Canada Like You've Never Heard it Before

Canada is more than hockey, Tim Hortons, mounted police and maple leaves and a new lecture series in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies is determined to prove that.

Join us for Canada Like You've Never Heard it Before. From economics to Indigenous issues, government and the east coast, you'll learn what shapes us as a country, where Canada has been and where it is going.

All faculty, staff, students, alumni, community members and proud Canadians are welcome.

2012 Speaker Line-Up

Friday March 9 - featuring Giller Award winning author Joseph Boyden!
Time: 4:00pm
Location: Vanier 135

Canadian author and Giller Award winner Joseph Boyden will visit York to discuss two of his books and answer questions on his work. In his presentation, Mr. Boyden will discuss his recent biography Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, discussing his research and understanding of the Métis leaders. From there, listeners can expect him to make some connections between the character and aspirations of Dumont and that of Mr. Boyden's Three Day Road Cree sharpshooters, Elijah and Xavier. Mr. Boyden will also address Métis and First Nations contributions to Canada's military history and armed forces in light of his writing.

Joseph Boyden is a York Alumni (Creative Writing) and Giller prize Winning author. As he notes of himself, "My heart is part Irish, part Ojibwe. I'm a Canadian in America. I'm grounded by history, and I am inspired by legend." Each of his texts reflects this interdisciplinary and varied identity.

His first book, a collection of short stories based in aboriginal life, was called Born with a Tooth and was nominated for the Upper Canada Writerscraft Award in 2001. Four years later, Boyden authored his bestselling first novel, Three Day Road featuring the story of Cree sharpshooters Xavier and Elijah in Canada's Armed Forces during WW1. Shortlisted for the Governor-General's award in 2006, it also won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Rogers Writer's Trust Fiction Prize, and the inaugural McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award.

Boyden's second book, Through Black Spruce garnered him the 2008 Giller Prize, and again returns the juxtaposition of First Nations and Canadian Culture in person of bush pilot Will Bird. In 2010, Boyden wrote a well-received biography of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, for Penguin's Extraordinary Canadians Series.

Currently, Mr. Boyden teaches writing at the University of New Orleans, and is Sir Wilfred Laurier University's poet-in-residence in Winter 2012.

Past Presentations

2011

Patricia Keeney - Nov. 16 : Living on the Edge: Across Borders in Words and Poems

Lieutenant-Colonel Allan Best - Nov. 11 : Remembering the Sacrifices: Stories of Bosnia and Afghanistan

Cate Sandilands (ENVS) March 21, : "State of Origin? National Parks and Canadian Identity"

Patrick Monahan (LAW) March 1, : "Proroguing of Parliament and the question of whether the Governor General should have accepted the advice of the Prime Minister in the recent controversies" More Details +/-
P. Monahan's Bio

Carolyn Podruchny (HIST) Feb 9, : "Tough Bodies, Fast Dogs, Well-Dressed Wives: Measures of Manhood Among French-Canadian Voyageurs in the North American Fur Trade.”

Janine Marchessault (FILM) Feb 16,: "Inventing 3D: Expo '67"

James Laxer (HREQ) Jan 5, : "The Crash and After: Economic Choices for Canada"

James Laxer Bio +/-

James Laxer is regularly asked to comment on current national and global issues by the Canadian media and frequently writes columns in major newspapers and periodicals.

In 1969, he was one of the founders of the Waffle Group, Canada's largest New Left political movement. In 1971, at the age of 29, he ran second for the national leadership of the New Democratic Party. In the mid 1970s, James Laxer was a leading crusader against the power of multi national petroleum companies. His books, speeches and television appearances helped lead to the creation of a nationally owned oil company, Petro Canada, established to counter the power of companies like Exxon in Canada.

In 1981, Laxer was appointed research director of the federal New Democratic Party. At the end of his two year term, he wrote a controversial, book length critique of the party's economic policies, charging that they were seriously dated. The report was front page news in Canada and was debated for months in the national media.

In 1984, the National Film Board of Canada hired Laxer to be host narrator, for a series of documentaries on the changing global economy and Canada's place in it. In preparing the series, Laxer travelled extensively in Japan, Europe and the United States. The series, entitled Reckoning, was denied broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because it was seen as too controversial.

In 1986-87, Laxer spent a year in Europe writing Decline of the Superpowers. From 1978 to 1981, he hosted a public affairs television program on TV Ontario. He regularly went to Europe to conduct interviews with leading European political and intellectual figures. In 1993 his book False God: How the Globalization Myth Has Impoverished Canada, was published by Lester Publishing.

