Kategorie: Veranstaltungen

Conference, April 21 – 23, 2016, London, UK

The British Association for Canadian Studies (BACS) will hold its 41st annual conference from 21 to 23 April 2016.  There will also be an opening lecture and reception at Canada House, Trafalgar Square, on the evening of Thursday 21 April and two full days of conference proceedings on Friday 22 and Saturday 23 April at the British Library Conference Centre, St Pancras, London.

CANADIAN STUDIES – AN OPEN CALL

To follow up the success of last year’s 40^th anniversary conference there will again be an open call for papers on any aspect of Canada, including comparative papers and papers placing Canada in an international context. Conference prices are being kept largely the same as in 2015 and there will again be free student registration (including lunches and refreshments) for students presenting a paper.

Individual papers (20 minutes) and panels of 2, 3 or 4 papers (90 minutes) are invited on any aspect of Canadian Studies including Canadian history, politics, international relations, literature, film, art, society, etc. Proposals for entire panels are especially welcome.

Outline proposals (250-500 words per paper plus brief c.v. or c.vs) should be submitted by 29 January 2016 to the conference secretary, Sue Scott-Martin,  and also the BACS President, Tony McCulloch.

As last year, paper proposals will normally be reviewed by the conference committee and answered within 48 hours in order to expedite conference planning and registration.

Confirmed speakers include:

Ceri Morgan (Keele University)who will give the Eccles Lecture on Friday 22 April on ‘Writing, Talking and Walking Québec’s Eastern Townships’

Pamela Palmater (Ryerson University) on Saturday 23 April –‘Addressing the National Crisis of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada’ 

You will find more information on the Association’s Website.

14th Comparative Canadian Literature Graduate Student Conference

April 1 – 2, 2016

Université de Sherbrooke, Québec/Canada

 The 21st century in Canada is marked by an ongoing discussion about settler/Indigenous relations. Recent events suggest a changing social landscape for Indigenous peoples in Canada, and it is obviously of vital importance to Canada’s future to resolve issues of land claims, environmental protection, self-governance, discrimination, re-appropriation of history, culture, language and identity. Contemporary social and political movements like Idle No More and No More Stolen Sisters (a human rights campaign calling attention to the extensively high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada) as well as the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) have highlighted the reality that Indigenous peoples in Canada face today. Yet the recent nomination of two Indigenous Ministers in the Liberal cabinet, the inclusion of Indigenous leaders at the global climate change summit in Paris and the growing interest in Indigenous studies all indicate a hopeful turn in the recognition of Indigenous governance in Canada and Quebec as well as in the reconciliation between Canada’s Indigenous peoples and settlers.

Literature represents one possible route to cultural reconciliation. The 14th Graduate Student Conference “Rethinking Comparative Canadian Literature: Indigenous Methodologies and Other Contemporary Approaches” will highlight the potential of indigenous and alternative ways of reading, writing, and thinking to question, but also to enrich established theoretical and analytical frameworks in Comparative Canadian literature.

The organizers will accept papers in English and French dealing with, but not restricted to, the following topics:

• Indigenous methodologies / decolonization
• Feminist, postcolonial and other contemporary theories
• Subaltern voices, counter-narratives, resistance narratives, culture from below, grassroots
• movements
• Cultural re-appropriation and literary authority
• Diverse forms of writing and self-representation, including Indigenous orature
• Theorizing Comparative Canadian literature
• Mainstream (English-Canadian and Québécois literatures) and minority literatures (immigrant
• and Indigenous literatures)
• Language questions (English, French, foreign and Indigenous languages)
• Translation studies

The conference will take place from April 1-2, 2016 on the main campus at Université de Sherbrooke and is designed as an open space of gathering for young scholars interested in Comparative Canadian Literature and Translation Studies. As the University’s Comparative Canadian Literature program is unique in the world, we invite graduate students (both MA and PhD) from different disciplines (Comparative literature, English/Canadian/French/Québécois literatures, Translation studies, Indigenous studies, Cultural studies, Film studies, History etc.) to submit paper and poster proposals. Submissions from advanced undergraduate students will be taken into consideration if the proposed abstracts indicate an outstanding and original contribution.

