August 11-13, 2026
York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
4700 Keele St, North York, ON M3J 1P3
Over the last five decades, rapid changes in constructions of Canadian identities have often failed to reflect historical tensions, including early conflicts with Indigenous communities, later frictions between and among settler communities, and the impacts of consecutive and varied waves of immigration. The Interrogating Canadian Identities / Les identités canadiennes — une interrogation (ICI) conference interrogates anachronistic and persistent images and ideas about Canadian identity that date back to 1967 and the celebration of Canada’s centennial. This conference is part of the Interrogating Canadian Identities / Les identities canadiennes — une interrogation (ICI) SSHRC Partnership Development Grant.
Conference Programme
Please access our conference programme* here (PDF).
*Last updated August 10. As the programme has already been printed, any changes will be reflected in this PDF version. Changes that will impact presenter times and locations will be communicated to the presenters directly, although we do not anticipate any of these changes.
Please note that if you are a presenter, you will have been emailed the presenter version of this program with minor additions that are not available to the general public. If you are a presenter and have not received the presenter version, please contact us and we will be happy to provide that for you.
Call for Papers
The Interrogating Canadian Identities / Les identités canadienne -- une interrogation (ICI) SSHRC grant is hosting a conference to interrogate anachronistic and persistent images and ideas about Canadian identity that date back to 1967 and the celebration of Canada's hundredth anniversary. These conceptions, however, are often rooted in the historical conceptions of settler communities and this country's first one hundred and fifty-five years.
The conference is particularly interested in the continued impact of that past on contemporary views of what it means to be a Canadian, in light of changes to the Canadian population over five decades of immigration following the enactment of the Multiculturalism Policy in 1971; the Calls to Action stemming from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015); movements toward greater diversity, equity, and inclusion; and other shifts in the way Canadians understand their identities in the 21st century. Over the last five decades rapid change in constructions of Canadian identities have often failed to reflect historical tensions, including early conflicts with Indigenous communities, later frictions between/among settler communities, and the impacts of consecutive and various waves of immigration.
To examine the theme of Interrogating Canadian Identities / Les identités canadienne -- une interrogation (ICI), we welcome paper proposals in areas including, but not limited to:
- Canadian identities and culture
- Canadian media, policy, or representations
- Indigenous Peoples in Canada
- Canadian media history
- Diversity and inclusion in Canada
Submission Guidelines
Please submit an abstract of 250 to 300 words, along with a short bio (100 words), to https://amaclenn.apps01.yorku.ca/machform/view.php?id=8082 by June 8, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by mid-June.
Download a PDF copy of the Call for Papers here. A French version of the Call for Papers is available here.
Accommodations & Travel
The following accommodations and dining options are located on or near the York University Keele campus and may be convenient for conference attendees.
Hotel Accommodations
Schulich Hotel – Located on campus at the Schulich Executive Conference Centre. Ideal for easy access to the conference.
Visit Website
Address: 56 Fine Arts Rd, North York, ON M3J 1P3
Phone: (416) 650-8300
Keele Campus Individual Room Bookings – Located on campus. Individual dorm room bookings by request. Please note that requests are subject to eligibility and availability.
Visit Website to fill out Accommodation Request Form.
Address: 4700 Keele St, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
Four Points by Sheraton Vaughan – Approximately 8-minute drive (20-minute walk) from York University.
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Address: 3400 Steeles Ave W, Vaughan, ON L4K 1A2
Phone: (905) 760-2120
Staybridge Suites Toronto – Vaughan South. About 10-minute drive (27-minute walk) from York University.
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Address: 3600 Steeles Ave W, Woodbridge, ON L4L 8P5
Phone: (905) 856-9600
Courtyard by Marriott Toronto Vaughan – Approximately 8-minute drive (40-minute walk) to York University.
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Address: 150 Interchange Wy, Toronto, ON L4K 5P7
Phone: (905) 660-9938
Keele Campus Restaurants
This is a map of restaurants on Keele campus that are near the conference.
Tim Hortons - Located in the Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Building, to the left of the main entrance.
Address: Tel Centre, York University, Victor Philip Dahdaleh Building, 4700 Keele St York University, North York, ON M3J 1P3
Hours: Monday to Thursday 8:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m., Friday 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., Saturday & Sunday 9:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m.
The Quad - A street with several food options, located along The Pond Rd.
Address: 95 The Pond Rd, North York, ON M3J 0L1
Restaurant list: Aroma Espresso Bar, Osmow's Shawarma, Burger King, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Subway, Gong cha, Salus Fresh Food, Chungchun Rice Hot Dog, Fat Bastard Burrito, Insomnia Cookies, Sushi-Q, Papa Johns Pizza, M2GO by Mandarin, Meltwich Food Co., Akashiro, Crepe Delicious, Booster Juice, Pizza Studio, Omni Noodle, Kajun Chicken & Seafood
York Lanes Mall – Shopping centre on campus with several food, shop, and service options.
Visit Website
Address: 80 York Blvd, North York, ON M3J
Hours: Varies depending on the restaurant/shop/service.
Restaurant list: Aroma Espresso Bar, Great Canadian Bagel, Pita Land Shawarma, Firehouse Subs, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, Thai Express, Chaska Indian Street Food, La Diperie, Hero Certified Burgers, La Prep, Z-Teca Mexican Eatery, Sushi Shop, The Campus Bubble Tea, Cucina Italian Cafe, Marry Me Mochi, Qoola FRESH, Sakura Japanese Foods
Shops/Services list: Shoppers Drug Mart, Grocery Checkout, Value Mobile, YorkU Bookstore, Appletree Medical, Bank of Montreal, York Lanes Dental, Salon Concepts
Central Square - Various food options in the heart of campus.
