Notice Board

The Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs (SACPA) presents a session discussing the role of corporate ideology in shaping research agendas for Alberta's post-secondary sector.

The corporate interests and ideologies shaping Alberta's universities: What do they mean for our future?

Thursday, January 21, 2021 – 10 a.m. (MST)
YouTube Live link:  https://youtu.be/FEcD0mwmSbM

The speaker asserts that: “If ever there were a time for universities to assume a leadership role in providing the knowledge needed for socio-ecological change, this is surely that moment.” But what drives research and innovation in Alberta’s largest universities, and in what directions? What kinds of knowledge are our universities producing to help Albertans make a transition to a post-carbon economy that can provide income security and a good life for all?

These are the questions that motivated the research that led to the June 2020 report, Knowledge for an Ecologically Sustainable Future? Innovation Policy and Alberta Universities, published by the Parkland Institute and the Corporate Mapping Project. Over five years, painstaking data collection from multiple sources allowed Dr. Laurie Adkin and her research assistants to reconstruct a picture of the funding flows to the Universities of Alberta and Calgary over a period of 20 years. Focusing on funding to the domains of energy and environmental research, located in multiple faculties, centres and institutes, they categorized research projects in relation to their contributions to ecologically sustainable development. The talk will present some of the findings from this extensive research, leaving time for discussion about what this all means for Albertans’ futures.

Speaker:                  Dr. Laurie Adkin

Laurie Adkin is a political economist and professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. Her main areas of research and teaching are political ecology, the populist radical right in Europe, and Alberta politics. Since 2002, she has studied the formation of climate change policy in Alberta and Canada.

She is the author of Politics of Sustainable Development: Citizens, Unions, and the Corporations (1998), and editor and co-author of Environmental Conflict and Democracy in Canada (2009), and First World Petro-Politics: The Political Ecology and Governance of Alberta (2016). Her recent work has focused on the political ecology of knowledge production in Alberta’s universities and on innovation policy and discourse as responses to the global climate.

In order to ask questions of our speaker in the chat feature of YouTube, you must have a YouTube account and be signed in. Please do so well ahead of the scheduled start time, so you’ll be ready. Go the YouTube Live link provided in this session flyer and on the top right of your browser click the “sign in” button. If you have Google or Gmail accounts, they can be used to sign in. If you don’t, click “Create Account” and follow along. Once you are signed in, you can return to the live stream and use the chat feature to ask your questions of the speaker. Remember, you can only participate in the chat feature while we are livestreaming.

Link to SACPA’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFUQ5mUHv1gfmMFVr8d9dNA

For further information on the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs, visit the SACPA website.