Autor: GKS

A conference hosted by the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ)

13th – 14th July, 2017, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Keynote Speakers: Associate Professor Eric Adams, Faculty of Law, University of Alberta

2017 marks the 150 years since the inception of the Canadian state with the British North America Act, 1867, and 35 years since 1982’s constitutional patriation, including the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While legal acts serve as focal points for the creation (and re-creation) of the Canadian state, the connotations of Canada’s constitutive documents operate across law, politics, history, geography, society, and culture, with consequences for the past, present, and future. To engage with the manifold cultural-legal meanings that constitutions and their anniversaries evoke and contest, the ACSANZ invites abstracts for papers that address the idea of constitutions and Canada.

The conference will ask how nations, states, and peoples in Canada have been constituted, and investigate the significance of constitutive moments in the Canadian context. Participants are invited to reflect on questions that include, but are not limited by:

• How do constitutive documents represent, legitimate, or deny indigenous, multicultural, gendered, and federal histories and claims?
• How has Canada’s constitutional model and history shaped Canada, and how have these changes resonated internationally?
• How do the arts constitute Canada and its communities? How are constitutive texts and histories reflected upon in the arts, and how are the arts shaping Canada’s legal consciousness?
• How has the Canadian Constitution addressed its imposition upon pre-contact societies with their own legal and political orders?
• What does the presence (or absence) of rights language in foundational documents like constitutions mean for their legal and affective power?
• How are the discontents of Canadian statehood and nationhood?
• How do we remember and represent the creation of states and nations, and what does it mean to celebrate such a contested moment in time?
• What attributes of Canada’s Constitution and its experience that have special resonance for Australia and New Zealand?
• What possibilities does constitutional change offer for imagining and re-imagining the Canada?

Contributions from across disciplines that deal with all aspects of Canada and Canadian Studies, including from a comparative perspective, are welcomed. Please email an abstract and brief bio to Dr. Robyn Morris and Dr. Benjamin Authers by December 1st, 2016.

A Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Canadian Confederation
Une célébration du 150e anniversaire de la Confédération Canadienne

42nd Annual Conference of the British Association of Canadian Studies, Canada House, London, April 20 – 22, 2017

On this historic anniversary, papers on themes of enduring interest to Canadianists will be welcomed. Space, however, is limited and priority will be given to paper sessions and round-table panels on the following themes:

• Citizenship, Diversity, Migration, Identity, Indigeneity, Social Policy
• Contemporary Canadian Culture, Art, Literature, Media, Dance, Film
• Geography, Environment, Energy, The North, The Arctic
• International Relations, Canada-UK Relations
• Post-Secondary Education, especially Canada-UK University Links
• Trade, Politics, Business, Law

Abstracts of 400 words, together with short bio(s) of 100 words should be submitted by November 30, 2016 to the Conference Adminsitrator, Sue Scott-Martin.

Keynote Speaker/Panellists invited include: The hon. Stéphane Dion, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada; Patrick Holditch (FCO) and former British and Canadian High Commissioners. Professors Jocelyn Letourneau, Coral Ann Howells, Colin Coates, Will Kymlicka, Klaus Dodds and Guy LaForest.

Updates will be posted on: www.canadian-studies.net

Inaugural Conference on Concepts of Contradiction in the Humanities, University of Bremen, 9 – 11 Feb, 2017

This international and interdisciplinary conference seeks to outline the new field of „Contradiction Studies“ in the Humanities, focusing on the interactions between seemingly contradictory socio-cultural phenomena and practices. This will allow an understanding of distinct, yet related categories such as antagonism, paradox, antinomy, and their uses within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. Participants will explore material instances and aspects of contradiction, as well as its theories and practice(s). The interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives of this conference will center on three key areas in the conference sessions:

a) Fields of Contradiction, i.e. contradictory topics, semantic aspects, and social or cultural phenomena linked to contradictions

b) Structures of Contradiction, i.e. (semiotic) forms of marking and negotiating contradictions

c) Practices of Contradiction, i.e. contradictory agency and institutional strategies.

Discussion will fathom the potential of Contradiction Studies as a central paradigm in the Humanities, and to this end the organizers invite scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplines, including art history, cultural and social anthropology, educational science and curriculum studies, geography, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary studies, performance studies, philosophy, political science, postcolonial studies, religious studies, and sociology.

The organizers are happy to announce that the following distinguished scholars are invited to address the conference as keynote speakers:

Prof. Dr. Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga (EHESS, Paris, France – invited, to be confirmed)

Prof. Dr. Jane Burbank (New York University, USA – invited, to be confirmed)

Dr. Stefan Müller (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany – confirmed)

Prof. Dr. Barbara Schmenk (University of Waterloo, Canada – confirmed)

Research questions may include, but are not limited to:

• In what ways are contradictions genuine elements and objects of knowledge production in the Humanities and beyond?
• Why and to what extent can practices and institutions of knowledge sustain contradictions?
• How are contradictions negotiated in institutions, and what is the role of the Humanities in these practices?
• How do contradictory aspects of power influence the paradigmatic developments in the Humanities?
• What are significant contradictions in power relations among social, historical, and/or cultural agents?