Address: 115 Campus Walk, North York, ON M3J 1P3
Hours: Varies depending on the restaurant in Central Square. Central Square itself does not close, as it is part of the University.
Restaurant list: Subway, Starbucks, Booster Juice
Schulich Executive Dining Room – Convenient for meals on campus.
Visit Website
Address: 111 Ian MacDonald Blvd, North York, ON M3J 1P3
Hours: Monday to Friday 7:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m, Monday to Thursday 4:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m. (Dinner), Saturday & Sunday Closed. Please note that they are closed for à la carte dinner service during the month of August.
First Student Centre - A food court with various options for meals on campus.
Address: 94 York Blvd, North York, ON M3J 1P3
Hours: Varies depending on the restaurant.
Restaurant list: Wendy's, Jimmy The Greek, Yogen Fruz, Gino's Pizza, Afro Spice, The Break Room, Pagoda Tree, The Island's Caribbean Cookshop, Gateway
The Orange Snail – Caribbean cuisine on campus.
Address: Stong College, 163-165 Campus Walk #106, North York, ON M3N 3A7
Hours: Monday 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m., Tuesday 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m., Wednesday 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m., Thursday 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m., Friday 11:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m., Saturday & Sunday Closed
Nearby Restaurants
Genji Sushi – Fresh sushi and Japanese cuisine.
Visit Website
Address: 2899 Steeles Ave W, North York, ON M3J 3A1
Hours: Monday Closed, Tuesday 11:30 a.m.–9 p.m., Wednesday 11:30 a.m.–9 p.m., Thursday 11:30 a.m.–9 p.m., Friday 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m., Saturday 12:30–9 p.m., Sunday Closed
VMV's Bar & Grill – Casual dining with a variety of options.
Visit Website
Address: 4207 Keele St Unit 1-2, North York, ON M3J 3T8
Hours: Monday 11 a.m.–1 a.m., Tuesday 11 a.m.–1 a.m., Wednesday 11 a.m.–1 a.m., Thursday 11 a.m.–1 a.m., Friday 11 a.m.–2 a.m., Saturday 9 a.m.–2 a.m., Sunday 9 a.m.–1 a.m
York University Keele Campus Map
Free drinking water is available to the York Community. Committed to providing alternatives to the use of disposable plastic water bottles, the University has eliminated the sale of single use plastic water bottles. Please see the Green Maps page for the locations of the water refill stations.
For directions to Keele Campus from Pearson International Airport, please visit this page.
For more information, please visit the TTC website.
York University Keele Campus Visitor Parking Map
For a PDF version of this parking map, please click here (PDF).
Please refer to the yellow highlighted and circled parking lots. These are the parking lots that are available for visitor parking.
The conference location is highlighted and circled in red. The closest visitor parking lots to the conference are:
- Lot 84 - Student Services Parking Garage
- Lot 83 - Atkinson Lot
- Lot 82 - Nelson Road Lot
- Lot 72 - York Lanes Parking Garage
- Lot 71 - Vanier Lot
To pay for parking, please use the HonkMobile App. You may also scan the QR code located in the visitor parking lot to access the HONK website page for your specific visitor parking lot. HONK will notify you by text message or push notification 15 minutes before your parking time expires, which allows you to purchase additional time directly through the app should you require it.
Contact
For more information or questions, please contact Dr. Anne F. MacLennan at amaclenn@yorku.ca and Christine Cooling at ccools@yorku.ca.
Conference Abstracts
Roberto Perin, York University, "The Tangled Web of Immigrant Identity"
A native of Montréal, Roberto Perin is Professor Emeritus in the History Department at York University specializing in migrant and religious history. He is the author of Rome in Canada:: the Vatican and Canadian Affairs in the Late Victorian Age (UTP 1990), winner of the John W. Dafoe Book Prize; Ignace de Montréal, artisan d'une identité nationale (Boréal 2008); The Many Rooms of This House: Diversity in Toronto's Places of Worship since 1840 (UTP 2018), winner of the Heritage Toronto Historical Book Award; Gens du Pays : une immigration nord italienne au Québec au XXe siècle (Presses de l'Université Laval, 2026).
