Call for Conference Papers for the 48th Annual Conference of the Urban Affairs Association, April 4-7, 2018, Sheraton Toronto Centre Hotel, Toronto, CN

In an era of globalizing forces, the region has become an important arena for collaboration and contestation, as metropolitan areas work to craft their individual identities. As they do so, questions of equity, inclusion, and sustainability remain. What is the role of diversity, difference and singularity of social actors and communities when it comes to forging visions of urban development that are collective in process, cohesive in vision and sustainable in implementation? Furthermore, as global financial systems exert greater control over national, regional, and local economies, what is the role of innovative and/or insurgent social practices in an urbanizing region? What are the most effective strategies to create environmentally and economically sustainable communities in a regional context? How will different factions of regional actors evolve given conventional relationships, increased social and cultural diversity, and the contradictions of competitiveness and solidarity?

The conference site, Toronto, has become an international model of alternative approaches to urban policies, particularly in the areas of housing, immigration/diversity, social equity, and environmental sustainability. The city anchors the largest metropolitan area in Canada, a region that has emerged as a global leader in innovation. But significant tensions underlie this impressive image. Rising socio-spatial inequality, escalating housing costs, racialized patterns of growth, and inadequate transportation infrastructure, all threaten the region’s future prospects. Furthermore, social, economic, environmental and political cleavages between municipalities comprising the Toronto region continue to emerge. Yet, there are also examples of collaboration in planning and policy at the local and regional levels that have created opportunities for community engagement, grassroots place-making and larger scale city-building. The conference provides an opportunity to both extend our understanding of the Toronto metropolitan experience, and importantly, to examine the broader topic of contestation and promise of collaboration in regions globally. Ultimately, the conference will allow us to examine a fundamentally critical question: how can policies and actions within a regional context promote the development of communities that are both just and sustainable?

Further information: www.urbanaffairsassociation.org

Abstract/Session Proposal Deadline: Oct. 1, 2017

Call for Article Proposals for a Special Issue to Appear in Transmotion

In the contemporary moment, the world has seen an increase in transnational and decolonial activist movements around indigenous rights. Idle No More, Rhodes Must Fall, the BDS movement for a Free Palestine and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests have all garnered international attention and trans-indigenous calls of solidarity. These politics have found their ways to literary productions, and many have dubbed the increase in Native American writings and the rapid growth in Indigenous Studies a cultural, literary, and academic renaissance.

In recent years, there has been an increase in Native American scholarship that attempts to consider separate and distinct histories, cultures and literatures in a comparative frame. In 2011, Daniel Heath Justice observed the number of Indigenous Studies scholars globally, “reaching out, learning about themselves and one another, looking for points of connection that reflect and respect both specificity and shared concern.” Jodi A Byrd, in The Transit of Empire (2011), employs the concept “transit” to describe the interconnectedness and continuum of colonial violence that implicated multiple peoples and spaces. In 2012, Chadwick Allen established the concept ‘Trans-Indigenous’ to develop a methodology for a global Native literary studies and, elsewhere, scholars have explored the potential for comparing Native American socio-historic perspectives with those of other colonized and oppressed people. In his latest book (2016), Steven Salaita adopts “inter/nationalism” as a term that embodies decolonial thought and expression, literary and otherwise, that surface in the intersectional moments between American Indian and Palestinian struggles. Similarly, there is a long tradition of Native American Indigenous authors exploring the transnational politics of oppression and the multidirectional movement of memory (Rothberg, 2008) in fiction, poetry and on stage: from Leslie Marmon Silko’s transcontinental decolonial revolution in Almanac of the Dead (1991) to Sherman Alexie’s reflections on Indigenous and Jewish experiences of genocide in ‘Inside Dachau’ (2011). These academic and creative projects cross the traditional disciplinary boundaries of indigenous, postcolonial, and settler colonial studies, bringing together histories and cultures that have rarely been considered alongside one another. But what, if any, is the relationship between these cultures? What is to be gained from studying, ostensibly at least, disparate literatures and societies in the same frame?

This special issue seeks to explore this new direction of Indigenous Studies, focusing on the significance of Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous American narratives in a global arena. We invite work that engages with historical or cultural narratives, spanning literature, art, film, or other modes of cultural production. Bringing together scholars researching Native American narratives in relation to diverse geographical and historical contexts, we hope to interrogate questions surrounding what comparative indigenous studies might look like and what potential it holds for transnational exchange on a global scale. A comparative focus foregrounds the distinct but interconnected experiences of (post-) colonial and disenfranchised communities across the world. A lens of this kind can expand and ask global questions on what it means to be native in specific colonial spaces and the ways through which one can analyze literary expressions that work towards decolonization in these contexts.

Further details: http://bit.ly/2vBgd6J

Deadline for Abstracts: Oct. 1, 2017

Symposium du Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la diversité et la démocratie (CRIDAQ) avec l’appui de l’Association internationale des études québécoises (AIEQ), 24 et 25 mai 2018, Université du Québec à Montréal

Il est va du Québec comme des autres sociétés, il aime à se comparer. Qu’on en juge par la popularité des classements en tous genres. Publics savants ou profanes, décideurs politiques ou économiques, médias d’information ou de variété, tous affectionnent ces mesures qui miroitent la place du Québec dans le monde. Le Québec progresse-t-il ou décline-t-il? Doit-il être heureux ou triste de son sort? Son niveau de vie, de bien-être, de pouvoir d’achat, d’éducation, de santé ou de loisir est-il enviable? Ses villes, ses universités, ses festivals sont-ils appréciés? La polysémie des objets de comparaison évoque la polyphonie des questions posées, mais aussi la cacophonie des interprétations proposées. Car, de ces comparaisons en débat sont dégagées des avenues d’action: des spécialités sont valorisées, des trajectoires sont corrigées; des fonds sont débloqués, des politiques sont implantées. L’enjeu de la comparaison se déplace ainsi vers l’amont et vers l’aval, vers l’intention, l’objet, l’interprétation : comment mesurer – et définir – le cours d’une société? Comment mesurer – et prioriser – la valence d’un indicateur par rapport à un autre? En bref, quel modèle privilégier? De ces comparaisons en débat font jour des débats de sociétés.

