Autor: GKS

Interdisciplinary Canadian Literatures in English Conference, University of Toronto (CA), May 25-27, 2017

Co-chairs: Smaro Kamboureli (University of Toronto), Larissa Lai (University of Calgary)

Canada’s Sesquicentennial anniversary of Confederation is an occasion that invites both
celebration and the need to take critical stock of how we have arrived at our particular
juncture. We currently inhabit a historical moment in which the colonial power of
English literary studies, though still present, is giving way to an English that circulates in
newly complex ways, especially in relation to global economic shifts, intensifications in
voluntary and involuntary human migration, and the rise of new or newly imagined
spiritualities and fundamentalisms. Literary study in English on that part of
Mikinaakominis (Turtle Island) that we call Canada has shifted from a colonial project
meant to build a settler nation to a project that was supposed to include marginalized
others, to, more recently, a project that must reckon with Indigeneity and the politics of
land. These and other related shifts take place within a cultural field that is also changing
with historical and geopolitical circumstances. Public culture and the idea of the public
have transformed through mutations in national space, economics, climate, lands, waters,
and even the air itself. Beside the changes in public space and our conceptions of them,
literature and writing in academic institutions are also transforming in response to
institutional and governmental politics. Further, within academia the humanities are
undermined in favour of knowledge mobilization designed to serve international capital
in (seemingly) pragmatic ways. This set of issues rises beside powerful and liberatory
Indigenous cultural and political resurgences and an accompanying imperative for non-
Indigenous people—imagined variously in racial and geo-political terms—to consider
anew responsibilities, respect, and strategies of cultural engagement as well as specific
contemporary and historical relationships to Indigeneity, land and movement.

What can literature and criticism be and do under these historical and spatial
circumstances? What can decolonization mean in its cultural and socio-political valences
now? What constitutes creativity, the imagination, experimentation, community, and
embodiment at the present moment? What kinds of activist and cultural labour can
criticism and creative writing perform? What forms might such criticism and creative
writing take? This iteration of the serial TransCanada conferences invites storytellers,
poets, novelists, creative non-fiction writers, critics, interdisciplinary practitioners and
activists to enter into newly imagined and innovatively structured forms of presentation
in order to re-build a vibrant, generative, re-productive, critical and creative community,
to ask the hard questions that need to be asked now, to attempt some provisional answers,
and to make story, poem and experiment together and apart.

Keywords to be addressed:
Affect • Activism & Activism as Performance • Asianness • Avant-Garde • Balance •
Blackness • Body • Coalition • Creative & Critical Practices • Cultural Economies •
Decolonization • Diaspora • Earth/ Water/ Air/ Fire/ Metal • Experimentation &
Experimental Writing • Forms (Literary, Cultural) • Forms & Politics / Forms in Relation
to Social Practices • The Humanities in Canada • Imagination • Indigeneity • Inheritance
/ Heritage • Institution • Justice • Kinships • Land • Literature & Activism • Migration •
Nation/ Nationalisms • New Materialisms • Neo-liberalism • Post-Humanism • The
Present • The Public • Reconciliation • Redress • Refugeeness • Relation • Transatlantic •
Transnationalism • Treaties • Writing as Practice

Submission Guidelines
Please submit proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute-long papers that address any of
the above issues. Collaborative proposals for panel sessions that break the conference
mold in interesting and generative ways, as well as proposals for stand-alone
presentations (performances, films, videos, poster presentations, and other forms of
“demonstration”) will be most welcome.

We wish to extend a special invitation to Ph.D. students for the Plenary Session
especially designed for the presentation of doctoral research projects in the field of
Canadian literary studies. Doctoral students whose dissertation projects are nearing
completion of their program and who would like to be considered for this plenary session
should submit a proposal based on their dissertation project, along with a one-page
(single-spaced) dissertation abstract. Three to five such projects will be featured in this
plenary session, while other projects will be vetted for inclusion in the concurrent panel
sessions.

