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!
Comfort food: succulent hugs in morsel mouthfuls. It’s soulful re-invigoration at a delightful and intangible level. Sinfully delicious or piously nutritious, our hard-studying taste buds deserve the best. We know what we like and we don’t need to ask why. But what if your favourite Canadian dish threatened extinction for a species in the wild?… Read more »
At Cirque de Soleil last week a unique opportunity presented itself: during intermission I gazed upward at a sea of audience faces entranced and captivated by the show and then over at the stage performers enraptured by the craft of their art. In this moment I attained a perfect middle between subject and object. It… Read more »
Behind ideas and actions lie belief systems; in times of war, philosophies have mortal consequences. Veterans spent so much of their life’s vigour and vim because they believed in ideals of duty, democracy, nation, and honour; in short, everything that makes our society free. Our liberty to study and flourish today exists because of these… Read more »
Ever wake up not feeling yourself? This can be a haunting reality as when a person says you’re not yourself today or that doesn’t seem like something you’d do. To have our stable wholeness questioned can leave us feeling off kilter or even defensive. These moments illustrate that our being (our ontology) is more fluid… Read more »
If you’re feeling overburdened or out of place as your coursework mounts this Fall it might help to consider the peculiar case of gold rush camels. Miners heading to Barkerville, B.C. during the 1860s tried importing camels to lug their rucksacks and mining tools through steep mountain passes (UVic, online). Our experience as independent scholars… Read more »
“No one here gets out alive” proclaimed a biography of Jim Morrison (Hopkins, Sugerman). No matter our personal age we must accept that the year is waning and the life of summer has fled. Autumnal chills with claustrophobic auspices may leave us feeling listless and trapped by the enforced hibernation of winter life. Even our… Read more »
“Ok, listen up! Everyone take off their shoes and put them on the table.” Are we in a post 9/11 airport? Nope, it’s the first day of art class and the student body is being asked as one to draw their own shoe. Inspiration drains away like chlorophyll from autumn leaves with the forced return… Read more »
Limpid thought and diluted meaning beckon us when we relax our critical faculties; our egos may inflate as we mow down course after course, yet it remains for us to be reflexive and consider what we’d hitherto discounted. Only fools rush in and when we draw conclusions based more on our disciplinary assumptions than on… Read more »
What if you awoke one day and were no longer yourself? Floating without memory in a swamp of stimuli, you’d be disengaged from the meaning of your actions and the coherence of your identity. Context and purpose having evaporated into a misty abyss, you might ask: What is going on? Writer’s block? A nightmare? A… Read more »
Let’s go play outside! Dawning summer brings the allure of outdoor study breaks that add an additional element to our matrix of procrastination. But it doesn’t have to all be guilty romps through sunny avenues. We can recharge our scholarly batteries at the intellectual level in several ways by stepping, proverbially, outside the bounds of… Read more »