“In the multicultural imaginary, identity is something immigrants bring with them from their place of birth and passed on intact to their offspring. It is one of the many tesserae making up the Canadian mosaic. Such a fixed and static perspective, however, reflects neither the lived immigrant experience, nor the fluid and changing nature of culture. Instead, what is proposed here is the notion of hybridity: an immigrant culture already hybrid in the first generation whose content is altered with each successive generation, becoming increasingly abstract and performative over time. Such is the conclusion reached in my just published monograph, Gens du pays : une immigration nord italienne au Québec au XXe siècle. It is a longitudinal study spanning a century of two migrant waves to Québec from the Italian province of Pesaro, the first occurring before the Second World War is comprised of three generations and the second in the postwar period of two generations. It examines their insertion in the labour market, their residential patterns, life-cycle practices, and social relations. Through these themes it interrogates the process of integration, a complex phenomenon in Québec because of its two historically dominant linguistic communities. The behaviour of this group offers little comfort to the multicultural imaginary. Like Italian immigrants generally, these immigrants are not spatially concentrated but rather spread throughout the island of Montréal and its environs. Only a minority resides close to Italian Catholic churches and the schools attached to them where the opportunity to hear and speak Italian is most pronounced. But even when restricted to the household, this opportunity is undermined by the marked trend to marriage outside the group in the second (60%) and third (86%) generations. How can the ancestral culture be retained in families that are not culturally homogeneous? Already in the first generation, the inexorable pull of the dominant cultures - Québécois, English Canadian, and American - is apparent. Words and expressions are appropriated from them to express new realities. As well, the worlds of industrial work, urban life, and consumerism impose new ways of seeing and being on those originating in rural and peasant settings. This already hybridized culture is then passed on to the second generation which has no immediate or direct contact with the culture of origin except as mediated by one or both parents. Whereas the latter's hybrid culture is tendentially more European than North American, for their children, the opposite is the case: their immediate and direct contact is with this continent's cultures. By the third generation, the culture of origin is a distant reality likely represented by only one parent and perhaps a still living grandparent. It is made up of ritualized practices and images transmitted by popular culture. When speaking of cultural retention, we must ask ourselves what is being retained. Is it the culture the immigrant generation brought with them or some imagined one more or less disconnected from daily life?”
Darrion Singh, York University, "Are We ‘Indian Enough?’: Finding a Space for Iando-Caribbeans in Canada, 1960 to the Present"
Darrion Singh is a historian of the British Caribbean and Canada. He holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto, and is pursuing his Master of Arts at York University through a Canada Graduate Research Scholarship. His research focuses on Indo-Caribbeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interest in Canada’s role in migration across the British Empire. More broadly, Darrion studies the history of capitalism, commodities, and commerce in the Atlantic World. He is interested in the movement of goods and people during Indian indentureship, British colonization in the Americas, and in the Caribbean post-1945.
“What does it mean to be Indo-Canadian? More specifically, what does it mean to be Indo-Canadian when your family immigrated from the Caribbean? This project examines the existence of Indo-Caribbean identity in Canada, and its history of migration from India to its interactions with other diasporic communities. In this project, I consider how the concept of a “double diaspora,” identified through Indian immigration to the Caribbean through indentureship (1838-1917), and then to Canada, intersects with questions of belonging, cultural memory, and representation in Canadian history. I am particularly interested in how the Indo-Caribbean immigration experience to Canada relates to immigration directly from the subcontinent, and considers the persistence of ancestral memory and cultural signifiers as important elements of establishing a space within Canada today. In my research, I draw on my experience as a second-generation Canadian from Trinidad, and integrate my understanding of an Indo-Caribbean-Canadian identity with sources from the 1996 Canadian census to research conducted on language and identity to interpret the role of this group among Canada’s cultural mosaic. Particularly, my research argues that the double diaspora contributes to some form of liminal space, as my comparisons of Indo-Caribbean migration to Afro-Caribbean and subcontinental Indian have found that the group exists in a not-here-nor-there place between racial identities. The value of studying Indo-Caribbean-Canadians is more than a case of an isolated diaspora. I argue that the nuances of Canadian immigration policy and present-day identity formation positions Indo-Caribbeans between the African and Indian diasporas, and this presentation studies how such hybridization exemplifies a search for identity facilitated by Canada’s diverse array of cultures. Ultimately, my project investigates how cultural and historical negotiation continues in today’s interactions with ancestry, memory, and belonging, and seeks to extend the role of Indo-Caribbeans and their contributions in Canadian identity.”
Irteqa Khan, York University, "Diaspora, Desi Geographies, and Deconstructing Belonging: The Case of Muslim Pakistani Immigrants in Canada"
Irteqa Khan is a Muslim-Canadian writer and poet. She is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at York University. Her research interrogates the stereotypes, perceptions, and fantasies that give shape to the political, social, and cultural belongingness of Muslim Pakistani immigrants in Canada, particularly in Toronto where she resides and Saskatoon where she grew up. Her creative writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and appears in ANMLY, The Feminist Word, The Hyacinth Review, and Five South among others. Irteqa’s debut poetry chapbook, rēza rēza, was published with Gap Riot Press in 2020.
“Although the Pakistani diaspora has had a long and enduring presence in Canada, the politics of immigration fixes racialized immigrants to an ongoing and contradictory position in which they are located both in the center and at the margins of society. Scholars of Canadian immigration have long theorized that it is a nation built on “successive waves” of immigration, arguing that colonialism, immigration, and capitalist labour exploitation are linked. Migration and border studies scholar Soma Chatterjee (2019) and migrant justice scholar and activist Harsha Walia (2021) both suggest that migrants do not just “appear” at borders, rather, they are produced by “systemic forces.” Thus, although temporary and permanent migration are historically used to bolster the Canadian economy, economic opportunity is managed along an uneven axis of citizenship race, and ethnicity. As an extension of the political debate surrounding multiculturalism in Canada, given that people’s immigration, citizenship, race, and ethnicity are interwoven and mutually constituted in their experiences in Canada, other scholars argue that there is an increasing need to critically explore “belonging.” “Belonging” serves as a motivating force for communities to engage or not engage in politics both formally and informally. According to political scientists Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Christina Gabriel (2002), encounters and engagements bound to “belonging” and “non-belonging” affect peoples’ sense of self and is therefore politically important. Moreover, within the context of rampant anti-Muslim hate that sees Muslims as uncivilized ‘Others’ and mobilizing postcolonial theory and a feminist geopolitics framework to understanding the urban/rural divide and how it influences the formation of new national identities, this research focuses on everyday negotiations of citizenship, assimilation, integration, culture, work, and social relationships in the Muslim Pakistani diaspora in an effort to fill the gaps in the literature on immigration, diaspora, transnationalism, regionalism, identity, and multiculturalism in Canada.”
