Examining identity, community and citizenship within Canadian public
culture
April 20-21, 2012
Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies
Trent University
Peterborough, Canada
Identity, belonging and citizenship within the nation state are
established, contested and legitimized within sites and institutions of
public culture, heritage and representation. In Canada, people from
diverse cultural backgrounds seek to engage with cultural, historical
and social knowledge in these spaces. While public museums have been
primary sites of engagement, some people have sought to create
alternative opportunities and institutional spaces to express and
represent the complexities of their histories, identities, communities
and places in both Canadian and global society. We are seeking papers
that explore the roles that all types of public spaces play in the
expression or contestation of different histories, different identities,
and different forms of community, national and transnational
citizenship.
The goal of this conference is to bring together a wide range of
academics, professionals, community leaders and students to examine,
analyze and theorize the dynamics of public cultural institutions in
relation to the putative multicultural nation of Canada. What
negotiations, relationships, compromises, conflicts, successes or
failures emerge as new spaces are established, and as old ones are
reconstituted or rethought? We welcome papers and panels from all
disciplines and interdisciplinary fields that touch on the spaces, the
structures, the goals, the practices, the people or the processes of
public cultural and heritage institutions on local, community, national
or international scales that comparatively or specifically offer comment
on the Canadian context. Possible topics might include, but are not
limited to:
• Conceptualizing difference/diversity/multiculturalism/pluralism
in public spaces
• Representing the multicultural “we†in national spaces
• New social and cultural spaces of representation
• Collecting the transnational/multicultural ‘citizen’
• Virtual/digital collections and the ‘real’ of the public
sphere
• Diaspora, migrations, uprooting and ‘heritage’
• Spaces of memory and testimony
• Donors, diversity, and ‘new’ museum publics
• State museums/institutions and representations of citizenship
• Citizenship/community in public spaces from above, below and
afar
• Cross-cultural encounters in public spaces/institutions
• Museums and collaborative processes
• Virtual worlds, public culture and representation
• New media and transnational identities
Please submit either (a) 250 word abstracts for an individual papers, or
(b) proposals for panels including 3 papers by August 31, 2011 to
diversespaces@gmail.com. Accepted papers and panels will be announced by
the end of January, 2012.
The conference is organized by Julia Harrison, Director, and Susan
Ashley, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Frost Centre for Canadian
Studies and Indigenous Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada.
