Category Archives: Canadian Studies Program UC Berkeley

Cal Day & Earth Day events; more Canadian films & lit

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A newsletter from one of our fellow Canadian organizations in the Bay Area.
Canadian Studies Announcements
In This Issue:
Program News & Events
  • Canadian Studies is coming to Cal Day!
  • 2022 Thomas G. Barnes Lecture: “‘Practically American’: What a Canadian Schoolteacher’s Fight Against California’s Anti-Alien Laws Reveals About the Boundaries of American Identity”
  • 2022 conference: “Implementing Migration Policy: Excavating the Administrative and Bureaucratic Processes Behind Migrant Admissions and Deportation”
External Events
  • Celebrating Earth Week across North America
  • Run Woman Run Virtual Screening
  • Permanent Revolution: A reading and conversation with Gail Scott
  • Canadian authors at the Bay Area Book Festival
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:
May 3:
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
Canadian Studies Program | Univ. of California, Berkeley, 213 Moses Hall #2308, Berkeley, CA 94720

Announcing our 2022 immigration conference! Plus: will banning foreign buyers fix Canada’s housing problem?

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A newsletter from a fellow Canadian organization in the Bay Area.
Canadian Studies Announcements
In This Issue:
Program News & Events
  • Announcing our 2022 conference: “Implementing Migration Policy: Excavating the Administrative and Bureaucratic Processes Behind Migrant Admissions and Deportation”
  • 2022 Thomas G. Barnes Lecture: “‘Practically American’: What a Canadian Schoolteacher’s Fight Against California’s Anti-Alien Laws Reveals About the Boundaries of American Identity”
In the News
  • Canada announces two-year ban on foreign homebuyers
Other Announcements
  • Applications open for General Idea Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada
External Events
  • Canadian film at the San Francisco Indie Fest Green Film Festival
  • Permanent Revolution: A reading and conversation with Gail Scott
PROGRAM NEWS & EVENTS
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
Canadian Studies is pleased to officially announce the dates for our 2022 conference, our first since the start of the Pandemic. Hosted on the afternoons of May 2-3, 2022, this conference will bring together acclaimed senior and emerging scholars to evaluate different immigration policies in a global context.
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 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:
May 3:
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.
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 Yale Department of History.
IN THE NEWS
Canada Announces Two-Year Ban on Foreign Homebuyers
Last Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a long-expected two-year ban on the purchase of Canadian real estate by foreign citizens. The new ban comes as Canada faces an overheating real estate market, and is part of a raft of policies unveiled by the government to improve affordability, including major financial commitments for new affordable housing construction.
The rising costs of housing have become a major concern for many Canadians over the last few years, as well as a major political liability. In the last election, Trudeau’s Liberal Party promised strong action to curb prices as Canada faced a 20% increase in housing prices. Provincial governments, including Ontario and British Columbia, have also implemented their own taxes on foreign homebuyers in the face of public pressure. Ontario’s foreign speculation tax was recently expanded outside Toronto to cover the entire province, and increased to 20%.
