Concordia faculty, staff and alumni/ae pop up in the media more often than you might think!

Steven Appelbaum (Management) was quoted in a Gazette feature on the false promises of office cubicles. “If you still have an environment where everybody guards his or her own domain, and they still e-mail each other rather than talk, then all that openness is just an illusion,” he said.

Michael Carney (Management) was quoted in the ACI World Report, a publication of the Airports Council Internaional. He gave a speech at the group’s first conference in Santiago in which he traced 20 years of airport privatization.

Beverley McGuire (Music) and three other women make up Maeve, a Celtic-music group. A charming profile of the group appeared in the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder prior to a concert there in January.

A profile of Roddy Ellias (Music) appeared in the Ottawa Citizen in January in which the guitarist talks about his jazz and classical background. The writer, Richard Todd, recommends two CDs of Ellias’s music, one with I Musici de Montréal, produced by Chandos, and the other recorded privately but available locally or through www.roddyellias.com.

Randy Phillips, who ably covers university sports for the Gazette, wrote a feature article on Réal and Armel Kitieu, both Concordia students and members of the Stingers men’s basketball team. The brothers, who are from Cameroon, in Western Africa, didn’t speak English or play basketball before coming here.

Patsy M. Lightbown (TESL) was widely interviewed in the francophone media, including on RDI’s Le Point and CBFT-TV’s Montréal Ce Soir, about the teaching of English as a second language after she made a presentation to the estates-general on the French language. Le Point, she reports, “had some great footage of high school students with almost no English and elementary school kids in intensive ESL classes (where we have done lots of research) speaking with confidence and pleasure. Great interviews with parents, as well.” Her brief made the point that where second-language acquisition is concerned, youth is an advantage.

Susan Palmer (Religion) was quoted in a recent story in Saturday Night magazine about Raël, leader of one of Quebec’s oddest and most successful cults. He is “extremely creative when it comes to theology,” said Palmer, a longtime Raël-watcher. “He’s an innovator, and a religious genius.”

An examination of the contributions of Arctic explorer and pioneer ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson in the Ottawa Citizen quoted Richard Diubaldo (History/Recruiting), author of Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic (1978, 1998).

Corinne Jetté (Engineering/Computer Science) was interviewed on TVA (Channel 10) about the Native Access to Engineering e-learning project, which brings together Concordia, Native Affairs Canada and IBM-Canada.

Randy B. Swedburg (Applied Human Sciences) is an expert in participation in leisure activities. Interviewed on Global TV about the increase in attendance at movies, he pointed to changing Canadian demographics, specifically the aging Baby Boomers, and pointed out that the film industry has done many things to attract a varied audience.

Balbir Sahni (CIAC/Economics) and three Concordia students, Heather Baragar, Mitch Blobstein and Alain Giroux, were part of an interview on CFCF-TV’s Pulse recently, talking about the International/Student Exchange Program and the new Mobility Bursaries.

Anouk Bélanger (Sociology/Anthropology) was quoted in the Journal de Montréal on the fascination exerted by Montreal’s boxing Hilton family. Bélanger specializes in the sociology of sport and the media.

Candis Steenbergen, a PhD in the Humanities student, was one of those who asked a question on a recent CBC “national town hall” hosted by Peter Mansbridge. The idea of the program was to ask a panel of historians and commentators what event would have had the most significant change on Canadian history if it had turned out differently. Candis asked, “What if all women in Canada, regardless of marital status, wealth, education or colour had been accorded full rights to democratic citizenship when Canada was formed in 1867?”

Marc Gervais (Cinema) gave a talk on Alfred Hitchcock at the Musée des Beaux Arts on February 21, on film noir and the quest for personal fulfillment as seen in North by Northwest. He is teaching on a number of Irish films this year, thanks to the efforts of Ciné Gael Montreal. Their work was described by John Griffin recently in the Gazette.

The latest film by Cinema grad Gary Burns, Waydowntown, rated three-and-a-half stars in the Gazette, higher than most Hollywood efforts.

Adalbert Lallier, retired professor of Political Science, has been testifying for the prosecution in a well-publicized war crimes trial in Germany. Lallier, who was a 19-year-old concentration camp guard in 1945, says he saw German Waffen SS officer Julius Veil shoot seven Jewish prisoners in cold blood. Though Lallier claims he has risked his life to testify, the details of the incident remain uncertain as the trial continues.