanities is a program series organized in collaboration with the Vancouver Public Library, bringing UBC scholars who study society and culture to library stages. The discussions aim to illuminate pressing social and political issues. All are welcome!

Monday April 13th
7:00-8:00PM
VPL Central Library, 350 West Georgia St., Vancouver
Alice MacKay Room, Lower Level

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Disability Justice: Fighting for a Better World

Disabled activists are experts in solidarity and using humour to challenge ableism. The People’s Alliance for Disabled Albertans was created by disabled people to stand up to Alberta government cuts. In this talk, Dr. Janz will speak about her experience helping to create PADA as an example of disability leadership that subverts injustice and fights for a better world for all.

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For many disabled people in general, and disability rights advocates in particular, working cooperatively and building alliances are both survival skills and traits for which they are known. Another trait often found to be common among disabled people in general and disability rights advocates in particular is a sardonic sense of humor which often enables us to flip ableism—even in its most deadly form—on its head, in order to expose its true absurdity. It was out of both these traits that the People’s Alliance for Disabled Albertans (PADA) was born

In this talk, Dr. Janz will reflect on her recent experience of helping give birth to the People’s Alliance for Disabled Albertans. The acronym PADA is a rather ingenious inversion and subversion of the acronym for the new Alberta Disability Assistance Program (ADAP), the Government of Alberta’s new workfare program, which is scheduled to begin in July 2026. From its initial inception, PADA was conceived of as a disability-led force, whose purpose it is to oppose the implementation of ADAP through a variety of means. Dr. Janz’s ultimate aim in relating some of the experiences that she has had with PADA thus far is to illustrate how important it is for disabled people to develop the skills of alliance-building and community-building in order to survive in a society that is becoming increasingly utilitarian and ableist.

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Heidi Janz, Ph.D. (she/her) is a long-time disability rights advocate, academic, filmmaker and playwright. Currently, Heidi is a Core Faculty Member and Associate Adjunct Professor with the John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre at the University of Alberta. Her primary area of specialization is Disability Ethics. Much of her research and teaching in recent years has focused on ableism in general and medical ableism in particular. She has written and co-written articles on Disability Ethics and medical ableism for numerous journals, including The Lancet, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, The Conversation (Canada), the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Bioethics. Through her research, writing, and teaching on Disability Ethics and ableism, she seeks to educate students, academics, and practitioners in fields as diverse as Medicine, Health Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities and Fine Arts, about the prevalence of ableism and the, often lethal, harms that ableism causes to disabled people.

Lunch and ASL interpretation provided. No registration required.

Tuesday April 7, 2026
1:00-2:00PM
Carnegie Learning Centre, 3rd Floor
401 Main St., V6A 2T7

Risk in the Archives: Preserving Anonymity, Access, and Cultural Memory

How can an archive at risk be supported to ensure its significant cultural, historical, or evidentiary value is preserved? What if the risk is in the process of creating the archive? Or in the decisions of what to include or exclude? How is an archive created when identities must be protected? And who has access to the anonymous records? These questions are critical to developing and maintaining archives with sensitive content that places them at risk.

Join us for an online presentation and discussion with Dr. Franziska Zaugg (University of Fribourg), Dr. Nathaniel Brunt (University of Victoria) and Dr. Kjell Anderson (University of Manitoba) as they explore how archives at risk, and those working with anonymity and access, are approached with care.

Speaker Bios

Franziska Zaugg is a lecturer at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg. From 2018 to 2022 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation/Ambizione. From 2015 to 2018, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at University College Dublin, Centre for War Studies, and from 2016 to 2018, she worked as an early career researcher in the “Transnational Resistance Project” at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on conflict and war history, resistance and collaboration movements, youth cultures, and the dialectal relationship between archives and society. Franziska Zaugg is a co-founder of the working group “History-Society-Violence” (Geschichte-Gesellschaft-Gewalt). She is also the SCVN Yugoslav Wars Research Cluster Co-Lead, working with a survivor who is a Roma woman, sharing her life experiences in Serbia in the 1990s where the discrimination and violence of the Yugoslav Wars shaped her childhood and youth.

Nathaniel Brunt is a Canadian interdisciplinary scholar, documentarian, and educator whose work critically examines modern armed conflict and the ways it is, and has been, represented photographically. Trained as a cultural historian and documentary photographer, he studies how individuals, institutions, and communities interpret their worlds visually during wartime. He completed his PhD in the Communication and Culture joint program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University, supported by SSHRC and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. Brunt’s photographic work has been widely published and exhibited internationally. He is currently undertaking long-term documentary projects in Northern Iraq and Kashmir, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria Libraries, and will be a Hannah Arendt Fellow in 2026. He joined the SCVN project in 2025 as a Research Advisor and will share his experience archiving in Iraq to support the Yezidi project archives.

Kjell Anderson is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Manitoba, specializing in genocide, perpetrator studies, international criminal law, and transitional justice. He is the author of Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (2017) and co-editor of Researching Perpetrators of Genocide (2020). His fieldwork spans Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and northern Iraq, where he has investigated atrocity crimes, victim experiences, and perpetrator narratives. He has held academic positions at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, the University of the Fraser Valley, and the National University of Rwanda, and worked with NGOs, think tanks, and international organizations. His current projects include books on Dominic Ongwen, the Rohingya genocide, and epistemic justice and transitional justice. He is also the SCVN Iraq/Syria Research Cluster Co-Lead working with a Yezidi survivor, ‘Jilan’ (not her real name) and graphic artist Birgit Weyhe to develop a graphic novel about Jilan’s experiences during the Yezidi Genocide. His interdisciplinary research integrates legal, criminological, and social science approaches to mass violence and post-conflict accountability.

Tuesday March 24th, 2026
10:00 – 11:30am PST

Registration required to receive Zoom link.