Deadline for all submissions: June 30, 2016
Notification of acceptance: by September 2016
Submission address: http://tinyurl.com/Mininaak-Trans

Guidelines for submission: Please submit your abstract via email as a Word document
attachment; ensure that your name and institutional affiliation don’t appear on the
abstract document; and use TC4-2017-abstract submission as the subject heading.

Proposals for panels should include the name/s of the panel convener/s, a brief rationale,
and abstracts by no more than three presenters.

For background information about the TransCanada conferences, please visit this website.

The Sixth Annual OISE Indigenous Education Network Mental Health Symposium, 26 May 2016, Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, Canada

The overarching goal of this Symposium is to build on our previous and current conceptions of Indigenous psychology and to provide new and innovative information, inquiry, and synthesis of mental health issues and solutions from Aboriginal knowledges. Through the development of new insights regarding Indigenous psychology throughout the Symposium, cutting edge and creative theories and models for addressing current mental health needs, including programming, counseling, and assessments of Indigenous peoples in Canada. This year’s symposium has a special focus on Healing and Education, taking a lead on discussing and strategizing implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report’s recommendations.

This Symposium will achieve several general central objectives. First, to get a clear understanding of the psychology of Indigenous mental health and healing by articulating conceptual foundations that expand the current deficit model of mental health, enriching knowledge by focusing on the social processes of socio-political contexts, culture, and traditional knowledges and medicines and how these are linked to psychology. Secondly, to bring together leaders and innovators in the fields of Indigenous mental health from traditional, academic, and practitioner backgrounds. The sharing of ideas and ensuing dialogue of the diverse expertise of these high profile speakers will allow all attendees at the Symposium to take part in the creation of Indigenous healing solutions to psychological challenges that will be developed out of the strengths and resources that Indigenous individuals and communities provide to explain the key intersections of mental health, socio-political realities, and Aboriginal knowledges. Thirdly, The Annual Indigenous Education Network Mental Health Symposium was developed in 2010 by Dr. Suzanne Stewart to address a dire need for the advancement of the psychology of Indigenous mental health from Aboriginal knowledges, given the overwhelming lack of culturally based theory and models and the growing population of Indigenous peoples migrating to cities, many of whom seek fruitless mental health services from non-Indigenous perspectives.

More specific Symposium objectives include:

• Reaching a diverse audience of those interested in Indigenous mental health, including educators, researchers, academics, students, practitioners, policy makers, and community service administrators.
• Developing new and refining existing traditional Aboriginal approaches to current mental health issues.
• Engaging Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and communities in meaningful dialogue on Indigenous mental health and healing.
• Training and/or enhancing the careers of Aboriginal scholars, practitioners, policy makers, and administrators.
• Infusing Aboriginal ways of knowing into current applied psychology theories and practices.
• Preserving and documenting Aboriginal knowledges within the various levels of research, practice, and administration.
• Identifying knowledge mobilization tools to extend research and practice impact to Indigenous communities first, and then more broadly to non-Indigenous contexts.
• Considering diverse modalities for Indigenous psychology: e.g. traditional Indigenous, academic, Western, Eastern, African, hybrid, etc.

Specifically, the symposium will explore six key topic areas via oral presentations, workshops presentations, and cultural workshops by leading Canadian Indigenous health and healing practitioners. As well, we invite researcher, student, institutional, and community organization members to present posters within the following topics:

1. Indigenous counselling and psychotherapy theory and practice
2. Psychological assessment from Indigenous perspectives
3. Integration of Indigenous and Western healing in mental health
4. Traditional cultural healing in mental health service
5. Research and ethical issues
6. Policy, program, and administrative issues

You may submit abstracts for poster presentations in any of the above key topic areas until May 15, 2016. Please email name, title, and abstracts to this address.

For more information or to register please contact the Conference Committee.

Tickets are available here.

Registration fees:
$120 for academics, practitioners and professionals
$60 for students & community members

For registration, please visit the Conference Website.