Joseph Mensah, York University, "Transnational Identity and Sense of Belonging among Older Black African Immigrants in Canada: What Gender Engenders"
Joseph Mensah is a Professor of Geography at the Faculty for Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto. His specialties are in population geography, immigrant transnationalism and identity formation, critical development theory, research methods, and quantitative techniques. Professor Mensah is a prolific scholar and a recipient of numerous competitive grants from the likes of the Gates Foundation, ILO, GDN, IDRC, and SSHRC. Professor Mensah is the author of Black Canadian: History, Expereinces, Social Conditions (2002 & 2010) and the co-author of Boomerang Ethics: How Racism Affects Us All (2017).
“Although research on older immigrants in Canada continues to grow, we know very little about how their identity and sense of belonging play out in a transnational context, and lesser still is known about how these processes are gendered, especially among Black African immigrants. Yet, such affective and ambivalent aspects of their lives are important when it comes to their well-being. Indeed, to the extent that identity formation is a process, we should expect it to continue through old age, especially since aging often comes with dramatic changes to our physical and mental capabilities, as well as our social lives. Arguably, issues of identity and sense of belonging are particularly important for older Black African immigrants whose bodies have long been racially coded in ways that place limits on their settlement and integration in many Western societies, including Canada. Moreover, both “identity formation” and “sense off belonging” are patently gendered, regardless of one’s age, race, or immigrant status; thus, gender remains an important discriminatory factor in how immigrants construct their identity and sense of belonging. This paper sheds light on how older Black African immigrants enact their identity and sense of belonging to both Canada and their home country. How do they describe their sense of belonging to Canadian society? How do they rate their attachment to Canada vis-à-vis their home country? Do they often think of themselves as “just or simply Canadians” or as people with hyphenated immigrant identities? And to what extent do these dynamics vary based on their gender? Ultimately, the study provides a rare insight into the gender dimensions of how older Black African immigrants sustain their identity and sense of belonging to their homeland and Canada, amidst their experiences of racism in the latter.”
John Bessai, Independent Scholar, "Public Code and the Canadian Aporetic Condition: Interrogating Identity Across Canadian Public Institutions"
John W. Bessai is an independent scholar, media producer, and educator working across Canadian Studies, political theory, public policy, and media studies. A third-generation Canadian and non-Indigenous settler scholar, he studies how public institutions, cultural policy, and media infrastructures shape democratic life in Canada and globally. His research develops the concepts of the Canadian aporetic condition, art as a public service, public code, and counter-policy. His recent work examines institutional design, public education, digital storytelling, environmental media, Canadian public culture, and democratic life. He holds a PhD in Canadian Studies from Trent University and brings professional research-creation experience across media.
“Canadian identity often appears in public language through inclusion, diversity, reconciliation, care, access, and recognition. This paper asks how those terms become material within public institutions and how their procedures shape civic belonging. Drawing on my current monograph project, Counter-Policy in Canada, I develop public code as a way to read the institutional decisions, classifications, administrative routines, policy documents, digital systems, public communications, and pedagogical forms through which Canadian identities become legible. The paper situates this method within the Canadian aporetic condition: the unresolved field in which settler sovereignty, Indigenous political authority, plural citizenship, welfare-state service, and cultural recognition occupy the same civic terrain. The analysis follows three institutional sites: official multiculturalism, public education, and welfare-state care. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act and related public communication organize identity through recognition, celebration, and managed pluralism. Public education translates Canadian identity into curriculum, assessment, language policy, attendance systems, digital platforms, and institutional routines. Welfare-state care organizes civic belonging through eligibility, waiting, access, portability, and administrative recognition. Together, these examples show how Canadian identity emerges through procedures that arrange visibility, memory, language, access, time, and public reasoning. The paper’s contribution lies in the concept of counter-policy. Counter-policy names institutional learning that begins when experiential archives clarify pressures within public systems. These archives include testimony, policy language, administrative records, educational materials, public communications, digital traces, and cultural memory. Counter-policy turns those records into revised obligations for public institutions. In this frame, interrogating Canadian identities requires attention to public narratives and to the administrative, pedagogical, technological, and institutional forms that make those narratives durable in civic life.”
Matt Lomas,York University, "Colonial Contradictions in Canadian Nation-Building"
Matt Lomas is a PhD student in the Sociology department at York University. Matt's doctoral research deals with the interplay of multiculturalism and the 1969 White Paper in the context of Pierre Trudeau's "just society" nation-building project.
