 Jill, welcome or welcome back to Arts One. We just wondered if you could introduce yourself, reintroduce yourself a little bit. First of all tell us something about your background, what you did before coming to UBC, what brought you here. Hello, introducing myself. I'm Jill Fellows and this is my second year teaching in the Arts One program. For Arts One I taught at Quest University, which is a small liberal arts and sciences university up in Squamish, really small, like 600 students small. But it does everything interdisciplinary so I was teaching philosophy, history and literature all together in the same course. And so I did that and before that I was here at UBC again so I'm kind of returning, which is cool. And you study philosophy and your specialization, could you tell us a little bit about that? So officially I'm a metaphysician and an epistemologist which sounds like really fancy terms. Basically what I do is I study the ways in which societies come to make and acknowledge knowledge, what knowledge means, when we think we know something, how do we come to know things. And I also study the nature of reality. So I study the way the world is or the way we think it is and how that might influence the way in which we go about trying to learn things. So I look at the intersection between knowledge and reality basically. Now you recently won national attention for a paper you gave about polar bears. Can you tell us a little bit about that? It was on the second page of the National Power Structures, exciting and slightly terrifying. Yeah, so I was working on issues of trust and expertise, in particular surrounding the idea of whether or not the polar bears are actually endangered and what kind of management tools would be appropriate for polar bear conservation. So I was looking at two different communities and how they understand what kind of thing a polar bear is. So this is back to kind of the reality side of my research. So do we think of a polar bear as an independent subject like a person that can interact with us and have a meaningful relationship with us, which it tends to be the way in which the polar bears can view polar bears. Or do we view polar bears more as kind of an object to be studied and managed, which is a little bit more the Southern scientists' attitude towards polar bears. And depending on how you view the polar bears, it can really influence the ways in which you think it's appropriate to learn things about polar bears and influence the ways in which you think it's appropriate to manage or conserve polar bears. And so this is causing tension between these two communities. And I was looking at ways in which the communities can build trust that polar bears are so different. Wow. Can you tell us a little bit about teaching, your approach to teaching, what works well, what you like about teaching? I guess what I really like about teaching is having really interesting discussions with interesting people and learning different ways in which people approach the stuff we're reading and different conclusions that are drawn. So I like to be surprised. I like to find out that somebody else has a completely different take on a piece of literature we're reading and figure out how they arrived at that conclusion and compare it with how I arrived at my conclusion. So I like to have a lot of discussions on a lot of group workshops and a lot of involvement of the students that we're all trying to teach each other. And those are the kind of things I try and do in seminar and what I find so exciting. Because when there's an energy in the seminar, then it's hard to get tired or get bored with any of the material because you hear all the different ways other people are interacting with it and it just makes it that much more interesting. Not that anything we're reading is boring because it's not, it's awesome. But it's even more awesome when you get to talk about it with other people. And what do you like in particular about Arts One? I think last year my favorite thing about Arts One was that I work in a team of instructors. So not only am I bringing my expertise to bear, but I get to learn a lot from people in other disciplines and I get to explore things that maybe I haven't studied since my undergrad because if you go on into grad school and then kind of take the professory, you end up being a little bit narrow. And you really spend a lot of time, in my case, with your head in philosophy and not really thinking about the other disciplines that the university might be teaching. So past my undergrad, I may not have done a lot of research in these other areas. So I find it really, really fun to get to go into a lecture and have somebody who's an expert in a completely different area lead us through a text or a film or whatever it is that we're studying. And just kind of trying to explore these things that I thought, sadly I left behind me in my undergrad, but I haven't, so cool. And this year you're teaching Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Ian Hacking. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the texts that you're teaching? Yeah, I'm really excited to get to teach Ian Hacking this year. Who is he? I think he's the last person I'm teaching. He's a philosopher who teaches at the University of Toronto, so he's Canadian. Actually he did his undergraduate at UBC. So there's a bit of a connection there. And we're reading, rewriting the soul, which is where Ian Hacking puts he actually does what he self-deprecatingly calls somewhat boring philosophy because he looks at the history of statistics. And the way in which the rise of statistics and the rise of social sciences has influenced the way we think about ourselves and about humanity. And so rewriting the soul is exploring this in particular in the area of psychology and the way in which the rise of psychology is a discipline and categorizing certain psychological disorders and understanding what symptoms go along with this kind of illness versus this kind of illness has affected the way in which we approach illness and the way in which we understand who we are as individuals. So we're going to follow kind of the history of one, well, we're going to follow the history of kind of the growth of dissociative identity disorder and how it's related to other disorders like multiple personality disorder or double consciousness. And I think it's going to be really exciting and very, very fun to read this text. It's one of my favorites so I'm very excited to be able to teach it this year. Anything else you can say about what you're looking forward to this current year? I'm really looking forward to Miranda's lecture on Sean of the Dead. I think that's going to be, it's a movie I really like. And I think she has a very different take so I'm really, really looking forward to being surprised and to learning how to interact with that piece of fiction in a new way. Plus zombies, I mean, what's not to look forward to. One last question. Have you got any advice you'd give to a student who's starting the course? Get to know your classmates and not just within your own seminar because your classmates in other seminars are going to be talking with other people and being led by different instructors and so it will open you up to different ways to interact with the text. And don't start your papers the night before they do. You need to be able to have time to do rewrites so start them early. Okay, great. Well thank you very much. Thank you. Looking forward to seeing you in the fall.