The effects of the housing crises have been especially acute effects on young, first-time homebuyers. Recent research from Statistics Canada shows that 62% of Canadians 18-34 are waiting for prices to drop before purchasing. Many rely on relatives to help cover down payments; some young Canadians are even turning to unorthodox strategies like co-ownership to afford property in urban markets.
However, experts are skeptical that Trudeau’s foreign purchaser ban will have a significant impact on housing prices. Some argue foreign speculators are a scapegoat for a larger problem. While data show that investors made nearly 20% of home purchases in Canada in mid-2021, foreign buyers represented a small portion of that number, mostly concentrated in high-end real estate in urban cores. The remainder was purchased by Canadian individuals and corporations. Hildebrand Fellow Molly Harris is currently researching this dynamic, and the role of private equity firms and investment trusts in commodifying the housing market in Vancouver.
There are also concerns about the legal and ethical aspects of the ban. Some legal analysts question whether targeting buyers on the basis of their national origin violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; likewise, some American politicians assert the move would violate the recently-signed USMCA trade agreement. And some worry the taxes could affect Canadian foreign residents. This summer, Hildebrand Fellow Taesoo Song will be in Toronto studying the effects of Ontario’s speculation tax on low-income immigrant households.
Economists suggest that targeting speculation more broadly, as well as following through on promises to construct more housing, are more effective strategies to increase availability. Rising interest rates stemming from attempts to control inflation are also likely to bring down home prices, although without increasing affordability as mortgages become more expensive. But given the outsized impact of the housing sector on the Canadian economy, the government will be cautious about doing anything that could radically lower prices at the risk of causing a recession.
Image: House for sale in Burnaby, BC. Philippe Giabbanelli, Wikimedia Commons.
Applications Open for General Idea Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada
Deadline: Friday, April 15
The National Gallery of Canada invites applications for its General Idea Fellowship, which encourages and supports advanced research in contemporary art. Research will relate to any aspect of contemporary art, and emphasize the use and investigation of the collections of the National Gallery of Canada.
The fellowship is open to art historians, curators, critics, conservators, graduate students and independent and other professionals working in the visual arts or in museology and related disciplines, and is open to international applicants. Each award is limited to a maximum of $15,000. The term of each award is one calendar year beginning May 30, 2022. Please visit the National Gallery’s site above for full terms and application details.
EXTERNAL EVENTS
San Francisco Indie Fest Green Film Festival
Friday, April 15 | 6:45 pm | San Francisco | Buy tickets here
This film festival will screen Forest for the Trees, the first feature film by award-winning Canadian war photographer Rita Leistner. Leistner goes back to her roots as a tree planter in the wilderness of British Columbia, offering an inside take on the grueling, sometimes fun and always life-changing experience of restoring Canada’s forests. The rugged BC landscape comes to life magically in Leistner’s photography, while the quirky characters and nuggets of wisdom shared around the campfire tell a sincere story of community.
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 Studies Program
213 Moses Hall #2308
Canadian Studies Program | Univ. of California, Berkeley, 213 Moses Hall #2308, Berkeley, CA 94720