After the Neo-Conservative Assault was published by Viking in 1996. The Undeclared War: Class Conflict in the Age of Cyber Capitalism, was published by Viking in 1998, and by Penguin Canada in 1999, in a paperback edition. Laxer's book, Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America was on national best seller lists for seven weeks in the autumn of 2000. In his review of the book for the Globe and Mail, David Shribman, Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the Boston Globe, commented: "This is a book by a Canadian that can change the United States." In 2004, Douglas and McIntyre published his book Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism. This memoir of James Laxer's childhood was the winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for best biography/memoir in 2005.

Laxer's latest book is Beyond the Bubble: Imagining a New Canadian Economy. With the onset of the current economic crisis, he argues, one chapter in the economic history of the world-- global neoliberalism-- is ending, and a new one-- of American empire-- is beginning. What role will Canada play in this vastly altered world?

James Laxer is a Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto.

Listen to Laxer's presentation ::: MP3

2010

David McNab: "Arctic Prescription: The Story of William Kennedy's Search for Franklin"

This lecture kicks off the series with a look at the mid-1800s adventures of Métis William Kennedy and his search for missing Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. The lecture was co-sponsored by The Centre for the Study of Indigenous Border Issues and couldn’t have been more timely: On July 25 a team of Parks Canada scientists, archaeologists and surveyors made a historic discovery. They found the HMS Investigator – a ship lost while searching for Franklin and his crew. The ship was found in shallow water in Mercy Bay along the northern coast of Banks Island in the western Arctic.

Professor David McNab's Bio +/-

David T. McNab is a Métis public historian who has worked for more than thirty years a quarter century on Aboriginal land and treaty rights issues in Canada. David teaches Indigenous and Canadian Studies in the new Department of Equity Studies in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University, in Toronto.

He has also been a claims advisor for Nin.Da.Waab.Jig., Walpole Island Heritage Center, Bkejwanong First Nations since 1992. In addition to over eighty published articles, David has published Earth, Water, Air and Fire: Studies in Canadian Ethnohistory (editor) (1998) and Circles of Time: Aboriginal Land Rights and Resistance in Ontario (1999) as well as co-edited Blockades and Resistance: Studies in Actions of Peace and the Temagami Blockades of 1988-89 (2003), Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal People and their Representations (2005), all with WLU Press.

His latest books include (with Ute Lischke) The Long Journey of Canada's Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories and Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal People and their Representations, all published by WLU Press.

In 2008 he published the fourth edition (with Olive Patricia Dickason), of Canada's First Nations, (Oxford University Press). His most recent book was published in October 2009: No Place for Fairness: Indigenous Land Rights and Policy in the Bear Island Case and Beyond, by McGill-Queens University Press.

Listen to McNab's presentation ::: MP3

* Co-sponsored by The Centre for the Study of Indigenous Border Issues

B.W. Powe: "Apocalypse and Alchemy: Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye"

This lecture looks at the the first meetings of what are arguably Canada's best known and most influential thinkers, and their 34 year dialogue with one another through their books, lectures, notes and comments. It is the premise of B.W. Powe's new book on his two teachers that McLuhan and Frye are the sources for an original indigenous visionary tradition. The lecture will look at their conflicts and their harmonies of thought; it will explore how central they are to the Canadian experience of technology and identity. We are still catching up to these two figures who are encoded in our mythological landscape.

Professor B. W. Powe's Bio +/-

B. W. Powe is a Canadian author and Associate Professor of English, York University. After studying with Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, Powe received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1981, and a Ph.D from York University in October 2009. His research focuses on McLuhan and Frye, their crossings in history, their conflicts and harmonies, and the stirring alchemy of their thought.

An accomplished author, essayist and poet, there are many works to Powe's credit. Amongst these include The Solitary Outlaw (1987, 1997), Outage: A Journey into Electric City (1995), The Living Literacies Print Record, (2004), The Unsaid Passing (2005), Towards a Canada of Light (2006), and Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and The Rose (2007). Powe has also written nationally-seen columns for The Globe and Mail newspaper. He has been called "way cool" by the Globe and Mail, "one of our finest cultural commentators" by the Toronto Star, a poet who can write "hair-raising lines" that seem to come "fully formed from the cosmos" by The Globe and Mail and who takes "considerable, unfashionable risks" by The Malahat Review, "a visionary--a modern day Magellan" by The Montreal Gazette, "an intellectual terrorist" by Barbara Amiel in MacLean's.

His novel, Outage, was listed as one of the best ten novels of the year by Philip Marchand in The Toronto Star, in 1995/96. It was also an editor's choice novel in the Globe & Mail in 1995. His book, A Tremendous Canada of Light was selected as a notable book of the year by the Globe and Mail in 1993. His book of poems, The Unsaid Passing, was shortlisted for The ReLit Prize in 2006.

Powe's York courses include "Visionary Literature: from Hildegard von Bingen and Dante to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell," and "Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Two Canadian Theorists." He also continues to teach the first year introduction to literature course.