“My proposed presentation is based on my ongoing dissertation research, in which I examine the interplay and contradictions between the 1969 White Paper proposal to abolish the Indian Act and the adoption of official multiculturalism in 1971. In that research, I take a Marxist approach, aiming to examine Trudeau’s “just society” nation-building project through the lens of land control and the political economy of settler colonialism. From my historical materialist vantage, I argue that the primary goal of Canadian nation-building is not identity per se but land control. The years 1968-1972 were a crucial period for Trudeau’s “just society,” as the Canadian government introduced both the 1969 White Paper, which was rejected on a wave of Indigenous activism, and the 1971 multiculturalism policy that has become a major Canadian symbol. It is curious, however, how Canada can maintain the Indian Act and multiculturalism; this curiosity is what I am taking up in my research. Based on preliminary theoretical work, I argue that properly understanding Canadian political economy and nation-building means understanding Canada as primarily a land economy, and that it is only in the context of privatisation of land and the capitalist accumulation that accompanies it, that we can make full sense of Canadian nation-building. With this approach, I am argue that, rather than being primarily identity-based or a type of Andersonian (2006) “imagined community,” Canada in the post-patriation period remains rooted in this land conflict. Multiculturalism, then, is not fully understood as a policy that breeds tolerance, so much as one that ensures the survival of the Canadian state and its internal class struggle. As such, we must consider how the land question can be overcome in a revolutionary transformation to be able to conceive of a Canada that can fulfill the promise of multiculturalism and the “just society.”
Sophia Martensen, York University, "From Multiculturalism to EDI: Universities and the Reproduction of Canadian Mythologies"
Sophia Martensen is a sixth year PhD candidate in the Socio-Legal Studies program at York. She holds an Honours in Criminology and a Major in Psychology from Western University, and a Master’s in Criminology and Sociolegal Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research sits at the intersection of racial governmentality, legal liberal critique, and critical university studies to examine Western liberal universities and the limits of transformative change within institutional spaces. Her current project focuses on anti-Black racism at a case study institution, tracing the emergence of social justice demands and analyzing how institutional responses discipline those demands.
“Over five decades since the implementation of the Multiculturalism Policy (1971), multiculturalism remains a powerful characteristic of Canadian national identity. However, some argue that the language of multiculturalism obscures race, manages difference, and remains complicit with settler colonialism (see Carlaw, 2021; Thobani, 2007; Bannerji, 2000; Ahmed, 2000; Simpson, James, & Mack, 2011). Arguably, the language of multiculturalism, through its enshrinement in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988), has enabled the proliferation of equity-based projects, such as Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI) frameworks in Canada that operate in both formal and informal ways. Yet, as some note, such projects, though ambitious in theory, have achieved substantially little when it comes to structural change in the academy (see Allan & Hackett, 2022; Henry et al. 2017). Nevertheless, national level EDI frameworks, I argue, are mirrored and supported at the institutional level—the institutionalization of EDI within university spaces has not only obscured race but supported national mythologies of inclusivity and diversity under a multicultural frame. Using a case study institution, my research demonstrates that in response to demands to address anti-Black racism on campus, university administrators offer EDI as the “…now the entirely predictable form of officially sanctioned ‘social justice’ on offer within the institution” (Thobani, 2022, p. 6). Importantly, demands for EDI frameworks were not within faculty and student demands, yet are offered as the official institutional response. Therefore, the university operates as a key site where Canadian identity is performed and secured, supporting an image of inclusivity that can obscure race/ism. The deployment of EDI frameworks in the university matches national-level strategies that function to re-narrativize Canadian identity, supporting an image of the benevolent nation. By affirming EDI frameworks both nationally and institutionally, the “‘doing’ of equity” (Thobani, 2022, p. 21) functions as confirmation of a ‘job well done.’”
Sanchari Sur, Wilfrid Laurier University, "Unhappy Disabled Queer Woman and the Failure of Canadian Multiculturalism in Saleema Nawaz’s Bone and Bread"
Sanchari Sur is a 2026 Peter Lang Emerging Scholar in Disability Studies, with their current research within the intersection of madness, postmemory, and creative writing. They have a PhD in English and Film Studies from Wilfrid Laurier University, and have work published or forthcoming in The Handbook of Global Trans Cinema, Canadian Settler Colonialism (2024), Wasafiri, Al Jazeera, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere.
“In the Canadian multicultural context, persons with disabilities were excluded from the “first draft of the [Canadian] Charter [of Rights and Freedoms]… as a group of protected persons” (Withers). As a social group, Canadians with disabilities are “absent citizens” (Prince), unable to “experience full substantive citizenship” (Bonnet; Lord & Hutchinson; Rioux & Valentine), a “disabling citizenship” (Devlin & Pothier). There is a friction between the way the Canadian state views its disabled citizens and the way these citizens make themselves visible to the state through ongoing protests and campaigns. It is in this friction that I locate my analysis of the queer mad Sikh character, Sadhana, in Saleema Nawaz’s 2016 Canada Reads’ finalist debut novel, Bone and Bread (2013). Contextualizing within a “cultural model of disability” (Chivers) and the current MAID discourse in Canada (Janz; Marquardt; Pullman; Coelho, Maher, Gaind, & Lemmens)—where the Canadian state’s efforts to expand eligibility for MAID “to include people with a sole diagnosis of mental illness and… mature minors,” including kids with disabilities (Janz), points to an “untenable” (Braswell & Garland-Thomson) “moral issue” (Pullman) within Canadian multiculturalism—I explore Sadhana’s relationship to the Canadian state. Nawaz highlights the erasure of Sadhana’s disabled body under the Canadian state through her able-bodied sister, Beena’s representation of Sadhana within a public health psychiatric ward. It is this binary dialectic between the neurotypical and neurodivergent sisters that my paper dismantles through the literary analysis of the “unhappy” affects (Ahmed)—emotional qualities—assigned to Sadhana’s disabled body. This paper shows how Beena becomes an agent of the Canadian state’s impetus to withhold Sadhana‘s SDH (Social Determinants of Health) needs, needs that would alleviate issues of accessibility in Sadhana’s life, an “untenable” failure of the state (Braswell & Garland-Thomson).”
