A Fulbright Welcome to Ottawa

Beautiful Ottawa!

 We were happy to see Ottawa for the first time and receive a warm welcome from the Fulbright Canada staff during the Fulbright Orientation from Sept. 6-8.

I'm living in Montreal for the 2013-2014 academic year with my family, Jeff and Cameron (age 8) while I do research through a grant from Fulbright Canada.  For more information on my Fulbright project, please see my posting about that.  

Here we are in front of the 
Canadian Parliament in Ottawa.

Our hotel room at the Lord Elgin Hotel was beautiful and comfortable with a magnificent view (see photo below).

The Fulbright Canada Team worked hard putting together a very interesting and educational orientation which included various speaker panels (described below), a tour of Parliament, a tour of the Canadian Supreme Court, and a visit to the Museum of Civilization and National Gallery of Canada.  (I will have several posts about the various tours.)  They even got hockey skates on us at the rink!

The Fulbright Canada Team (standing in the background in left photo)
greeting us at our first gathering at the hotel.  

One of the speakers on the Higher Education panel spoke about how Brazil has launched a "Science Without Borders" initiative in which 100,000 students are being sent abroad by the Brazilian government to study science.  Policy makers in Brazil designed this program to be a "game changer" for the country in the long-term. Interestingly, last week when I was giving my new Brazilian friend, Simone, a ride to the metro after we saw a documentary about international social justice movements, she told me her grant to come work at Concordia University's Oral History Centre was from the Brazilian government. I realized Simone was one of those 100,000 game-changers!  I'm excited that she is talking about submitting a proposal on access to information in societies with significant illiterate populations to a symposium I'm organizing on Sustainabiliy and Human Rights in November.

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The Panel on Higher Education.

Several panels of Fulbright Researchers were on the agenda for Sat. morning.
 Here, Lauri Mercier speaks about her research.
She does oral histories about coal mine workers.  

I was on the Social Justice panel with two terrific Fulbright scholars:  Doug Tewksbury, who does oral histories about the Occupy Movement and about student movements in Canada, and Tonia Warnecke, who will be doing oral histories with women in Asia looking at mid-tier economic development strategies for women.  

Here is a photo of our whole group of Fulbright Scholars and Killam Fellows (undergrads).  I had never heard of the Killam Fellowship before but was very impressed with these young people doing Canada/US exchanges for the academic year.   

(Note:  This photo is from the Fulbright Facebook page at this link: 

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Fulbright-Canada/193768967190

What happens when Fulbrighters play ice hockey?
Some of us fall down, a few are really good, and all of us have a lot of fun.

Here are a few more photos of our lovely hotel, the Lord Elgin:

All the Fulbrighters and Killam Fellows were treated to a delicious, gourmet meal at the Empire Grill in the Bytown Market area of Ottawa.  The white Cadillac in front of the Empire Grill is not for us, but it shows you just how fancy that restaurant was!

On our way to the National Gallery of Canada...

For the afternoon of our second day of orientation, I opted to go with the group going to the Museum of Civilization (see photo below).  It was a phenomenal museum.  For more details and photos, see my other blog post about the Museum of Civilization.