He has been the program director or co-director for three significant events at York University in Toronto: Marshall McLuhan: What if He Was Right? (1997), The Trudeau Era (1998) and Living Literacies (2002). He is currently at work founding the McLuhan Initiative for the Study of Literacies at York University.

His novella, These Shadows Remain: A Fable, is to be published in the winter of 2010 by Guernica

Listen to Powe's presentation ::: MP3

Priscila Uppal (CRWR) "Health Poetry: Priscila Uppal's Traumatology & Winter Sport Poems "

Priscila Uppal's two most recent poetry collections examine notions of health (body, mind, spirit) in unconventional and exciting ways. The world of Traumatology is populated by dubious health authorities as the poet attempts to achieve some sort of working relationship with the various parts of her psyche and psysionomy, and against her mortality. Winter Sport: Poems is a collection of the poems Uppal wrote as the first Canadian Athletes Now's poet-in-residence during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics. Here Uppal celebrates the beauty of winter sports (luge, bobsleigh, figure skating, hockey, and more), the athletes, the games, sport vocabulary, but most of the all the spectacle of the human body and spirit attempting the impossible.

Uppal will read from and discuss these two collections of poetry and the impact they've had on the poetry, sports, and health worlds. A Question and Answer period will follow.
Professor Priscila Uppal's Bio +/-

Priscila Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer and York University professor. Among her publications are seven collections of poetry, most recently, Ontological Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the $50,000 Griffin Poetry Prize), Traumatology (2010), and Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K.); the critically-acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009); and the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009).
Her work has been published internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean and Latvian. She is on the Board of Directors at the Toronto Arts Council, and was poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic games. Time Out London recently dubbed her “Canada’s coolest poet.” For more information visit priscilauppal.ca

Jody Berland "Cultures of Militarization"

In the face of the now infamous Toronto G20 summit and the violence surrounding it, many observers wondered "what happened to my city?" and "is this Canada?!" The feelings of fear, frustration, rage, humiliation, and confusion surrounding this event brought public attention to the growing securitization of Canadian society. In her talk "Cultures of Militarization," Professor Berland takes these events as a starting point for a broader discussion about the militarization of culture and the culturalization of the military in Toronto, in Canada, and beyond.
Her talk draws from the introduction to the recently published book Cultures of Militarization (edited by Berland and Blake Fitzpatrick, TOPIA/ Cape Breton University Press, 2010) and some of its case studies to open out the discussion of militarization to the surfaces and screens of contemporary culture.

Jody Berland Bio +/-

Listen to Berland's presentation ::: MP3

Jody Berland has published widely on cultural studies, Canadian culture and communication theory, music and media, culture and the environment, and the cultural technologies of space. She is co-editor of Theory Rules: Art as Theory/Theory and Art (1996), Cultural Capital: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions and the Value(s) of Art (2000), and editor of Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (www.yorku.ca/topia).

Her book North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (2009) explores changing relations between nation, technology, nature and culture in Canada as expressed in spatial writing, landscapes, borders, radio broadcasts, pianos, representations of the weather, concepts of evolution, stories about women, and other cultural expressions.

Her current research, 'Virtual menageries in network cultures' concerns the widespread triangulation of animals, mobile technologies and young consumers in contemporary advertising, popular culture and digital spaces, and its implication for humanist and posthumanist thought. This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Professor Berland was awarded the Association for Canadian Studies 2009 Award of Merit. Her latest book, co-edited with Blake Fitzpatrick, uses the G20 Summit in Toronto as a starting point to investigate the ongoing process of militarization in our civic culture.

Maura Hanrahan "Women as Agents their own Lives in Depression Era Newfoundland"

"The Roots of the Novel, Sheilagh's Brush" by Maura Hanrahan"

Testimonials

"The Speakers Series will give students insight into how wonderful Canada is, and how many things there are to learn about our country." - Alison Sanelli, second-year humanities student

"I am excited and eager to participate in the Canadian Studies Program Speakers Series. As a student spectator, I know I will achieve further knowledge that will be beneficial to my future professional career. We couldn't ask for better professors guiding us through our educational interests!" - Cassie Savoia, second-year Canadian Studies student

“The series really aims to showcase the breadth and depth of Canadian scholarship and research at York. We have many senior faculty from across York and across disciplines participating – including two Canada Research Chairs – who are eager to engage with students and members of the York community on key issues of the Canadian experience.” - Dr. Jon Sufrin, program coordinator

Thank you to the following sponsors

Without the generosity of the following individuals and groups, this series would not be made possible. We appreciate your support.

Dean's Office, LA&PS
Canadian Studies program
Students for Canadian Studies
Stong College
Vanier College
Winters College
New College
Calumet College
Founders College