Anne F. MacLennan,York University, “Shifting Canadian Identities: Is the Sum Greater Than the Whole?”
Bio and abstract to be added.
Whitney Hodgins, Athabasca University, "Erased Identity: Finding the Lost WWI Indigenous Soldiers of Southwestern Manitoba"
Whitney Hodgins is a graduate student at Athabasca University taking a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on Social & Heritage History. Prior to this Whitney completed a BA and BEd from Brandon University. When not being an aspiring scholar, she has spent the last 15 years dedicating her life to being a national award winning advocate, most recently being named a King Charles III Coronation Medalist for bringing credit to her region in Canada.
“During the First World War, thousands of Indigenous men enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, answering a call to arms despite facing severe systemic barriers at home. Yet, the historical legacy of their service was largely obscured by state erasure. This presentation titled, “Erased Identity: Finding the Lost WWI Indigenous Soldiers of Southwestern Manitoba”, examines the deliberate institutional mechanisms that rendered these veterans invisible within the historical record across multiple Indigenous identities. Focusing on Southwestern Manitoba, this research investigates how oppressive government politics, systemic racism, and aggressive assimilation tactics operated to systemically erase the identities of these soldiers. Federal policies, often stripped Indigenous enlistees of their status, or failed to document their distinct cultural identities, absorbing them into a homogenized mainstream narrative that served the Canadians state’s broader goal of forced assimilation as well as upholding the idea that WWI is a white man’s war. By meticulously cross-referencing military enlistment data, community records and census data, this small N within a bigger data set uncovers the long-ignored personal realities of these service members. The goal of this presentation is to move these servicemembers beyond institutional silence and to acknowledge the complex realities of Indigenous servicemembers who fought a double war: one on the battlefield, the other against bureaucratic dispossession at home. This work challenges what it means to be a Canadian within the First World War landscape. In doing so, it reclaims a lost narrative for these Indigenous soldiers and ensures that their vital contributions are etched back into national and local histories.”
Deirdre McCorkindale, University of Guelph, "“The Canadian Study” The Role of Canada’s National Myths in the Fight against Brown v. Board of Education"
Deirdre McCorkindale is an assistant professor in the History department and Black Canadian Studies at the University of Guelph. Her area of interest is the history of race in North America with a focus on the Black Canadian and Black American experience.
“In a strange contradiction, Canada’s identity as a country often excludes Black people from its history as citizens, but at the same time Canada’s image is also deeply tied to Black people through national mythmaking, particularly concerning the Underground Railroad and Canada as a refuge free from racial prejudice. This mythmaking does not stay insulated in Canada but is also an image projected outside our borders and often believed with little pushback. In 1939 Dr. Harry Ambrose Tanser, the Superintendent of Schools for Kent County, published a book entitled The Settlement of Negroes in Kent County, Ontario, and A Study of the Mental Capacity of their Descendants. This book harnessed those same romantic narratives of Canadian racial harmony and the Underground Railroad to promote scientific racism. This paper discusses the Tanser study with a focus on second life of his work in which American scientific racists in the 1950s reanimated his book and Tanser’s assertions of Canada as a tolerant space for Black people to support their attempts to maintain the legal separation between races in response to Brown v. Board of Education.”
Karleen Pendleton Jiménez,Trent University, "Queer Immigrant Fertility in Canada: Constructing an Animated Memoir"
Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is a writer, filmmaker and Professor of education, gender, and social justice at Trent University. Her work centres on queerness, gender diversity, and Latinidad. She is author of several books, including, Tomboys and Other Gender Heroes and The Street Belongs to Us, and animated shorts Tomboy (https://vimeo.com/10772672) and The Butch and The Baby Daddy (CBC Gem). Originally from LA, she now makes her home in Toronto with her girlfriend and daughter.
“This presentation follows the Canadian development of an animated film based on an immigrant butch lesbian’s quest to get pregnant. The author attempts to deconstruct normative conceptions of fertility and pregnancy, which limit who has the right to, and imagination for, bringing more Canadians into the world. For example, how do Canadian laws affect LGBTQI2S individuals seeking fertility support? She explores the influence of gender and ethnic identities (butch and White/Chicana) on her experience in a Canadian fertility clinic, and on the lived conditions of reproduction. Her body, at the intersection of gender, sexuality and ethnicity, produces knowledge for scholarly inquiry. The memoir was constructed through fieldnotes and reflective journaling. Her observations and analyses reveal insights into the sensibilities and values of fertility clinics, as well as those of the communities that have shaped her. In addition, the process of Canadian filmmaking and representation will be analyzed. Who funds Canadian Queer LatinX filmmaking? How do the filmmakers need to describe the story in pitches, for grant-making bodies, for producers, etc. to be recognized as a worthwhile Canadian story. With a pilot of the film screening on CBC Gem, under “Canadian Reflections,” what can we learn about Canada through stories of queer immigrant fertility?”
Thomas Tri, York University, "The True North Strong and Free? Interrogating Media Narratives of LGBTQ+ Refugees in Canada"
Thomas Tri is an incoming Ph.D. student in the School of Social Work at York University. Their research interests spans queer migration, cultural production, and political economy, with published work on LGBTQ+ newcomers in Canada. They are involved with the international organization Rainbow Railroad, supporting LGBTQ+ people facing violence and persecution abroad to relocate to safer locations. Over the past three years, they have also worked front-line with LGBTQ+ newcomers, facilitating arts‑based programming.
