Category: Events

The Friends of the University of Alberta present Raise The Bar
with Dr. PB Berge

Video Games. No Longer Child’s Play!

Video gaming is the BIGGEST entertainment business on earth. Worth more than twice the global film and music industries combined! Yet many people think video games are “child’s play”.

They’re not. They are classrooms, laboratories, and spaces of social protest and you should know more about them. On Oct. 28th, join us when video game expert, Professor PB Berge dismantles misconceptions about games today and reveals how players are using video games to challenge technology, identity, and power itself.

Blue Chair
9624 – 76 Avenue NW

Tue, Oct 28, 2025

5:00 PM Doors Open
6:00 PM Speaker + Q&A

Ticket includes 1 drink (beer, house wine, non-alcoholic)
Drinks Menu at The Blue Chair Cafe

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Dr. Persephone Blue (“PB”) Berge is an award-winning media scholar, game designer, and self-described ludoarsonist. 🔥 She is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Game Design and is cross-appointed in the Media & Technology Studies Program and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. They are also the director of the Discord Academic Research Community and a co-founder of Tabletop Research in Practice. Their research concerns the so-called “unplayable,” trans game design, feminist platform studies, and toxic technocultures. Their work can be found in New Media & Society, Game Studies, Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and more. Website: https://psberge.com

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Raise The Bar is a program designed by The Friends of the University of Alberta to provide engaging learning opportunities delivered by U of A researchers in a causal setting – like a bar. We’re raising the bar on the way people consume content!

The Friends of the University of Alberta present Raise The Bar
with Dr. Cressida Heyes

Sleep is the New Sex?

Sleep is always in the news, often under the headline that we are experiencing a “sleep crisis.” What is this crisis, and where did it come from? Why are we so anxious about sleep? In this short talk I’ll offer some answers to these questions drawn from my research in cultural politics. Come along and learn a little bit about the history of sleep, the preoccupation with giving advice to new mothers, the “sleep gaps” in gender and race, or why powerful men like to pretend they never sleep.

Blue Chair
9624 – 76 Avenue NW

Tue, Jun 10, 2025

5:00 PM Doors Open
6:00 PM Speaker + Q&A

Ticket includes 1 drink (beer, house wine, non-alcoholic)
Drinks Menu at The Blue Chair Cafe

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Cressida Heyes is the author of three monographs, most recently Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Duke University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 David Easton Award from the American Political Science Association, and finalist for the North American Social for Social Philosophy Book Award. The book argues that “experience” is a thoroughly political category, a social and historical product not authored by any individual. At the same time, “the personal is political,” and one’s own lived experience is an important epistemic resource. Anaesthetics of Existence reconciles these two positions, drawing on examples of things that happen to us but are nonetheless excluded from experience. If for Foucault an “aesthetics of existence” was a project of making one’s life a work of art, Heyes’ “anaesthetics of existence” describes antiprojects that are tacitly excluded from life—but should be brought back in. Drawing on critical phenomenology, genealogy, and feminist theory, Heyes shows how and why experience has edges, and analyzes phenomena that press against those edges. Essays on sexual violence against unconscious victims, the temporality of drug use, and childbirth as a limit-experience build a politics of experience while showcasing Heyes’ philosophical method.

Dr. Heyes is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project called “Sleep is the New Sex,” which extends and moves beyond the work in Anaesthetics, to examine how representations of sleep are implicated with cultural anxieties and political struggles around gender, sexuality, work, leisure, and rest.

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Raise The Bar is a program designed by The Friends of the University of Alberta to provide engaging learning opportunities delivered by U of A researchers in a causal setting – like a bar. We’re raising the bar on the way people consume content!

The Friends of the University of Alberta present Raise The Bar
with Dr. Ted Bishop

The Social Life of Ink

Ted Bishop will talk about the invention of the ballpoint pen and the resurgence of fountain pens. Dr. Bishop will bring along the materials for making the ink used by Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and the author of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Audience participation! We’ll smash gall nuts with a hammer, grind them with a mortar and pestle, add liquid, and then write with the iron-gall ink using dip pens. Copies of Dr. Bishop’s book “The Social Life of Ink” will be available for purchase.

Blue Chair
9624 – 76 Avenue NW

Tue, Apr 22, 2025

5:00 PM Doors Open
6:00 PM Speaker + Q&A

Ticket includes 1 drink (beer, house wine, non-alcoholic)
Drinks Menu at The Blue Chair Cafe

Ted Bishop is professor emeritus of English literature and film studies at the University of Alberta. Ted has made a career of investigating original texts, poring over stains on paper by some of the greatest minds in literature. He has taught creative nonfiction, book history, and modernist literature.

Ted has written about striding in a fashion show (“Strange Tales from the Catwalk”), sliding in an avalanche (“Sluff!”), and dripping enchiladas on an ebook (“Living with the Kindle”). His shorter nonfiction has appeared in the Globe and Mail and other Canadian newspapers, Enroute, Prairie Fire, Cycle Canada, Alberta Views, and Rider.

His first book, Riding with Rilke, a motorcycle odyssey that combines the sensory seduction of the road with the intellectual rewards of archival research, was a Canadian bestseller and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Ted’s latest book, “The Social Life of Ink” is a rich and imaginative discovery of how ink has shaped culture and why it is here to stay.

Then mixed with water, or vinegar, or beer and then some iron sulfate. The internet has Jane Austen’s ink recipe and extensive explanation of “small beer”, but I digress. The audience learned a new phrase to challenge the Quick brown fox. We all had the opportunity of writing something profound, but some of us just wrote something profound. More than one attendee noted their penmanship was improved with the dip pen.

Thank you to Dr. Ted Bishop, Blue Chair staff for hosting this event and the RTB team. The Friends look forward to our next event in June 2025 – we hope you are able to join us.

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Raise The Bar is a program designed by The Friends of the University of Alberta to provide engaging learning opportunities delivered by U of A researchers in a causal setting – like a bar. We’re raising the bar on the way people consume content!