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Constituting Canada: Interdisciplinary approaches to an idea

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

Venue:                        University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Date:                           Thursday 13^th July – Friday 14^th July, 2017

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

2017 marks 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 Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (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 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 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 ([email protected]) and Dr Benjamin Authers ([email protected]) before Dec 1^st, 2016. To assist with planning, earlier abstracts are welcomed and will be evaluated when they are submitted.

“WHAT DID WE THINK WE WERE DOING…”
… we young writers of Canada?”  That’s a question Margaret Atwood asked during a Canadian Literature Centre talk in Edmonton.  In excerpts from the talk and in conversation with Paul Kennedy, she considers the accidental but sometimes intentional creation of a culture and a tradition.  Some things were unimaginable decades ago, like the diversity and strength of Canadian literature today…or the PowerPoint she uses to help tell the tale.

Friday September 16, 2021
CBC Radio One at 9:05 pm, 9:35 in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Hear it online: cbc.ca/ideas

LOUISE DUPRÉ
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
STUDENT LOUNGE
ARTS & CONVOCATION HALL
This reading will be both in French and English
Poète, romancière, nouvelliste et essayiste, Dupré a publié une vingtaine de titres, qui lui ont été maintes fois récompensés. Parmi ses recueils de poésie comptent Noir déjà, Tout près, Une écharde sous ton ongle et Plus haut que les flammes, qui en 2011 lui a mérité le Prix du Gouverneur général du Canada et le Grand Prix Québecor du Festival International de la Poésie. Récipiendaire, entre autres, du prix Alfred-Desrochers et du prix Ringuet, Louise Dupré a été reçue dans les rangs de l’Académie des lettres et des sciences humaines de la Société royale du Canada et dans ceux de l’Académie des lettres du Québec.

JAEL RICHARDSON
IN COLLABORATION WITH
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19
STUDENT LOUNGE
ARTS & CONVOCATION HALL
Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. The book received a CBC Bookie Award and earned Richardson an Acclaim Award and a My People Award. Excerpts from her first play, my upside down black face, are published in the anthology T-Dot Griots. Richardson has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She lives in Brampton where she serves as the Artistic Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD).

LARISSA LAI
MONDAY, DECEMBER 5
STUDENT LOUNGE
ARTS & CONVOCATION HALL
Larissa Lai is the author of When Fox Is a Thousand, Salt Fish Girl, sybil unrest with Rita Wong, Automaton Biographies, Eggs in the Basket, and Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. She is a recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers Award and has been shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award, the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary and directs The Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing.

Click HERE to see the 2016 CLC Kreisel Lecture with Margaret Atwood.