Please submit your abstract of no more than 250 words and a short biographical note (150 words) to this e-mail address. Be sure to include your name, affiliation and degree, e-mail address as well as the title of your presentation and upload the documents as an attachment (PDF format).

Submission deadline: January 31st, 2016.

International Conference, University of Graz (Austria), June 2 – 4, 2016

Organizers: Stefan Brandt, Susanne Hamscha, Ulla Kriebernegg, Simon Daniel Whybrew

In Canadian Studies, the complex concept of ‘liminality’ has been used in a variety of ways. There is an abundance of scholarship and research dealing with the stage ‘betwixt and between,’ as Victor Turner most famously defined it (1964). This conference aims at re-mapping the field, focusing on liminality and the liminal within Canada.

The terms ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ refer to multiple levels of meaning. Originally developed by cultural anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his seminal studies on rites of passage in 1909, and re-discovered by Victor Turner in the 1960s, the spatial metaphor of ‘liminality’ has particularly since the ‘Spatial Turn’ become a keyword in contemporary cultural theory to refer to processes of identity negotiation connected to experiences of transition. It has been used in connection with terms such as ‘border,’ ‘frontier,’ and ‘threshold,’ and in opposition to the equally metaphorical concept of ‘marginality.’ While marginality connotes ‘periphery,’ and thus mainly focuses on exclusion from and by dominant discourses, liminality is concerned with the space of the borderline itself, with feelings of ambiguity and ambivalence.

Liminality can be experienced as challenging, uncomfortable, threatening, and disruptive, but also as subversive and powerful, as a stage facilitating creativity and change. In the context of (Anglo-) Canadian Studies, liminality has been employed to discuss geographical frontiers such as the Niagara Falls, the St. Laurence River, the Rocky Mountains, the Canadian Prairies, British Columbia, Quebec, and the Arctic, as well as symbolic frontiers including migration, French-English relations, encounters between First Nations and settlers, and Northrop Frye’s ‘garrison mentality.’ Liminality has also been examined as an aesthetic concept in its relation to the sublime and the uncanny.

As a theoretical concept, liminality can be of help for an analysis of the constructedness of Canada’s collective identity/identities as well as of individual processes of identification and change. These observations lead us to the following questions: How has the Canadian cultural imaginary fashioned itself with regard to the ‘boundariness’ of its social and identificatory practices? Which role do symbolic ‘frontiers’ play in Canadian discourses of self-representation (with respect to inner-Canadian border areas, but also in comparison to the U.S. American frontier)? How do ethnic, sexual, and other minorities position themselves in this nexus of liminal identities?

This conference aims at bringing together scholars who wish to engage in a discussion of Canadian liminal spaces and places, of fragmented and contradictory social, cultural, and political practices, of real and imagined borders, contact zones, thresholds, and transitions in Anglo-Canadian literature and culture. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Geographical and imagined borders
• Spatial and temporal liminalities
• Canadian ‘frontiers’
• The relationship between anglophone and francophone Canada
• The Canadian North
• Cultural theory and the limits of postmodernism (e.g. Derrida’s ‘limitrophy’)
• The aesthetics and poetics of liminality
• The liminal and the subliminal
• Genre, media, and intertextuality
• Cultural encounters and First Nations
• Queer cultural spaces
• Transgender and intersex identities
• Embodiments and dis/abilities
• Hybridity, multiculturalism, and transnationalism
• The figure of the trickster
• Aspects of intersectionality, transgression, and normativity
• Old age as a liminal stage
• Liminality and the end of life

Proposals of no more than 300 words, together with the name, institutional affiliation and a bio blurb (max. 150 words) should be sent to this e-mail address.. The closing date for submissions is Sunday, January 10, 2016.

Impressum:

Department of American Studies
University of Graz
Attemsgasse 25/II
8010 Graz
Austria
Tel. +43 (0)316 380 2465
Fax. +43 (0) 316 380 9768
http://amerikanistik.uni-graz.at/en/

C.IAS
Center of Inter-American Studies
Merangasse 18/II
8010 Graz
Austria
Tel. +43 (0)316 380 8213
Fax. +43 (0)316 380 9767
https://interamerikanistik.uni-graz.at/en/cias/