Professor Alvin Finkel

Professor Alvin Finkel, of Athabasca University, is being recognized for his exceptional contributions to the community during a long and distinguished career as a scholar and teacher in the field of Canadian history. As one of his colleagues has commented, “Alvin exemplifies those intellectuals who do not work for the sake of their career alone but who communicate on issues of social and political importance to a wider audience, in this instance in the area of labour and social history.” Dr. Finkel has worked tirelessly to give back to ordinary Canadians their own history. He was a founder of the Alberta Labour History Institute, which has a mandate “to collect, preserve and publicize the stories of Alberta’s working people and their organizations,” he consulted on the CBC’s highly-regarded production Canada: A People’s History, and he co-authored the popular Canada: A National History (2003, 2006), which re- examines the history of ordinary Canadians within the political context of Canada. Dr. Finkel is a frequent commentator in the popular media and has edited multi-disciplinary journals like Labour/Le Travail and Prairie Forum, directed at both academic and non-academic readerships. Above all, as a long-time teacher at Athabasca University, he has been instrumental in its development as a world-class provider of distance education, dedicated to removing barriers to access to, and success in, university-level studies for a community of adult learners worldwide.

Professor Lisa Doolittle

Professor Lisa Doolittle, of the University of Lethbridge is being recognized for her innovative contributions to the wider community through her academic research and creative work with dance and theatre. An influential anthology, Dancing Bodies, Living Histories: New Writings on Dance and Culture (2000), which she co-edited, broke new ground in dance scholarship by examining the experience of dance in the contexts of social relations, identity, politics and history. As co-founder and contributing editor of Dance Connection Magazine, in her wide-ranging academic research, and in her award-winning video productions, Lisa Doolittle has helped broaden public understanding of dance to include the work of traditional, regional groups such as the Japanese-Canadian Momiji Dancers of Lethbridge, the subject of one of her ongoing research projects. As one of her colleagues has noted, “The forms of dance and performance activity that have occupied Ms. Doolittle as a researcher and participant/scholar have been those commonly tarnished by the link with community groups, religion, ethnic folk traditions, multiculturalism and non-Caucasian practitioners, or mainstream and popular dance habits.” Professor Doolittle has been instrumental in presenting interdisciplinary collaborations and workshops in dance, theatre and film in the Now Showing Live Arts Series, which offers a unique cultural experience to local audiences in Lethbridge. She is deeply involved in community outreach projects, and is currently working on an “interactive” theatrical collaboration between students and clients of Lethbridge’s Family and Immigrant Services, entitled “Something to Declare,” which is based on a script developed from the real- life stories of the participants.

Professor Emily Luce

Professor Emily Luce, who took up her appointment in the Department of New Media in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge in July 2006, is being recognized for her remarkable contribution to the community outside the university through her work as a member of the Hupacasath First Nation language preservation team. With the goal of documenting and revitalizing the Nuu Chah Nulth Barclay dialect, the Hupacasath Language Project, with the assistance of Professor Luce, has been involved in transferring what was a wholly oral language to a computer-based written form, while maintaining the strong visual tradition that is a part of the culture from which it comes. Among much else, this process has involved Professor Luce in the design of an alphabet “to accommodate the non-Latin characters required by the Nuu Chah Nulth language for the keyboard.” To date, eight books and a website have been produced using this font, and work is ongoing on projects including a book about family relationships, the incor- poration of sound and video components into the Hupacasath web site, and a history project entitled “Oral to Typographic,” dealing with the design and typographic treatments of the Nuu Chah Nulth language from the time it was first recorded. As the Chief Councillor of the Hupacasath Nation writes, “With Emily’s help, the vision of the Hupacasath language project expanded on the central idea of simple revitalization into illustrating and preserving our culture through our language.” A colleague comments: “The project is now more than just a solution, it has become a model for others – that is, other people and teams and languages and cultures. It is a designed system that encompasses resources and methodologies and truly epitomizes how applied research can move beyond educational institutions and into everyday society.”