Canadian Studies Announcements

In this issue:

4th Annual Canadian Family Thanksgiving

October 9 | 5:00 pm | Alumni House, UC Berkeley | Purchase tickets here

Don’t miss your chance – join us this Saturday for our annual Canadian Thanksgiving dinner! Join us and our partners at the Digital Moose Lounge for a special meal celebrating the Bay Area’s Canadian community as we meet together for the first time since the pandemic. Mingle with your fellow SF Bay Canadians while enjoying entertainment and a delicious boxed turkey dinner. There will also be special prizes, including a raffle of Air Canada tickets! The dinner will take place outdoors and will observe all relevant public health measures.

Tickets are selling out fast, so buy yours today through the Digital Moose Lounge.

We’re also looking for volunteers to help staff the event. A limited number of half-priced tickets are available to volunteers; please contact us for more information.

UPCOMING EVENT

Book Talk: Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada

October 12 | 12:30 pm PT | Online | RSVP here

In the 1950s and 1960s, immigration bureaucrats played an important yet unacknowledged role in transforming Canada’s immigration policy. Their perceptions and judgements about the admissibility of individuals influenced the creation of formal admissions criteria for skilled workers and family immigrants that continue to shape immigration to Canada. Bureaucrats emphasized not just economic utility, but also middle-class traits and values such as wealth accumulation, educational attainment, entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness and a strong work ethic. By making “middle-class multiculturalism” a basis of nation-building in Canada, they created a much-admired approach to managing racial diversity that has nevertheless generated significant social inequalities. Migration expert Jennifer Elrick will discuss insights from her forthcoming book examining the topic.

Jennifer Elrick is an assistant professor of sociology at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Her research interests lie in the area of state classifications (in censuses and immigration policy) and their relationship to social stratification along the lines of race, gender, and social class. Her work is multi-national in scope, focusing on Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

This event is cosponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute of International Studies.

IN THE NEWS

Canada Marks First “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation”

September 30 was Canada’s first-ever National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Originating from the Indigenous-led grassroots campaign known as “Orange Shirt Day”, the new commemoration honors survivors of Canada’s residential school system as well as the children who perished in the schools.

Canada’s residential schools operated for over a century, and were intended to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people into European-Canadian society. Attendance was compulsory for Indigenous children from 1894 to 1947. Children were intentionally separated from their communities, with the goal of eliminating Indigenous cultural practices; meanwhile, within the schools, they endured neglect, deprivation, and abuse.

In 2013, Indigenous writer and residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad established “Orange Shirt Day” on September 30, to promote awareness of the system’s impact on Indigenous communities. Webstad had arrived at the school wearing a new orange shirt, which was taken from her on arrival: it now symbolizes “stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations.”

After several high-profile gravesite discoveries at former residential schools brought renewed attention to the issue earlier this year, the Canadian Government officially recognized the commemoration as a national statutory holiday called “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation”. Public commemoration and acknowledgement of the devastating impact of the system on Indigenous families and communities is vital to the reconciliation process.

EXTERNAL EVENT

Conversations on Canada: Solo Canada? The 2021 Election’s Implications for Canadian Foreign Policy

October 6 | 11 am PT | Online | RSVP here

The 2021 Canadian election included debates over just a few international relationships and issues, mainly China, climate change, and the evacuation of Kabul. On these issues and more, the relationship with the United States is important: border restrictions, COVID, Buy American provisions, USMCA implementation, Enbridge Line 5, and the extradition of Meng Wanzhou. On a growing range of issues Canada is looking for a partnership with the United States, but Canadians increasingly wonder if they are talking to themselves and if Americans are listening.

Dr. Christopher Sands, director of the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute and a Canadian Studies Program board member, will address these challenges in a conversation moderated by Dr. Christopher Kirkey, director of the Center for the Study of Canada and Institute on Québec Studies, SUNY Plattsburgh.

Call for Papers: ACSUS 2022 26th Biennial Conference

Deadline: November 1, 2021

In celebration of the its 50th anniversary, the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (ACSUS) will host its 26th biennial conference, March 24-27, 2022, in Washington, D.C. The conference is open to all proposals with a significant Canadian focus. ACSUS welcomes papers and panel proposals from graduate students, professors, independent scholars,

and practitioners on all diverse and critical perspectives related to the theme, ‘Canada: Near and Far’. How is Canada perceived and portrayed from outside its borders, and by the international community? How is Canada understood by its expatriates? What role do non-governmental agencies around the world play in shaping Canada’s relationships with the world? What is ACSUS’s role in these larger questions? Proposals that touch on these themes through diverse and critical perspectives are especially encouraged, though, as always, submissions on all subjects addressing Canada and Canadian-American relations are welcome.

For more information on proposal guidelines and for submission information, please visit the conference’s website.

Call for Papers: The Clean Water Act and Lake Champlain Basin: Origins, Implementation, Impacts

Deadline: December 31, 2021

The Institute on Quebec Studies and the Lake Champlain Research Institute at SUNY Plattsburgh, in partnership with Groupe d’études et de recherche sur l’international et le Québec (GERIQ), École nationale d’administration publique (ÉNAP), and Observatoire sur les États-Unis, Chaire Raoul-Dandurand, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), are co-organizing a two-day authors’ workshop to investigate and review the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act (CWA), and the implementation and impact of the Act on the Lake Champlain Basin. The goal is to produce a book volume with a leading university press.

This scholarly research colloquium and publication initiative – to be held in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the CWA – will bring together social scientists, applied scientists, and leading practitioners from the United States and Canada. They invite single-discipline, multidisciplinary, comparative, and applied case study proposals that offer original perspectives.

For more information, please read the call for papers here.

Canadian Studies Program

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