Event: Our Legacy Our Hope
May 9, 2012
I’m looking forward to participating in this event at NYU:
Our Legacy Our Hope: Youth Perspectives on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
May 10, 2012 6:00pm – 7:30pm, 20 Cooper Square, New York, NYU, Journalism 7th Floor Commons
Jointly convened by the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University and The International Center for Transitional Justice, this evening will feature a mini-documentary screening and panel discussion on the intergenerational effects of the Indian Residential School and youth involvement in transitional justice processes.
“Our Legacy Our Hope,” a mini-documentary filmed, scripted, and edited by Canadian youth, depicts the proceedings of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Atlantic National Event from the perspective of intergenerational survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. This short film will be presented by the student filmmakers and followed by a panel discussion examining the importance, the benefits, and the challenges of active youth participation in transitional justice mechanisms.
Panelists include:
Virginie Ladisch
Head of the Children and Youth Program at the International Center for Transitional Justice
Marie Wilson
Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (to be confirmed)
Naomi Angel
Ph.D. Student in Media, Culture, and Communication at investigating the ways in which Truth Commissions speak to issues of historical responsibility
Day One in Halifax
October 27, 2011
It’s the end of the first day of the TRC’s third national gathering in Halifax. The day began with the lighting of the sacred fire, which took place on the grounds of Province House. The ashes from the sacred fire at the first gathering in Winnipeg were transferred to the sacred fire in Inuvik, and have now been brought to Halifax. According to the TRC:
The Lighting of the Sacred Fire happens before we begin each Event to ensure that it is the spirits and the teachings that guide us and protect us while the Commission does its work. The transferring of the ashes has become a symbol of national unity as it becomes lit from coast to coast to coast.
The ceremony took place in front of a statue of Joseph Howe (1804-1873), a Nova Scotian politician. Under his outstretched arm, the commission, elders, and participants watched as the sacred fire was lit. (Photos of sacred ceremonies are forbidden. The image above was taken before the ceremony began.) Shortly afterwards, the Truth and Reconciliation Walkers entered the square. The group of five walked for 2,200 kilometres from Cochrane, Ontario to attend the event in Halifax: Patrick Etherington Jr., Robert Hunter, James Kioke, Samuel Koosees, Frances R. Whiskeychan. As they walked from community to community, they raised awareness about the Indian Residential School legacy and the truth commission’s work. I had the honour of hearing Patrick Etherington Jr. speak in Winnipeg about their journey to the first national gathering. They are a truly inspiring group. For more on their journey, click here, or here.
CFP: Borders and Borderlands in Berlin
September 9, 2011
The 15th Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality will be held from March 28 – 31, 2012. I attended a previous Roundtable on Memory Politics and had a great experience: interesting presentations, outstanding keynote speakers and wonderful hosts at the Irmgard Coninx Foundation. The papers are selected through an international essay competition. Accommodations and flights to Berlin will be provided to the authors of the (approximately) 45 successful papers. Apply!
Borders and Borderlands: Contested Spaces
15th Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality, March 28 – 31, 2012
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new era seemed to have opened up: a world without borders and thus – potentially – a world with less conflict and more freedom. Today, more than 20 years later, we can observe that some border systems have softened while others have been consolidated, and many more border-based regulations have been created on national and supra-national levels. The nation-state has not disappeared and neither have its borders. However, borders and borderlands cannot be reduced to spaces of division and conflict but they also exist as spaces of social, ethnic, cultural and economic blending – territories of their own. In the tradition of previous Berlin Roundtables held on urban development, transnational risks, human rights, and cultural diversity the 15th Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality will focus on borders and borderlands as contested spaces.
For further details please see the background paper.
Conference Format
The 15th Berlin Roundtables will be held at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) from March 28 – 31, 2012. Based on an international essay competition, approximately 45 applicants will be invited to discuss their research, concerns and agendas with peers and prominent scholars in Berlin. The Irmgard Coninx Foundation will cover travel to and accommodation in Berlin.
Discussions will take place in three workshops:
“The Social Life of Borders and Borderlands” chaired by Julie Y. Chu (Anthropology, University of Chicago) and Tatiana Zhurzhenko (Political Science, University of Vienna),
“The Politics of Borders: Security and Control” chaired by Mattias Kumm (Law, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, WZB and New York University) and Eric Tagliacozzo (History, Cornell University),
“Natural Resources and the Environment along Borders and Borderlands: Conflicts and Solutions” chaired by Michael Redclift (Geography, King’s College London) and Maria Tysiachniuk (Environmental Unit, Center for Independent Research St. Petersburg).
The conference will be accompanied by evening lectures. Guest speakers will be announced soon.
Eligibility and Application Procedure
The call for papers extends to scholars (max. up to 5 years after Ph.D.) and practitioners (e.g. workers in governmental or urban services, NGOs, journalists). Please submit your paper (maximum 3500 words including footnotes and bibliography), an abstract (max. 300 words), a narrative biography and a CV using the online submission form and the style sheets for your abstract and essay.Submission deadline is November 30, 2011. Please note that co-authorship and already published papers will not be accepted. All participants are expected to actively participate during all days of this workshop.
Irmgard Coninx Research Grant
Conference participants are eligible to apply for one of up to three short-term fellowships to be used at the WZB in Berlin. For further information on the fellowship please visit our research grant site. Conference participants will receive all necessary details on the grant application shortly before the conference.
