Canadian Studies Announcements

In This Issue:

Program News & Events

External Events

PROGRAM NEWS & EVENTS

Canadian Studies is Coming to Cal Day!

Saturday, April 23 | 9:00 am – 4:00 pm | Dwinelle Hall

Canadian Studies is pleased to announce that we’ll be manning a booth this Saturday at Cal Day, UC Berkeley’s annual open house! While this year’s event is only open to new students and their families, we’ll be happy to welcome both Canadians and friends of Canada at our booth in Dwinelle Hall with some tasty Canadian candy. Stop by and say hi! We also welcome Berkeley student volunteers: write to us at canada@berkeley.edu for information.

Photo: Sather Gate on Cal Day. (Peg Skorpinski)

2022 THOMAS GARDEN BARNES LECTURE

“Practically American”: What a Canadian Schoolteacher’s Fight Against California’s Anti-Alien Laws Reveals About the Boundaries of American Identity

Thursday, April 28 | 12:30 pm PT | 223 Moses | RSVP here

Former Hildebrand Fellow Brendan Shanahan explores the case of Katharine Short, a Canadian immigrant to California who challenged early 20th-century anti-immigrant laws. In 1915, Short found her job as a California schoolteacher at risk when the state began enforcing a law barring non-citizens from public employment. She responded with a vigorous legal, public relations, political, and diplomatic campaign to save her job and those of other non-citizen schoolteachers in the state. Shanahan will discuss what the case shows about the disparate impact of the state’s anti-alien hiring laws, comparing the experiences of favorably portrayed immigrants (like white, middle-class Canadians) vs. less favored non-citizens (such as Mexican blue-collar laborers).

Brendan Shanahan is a socio-legal historian focusing on (North) American immigration and citizenship policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from UC Berkeley, received a Hildebrand Fellowship for work in Canadian Studies, and won the 2019 Outstanding Dissertation Award of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. He is currently a postdoctoral associate at the MacMillan Center and visiting lecturer in the Department of History at Yale.

2022 Conference: Implementing Migration Policy: Excavating the Administrative and Bureaucratic Processes Behind Migrant Admissions and Deportation

May 2-3 | 1:00-5:00 pm PT | IGS Library, Moses Hall | Learn more and RSVP here

The question of how to effectively manage international migration is one of the most difficult tasks facing governments in today’s globalized world. While much attention is paid to the ways politicians and activist groups influence immigration policy, commentators have often ignored the importance of administrative actors, such as bureaucrats, tasked with implementing these decisions. Often hidden from public view, these individuals operate behind the scenes to transform formal policy into on-the-ground practices which impact migrant populations in a variety of ways.

This conference will bring together acclaimed senior and emerging scholars to evaluate different immigration policies in a global context. Participants will discuss how bureaucratic agencies and civil society organizations influence immigration policy and resettlement in developed countries in North America, Europe, and East Asia. Comparisons will be drawn between countries with relatively liberal immigration policies, such as Canada, with those that maintain more restrictive regimes. The conference will be organized into the following sessions:

May 2:

1-3 pm: “Bureaucrats’ role in shaping immigration policy”

3-5 pm: “Civil society’s engagement in policy implementation”

May 3:

1-3 pm: “The role of subnational jurisdictions in migrant entry and settlement”

3-5 pm: “How states reconcile national law with international legal and global normative pressures”

A public reception will also be held on the evening of May 2. To view the full list of speakers and RSVP, please visit our conference page.

EXTERNAL EVENTS

Celebrating Earth Week Across North America

April 18-25

This Friday, people around the world will come together to celebrate Earth Day, the global holiday promoting the environment, conservation, and sustainability. First celebrated in the United States in 1970, the holiday spread to Canada in 1980.

Visit EarthDay.ca to find a wide variety of fun and educational events (many online) that celebrate Canada’s rich natural heritage. CBC will also be debuting a slate of original shows on nature and climate chance across multiple platforms. And if you’re in Berkeley, don’t miss these great events:

Image: Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta. (Gorgo, Wikimedia Commons)

Run Woman Run Virtual Screening

Wednesday, April 20 | 1:30 pm PT | Online | RSVP here

In honor of National Canadian Film Day 2022 (April 20), join the Embassy of Canada in Washington, D.C. for a virtual screening of Run Woman Run. Directed by Heiltsuk/Mohawk filmmaker Zoe Leigh Hopkins, this drama-comedy follows a single mom who learns to reclaim her dreams with the help of an unlikely running coach. The screening will begin at 4:30 pm ET and will be followed by a Q&A. Attendees will receive a link to view the film that will be live on April 20 and will be available for viewing for 48 hours.

Permanent Revolution: A Reading and Conversation with Gail Scott

Thursday, April 21 | 4:00 pm | 4229 Dwinelle Hall

The Montreal writer Gail Scott writes in the interstices of anglophone and francophone traditions, of the novel and theory, of prose and poetry. Scott’s audacious books refuse to divorce aesthetics from politics, and they demonstrate the inseparability of the erotic and the theoretical. Her innovative sentences dramatize the fractured relationship to language of minority subjects (including women, lesbians, and Indigenous people) and the sutured subjectivity that results.

In the 1970s and 80s, living in a French-speaking metropolis gave Scott a kind of privileged access to “French theory,” reading Barthes, Cixous or Derrida in the original. It also was during this period that she participated in Quebec’s feminist and formalist écriture au féminin moment alongside the poet Nicole Brossard. Her continental consciousness later led to her involvement with San Francisco’s New Narrative group in the 1990s and New York’s conceptual poetry scene in the past two decades.

Scott reflects on this trajectory in her essay collection, Permanent Revolution (Book*hug, 2021): “an evolutionary snapshot of [her] ongoing prose experiment that hinges the matter of writing to ongoing social upheaval.” She will read from her new book and then be joined by Canadian Studies faculty affiliate William Burton to discuss the politics and/of form, lesbian sexuality, colonisation, and more.

Canadian Authors at the Bay Area Book Festival

May 7 | Berkeley | View full schedule here

The Bay Area Book Festival is one of the world’s premier celebrations of writers, readers, and the written word. Now back in person after two years online, the festival line-up includes two exciting literary voices from Canada thanks to the generous support of the Consulate General of Canada San Francisco.

“We Read in Order to Come to Life”: Grief, Joy, and the Magic of Literary Form

2:00 pm | Buy tickets here

In this panel, Pik-Shuen Fung will discuss her acclaimed debut novel Ghost Forest, which explores the narrator’s grief for her “astronaut” father, one of many such fathers who remained in Hong Kong while the rest of the family emigrates to Canada.

What’s New in Native American Literature for Kids

2:45 pm | More information

Cree children’s author David A. Robertson (On the Trapline, The Great Bear), two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, will participate in a panel on exciting new trends in Native American literature for young people.

Canadian Studies Program

213 Moses Hall #2308

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