Woodward’s

The Walrus Magazine held an event on Tuesday, March 25 in the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema during which seven different speakers were given seven minutes each to discuss an issue surrounding sustainable renewable energy. Topics included First Nations rights in relation to resource extraction, the political climate surrounding the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipelines, and the role for young people in mitigating climate change.

Harbour Centre

Each year, a public lecture is held in honour of the late SFU professor of communication, Dallas Smythe. This year’s memorial lecture, titled “Pulling Punches: Media Power, People Power,” was given on Monday, March 24 by Natalie Fenton, a communications professor from the University of London. Fenton discussed whether or not the media affects the practice of democracy in our society, and if so, which forms of media might have the most influence.

Surrey

Angelika Neuwirth, one of the world’s leading scholars of the Qur’an, spoke at SFU Surrey on Thursday, March 27 about “Reading the Qur’an as a Text of Late Antiquity.” Opening with a quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the Qur’an being the “book of books,” Neuwirth unpacked a weighty thesis on how the Qur’an can be read as a literary text in its own context. In her lecture last Thursday, she argued that the Qur’an deserves to be recognized for it’s “epistemic shift” towards morality for the sake of humanity, rather than as a mere continuation of the preceding Abrahamic texts.