Canadian Studies Announcements
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In this issue:
- Big Give update: Thank you for your support!
- Event tomorrow: Hildebrand Graduate Research Showcase
- Call for Papers: American Council for Québec Studies 22nd Biennial Conference
- Upcoming event: “Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences: Indigenous Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents”
- External conference: “Public attitudes towards immigration in Canada: A false or true positive?”
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 Big Give Update: Another Amazing Year, Thanks to You! Canadian Studies is excited to announce yet another record-breaking Big Give for the program. With processing not yet finished, we’ve raised almost $29,000. That’s almost 15% of ALL money raised for the entire Research Division! We can’t say this enough – your support is the bedrock for everything we do. We’re a small program, but we have an outsized impact thanks to the strength of our community engagement. We’re incredibly grateful for all you do, whether through your philanthropy, volunteering your time, or just attending our events. You make our work not only possible, but meaningful. So thanks again, and we hope to see you soon!
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Hildebrand Graduate Research Showcase
Tuesday, March 15 | 12:30 pm PT | 223 Moses Hall | RSVP hereLearn about the research Canadian Studies funds through our Edward Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowships, as recipients present short overviews of their projects. This panel will have a special focus on the environment, development, and Indigenous resource sovereignty. This event will be held in-person as well as broadcast via Zoom.
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Mindy Price, Ph.D. candidate, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
“New Agricultural Frontiers: Land, Labor and Sovereignty in the Northwest Territories, Canada”
Now more than 1º Celsius warmer than a century ago and warming at three times the global average, the Arctic and Subarctic are being reimagined as a new frontier for food production. Despite a growing body of evidence that climate change will enable new possibilities for agriculture in the North, much research remains agnostic about how northern agricultural development will affect communities and landscapes and the relations between them. Mindy uses archival research and ethnography in three extended case studies to examine the implications of agriculture development on the social relations of production and consumption in the Northwest Territories, Canada.
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Aaron Gregory, Ph.D. student, City and Regional Planning
“Kinship Infrastructures: Indigenous Energy Autonomy and Regulatory Sea Change in Beecher Bay”
Aaron’s research explores the social, technical, and regulatory impacts of a renewable energy system developed by the Scia’new First Nation in Beecher Bay, British Columbia. He examines this project as an emergent approach to Indigenous environmental governance, an infrastructural solution responding to the problem of Indigenous energy sovereignty, and a regulatory provocation designed to challenge a provincial monopoly on energy production and distribution.
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Call for Papers: American Council for Québec Studies 22nd Biennial Conference
Submission deadline: April 1, 2022
The American Council for Québec Studies (ACQS) invites proposals for papers and panels for their upcoming conference, to be held October 20-23, 2022 in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference hopes to give space to multiple openings and exchanges. Proposals related to any aspect of Québec studies will be considered, including Québec’s diasporas and the Francophone presence in the Americas. The conference is open to a wide range of approaches across the social and physical sciences and humanities. Submissions of both individual papers and complete panels are encouraged.
All submissions (abstracts of +/-250 words) are should be made via the ACQS website.
Conference presentations can be made in French or English. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is April 1, 2022. Please visit www.acqs.org for more details.
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Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences: Indigenous Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents
Thursday, April 7 | 12:30 pm PT | 223 Moses | RSVP hereThe artificial intelligence (A.I.) industry-academic complex does not have an ethics problem. It has an epistemology problem. The persistent failures with computationally-enabled and -amplified bias are symptoms of a blind allegiance to knowledge frameworks that define the “knower” as a post-Enlightenment individual motivated by selfish utilitarianism while subordinating or erasing ways of understanding the world that imagine people differently. How do we expand the operational definitions of intelligence to account for different epistemologies? In particular, how might we take inspiration from Indigenous knowledge frameworks that situate knowing within a web of relationships amongst humans and non-humans? And how might we consider integrating advanced computational practices, such as A.I., into traditional knowledge frameworks to the benefit of Indigenous communities?
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Jason Edward Lewis is the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well professor of computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal. His research explores computation as a creative material, and seeks to understand how our technologies are constituted through explicit and implicit cultural knowledge practices. He is lead author of the award-winning “Making Kin with the Machines” essay and editor of the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper. Lewis directs the Initiative for Indigenous Futures Partnership, and co-directs the Indigenous Futures Research Centre and the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network.
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Public attitudes towards immigration in Canada: A false or true positive?
Tuesday, March 22 | 7:00 am PT | Online | RSVP hereContrary to the experiences in most European countries and the U.S., public attitudes towards immigration in Canada have grown increasingly positive over the last two decades. However, several studies have found that while most of the population has a positive opinion on immigration, there is a significant difference in public attitudes depending on an individual’s education, age or political ideology. Studies also have shown that different factors, including economic and cultural concerns, play an essential role in influencing public opinion towards immigration, and that this has been shown to shift over time.
To understand the reasons behind changing public opinion, researchers have explored whether they are driven by changing demographics, ideological shifts or simply individuals changing their minds. Some scholars have taken a further step to examine what public support is like towards specific categories of immigration, racial groups or regions, showing that, at the finer grain, public support might not be as positive as Canada’s general attitudes suggest.
This workshop aims to address the following questions:
- What are the main factors that explain the positive change in public attitudes towards immigration in Canada?
- Are there differences in attitudes towards refugees versus (economic) immigrants?
- Should we look closer at the attitudes of people in smaller communities?
- What can we learn from qualitative and quantitative perspectives?
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Canadian Studies Program
213 Moses Hall #2308
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Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 