Coming Through Fire: Rebuilding, Reconciling, Rethinking
5th Annual Keyano College Arts and Humanities Conference
March 18, 2017
Keyano College, Fort McMurray, AB
On May 3rd, 2016, the Horse River Fire, officially known as MWF-009-16, forced the evacuation of the city of Fort McMurray and the surrounding region. At least 88000 people were displaced from their home and community, and nearly 2000 structures were destroyed. And, though the official re-entry period began June 1st, as Fort McMurray and the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo work to rebuild, they still bear the marks of the crisis and the uncertain process of return remains ever present. Keyano College, as the post-secondary institution that serves the Fort McMurray region and as part of the community affected by this crisis, recognizes its role in attempting to understand the Fire and its aftermath. As a result, the 5th Annual Keyano College Arts and Humanities Conference seeks proposals for presentations related to the theme, “Coming Through Fire: Rebuilding, Reconciling, Rethinking.” For the past four years, the Arts and Humanities instructors in the University Studies Department of the School of Arts, Science, Business, and Education at Keyano have organized the conference in order to allow students and the local community to engage with the critical work of the Humanities disciplines. It is our desire this year to provide a forum to understand the Fire in a scholarly context. We do take an expansive approach to what constitutes scholarly work and the conference has two streams for presentations: in the morning, we have presented more traditional and formal scholarly work, and in the afternoon, we offer longer experiential sessions.
Possible topics for consideration include:
 The Survivor and Survival Narratives
 Survival, Socio-Economics, and its inadequacies
 Apocalypse and Rebirth
 Exile and Return
 Fort McMurray as space, place and imaginary
 Fort McMurray and/as Identity
 Representations of Fort McMurray and Representations of the Fire
 Reconciliation in the land of the Oil/Tar Sands
 Disaster/Rebuilding as Metaphor
 Indigeneity and the Fire
 The Cultural Politics of Fort McMurray and the Oil/Tar Sands
Abstracts of no more than 500 words for panel discussions, 20 minute papers, or 100 minute experiential sessions should be sent to Dr. Ryan J. Cox at ryan.cox@keyano.ca no later than January 20th, 2017. Keyano College is located at 8115 Franklin Ave, Fort McMurray, Alberta on Treaty 8 land in the traditional home of the Cree, Dene, and Metis peoples.
https://www.facebook.com/KeyanoArts
http://www.keyano.ca/
info: ryan.cox@keyano.ca
Conference Registration: https://goo.gl/esd6kJ