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Meeting Places / Lieux de rencontre :
An International Canadian Studies Conference

September 18-21, 2013
Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia &
Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick

This international Canadian studies conference explores place-based communities and cultures. To engage the collaborative possibilities of place-based communities and cultures, the conference will bring together academic, cultural, and artistic communities and move between two locations. After gathering in Halifax, Nova Scotia at Saint Mary’s University, conference participants will travel together across the provincial borders and the Cobequid Pass to Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Participants will reflect on how place-based communities work to defend and develop their particular identities and to resist the time-space compression that threatens to disrupt and overwhelm the significance of place. In Canada, where space and place have long been contested ground, the discussion of place-based cultures has moved beyond national boundaries to include global and transnational cultures. One of the goals of the conference, therefore, is to study the dynamics, relations, and tensions between the local, the national and the global understandings of place.

Keynote speakers:

ANDREA BEAR NICHOLAS Maliseet from Tobique, New Brunswick, Chair in Native Studies at St. Thomas University, New Brunswick, is currently documenting the histories of five Maliseet communities.

COLE HARRIS award-winning author of Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (2003) and The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada before Confederation (2009), is professor emeritus of the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia.

TANIA MARTIN Canada Research Chair in Built Religious Heritage and assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Université Laval in Quebec City is an expert in the history of North-American vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes.

GRAEME WYNN historical geographer and pioneer in the interdisciplinary field of environmental history, author of Timber Colony: a historical geography of early nineteenth century New Brunswick (1981) to Canada and Arctic North America (2007), is professor of environmental and historical Geography at the University of British Columbia.

Proposals are invited from those engaged in the study of Canada in all disciplines or research areas (arts and media, history, geography, literature, archaeology, economics, politics and policy) for papers that address the conference themes from multiple perspectives (urban or rural; indigenous, immigrant, or diasporic; virtual or embodied). Some possibilities include:

• Competing Narratives of Place and Space
• Constructing and/or Contesting Regional Identities
• In/Between/Other Spaces: le Québec, l’Acadie, le Canada français, des espaces à définir
• Representing or Re-presenting “Home”
• Acadiaspora: déracinement, enracinement, rhizome, or Rerouting the Uprooted
• Real-and-Imagined Cultural Geographies
• Meeting Peoples: Narrating Encounters with Original Peoples
• Making Contact: Cross-cultural Encounters in Canada
• Past - Present - Future: l’espace-temps acadien en mouvement
• The Politics of Place and Environment
• Tourism: Travelling with a Place in your Baggage
• Tourism: Meeting Expectations of Place
• Screen Travels in Space and Time
• The Aesthetics and Economics of Artistic Space and Place
• Social, Political, and Environmental Movements in and out of Place
• Particularity of Place: the Everyday in Cultural Production
• Collaboration and Connection across Space and Place

The organizing committee welcomes proposals that take various formats – papers, organized panels, round tables, or other modes of presentation. Early submissions are encouraged.

Please send a 250 word proposal, a 100-word abstract, and a 100 word bio-bibliographic note by 10 October 2012 to: [ meetingplaces@smu.ca ]
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