“This presentation critically examines Canada’s paradoxical image as a sanctuary for LGBTQ+ refugees by contrasting the nation’s perceived benevolence with oppressive migration practices embedded within its asylum system, including surveillance, deportation, exclusion, and denial. While global advancements in LGBTQ+ rights have occurred in some regions, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, criminalization, and violence continue to persist worldwide, forcing many individuals to seek refuge through asylum pathways in countries such as Canada. Canada is frequently celebrated internationally as a progressive and inclusive “safe haven” for queer and trans refugees; however, refugee experiences often reveal a far more complex and contradictory reality. Drawing on Jasbir Puar’s (2007) concept of homonationalism, this study employs critical discourse analysis to examine sixteen Canadian news articles that construct and circulate narratives about LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers. Through this analysis, the study explores how media discourse reinforces Canada’s national identity as morally exceptional and sexually progressive while simultaneously obscuring the systemic violence experienced by LGBTQ+ migrants under the state. Four key themes emerge from the findings: the dominance of a freedom and liberation narrative positioning Canada as inherently tolerant; the production of an “acceptable” queer refugee subject rooted in normative expectations of gender identity and sexuality; the treatment of refugees as disposable and deportable subjects within migration systems; and the recurring construction of LGBTQ+ refugees as helpless, desperate, and dependent on Canadian intervention. Ultimately, the study argues that Canada’s idealized image as a humanitarian safe haven relies upon selective representations of LGBTQ+ refugees that conceal ongoing forms of institutional violence, precarity, and exclusion. By interrogating the tensions between national self-representation and refugee realities, this research calls for a more nuanced and critical understanding of LGBTQ+ refugee experiences within Canada’s immigration and asylum framework.”
Simal Iftikhar, Trent University, "The Lie We Tell: Educational Barriers of Refugee Students in Canada"
Simal Iftikhar has been deeply committed to her work in activism and social justice in the community of Nogojiwanong, Peterborough. Due to her experiences with immigration as a Pakistani- Canadian, Simal has recently completed her Master’s degree at Trent University in Education, focusing her research on supporting refugees resettling into Canada and better understanding the barriers newcomers face in the Canadian education system. Simal has also worked in the non-profit sector for almost 5 years, working in children’s mental health, health care programming, and child care. These intersectionalities have led to her deep passion for social justice and creating positive changes in our local community. Simal uses her privilege and voice to amplify the voices of marginalized individuals who deserve to have their stories heard.
“The title “The Lie We Tell” refers to the discrepancy between Canada’s public declaration of being a welcoming safe haven for refugees and the harsher, often unwelcoming reality that many refugees face upon arrival. The message to newcomers is that they will be welcomed into Canada, where diversity is celebrated, and acceptance happens with open arms. However, it is clear to me that newcomers and refugees are asked to fit a certain mold and if they can’t, they are labelled with deficits and disabilities. My primary research question was: what are the educational experiences of young refugee students in Canadians schools? I employed DisAbility and Critical Race Theory as my theoretical framework (DisCrit,) which was used to examine experiences refugee students have in schools to highlight their voices and concerns. I also used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as my methodology to deconstruct these social inequities and power relations to create social change and works to dismantle abuses of power between groups through a critical examination of discourses that are embedded in and reinforced by language, practice, pedagogy, power, and policy (Van Dijk, 2015). Major findings were organized as follows: identity vs. identities, discourses of gratefulness and racism, systems of whiteness, systems of support, participants’ assets, mentorship, and what constitutes supportive educational environments. Although each of these central themes derived from data analysis were explored separately, all of them shed important light on the immediate challenges refugee students face and how these difficulties are shaped by problematic dominant discourses that continue to hamper schools’ ability to be responsive to newcomers. Each of these findings contributed to my recommendations, which include implementing a peer mentorship program and preparing teachers for the influx of refugee students. As we continue welcoming thousands of refugees per year, it is not only teachers who must deepen their awareness of instruction and language. Effectively teaching and welcoming newcomer students is also a responsibility of the entire school. As Maadad and Mathews argue, “schools must also recognise and challenge perceptions and discourses about refugees within which schools operate” (2018, p. 3). Furthermore, implementing a buddy system or peer mentorship program can also be instrumental in adjusting to a new learning environment. The first few weeks attending a new school are vital in shaping refugee students’ academic and emotional trajectory (Carley & Farnan, 2013) especially because many refugee students do not start at the beginning of the school year. Many students begin halfway through the school year due to the timing of their resettlement, and this can impact their sense of belonging as friendships and classroom expectations are already established. Joining school mid-way through the academic year can create feelings of loneliness, isolation, and anxiety (Carley & Farnan, 2013). A peer or buddy assigned to the student can decrease barriers to belonging and inclusion by providing an immediate supportive relationship (Vickers et al., 2017).”
Evangeline Holtz Schramek, McMaster University, "u + me in a “tim horton’s imaginary”: towards decolonizing gord"
Evangeline Holtz Schramek is from the territories known as Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia who currently resides on the territories known as Toronto, Ontario. Their creative and critical work appears in journals including CV2, Feminism & Psychology, English Studies in Canada, The Ampersand Review, Feminist Media Studies, Grain, and Canadian Literature. They are completing their doctorate at McMaster University.