Thursday event cancelled; new Hildebrand fellow studies immigration & housing policy

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An item from one of our fellow Canadian organizations in the Bay Area.
Canadian Studies Announcements
In This Issue:
Program News & Events
  • Cancelled: “Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences: Indigenous Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents”
  • New Hildebrand Fellow Taesoo Song studies intersection of immigration & housing policy in Toronto
  • 2022 Thomas G. Barnes Lecture: “‘Practically American’: What a Canadian Schoolteacher’s Fight Against California’s Anti-Alien Laws Reveals About the Boundaries of American Identity”
External Events
  • Canadian films at the 2022 International Ocean Film Festival and the San Francisco Indie Fest Green Film Festival
  • Permanent Revolution: A reading and conversation with Gail Scott
EVENT CANCELLED
Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences: Indigenous Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents (April 7)
We regret to inform our subscribers that this week’s colloquium, scheduled for Thursday, April 7, has been cancelled due to circumstances beyond our control. We sincerely regret this disappointment, and hope to reschedule Professor Lewis during the next academic year.
Pease email any questions to canada@berkeley.edu.
PROGRAM NEWS
New Hildebrand Fellow, Taesoo Song, Studies Intersection of Immigration & Housing Policy in Toronto
Canadian Studies is pleased to introduce Taesoo Song as the second recipient of an Edward Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship for Summer 2022. Taesoo is a Ph.D. student in city and regional planning. He is interested in the role of housing policy and neighborhood planning in promoting more equitable and socially just urban and community development, particularly for low-income and minority households.
Taesoo’s Hildebrand Fellowship will help expand the current understanding of the links between housing and immigration, as well as their broader impacts on urban environments by studying Ontario’s Non-resident Speculation Tax on Toronto. More specifically, he is interested in employing mixed methods to investigate the housing and neighborhood trajectories of immigrants to Toronto and how they are impacted by the taxation. His research will be carried out in close collaboration with the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.
Taesoo holds a B.A. in economics and an M.S. in urban planning and engineering from Yonsei University in Korea. Before starting his Ph.D. program, Taesoo worked as a researcher for the Seoul Institute, where he investigated the ongoing gentrification in Seoul’s Historic Downtown area, its impacts on local businesses and residents, and strategies for more inclusive growth.
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 Yale Department of History.
EXTERNAL EVENTS
Canadian Films at the 2022 International Ocean Film Festival
Saturday, April 9 | San Francisco | Buy tickets here
Two feature-length Canadian films will be showcased at this year’s International Ocean Film Festival in San Francisco. In Coextinction, filmmakers Gloria Pancrazi and Elena Jean travel through the Pacific Northwest to uncover the interlocking environmental issues threatening an endangered pod of orcas. And in Bangla Surf Girls, Elizabeth D. Costa and Lalita Krishna tell the story of three Bangladeshi teenagers who defy tradition and their families’ expectations with their dreams of professional surfing. Check out the full program to discover additional shorts by Canadian filmmakers!
San Francisco Indie Fest Green Film Festival
Friday, April 15 | 6:45 pm | San Francisco | Buy tickets here
This film festival will screen Forest for the Trees, the first feature film by award-winning Canadian war photographer Rita Leistner. Leistner goes back to her roots as a tree planter in the wilderness of British Columbia, offering an inside take on the grueling, sometimes fun and always life-changing experience of restoring Canada’s forests. The rugged BC landscape comes to life magically in Leistner’s photography, while the quirky characters and nuggets of wisdom shared around the campfire tell a sincere story of community.
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 Studies Program
213 Moses Hall #2308
Canadian Studies Program | Univ. of California, Berkeley, 213 Moses Hall #2308, Berkeley, CA 94720

