So, we have quite a few photo feeds. Eric Harrison put up a beautiful collection on his Flickr page from which I put a selection up on my Facebook page. His pictures are stunning. He really captures the mood and feel of the event. Lily Panamsky, one of the editors of The Silhouette, the student …
Category Archives: Political Comm
A very successful visit to McMaster from Michael Ignatieff!
Well, yesterday, Michael Ignatieff stopped by McMaster for his conversation with students and faculty. It was a magical afternoon. Historic Convocation Hall was packed to the rafters with participants! In fact, we had at least 600 in the room, in the gallery up top, standing in the foyer and spilling out into the corridor. And …
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Preparing for Michael Ignatieff’s visit to McMaster.
Communications campaigns have really been the focus so far this term! In a couple of days, Michael Ignatieff will visit McMaster for an open conversation with students and faculty in a non-partisan, unbranded town hall-style forum. I am one of three Co-Chairs for the event, with Tyler Banham, a Hamilton lawyer and political organiser, Sarah …
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Classes begin. Teaching a new course: Communications for Not-for-Profit Campaigns and Elections
Classes are beginning very early this year, on January 4th! Good Lord. New Year’s was just a couple of days ago. I am excited about this term. I will be teaching a fourth-year translation class for the Department of French. I love translation – I have done it as a consultant for government and private …
Two Days of Protest Against Four Days of Furlough at Lakehead University
[A version of this post was published in the December-January edition of the MUFA Newsletter] On December 20-21, I went to Lakehead University in Thunder Bay as representative of MUFA to participate in a protest against the Lakehead administration’s decision to put faculty and staff on a four-day furlough to save money. The protest was …
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Terry Fallis Visits Hamilton
Today was a very literary day. I got a chance to meet Terry Fallis and listen to him read excerpts from his first book, The Best Laid Plans. Terry is a McMaster alumnus (Engineering), a former political staffer and organiser and is current one of the principals at Thornley-Fallis, a marketing agency based in Toronto. …
Future public servants evaluated on opinions about Conservative Economic Action Plan.
The highly controversial Conservative Economic Action Plan is being used in an essay question for potential applicants to an elite management training program in the federal public service. One of my former research assistants was really excited recently – he was applying to get a job in Canada’ public service. So he logged on to …
Canadians deserve evidence-based politics
It is about time that political communication caught up to medicine by applying modern standards of evidence to its practices. The practice of medicine has been revolutionised over the last 20 years by the emergence of evidence-based diagnosis and treatment. The idea behind evidence-based medicine is that doctors should apply the findings of scientific research …
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Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie – a great documentary
I have spent the evening writing up a grant to fund a new research project (while eating lots of chicken couscous that I made yesterday) on political communication using the technique of content analysis. I will be submitting it later on this week. More on that project in a future post. While I was writing, …
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Canada’s choice: political communication as dance or war?
Yesterday afternoon, I gave a lecture to my first year communications class on George Lakoff’s idea that our thinking is fundamentally rooted in metaphor. Lakoff explains that the underpinnings of how we structure our understanding of the world is metaphorical. He gives the example of “Time is money” – a metaphor that expresses a principle …
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