Call for Papers | International Conference on Canadian Studies

The Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University is delighted to invite papers for its upcoming International Conference:

"Medical Humanities in the Anthropocene: Indigeneity, Borders and Justice through Indo-Canadian Perspectives"

 3–4 February 2027

Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 November 2026

This is a particularly special year for us as the Centre celebrates its 20th anniversary. Over two decades, the Centre has grown through sustained conversations and collaborations, connecting Canadian Studies in India with wider global conversations and academic communities. As we celebrate this journey, we are excited to open up new conversations that bring together scholars and students from India and beyond, and to think together across disciplines, borders, and perspectives. We warmly invite you to be part of this milestone and to contribute to the next chapter of the Centre’s ongoing intellectual journey. Please share the CFP (as given below and as attached) widely with colleagues, scholars, students, and academic networks. We look forward to hearing from you and welcoming you to Jadavpur University in February 2027!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CENTRE FOR CANADIAN STUDIES

JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY

CALL FOR PAPERS

Medical Humanities in the Anthropocene: Indigeneity, Borders and Justice through Indo-Canadian Perspectives

International Conference on Canadian Studies

3-4 February 2027

The Anthropocene has generated an urgent rethinking of the relationship between human life, environmental transformation, and planetary crisis. Yet the category of the Anthropocene also raises important questions about whose histories, bodies, and experiences are represented when “humanity” is positioned as the primary agent of planetary change. Interventions such as the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and Colonialocene remind us that planetary precarity is neither universal nor evenly experienced; rather, it is historically produced through unequal relations of power (Haraway, 2016; Moore, 2016).  The Conference seeks to further explore these questions from Indo-Canadian perspectives wherein histories of South Asian migration, colonialism, racialization, settlement and belonging in Canada unfold within ongoing structures of settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. An Indo-Canadian lens can articulate a productive space for examining how questions of health, environment, land, mobility and justice intersect across histories of migration and indigeneity while also addressing differences between diasporic displacement and Indigenous dispossession. Indeed, climate change requires the humanities to reconsider the relationship between human history and geological time, while exposing the limitations of historical frameworks that have treated humanity as a unified subject. (Chakrabarty, 2009). Such a standpoint enables the Medical Humanities to consider planetary crisis not as a universal experience but as one mediated by histories of colonial power, migration, race, and unequal vulnerability. From Indigenous perspectives, planetary crises must be understood in terms of the disruption of Indigenous relationships with land and more-than-human worlds. Kyle Powys Whyte (2017) insists on an approach that decolonizes Anthropocene discourse by foregrounding Indigenous histories, ecological knowledge, sovereignty, and experiences of environmental change. Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and Traditional Medical Knowledge further offer important frameworks for understanding health as relational, place-based, and embedded within reciprocal relationships among humans, land, and more-than-human worlds. Attending to these knowledge systems also calls for critical attention to the ways colonial structures have historically suppressed, appropriated, or delegitimized Indigenous epistemologies, healing practices, and systems of care.

It is within this context that Medical Humanities offers a particularly productive interdisciplinary framework. Medical Humanities has worked with the relationship between medicine, culture, narrative, ethics, and human experience. In a world constantly in the throes of man-made crises, Medical Humanities must now be expanded to examine how health and illness are shaped by environmental, colonial, racial, and geopolitical conditions. The twenty-first century has profoundly unsettled conventional understandings of health. Pandemics, climate change, environmental toxicity, forced migration, widening mental health crises, and the unequal distribution of healthcare have demonstrated that illness can no longer be understood exclusively through biomedical paradigms. Rather, health emerges as a relational condition produced through ecological systems, political economies, colonial histories, and cultural imaginaries. The critical Medical Humanities have responded to this shift by interrogating how illness, disability, care, embodiment, and wellbeing are mediated through structures of power, environmental change, and social inequality, while foregrounding the indispensable role of narrative, ethics, and culture in understanding human experience (Whitehead & Woods, 2016; Crawford et al., 2020). The body is never entirely separate from the landscape in which it lives, nor from the political structures that determine whose lives are protected, whose suffering is recognized, and whose health is considered expendable (Foucault, 1974). These questions also invite attention to Two-Spirit, queer, and trans Indigenous experiences as shaped by colonial histories and ongoing structures of heteropatriarchal power and the neoliberal capitalist economy. Indigenous queer and Two-Spirit perspectives challenge normative understandings of the body, kinship, care, and belonging, while opening possibilities for more relational and decolonial approaches to health and environmental justice (Driskill et al., 2011). The Environmental Humanities similarly challenges the separation of culture from ecology by asking how literature, narrative, history, and representation shape our understanding of environmental crisis (Buell, 2005; Heise, 2008). Bringing these fields together allows us to ask how illness, disability, vulnerability, ecological degradation, and environmental displacement might be read as interconnected forms of embodied experience.

Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s study of medical colonialism demonstrates how the history of Indigenous children’s healthcare in Canada must be understood within broader structures of colonial power and dispossession (Shaheen-Hussain, 2020). Glen Sean Coulthard (2014) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), in different but complementary ways, further demonstrate the importance of foregrounding Indigenous sovereignty, Traditional Knowledge Systems, relationality, land and resistance. Further, Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” describes forms of violence that are incremental and dispersed across time and space, often affecting populations whose suffering receives limited political or media attention (Nixon, 2011). Avtar Brah’s concept of “diaspora space” is also particularly useful because it brings together the histories of migrants, diasporic communities, and Indigenous populations within the same social and political landscape (Brah, 1996). Such diverse perspectives challenge Medical Humanities to move beyond individualized understandings of illness and care toward questions of structural violence, collective health, land, sovereignty, and justice. Therefore, Indo-Canadian experiences of belonging cannot be understood only through the framework of multiculturalism; they also raise questions about land, settlement, Indigenous sovereignty, racial hierarchy, and the politics of migration. Moreover, it is crucial to explore possibilities of Indigenous–diasporic dialogue without collapsing distinct histories of dispossession, migration, settlement, and sovereignty.

The Conference seeks to create a vocabulary for examining how forms of violence are narrated, remembered, normalized, or resisted. It also invites questions about whose environmental knowledge is recognized and whose experiences of ecological crisis are rendered invisible. Further, the Conference hopes to generate conversations that investigate how literary texts, cultural narratives, medical histories, life writing, visual culture, and other forms of representation illuminate the relationships among health, illness, environment, migration, indigeneity, borders, and justice. Most importantly, it asks how the humanities might help imagine forms of care that recognize the interconnectedness of bodies, communities, histories, and environments while remaining attentive to the differences in power and history that shape their relationships.

The Conference welcomes submissions from scholars, researchers, creative practitioners, healthcare professionals, environmental thinkers, and postgraduate researchers whose work engages critically with these themes from interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives. Possible areas of engagement include, but are not limited to, the following subthemes:

• Critical Medical Humanities and the Politics of Health 
• Health Humanities and Narrative Medicine
• Mental Health, Trauma, and Literary Representation
• Ecological Grief, Climate Anxiety, and Environmental Affect
• Health, Disability, and Embodiment
• Indigenous Healing Practices and Traditional Medical Knowledge
• Adivasi, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Literatures
• Environmental Humanities and Planetary Health
• Environmental Justice and Medical Ecology
• Toxicity, Pollution, and Slow Violence
• Climate Change and Public Health
• Water, Health, and Blue Humanities
• Decolonizing Medicine and Healthcare
• Indigenous Knowledge and Ecological Ethics
• Migration, Diaspora, and Health
• Care Ethics and Community Health
• Food, Agriculture, and Medical Humanities
• Graphic Medicine and Visual Cultures of Health
• Pandemic Narratives and Global Health
• Aging, Caregiving, and Memory
• Gender, Sexuality, and Reproductive Justice
• Translation, Health Communication, and Cultural Mediation
• Comparative Literary Perspectives on Health and Environment
• Literature, Ecology, and the Politics of Justice
• Multispecies Health and More-than-Human Worlds
• Decolonial Futures in Medical Humanities
• Indo-Canadian Diaspora, Health, and Belonging 
• South Asian Migration, Settlement, and Settler Colonialism 
• Indigenous–Diasporic Encounters, Solidarities, and Tensions 
• Borders, Mobility, Citizenship, and Health Justice 
• Race, Racialization, and Health Inequities in Indo-Canadian Contexts 
• Land, Displacement, and Indigenous–Diasporic Relations
• Two-Spirit Identities, Indigenous Queerness, and Decolonial Health
• Queer and Trans Perspectives on Settler Colonialism
• Queer Sovereignty, Kinship, and Decolonial Futures

