An unofficial AU advocate at large, Jason never misses a chance to recount the merits of an Athabasca education. Jason’s studies began alone in front of a rustic rural fireplace in December of 2003 and carried on through various brick and mortar college classrooms yet always with Athabasca as part of his journey. In 2014 he completed his BA in Sociology and in 2022 graduated with an MA in Cultural Studies. To this end, his columns seek to explore edifying moments of learning how to learn within the challenging ideological terrain of that great bugaboo facing students everywhere: the real world!
Music soothes the savage beast, goes the old aphorism, and when we need a study break nothing quite beats a little rocking it out and dancing it up courtesy of our favourite genre. Ambient soothing auras can be an auditory study buddy and so can more in-your-face lyricisms. A question I have, though, is where… Read more »
As a wee lad my Father would sometimes bring me out to his forestry job sites. Amidst towering conifers that seemed to hold up the sky he’d say “Listen!” and, amidst the stillness of nature, we’d hear only the whispering breeze. Though science was the essence of Dad’s work and framed my upbringing, those golden… Read more »
Explanatory prowess often begins with a metaphor. Take bubbles, for instance. They can be blown, popped, or inhabited. Social distancing is inseparable from the metaphor of a bubble and distance education runs with the notion that each of our identities contains an inland empire of meaning and activity. Likewise, the sky’s the limit in our… Read more »
Fear is a fickle thing to which the famous 4 F’s of the brain’s hypothalamus do scanty justice. Besides fight, food, fucking, and flight, limbic fear also propels us over mountainous humps we’d have hitherto imagined as insurmountable. So it was with trepidation that I took the stage along with my graduating cohort at the… Read more »
An ironic thing happened to me on the way to writing this column. I’d forgotten the page number for a reference I’d found in a snail-text (book) I’d checked out of the AU Library. Google’s wonders shortly provided the needed notation: the answer, as such, was to be found on page 30 of Jean Baudrillard’s… Read more »
A scanty few decades ago childish tears and angst were met with the phrase “I’ll give you something to cry about!” Social evolution means that what was once a real threat evolved into a threat of a threat before landing with a plop in a puddle of joke threats that, ideally, would bring cheer to… Read more »
Adults though we be, and increasingly learned ones, we remain susceptible to the hubris our narrow mindsets invariably bring. So, when pondering Alexandrina Victoria’s 201st birthday and the kicktail long weekend in May that bears her name, we run the risk of oversimplifying the era of her Imperial regime. England was at the height of… Read more »
Although May Day is now past, the insight it can bring continues on, much like how we continue our exploration from last time of it and how our studies at AU separate us from the conformity of clapping hands and stomping feet. As times changed so did Mayday celebrations. But, like Mother’s Day that celebrates… Read more »
The year was 1986. Kindergarten. A larval Fly on the Wall refused to sing or perform the actions of the classic kiddie tune “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” He was told to go sit in a chair in the corner. What a pretentious kid, or was he precocious? Maybe he was channelling his… Read more »
As spring’s fervid grasp permits life to flourish, we at AU might take a moment to record our progress as we arrive at this season of rebirth. Foremost among methods of self-germination may, for we studious AU students, be the act of writing itself. Each essay has affected us as a dialectic between the course… Read more »