New Hildebrand Fellow studies prehistoric extinctions; Canadian films in SF

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An item from a fellow Canadian organization in the Bay Area.
Canadian Studies Announcements
In This Issue:
Program News & Events
  • Next week: “Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences: Indigenous Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents”
  • New Hildebrand Fellow Joshua Zimmt probes ancient fossils for modern lessons
  • 2022 Thomas G. Barnes Lecture: “‘Practically American’: What a Canadian Schoolteacher’s Fight Against California’s Anti-Alien Laws Reveals About the Boundaries of American Identity”
Other Announcements
  • Call for papers: American Council for Québec Studies 22nd Biennial Conference
  • Call for applications: Cornell University Migrations Summer Institute
External Events
  • Canadian films at the 2022 International Ocean Film Festival
  • Permanent Revolution: A reading and conversation with Gail Scott
NEXT WEEK
Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences: Indigenous Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents
Thursday, April 7 | 12:30 pm PT | 223 Moses | RSVP here
The 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?
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.
PROGRAM NEWS
New Hildebrand Fellow, Joshua Zimmt, Probes Ancient Fossils for Modern Lessons
Canadian Studies is pleased to introduce Joshua Zimmt as the latest recipient of an Edward Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship. Joshua is a Ph.D. candidate in integrative biology and affiliate of the UC Museum of Paleontology, and is studying the link between climate change and mass extinction in the fossil record.
Joshua’s Hildebrand Fellowship will support his dissertation research on the exceptional fossil and rock records on Anticosti Island, Québec. Joshua hopes to understand how climate change may have caused the Late Ordovician mass extinction, one of the largest known extinction events. Recent studies have linked this disaster, which led to an estimated extinction of 85% of marine species, to a drop in global temperature. By producing a better understanding of this critical interval in the history of life, Joshua’s research will serve as a case study of global change that can be used to better understand our rapidly changing modern world.
Joshua holds a B.Sc. in geology from the College of William & Mary. His work was awarded the American Paleontology Association’s Best Paper Prize in 2021. In addition to his research, Joshua is the student lead on the ACCESS program, an initiative by the UC Museum of Paleontology to bring engaging paleobiology and geology lessons to community college classrooms around the country.
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 Yale Department of History.
Your copy should address 3 key questions: Who am I writing for? (Audience) Why should they care? (Benefit) What do I want them to do here? (Call-to-Action)
Create a great offer by adding words like “free” “personalized” “complimentary” or “customized.” A sense of urgency often helps readers take an action, so think about inserting phrases like “for a limited time only” or “only 7 remaining!”
OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS
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 acqs.org for more details.
Call for Applications: Cornell University Migrations Summer Institute
Application deadline: April 4, 2022
Cornell University invites advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career scholars to apply now for the virtual 2022 Migrations Summer Institute, “The Ongoing Afterlife of Dispossession in Africa and the Americas.”
From July 11 to 22, 20 participants will join a collaborative virtual space that engages with African studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and settler colonial studies from a comparative perspective. A stipend of $2,000 supports each participant as they join a dialogue with other migration scholars, activists, and artists, design curricula and digital humanities resources, and contribute to a publication.
This institute is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge. Learn more and apply here.
EXTERNAL EVENTS
Canadian Films at the 2022 International Ocean Film Festival
Saturday, April 9 | San Francisco | Buy tickets here
Two feature-length Canadian films will be showcased at this year’s International Ocean Film Festival in San Francisco. In Coextinction, filmmakers Gloria Pancrazi and Elena Jean travel through the Pacific Northwest to uncover the interlocking environmental issues threatening an endangered pod of orcas. And in Bangla Surf Girls, Elizabeth D. Costa and Lalita Krishna tell the story of three Bangladeshi teenagers who defy tradition and their families’ expectations with their dreams of professional surfing. Check out the full program to discover additional shorts by Canadian filmmakers!
Permanent Revolution: A Reading and Conversation with Gail Scott
Thursday, April 21 | 4:00 pm PT | 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 Studies Program
213 Moses Hall #2308
Canadian Studies Program | Univ. of California, Berkeley, 213 Moses Hall #2308, Berkeley, CA 94720

