Research as Reconciliation

The edited book will profile stories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers engaging in the process of reconciliation. Although coming from various disciplines and backgrounds, all their work is grounded in Indigenous world views. The overarching questions that guide this work are, what does research that advances reconciliation look like? What are the experiences of researchers and community members who are striving to do research that is responsible to communities and grounded in relationships (to people, land and spirit)?

We aim to highlight Indigenist research, methodologies and pedagogy as forms of knowledge production and transmission that extend beyond the theoretical into practical work that demonstrates reconciliation processes in action. The book will profile stories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers from various disciplines doing work that is grounded in Indigenist world views. Contributors will include Métis, First Nations, Inuit, and Non-Indigenous voices from communities across Canada as well as a few international Indigenist scholars. The book will be comprised of research stories written in a variety of creative forms, such as stories, plays, twitter conversations and visual methodologies. By emphasizing stories rather than traditional academic chapters, we aim for the book to be reflective of individual voices, relevant to Indigenous traditions of storytelling, and interesting to practitioners, community members and others outside of academia who are engaging with research.

Submission deadline: August 15, 2017

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

Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada, May 18-19, 2018

At a Q&A that followed a Toronto screening of Little Men (2016), a film about two families‘ battle over a lease and its impact on the lives of its central protagonists, director Ira Sachs reflected on the modern-day struggle of many families to remain in the middle class. Sachs’s film speaks to the primacy of economics in discourse. Recent scholarship has shown the value of reading film and literature economically. The enormously influential work of David Graeber, Mary Poovey, Margot C. Finn, Julian Hoppit, Sandford Borins, Audrey Jaffe, Margaret Atwood, and others have opened up new avenues for thinking about money and the humanities. This conference aims both to consolidate and to advance criticism in literature, film, philosophy, and cultural studies by attending to some incarnations of debt and analyzing their wider implications.

Further information: https://www.facebook.com/DebtinHistory/

Deadline for submissions: Aug. 1, 2017

L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History, McMaster University, May 10-12, 2018

Women have long organized across national borders, even before the current nation-state regime solidified. Activists have come together around issues including resistance to colonialism, struggles for national liberation, movements for social and economic justice, and other efforts to gain rights. As a field of study, transnational feminism emerged in the 1980s in response to a singular “global” feminism that erased differences within and between nations. While it underscores the emancipatory potential of inter-national networks and alliances for activist women, this scholarship also addresses the challenges to solidarity that arose from, among others, economic globalisation, (neo-)colonialism, and racism. It consequently uses multiple frameworks of difference, epistemologies, and methodologies to tackle the complexity of women’s lives and politics. Transnational feminism is a highly interdisciplinary field that seeks to disrupt national narratives and nation-oriented approaches while remaining attentive to differences among women within countries. In the Canadian context, transnational feminist analyses can be used, for example, to think about the country’s multinational realities where Indigenous, Diasporic, and Québécois feminisms each posed a distinct challenge, not only to hegemonic understandings of feminism but also to the nation-state.

Organized by the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University, this two-day workshop will bring together scholars from Canada and around the world to address the methodological and epistemological challenges of writing transnational feminist histories. While this workshop is open to scholars in disciplines other than history, proposals from non-historians should indicate the ways in which their paper addresses questions of women’s activism in the 19thor 20th centuries from an historical perspective.

For further details, please see: http://bit.ly/2u9zIl7

Deadline for proposals: Sept. 30, 2017

University of Coimbra, Portugal, 22-24 March 2018

The struggle over social issues and the resistance to ruling elites have a long history in the colonies and nations of the Americas. They range from wars of independence and slave uprisings to conventions for women’s rights, workers’ and peasants’ rebellions, indigenous movements, and protests against U.S. wars in Vietnam or in Iraq. Since World War II new forms of international and national inequalities and new dynamics in societies and in the media have increased our awareness of the many ways in which the social keeps being re-negotiated from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

Recent decades have been characterized by new approaches to time- and space-binding and mediational and relational webs of the social; the invention, invocation, and narration of tradition, history, and heritage serve as key elements in the creation of new social bonds with earlier generations; since the turn of the millennium formerly excluded social groups have been prominent in reshaping the scope and the normativity of the social; a diminishing civil society has opened space to the influence of extremisms; unemployed young people, deprived of prospects for the future, attempt new forms of expression and intervention; the disenfranchised take to the streets and to the Internet; social media open up new channels and formats for expression; literature raises consciousness for just causes; artists in every realm translate and give form to many of these thoughts and feelings; sociologists and political scientists bring up new interpretations of and theories on the social.

Whereas Justin Trudeau named the most diverse government in Canada’s history, the Indigenous president Evo Morales in Bolivia and the African-American former president of the U.S.A., Barack Obama, promoted multi- and pluricultural imaginaries and questioned social relations based on coloniality, while the ongoing discussion of Indigenous concepts such as “Buen vivir” revives and reveals more balanced relations between nature and society. Even if the hegemony of the U.S.A. in the Americas has been waning, the election of Donald Trump and his nostalgic vision of “Make America Great Again” will have global impacts, specifically on the Americas. In focus are also issues of immigration and the targeting of difference—be it racial, ethnic, religious, or gender—, the border wall with Mexico, immigration reform policies, the treatment of Muslim inhabitants, and the hosting of refugees, mostly from the Middle East, as well as feminist issues, environmental policies, and human rights in general. […]

Our purpose is therefore to explore past and present forms of intervention, relation, knowledge, translation, negotiation, solidarity, or alliance that promote the emancipation of those usually silenced by hegemonic formulae and hierarchies. Through the debate and exploration of new ground we aim at contributing to the designing of a new grammar and a new pedagogy of the social from epistemological and practical perspectives on the Americas.

For more information, please visit: http://www.interamericanstudies.net/?page_id=6447
Deadline for submissions: Aug. 31, 2017.

Appel à communications-Congrès des Algonquinistes 

Oct 27 – 29, 2017 University of Montreal

Du 27 au 29 octobre 2017, l’Université de Montréal accueillera le 49e Congrès des Algonquinistes. Nous invitons toutes les personnes intéressées à soumettre des propositions en anglais, en français ou dans n’importe quelle langue algonquienne pour des communications sur tous les sujets en recherche algonquiniste. La durée des présentations sera de 20 minutes avec 10 minutes supplémentaires pour les questions. Les résumés doivent être de 300 mots maximum, excluant le titre et les références.

The 49th Algonquian Conference will take place from 27-29 October 2017 at the University of Montreal. We invite everyone interested to send proposals in English, French or any Algonquian language, for papers in all areas of Algonquian research. Presentations will be 20 minutes long followed by a 10-minute question period. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words in length, excluding title and references.

Further details
Deadline for submissions: Sept. 1, 2017.