Abstracts of 500 - 700 words along with a 50-word bionote are to be sent to ccsju@jadavpuruniversity.in by Sunday, 15 November 2026, 11:59 pm IST. Acceptance will be intimated by 30 November 2026.

Undergraduate students (UG I, UG II, and UG III) may apply only for poster presentations accompanied by a 10-minute oral presentation, and should submit an abstract of 300 – 400 words along with a 50-word bionote to ccsju@jadavpuruniversity.in by Sunday, 15 November 2026, 11:59 pm IST. Acceptance will be intimated by 30 November 2026.

From 2017, the Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University has introduced two student awards for the best paper presented at a regular session at the Conference as follows:

1. “Victor Ramraj Memorial Prize” for the best paper in Canadian Diaspora Studies

2. “Renate Eigenbrod Memorial Prize” for the best paper in Indigenous Canadian Studies

• A student may apply for only one of the above-mentioned prizes and should indicate the same during abstract submission. Joint authors would not be eligible to participate. The student must be registered as a current BA Fourth Year, Masters or PhD student at a college/ University/ Research Institute. Previous awardees (within the last three academic years) in any category would not be eligible to apply. 
• In order to be considered for the prize and upon acceptance of the abstract, completed papers (2500 words excluding bibliography, Chicago Stylesheet, 18th Edition) should be emailed by Monday, 4 January 2027, 11:59 pm IST. Inability to adhere to given deadlines and formats would lead to instant disqualification and the students would not be shortlisted for the prize.
• Only shortlisted students would be eligible to compete for the prize but all students whose abstracts have been accepted would be eligible to present their paper at the conference.
• Shortlisted students must be present in person at the Conference to present their papers and compete for the prize.
• The Prize(s) would be awarded only if the Screening Committee believes in the originality and academic excellence of the submission. The decision of the Screening Committee would be final.

Virtual presentations will be considered only for overseas participants, subject to logistical feasibility. A registration fee will be mandatory for all selected participants.

Registration information as given below for both participants and attendees (Includes Lunch/ Refreshments/ Conference Kit)

Faculty: Rs. 800 + 18% GST = Rs. 944/-

Postdoctoral Scholar: Rs. 600 + 18% GST = Rs. 708/-

PhD Scholar/ Independent Scholar: Rs. 400 + 18% GST = Rs.472/-

UG/PG Students: Rs. 300 + 18% GST = Rs. 354/-

Foreign Delegates: USD 50 + 18% GST = USD 59

Please send a copy of the transfer document/receipt along with transaction ID with your details, including name, affiliation, address, email-id and contact number at ccsju@jadavpuruniversity.in 

Information about registration link will be provided ONLY after acceptance of papers/ requests for attendance.

Deadline for completion of registration: 15 January 2027.  Pre-registration is mandatory. 

Accommodation

Participants will make arrangements for their own stay. Suggestions for possible places to stay can be provided on request. 

Conference Coordinator: 

Professor Debashree Dattaray, Coordinator, Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata – 700032

Organising Committee:

Aunshuparna Mustafi (PhD Student, Jadavpur University)

Labanya Sikdar (Research Scholar, Jadavpur University)

Abhik Sarkar (Research Scholar, Jadavpur University)

Sayan Mazumder (Research Scholar, Jadavpur University)

Debashree Dattaray (Faculty member, Jadavpur University)

Contact Information

Professor Debashree Dattaray

Coordinator

Centre for Canadian Studies

Jadavpur University

Kolkata - 700 032

West Bengal 

India

Contact Emailccsju@jadavpuruniversity.in