{"id":6965,"date":"2017-05-10T06:22:55","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T06:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6965"},"modified":"2017-05-10T06:22:55","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T06:22:55","slug":"the-week-before-weec-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2017\/05\/10\/the-week-before-weec-in-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"The week before WEEC in Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The programme for the <a href=\"http:\/\/weec2017.eco-learning.org\/congress-themes\/\">WEEC<\/a> event in Vancouver in September is becoming clearer, and credit is obviously due to the organisers for taking Canada's rich cultural heritage seriously \u2013 at least as far as keynote speakers are concerned. \u00a0You can see the detail <a href=\"http:\/\/weec2017.eco-learning.org\/plenary-speakers\/\">here<\/a>. \u00a0It will be more of a challenge to ensure that participation in the rest of the programme reflects the breadth of\u00a0Canada's communities, but then it always is. \u00a0I thought that the Durban WEEC was the most successful in doing this, but this WEEC might run it close. \u00a0Earlybird <a href=\"http:\/\/weec2017.eco-learning.org\/registration\/\">registration<\/a> ends on May 31st.<\/p>\n<p>As it happens, the other day I received an invitation to attend\u00a0a two-day workshop in the week before\u00a0WEEC that \"will bring together international experts on sustainability competencies in higher education\", although it's not yet clear what the purpose of the event is: maybe it will be a freewheeling kind\u00a0of affair where streams of consciousness eddy, swirl and conflueure [<em>sic<\/em>]. \u00a0I hope not. \u00a0Anyway, nice to be asked, but as I'll not be at WEEC, I'll not be going to this either. \u00a0Anyway,\u00a0I've never considered myself an expert on such things \u2013 just too sceptical of the idea of competence \/ competency, I think.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, on this Canadian theme, a feature\u00a0in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/erasmus\/2017\/05\/marriage-and-religious-fundamentalism?cid1=cust\/ddnew\/n\/n\/n\/2017052n\/owned\/n\/n\/nwl\/n\/n\/uk\/Daily_Dispatch\/email&amp;etear=dailydispatch\">Economist<\/a>\u00a0caught my eye about how a liberal country with impeccable toleration policies struggles to cope with polygamy. \u00a0The story was\u00a0about a Jack Morman with a lot of wives and\u00a0over a hundred\u00a0children. \u00a0It's not the man \u2013 women \u2013\u00a0children that Canada struggles to cope with, but the fact that the women are wives (though they may not so, fully legally). \u00a0This is how the article ends:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\"Still, there is virtually no tolerance for multiple marriages within the boundaries of a single democratic state across the Western world. \u00a0It remains axiomatic that a person who enters a marriage ceremony while still legally wedded to somebody else is a bigamist. That rule invalidates the second marriage and renders the bigamist liable to prosecution.<\/p>\n<p>Yet even that simple-sounding principle is not easy to apply. \u00a0What if the \u201cceremony \u201c is some new-fangled rite which has been dreamed up by a recently constituted community, with no real social or legal standing? \u00a0Does that make the situation better or worse than simply living with multiple partners, which is not illegal? \u00a0Such questions will remain hotly contested through this trial and beyond.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A hot topic for WEEC, maybe, though probably not for the competencies seminar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The programme for the WEEC event in Vancouver in September is becoming clearer, and credit is obviously due to the organisers for taking Canada's rich cultural heritage seriously \u2013 at least as far as keynote speakers are concerned. \u00a0You can...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6965\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}