There are lots of exciting events coming up in the Faculty of Arts.  Mark your calendars!

• The Economic seminar series will host Dr. Diana Alessandrini from St Xavier University on November 10 from 1:00 to 2:00 PM in room 211, Main Building. Her seminar talk is entitled “Minimum wage effects on human capital accumulation: Evidence from Canadian data.” Please find attached the latest draft of Diana’s paper.

• The Bookmark’s 50th Anniversary Reading Series is thrilled to present Ann-Marie MacDonald in conversation with Dr. Greg Doran on Monday, November 14th at 7 pm in the Florence Simmons Hall, 140 Weymouth Street, Charlottetown. Ann-Marie MacDonald is an award-winning novelist, playwright, actor, and broadcast host. She is the author of the bestselling novels Fall On Your Knees, The Way the Crow Flies, and Adult Onset.

• Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, executive director and general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), will present the 2022 Chief Justice Thane A. Campbell Lectureship in Law on Thursday, November 17, at 12 noon, at the Delta Prince Edward Hotel in Charlottetown. Mendelsohn Aviv’s lecture is titled “The Icing on the Cake: on tensions between freedom of religion and equality.”“Clashes between religious freedom and equality have arisen in numerous cases: from refusals to accept 2SLGBTQI+ marriages or people, to bans on religious symbols, for example in courts or in the classroom,” she says. “To resolve these issues, one must consider the meaning and theory underpinning the rights to equality and religious freedom, how they interact, where stereotypes have impacted decision-making, whether there could be a hierarchy of rights, and which of the seeming conflicts are in fact reconcilable.”

• The Faculty of Arts would like to invite students and faculty to join us on Thursday, November 17^that 3:00pm in Main Building^, Faculty Lounge where Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, Executive Director and General Counsel, will discuss the work of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.  

The Faculty of Arts would like to invite students and faculty to join us on Thursday, November 17^th at 3:00pm in the Faculty Lounge, where Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, Executive Director and General Counsel, will discuss the work of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.  All are welcome to attend.

What does the Canadian Civil Liberties Association do? 

CCLA is a human rights organization committed to defending the rights, dignity, safety, and freedoms of all people in Canada. As was established in the organization’s founding principles, CCLA is the pre-eminent voice advocating for the rights and freedoms of all Canadians and all persons living in Canada. Recently, the Association has participated in the public hearing about the imposition of the Emergency Measures Act during last winter’s “trucker’s protest,” and has mounted responses to the imposition of Bill 28 concerning striking educational assistants in Ontario and Bill 21 concerning bans on religious dress in Quebec.

Dr. Scott Lee (Modern Languages) has recently published two articles on the work of the contemporary French novelist Yves Ravey. The first, entitled “Obsession et rachat: Enlèvement avec rançon d’Yves Ravey” (in Studi francesi 193 [January-April 2021]: 58-74), was presented in preliminary form at a session of the Fiona Papps Research Series, Dept. of Psychology, UPEI. The second article, “Bourdonnements de l’Autre. Trois jours chez ma tante d’Yves Ravey,” appeared in Les Lettres romanes75, no. 3-4, 2021: 347-368.

Dr. John McIntyre (English) is having a book launch for his new edited volume, Modernism and the Anthropocene: Material Ecologies of Twentieth-Century Literature, published in the fall of 2021 with Rowman & Littlefield Press. He invites colleagues to come out to Upstreet on April 21st at 7pm for a lively conversation about literature and climate. Food and beverages will be available for purchase. 

As part of a special issue on energy in the Atlantic region, the latest issue of Atlantic Business Magazine has published a profile of Dr. Joshua MacFadyen’s (ACLC) research in the ALCL GeoREACH Lab. Quoting the article, titled “P.E.I. Agro-energy—Back to the future of sustainability”,

“To be accurate, this is about his new research which seems to show, in surprising and convincing ways, that old-time farmers were actually more energy efficient, environmentally sustainable, and commercially viable than many of their contemporary, high-tech counterparts.”

You can subscribe to read the full article using this link, https://atlanticbusinessmagazine.ca/article/p-e-i-agro-energy-back-to-the-future-of-sustainability/. In the mean time, please enjoy this scan of the impressive title page introducing the article on Dr. MacFadyen’s work.

This Friday, April 1st, the Department of Economics will host a seminar from 3-4 pm located in Kelly Building, Room 210. Professor Didier Tatoutchoup from the Université de Moncton will present “Do we Recycle too much? Evidence from the U.S.”.

The Department of Sociology & Anthropology has brought back their newsletter that began last year. In the newsletter you can read about events of interest, announcements, and opportunities like awards, scholarships, professional development and training. It is a great resource for students to find out more about what’s going on in this department!

Raquel Carvalho Hoersting is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department here at UPEI with a unique teaching style involving creativity and spontaneity. She has a glowing education background highlighted by an undergraduate degree from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador), a Master’s and Ph.D. degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of North Texas (USA), and a postdoctoral fellowship in Social Psychology, Work and Organizations at the University of Brasilia (Brazil).

WIthin her research in clinical and intercultural psychology, Dr. Hoersting examines social identity, belonging, culturally congruent psychological interventions, expressive therapies, trauma, and mental health. Additionally, her background in clinical and social psychology has allowed her to research aspects of cultures’ effects on mental health like the identity shifts related to migration and other intercultural processes. More recently, she has begun to integrate expressive arts into her psychotherapy research, with emphasis on using it as a tool to connect with clients of different cultural backgrounds.

Dr. Hoersting has had numerous exciting things happen within her career recently. Something she is finding very rewarding in her role as an educator is the clinical training she has been part of in the new Doctor of Clinical Psychology program we have at UPEI. Additionally, last month, she was awarded a UPEI internal grant to study narratives and metaphors of transitions of Latin Americans living in PEI. In January, her team was joined by Alejandro Ramirez Torres as he was awarded the Emerging Leaders of Americas Program (ELAP). This award gives post-secondary individuals in Latin America and the Caribbean the opportunity to study or do research in post-secondary institutions here in Canada. He will be working alongside Dr. Hoersting on a few ongoing projects with plans to stay until July 2022. However, the excitement doesn’t stop there as she has had many invitations to conferences, workshops, and peer reviews to consider. Notably, she was invited by the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) to deliver a pre-conference workshop at the Culture and Psychology Summer School in July 2021, focusing on values and identity, in which she presented virtually. A doctoral student of hers, Joy Nnadi, presented at this same conference as well. Dr. Hoersting also has upcoming presentations this year; as an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy trainer, she will present at two EMDR conferences based on her developments within EMDR protocol and storytelling, trauma narratives, and metaphors.

After having accomplished so much in her career already, Dr. Hoersting’s plans for the future are to continue solidifying important relationships in the community for UPEI’s PsyD research and training, as well as supervising doctoral dissertations and honors theses. Regarding research, she will remain within her focus on clinical and intercultural psychology, and continue to learn more about the healing processes involving creativity and the contexts in which these processes can occur.

To end, we’ve asked Dr. Hoersting to send a message or piece of advice to both students and staff. She has shared two axioms that have helped her through difficult times: 

“Progress, not perfection” & “Live and let live”

Thank you Dr. Raquel Hoersting for all that you do and we are all excited and thrilled to see what you accomplish next!