On Friday, May 20th, CiTR will being broadcasting a series of ten radio documentaries produced to mark UBC’s 100 year legacy. Each documentary portrays a slice of Vancouver history, covering challenging topics relevant to the local community, including the rise of the UBC football, early hip hop battles in Vancouver, the fight for trans health care, accessibility and the media, and the Lady Godiva ride and rape culture at UBC. The documentaries use archival content from CiTR’s history audio collection in addition to interviews with faculty, students, alumni and community members. Listen in for ten consecutive weeks to hear these documentaries air Fridays at 9 am starting on May 20th.
“Students cover what’s happening on campus in a way that national or international media can’t, because they are there and it impacts them differently,” says documentary producer and UBC student Eleanor Wearing. “Things like the Lady Godiva ride and what happened with the Montreal massacre mattered to wider society, and the coverage that the student media gives is more grounded in lived, real experience. The rest of the media gets the most sensationalized story and leaves. In making the doc, I realized how important the student media is – both CiTR’s archives and the Ubyssey archives – and the stories that were published there. People referenced it so often.”
Over the past year, more than 890 reel-to-reel audio tapes from over sixty years of the Student Radio Society of UBC have been digitized, for a total of 406 hours of historic audio. Recordings include music programs, radio documentaries, public service announcements, and campus and community news and events broadcast on CYVR/CiTR and its affiliate stations from 1949 to the late 1990s. This collection has been uploaded to UBC Library’s Open Collections portal, available to the public for streaming and download. Clips from the archive are used in the documentaries, to show an audio evolution of UBC.
“The personal opinions, stories and thoughts of our broadcasters are what have shaped the archives, and that’s the same spirit of these documentaries,” adds Madeline Taylor, CiTR’s Spoken Word Coordinator responsible for supporting our documentary producers. “This project gives people a chance to tell the stories that speak to them rather than stories that are typically told about the history of an institution. We’re telling a non-academic history of UBC, a grassroots history.”
Inclusion of the Underrepresented: The Beginning of Diverse-Ability in Media by Deepi Leihl, Dama Correch & Estephania Solis is the first documentary to air, discussing the impact the production and consumption of media has on people with disabilities. Listen to the first of CiTR’s UBC 100 Doc Series on Friday, May 20th, at 9 am on 101.9 FM, streamed at citr.ca and available as a podcast at 5 pm at citr.ca/citrdocs. Ten documentaries have been produced for the UBC 100 Doc Series, with the first four previously broadcast in January, and the entire series airing over the next ten weeks.
This project was funded by UBC’s Centennial Initiatives Fund, with additional support from the BC History Digitization Program, UBC Library’s Digitization Centre, UBC’s University Archives, and CiTR donors.
CiTR’s UBC 100 Doc Series Broadcast Schedule:
May 20th at 9 am: Inclusion of the Underrepresented: The Beginning of Diverse-Ability in Media by Deepi Leihl, Dama Correch & Estephania Solis
May 27th at 9 am: Obstacles and Outcomes by Vanessa Tara Colantonio
June 3rd at 9 am: CiTR’s DJ Sound Wars: Hip Hop Battles in the 90’s by Rohit Joseph
June 10th at 9 am: Roadside Attractions by Jonathan Kew
June 17th at 9 am: Gentlemen and General: The Rise of the UBC Thunderbirds by Olamide Olaniyan
June 24th at 9 am: The Peace Movement by Christine Kim
July 1st at 9 am: Grunge by Roger Allen
July 8th at 9 am: Queer Decade by Heather Kitching
July 15th at 9 am: Waiting for Godiva: Conversations about Sexism at UBC, 1980-2013 by Eleanor Wearing
July 22nd at 9 am: TBA
Read the full Press Release – CiTR produces challenging historical docs to mark UBC Centennial, along with a description of each documentary and its creator.