CFP: Encuentro 2012
July 20, 2011
Artwork by Pedro Lasch at the 2009 Encuentro in Bogotá
Every few years, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics holds an amazing conference. It’s called the “Encuentro,” meaning “meeting” or “encounter.” I had the pleasure of attending the Encuentro in 2009, held in Bogotá, Colombia. (See my posts on the event: Part I and Part II.) It was absolutely fantastic, an engaging 9 days spent with inspirational people. I highly recommend the conference, and it would be great to see a large Canadian contingent there! See the CFP below:
Cities | Bodies | Action
The Politics of Passion in the Americas
March 17-25, 2012
Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana
Centro Histórico, Mexico City
The 8th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute seeks to examine the broad intersections between urban space, performance and political/artistic action in the Americas. From the critical poetics of body art to the occupation of public space by social movements, the event invites participants to explore the borders, identities and practices through which subjectivities, hegemonies and counter-hegemonies are constructed in the spaces of the city and beyond. We are particularly interested in the ways in which bodies both interpellate and are interpellated, mobilize and are mobilized, by and around the diverse and complex passions that define our globalized and mediatized present—fear, hatred, disenchantment, hope and faith, among others. We seek to investigate, collectively, the strategies through which bodies (individual, social and political) make themselves present, and intervene aesthetic conventions, social formations and political structures in their search to create new meanings and new modes of sociality. This theme will be the point of departure for a vast array of performances, exhibits, roundtables, workshops, lectures and work groups.
Since 2000, our Encuentros have been a point of contact for artists, scholars, students and activists interested in the relationship between performance and politics in the Americas. Each Encuentro brings together 400-600 participants, and is part academic conference, part performance festival, and always interdisciplinary. The Encuentro is a space focused on experimentation, dialogue and collaboration.
The application deadline for the Encuentro is September 26, 2011. To apply, see the instructions on our website (Propose a Project or Apply to a Work Group) and then fill out the Online Application in English.
Two Upcoming Events: New York and Guelph
March 23, 2011
1. Memory: Silence, Screen, Spectacle, March 24 – 26, The New School for Social Research, New York
| The clamor of the past can be almost deafening: it preoccupies us through speech, texts, screens, spaces and commemorative spectacles; it makes demands on us to settle scores, uncover the “truth” and search for justice; it begs for enshrinement in museums and memorials; and it shapes our understanding of the present and future. However noisy and ceaseless the demands and memory of the past may seem, though, in every act of remembering there is something silenced, suppressed, or forgotten. Memory’s inherent selectivity means that for every narrative, representation, image, or sound evoking the past, there is another that has become silent—deliberately forgotten, carelessly omitted, or simply neglected. The conference will explore the tension between the loud and often spectacular past and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear.
[I'll be presenting a short paper on the IRS TRC's first national gathering in Winnipeg last year.] |
2. Animating the Indigenous Humanities, March 25, 2011, Transcanada Institute, Guelph Ontario
The TransCanada Institute is hosting a one-day colloquium titled “Animating the Indigenous Humanities: Portaging Disciplines, Institutions, Ecologies” with the Indigenous Humanities Group of the University of Saskatchewan on Friday, March 25th at 11:00am.
The Indigenous Humanities Group (IGH) work in transcultural and transystematic ways to nourish a new/old learning spirit into education at all levels and into every aspect of what is recognized, funded, and published as academic research. Since establishing over a decade ago, the IHG has aligned itself with critique of Eurocentrism and promotion of indigenous voice and vision. These two activities encourage decolonization in complementary ways, challenging established academic hierarchies, assumptions, practices, and outcomes, and seeking to implement forms of inquiry, dialogue, and exchange based in the adaptive traditions developed by the First Peoples of North America. More info: http://www.transcanadas.ca/
Thanks, Sachi for sending information about the Guelph event!
AFN Event
December 12, 2010
The Assembly of First Nations is holding an event tomorrow, December 13, 2010, in Ottawa focusing on the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. The event will be webcast live from 8:30am – 4:30pm. Click here for more information and a link to the webcast.
New Book: Other Tongues
December 10, 2010
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the book launch for Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore. It was an inspirational evening and I felt so honoured to be a part of the event and this amazing book.
Earlier in the week, I had decided that I wasn’t going to read an excerpt from my short story, “On the Train”. The idea of standing up in front of a room full of strangers to share this story made me too nervous. But as I sat in the audience and heard all these amazing women read their poems and stories, I gathered the courage and decided to read as well. I’m glad I did.
Thank you to the editors, Adebe D.A. and Andrea Thompson, the publishers Inanna Press (York University), and all the contributors who made the collection possible. I’m looking forward to reading the book from cover to cover.
A Ceremonial Nation: Armistice Day
November 11, 2010
A rainy Armistice day in Paris:
Calls for Papers: Upcoming Conferences
November 3, 2010
I just updated the “Call for Papers” section of the site with a few upcoming conference deadlines. It looks like some interesting events are on the horizon in 2011. Here are just a few (two in Montreal, one in New York):
1) Memory: Silence, Screen and Spectacle
The New School for Social Research, New York.
Deadline for Abstracts: November 22, 2010. Conference: March 24-26, 2011.
2) DATABASE|NARRATIVE|ARCHIVE
An International Symposium on Nonlinear Digital Storytelling
Organized by CINER-G (Concordia Interactive Narrative Experimentation and Research Group)
Deadline for Abstracts: Dec. 15, 2010. Conference: May 13 – 15, 2011, Concordia University, Montreal.
Organized by the Art History and Communications Studies Department at McGill University, Montreal.
Deadline for Abstracts: January 17, 2011. Conference: April 20th, 2011
For more information, click on the links above, or here.
Happening Now: Webcast of Public Education Initiative
October 26, 2010
To watch the live webcast of Public Education Initiative, presented by the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, connect to the IRSSS site and click on the webcast link. The event is scheduled to run from 8:30am – 4:30pm PST and is hosted by Squamish Nation at the Chief Joe Mathias Centre in North Vancouver.
The audience listens to Grand Chief Stewart Phillip the Public Education Initiative.
Grand Chief Edward John addresses the audience via video link