Affiliate wins teaching award; new affiliate studies Quebec literature

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A newsletter from a fellow Canadian organization in the Bay Area.
Canadian Studies Announcements
In This Issue:
Program News & Events
  • Faculty affiliate Sabrina Agarwal wins 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award
  • New faculty affiliate William Burton studies French & Québécois literature
  • Upcoming event: “Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences: Indigenous Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents”
Other Announcements
  • Call for applications: Cornell University Migrations Summer Institute
External Events
  • Public attitudes towards immigration in Canada: A false or true positive?
  • Ciné Canapé: Language is a Love Story
  • Reading Canada: Canada in NATO, 1949-2019
  • Permanent Revolution: A reading and conversation with Gail Scott
PROGRAM NEWS
Faculty Affiliate Sabrina Agarwal Honoured With 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award
Canadian Studies is proud to announce that Sabrina Agarwal, a professor of anthropology and Canadian Studies affiliate, was one of five Berkeley faculty selected to receive a 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award. The award recognizes faculty for “sustained performance of excellence in teaching”. We hope you will join us in congratulating Professor Agarwal for this significant achievement!
Professor Agarwal is an expert in biological anthropology specializing in age, sex and gender-related changes to human bone. She received her bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, where she also taught for one year before coming to Berkeley. She is interested in the philosophies of teaching, and is actively involved in the pedagogical training of current and future college instructors.
Professor Agarwal emphasizes inclusive and respectful exchange in her teaching and research, particularly in the context of the fraught relationship between anthropology and many historically disenfranchised communities. In addition to her teaching, she chairs the UC Berkeley NAGPRA Advisory Committee, which facilitates the return of Native American ancestral remains and cultural goods to their tribes of origin. Last month, she moderated a panel on repatriation efforts in the US and Canada for Canadian Studies.
Recipients of the Distinguished Teaching Award receive a cash award from the campus and permanent recognition in the UC Berkeley catalogue. Distinguished Teachers are frequently called upon to serve on forums, panels, and committees involving teaching issues, and advocate for excellence in teaching at Berkeley.
Canadian Studies Welcomes William M. Burton, Scholar of French Literature, as Newest Faculty Affiliate
This week, people across Canada and around the world celebrate the French Language and Francophonie, the global French-speaking community. Canadian Studies is pleased to join in by announcing that William M. Burton, an assistant professor of French with a love for Quebec, has joined the program as our newest faculty affiliate.
Professor Burton is an expert in 18th- and 20th-century French literature and philosophy, with a focus on gender, sexuality, and feminism. Their current project, The End of Sex, approaches this topic through a case-study of Monique Wittig and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Burton also has an interest in Quebec culture and literature. This semester, they are teaching “Montreal: Colonization, Urbanization, Migration“, a course that explores the development of the unique literary and artistic voice of the world’s second-largest Francophone city.
Professor Burton joined the Berkeley faculty in August 2021. They received their B.A. in French literature and translation from McGill University; an M.A. in English studies from Université de Montréal; and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in French and Romance philology from Columbia University.
UPCOMING EVENT
Future Imaginaries of Abundant Intelligences: Indigenous Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents
Thursday, April 7 | 12:30 pm PT | 223 Moses | RSVP here
The 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?
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.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Call for Applications: Cornell University Migrations Summer Institute
Application deadline: April 4, 2022
Cornell University invites advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career scholars to apply now for the virtual 2022 Migrations Summer Institute, “The Ongoing Afterlife of Dispossession in Africa and the Americas.”
From July 11 to 22, 20 participants will join a collaborative virtual space that engages with African studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and settler colonial studies from a comparative perspective. A stipend of $2,000 supports each participant as they join a dialogue with other migration scholars, activists, and artists, design curricula and digital humanities resources, and contribute to a publication.
This institute is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge. Learn more and apply here.
EXTERNAL EVENTS
Public attitudes towards immigration in Canada: A false or true positive?
Tuesday, March 22 | 7:00 am PT | Online | RSVP here
Contrary 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?
Ciné Canapé: Language is a Love Story
Wednesday, March 23 | 4:30 pm PT | Online | RSVP here
Join the Alliance Française of San Francisco for a special “Celebrate Francophonie” virtual film screening of the Canadian film Language is a Love Story (original title: “La langue est donc une histoire d’amour”). The film tells the story of a woman who teaches refugees to read and write. Their stories of pain and hope converge in one big-hearted lesson
This program is co-hosted by the consulates general of Canada, Luxembourg, and Switzerland in San Francisco, the Wallonia Export & Investment Agency, and the Quebec delegation in Los Angeles.
Reading Canada: Canada in NATO, 1949-2019
Thursday, March 24 | 11:00 am PT | Online | RSVP here
On April 4, 1949, Canada joined 11 other states in signing the North Atlantic Treaty, establishing a post-war western alliance and becoming one of the founding members of NATO. In the seventy years that followed, Canadian contributions to the organization have assisted operations in Korea, the Baltics, and the Middle East, supported NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe, and played a vital role in promoting Canada’s image of international leadership.
Join the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute for a moderated discussion with Dr. Joel Sokolsky and Dr. Joseph T. Jockel, co-authors of Canada in NATO: 1949-2019. The 2021 publication explores Canada’s historical contributions to NATO and the impact that the alliance has had on Canadian defense and foreign policy.
Permanent Revolution: A reading and conversation with Gail Scott
Thursday, April 21 | 4:00 pm PT | 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 Studies Program
213 Moses Hall #2308
Canadian Studies Program | Univ. of California, Berkeley, 213 Moses Hall #2308, Berkeley, CA 94720