Accepted paper proposals will be arranged with respect to the above-mentioned aspects in three sessions: Fields of Contradiction, Structures of Contradiction, and Practices of Contradiction.

The organizers invite presentations of no longer than 20 minutes. Please submit your abstracts and proposals (max. 1,500 characters including spaces) here, or send an e-mail, along with your contact information, to this mail address.

The submission deadline is August 31, 2016.

There will be a poster session for young researchers, and for presentation of work in progress. Poser proposals (max. 1 page) should be submitted as PDF files, no later than October 31, 2016.

Conference registration will be open on the conference website from July 1, 2016, until December 15, 2016. The website will also carry information concerning the conference venue, accomodation, travel, and conference dinner.

Attendance fees are set daily, at 40 € per conference day. A reduced fee for students, independent scholars, and the underemployed is set at 20 € per conference day.

International conference, Nov 23-24, 2017, Grenoble Alpes University, France

Subject fields: Australian and New Zealand History/Studies, British History/Studies, Canadian History/Studies, Colonial and Post-Colonial History/Studies, Ethnic History/Studies

(Colonial and Postcolonial English-speaking World, 18th – 21st Century)

The research group ILCEA4 is pleased to announce the organisation of an international conference on „Space, Place and Hybridity in National Imagination“ to be held at Grenoble Alpes University. It proposes to examine the notion of hybridity or cross-fertilization in the highly controversial field of national identity – namely the spaces, figures and historical events that best symbolize it, as exemplified in the cultural productions originating from a nation or an ethnic or community group. The concept of „third space“ as developed by Homi Bhabha in his seminal book The Location of Culture, is particularly productive in that it suggests a vision of space based not on confrontation, binary oppositions or antagonistic relationships of lordship and bpondage, but on interactions involving exchange, transfer and mediation.

The conference shall examine the foundations of any „imagined community“ (Benedict Anderson) and the ways in which artistic productions cause this set of images, values and references to evolve. These both reflect a history and a heritage but also expose their inherent limitations and underlying ideology, thus paving the waay for the progressive transformation of such national figures, values and spatial representations.

All the elements pertaining to culture in a general sense and commonly considered as representative of national identity are within the scope of the symposium:

• Iconography: flags, posters (nationalistic or otherwise), emblematic figures (specimens from the local flora and faune for example), the representation of the national landscape in painting or photography, allegorical figures of the nation
• The short form as a medium for the national sentiment: national anthems, songs, poems.
• Literature in a  general sense: fiction, chidren’s and youn adult literature, textbooks, political speeches, philosophical essays, history books
• Places, types of geographical spaces but also historical events crystallizing what the nation is supposed to represent (map making, memorial ceremonies, official events)
• Cultural productions: film, dance, street art.

Every nation perceives itself as articulated around the concept of origin: a choice then emerges between a founding myth specific to it (a sort of self-generation devoid of any hybridity), and an impure, problematic genesis, born out of the contact with another cultural, historical and geogprahical sphere. Thus, within the British world itself, Scotland for example can be said to have been defined, both historically and culturally, in close relation to its rival and double, England. Similar considerations are relevant for Ireland and Wales.

More generally, former colonies of the British Crown have founded themselves in an ambiguous relationship to the „motherland“ while trying to free themselves from its influence. After the colonial period, the goal was for the settler colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) to found their identity antagonistically to that of the motherland, especially by focusing on their new land and the type of relationship they had with it so as to invest both with distrinctive national characteristics.

An interesting and contentious point of study is the undeniably hybrid character of such early identity formations devoid of any cultural heritage or history except for those bequeathed by the motherland. Another essential and no less challenging issue is that of the relationship to the Indigenous populations of the colony whose culture and values, whose very existence sometimes, were voluntarily erased. The question of a possible hybridization between the culture of the colonizer and that of the colonized could be seen as a form of defilement, corruption or degeneration. Conversely, the appropriation and even the instrumentalization of symbols, places and values specific to Indeigenous peoples in national mythologies is a highly controversial issue deserving careful scrutiny.

In what is commonly referred to as the „postcolonial“ period, the discussion often centres on the denunciation or re-definition of national figures, symbols and places as well as the great texts and events constitutive of the core of a nation’s identity. Examining those shows how much they have evolved, acress generations, through an underlying hybridization allowing greater representativeness, not only of the first inhabitants but also of new migrant communities or minority groups.

Space and place are not to be apprehended as strictly geographical or referential but also as textual, thus enabling new hybrid subject positions within national mythologies. The rewriting or new adaptation of famous works in other forms (with generic, gender or modal variations) characterstic of the postmodern approach also allows the reevaluation of what constitutes the core of a nation’s identity, changing it into a field of experimentation and cross-fertilization.

Please send an abstract (max. 300 words) either in French or in English, and a short biographical note (max. 150 words) to both Christine Vandamme and Cyril Besson by January 6, 2017. The notification of acceptance will be sent by February 10, 2017, at the latest.