The CAP Conference was a fitting end to the year. With presentations covering almost every topic we studied in our CAP program, it was a great way to wrap up a successful year academically for me, and to say goodbye to all of our CAP friends. All of the presentations were very interesting, but the one that I found most intriguing was the presentation on the UBC Rare Books and Special Collections Library by Antonio, Mielle, Margot, Andrea, and Jay.

I found that Andrea’s points were very interesting regarding the power dynamics and representation in the Chung Collection, and the unique, westernized representation of Chinese immigrants. For example, Andrea pointed out the “dominance of Anglican letter-writing practices” where the paper was written in a predominantly horizontal format rather than a traditional vertical format. Andrea concluded that the Chung Collection reinforces western values and is an indicator of how Chinese-Canadians, a marginalized group, saw themselves at that time. Further, Jay reinforced this point by talking about how documents “preserve social norms”, and thus the Chung Collection preserves the Chinese- Canadian society at the time.

The presentation as a whole was an interesting take on the archives. For some CAP students who did not have the privilege of working in the archives, it was a very intriguing introduction to the works contained in the RBSC, and also provided a different perspective for those who may have already done work in the archives. I think that this presentation shows how far we’ve come in CAP since the beginning of the year. When we first started work in ASTU, we did not have to do much research on our own for our papers. Most of the work was provided and we had a distinct way of interpreting it. When we moved to the second term and starting work in the archives, it was confusing at first. We had so many resources and it was up to us to figure out a topic to write about using sources that are likely to have never been taken up in a scholarly way outside of ASTU before. This was a tough project, however the presenters at the CAP conference took the RBSC to new heights by finding different ways of interpreting the works and presenting their findings. This goes for the CAP conference as a whole, as well. The presentations were very impressive in the way that they took what we have already learned and each provided their own, unique interpretations of the work.

Overall, this year has been a success. The CAP conference showed how unique each student is, and how academically we have come so far since entering our first year of university. The conference provided a bittersweet ending to the academic year, and I know I will miss each and every student in the program.