En cela, observées sur la moyenne et la longue durée, les comparaisons dessinent le contour de priorités et de préoccupations collectives, de choix et de questions de sociétés, d’horizons de sens. Au siècle des nationalités, le Québec se comparait à l’Irlande, à la Grèce, à la Pologne. Le nationalisme de Bourassa se lovait à l’aune de la guerre des Boers. La décolonisation et le socialisme rapprochaient le Québec de Cuba, de l’Amérique du Sud. La France et l’Amérique ont toujours fait rêver. Aujourd’hui, le Québec est comparé à l’Ontario, aux pays scandinaves, aux pays latins, aux pays catholiques, aux nations sans État, aux sociétés neuves, aux petites nations… Qu’y cherche-t-on? Qu’espère-t-on y trouver? Il en va en quelque sorte de la construction du soi individuel comme du soi collectif: la société se dit en se comparant, se fait en se distinguant.

Les autrui comparatifs du Québec ne sont donc pas choisis au hasard. Ce sont des autrui significatifs (Mead, 1963), avec qui le Québec entre en relation dans l’espoir de mieux se dire, de mieux se faire. S’il s’agit certes de sociétés, il s’agit aussi de personnes, d’époques, d’œuvres : que dire de grands livres, de grands intellectuels, dont l’exemple édifie, dont le jugement est attendu? Alexis de Tocqueville, Lord Durham, Rameau de Saint-Père, André Siegfried, Jacques Maritain ont porté des jugements sur le Canada français. Lamartine, Chateaubriand nous racontaient. Dans les enjeux sur la diversité, le Québec est aujourd’hui une référence – A. Finkielkraut, J. Habermas, F. Fukuyama, R. Hollinger. Modèles ou contremodèles, enquêtes ou quêtes, ce sont des autrui avec qui le Québec entre en dialogue significatif.

Appel à communication en détail: http://bit.ly/2vBz6Xa

Date butoir: 1er octobre 2017

One way of telling the story of feminism is to tell it as a story of protest: protest against, protest for, protest within. In this issue, we invite contributors to reflect on the histories, presents, and futures of protest through a feminist lens.

The current moment is often hailed as „the age of protest,“ one in which the recent women’s marches, originating in the US but soon spreading globally, were seen to be a culmination. Such declarations, however, depend on a very particular notion of what counts as protest, and indeed feminist protest, often reifying the global North as an originary site of feminist protest; or disregarding movements that do not explicitly foreground gender or women as their primary agenda.

We contend that popular „age of protest“ narratives risk obscuring other key moments and sites of long standing protest, particularly when led by racialized or otherwise minoritized populations. The rich histories of centuries of protest by working class and poor women, immigrant women, women of color, and anticolonial, indigenous and transnational feminists still remain understudied. And yet, it is difficult to deny that globally, protest has been revitalized by mass participation on a larger scope than has been seen in the almost two decades since massive protests spawned global networks that came to be known as the alterglobalization movement. Such protests have been diverse in issues and tactics – from the revolutions of the Arab Spring, to the ceaseless protests in Kashmir against Indian occupation, to the anti-rape protests in India, to the #niunamas and anti-femicide movements in Latin America, to the Women’s Marches, BlackLivesMatter movement, Dalit women’s self-respect marches, Idle No More and the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in the US and Canada, to name only a select few of a plethora of protests globally that have thrown up key questions for feminism. Beyond the streets, the digital domain has been a lively site of protest and organizing, particularly in zones where the presence of protesting bodies on the streets may be met with deadly violence. We invite our contributors to think broadly and critically about the relationship between feminism and protest as one that emerges from multiple and overlapping locations and communities, on and beyond space of „the streets.“

See the full CfP here.

Deadline for submission of full articles: Sept. 15, 2017.

The Canadian Literature Symposium, Department of English, University of Ottawa, May 4-6, 2018

Arguably, there have never been more opportunities for poetry to live ‘off the page.’ Over the last 20 years, the radical proliferation and expansion of online social media, media-sharing sites, web-based archives, blogs, vlogs, institutional web-pages and the like have made archiving, accessing, and distributing poetry easier than ever before. The multi-media possibilities of the web, the optic flexibility of digital books, the ability to record image and sound cheaply and share that material quickly and widely over a variety of platforms, have drastically undermined poets’ dependence on the page and print-based forms of distribution. One needn’t be a technological determinist to acknowledge that something has changed in the manner we encounter ‘poetry.’ To what extent, though, have these technological changes transformed the forms and functions of poetry as such? Have they, for instance, finally produced the necessary conditions for truly ‘verbi-voco-visual’ work, a one-time dream of the modernist avant-garde?  Have multimedia forms of poetry displaced more traditional forms and formats, or do they operate alongside print journals and books—mere addenda to an essentially unchanged institutionalized discourse? How has Canadian poetry, in particular, exploited (or perhaps ignored) the available material supports for innovations in form, format, and dissemination?  Kanada Koncrete will explore these questions over three days, May 4-6, 2018.

For the full CfP: http://artsites.uottawa.ca/canlit-symposium/en/callforpapers/

Abstract Submission Deadline: Sept. 25, 2017