“The Tragically Hip’s late frontman Gord Downie was a major proponent of reconciliation. Critics have tried to grapple with Downie’s efforts towards raising consciousness for TRC causes. I look, instead, at how a fan might reckon with his works in the wake of the TRC and after Downie’s final effort, The Secret Path, his most explicitly Indigenous-focused work, and one that received much pushback. But I wanted to think about how to think about the earlier work in light of these efforts and how I can engage my own autobiographical listening of Downie’s oeuvre to, ideally, become a better ally, or at least, face my own blind spots. I go back to a pure aesthetic reaction I had to a Gord Downie song, 2001’s “Vancouver Divorce” – a song that references Tim Horton’s. The song is off Coke Machine Glow (2001), Downie’s first solo project. I begin by trying to outline where my aesthetic reaction came from – and why, over twenty years later, I feel embarrassed about my pure love for a song that, to my adult mind, seems to reinforce settler colonial propositions about Canadian space and cultural ownership. I thus think about Downie as regional bard whose lyrics can serve to “sing a country into existence” (Barclay 12). Whose country does he make manifest? Is it the one that was his by “birthright” (quoted in Millard 651)? White folks in this nation-state are settlers: we have no right to this land. However, this project is not about “cancelling.” I love the music and revere Gord for what he was trying to do. I develop a way to read the Hip and Gord now in concert with a poem by Liz Howard, also set in a Tim Horton’s. I call this framework a “tim horton’s imaginary.””
Jebunnessa Chapola, University of Calgary, "Identity Construction in Diaspora: An Autoethnographic Reflection on the Lived Experiences of a Bangladeshi-Canadian Woman"
Postdoc Associate. Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment Faculty of Science University of Calgary Calgary, AB.
“The growing number of women living with hyphenated diasporic identities in Canada has generated new ways of understanding belonging, identity, and citizenship. Diasporic identities are neither fixed nor singular; rather, they are continuously constructed, negotiated, and reconstructed through lived experiences that span both the country of origin and the host society. The process of identity formation is shaped by multiple and intersecting factors, including nationality, ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion, culture, language, family expectations, ethnic community expectations, cross-cultural community networks, and broader national and transnational political dynamics. These influences shape how diasporic women navigate social inclusion and exclusion, negotiate boundaries of belonging, and make sense of their place within multiple social and cultural worlds. Drawing on an autoethnographic approach, this paper explores my lived experiences as a Bangladeshi-Canadian woman and examines the complexities of diasporic identity construction within the Canadian context. Through critical self-reflection, I investigate how migration, settlement, and everyday interactions contribute to the formation of a hyphenated identity that is both enabling and challenging. Central to this inquiry are questions of belonging and self-identification: What does it mean to be Canadian while maintaining emotional, cultural, and social ties to Bangladesh? How are Bangladeshi and Canadian identities negotiated, prioritized, or contested in everyday life? Is one side of the hyphen privileged over the other, or can both coexist in meaningful and complementary ways? The paper further explores how diasporic women navigate multiple and overlapping identities associated with religion, ethnicity, visible minority status, socioeconomic position, family roles, sexuality, and interracial or intercultural relationships. These identities often intersect in ways that create both opportunities and tensions. As a diasporic woman, I have frequently experienced the burden of carrying multiple identities simultaneously—Bangladeshi and Canadian, immigrant and citizen, woman and professional, mother and community member. For many women, additional identities related to faith, caste, class, race, sexuality, or gender expression further complicate the process of self-definition. Such complexities raise important questions about the social construction of identity and the emotional and psychological challenges associated with navigating multiple, and at times conflicting, social expectations. Through my lived experiences and critical analysis, I argue that identity construction in diaspora is a dynamic, fluid, and often contradictory process. While migration can create opportunities for empowerment, self-discovery, and the formation of new social and cultural identities, diasporic women also encounter systemic and multilayered forms of oppression. These experiences are often shaped by patriarchal norms and power structures. This paper contributes to scholarship on diaspora, gender, and identity by highlighting the lived realities of diasporic women as they negotiate multiple belongings across transnational spaces. It demonstrates how identities are continuously shaped by shifting social, cultural, political, and historical contexts and reveals the tensions between agency and constraint in the process of self-construction. The paper argues that diasporic identity is best understood as fluid, relational, and intersectional, reflecting the ongoing negotiation of belonging, difference, and selfhood across multiple social, cultural, and national locations.”
Laura Beatriz Montes de Oca Barrera, University of Calgary, "Longing for Belonging. Latin American women living in Calgary"
Laura Montes de Oca Barrera is an experienced professor and social researcher committed to generating and sharing knowledge with students, colleagues, and the broader community. She served for ten years as a full-time professor at the Institute of Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and, since 2025, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary. She has published books, chapters, and peer-reviewed articles, mainly for Latin American audiences. Her research focuses on non-profit organizations, collective action and social change; and Latin American women in Canada. In 2023, she produced the docuseries Latinas’ Diary.
Studies show that migration policies are often deeply intertwined with racial hierarchies and colonial legacies. Canadian immigration policies are rooted in racialized and gendered assumptions. These programs were historically designed under the belief that racialized people from the Global South were suited only for low-skilled, seasonal, or caregiving work (Mooten, 2021). This legacy continues to shape how these workers are treated today, as they often face substandard labor protections, limited mobility, and restricted access to permanent residency. Despite Canada’s reputation for meritocracy, foreign-trained professionals – especially racialized women – are frequently underemployed or relegated to low-status jobs (Nazari, 2024). Employers often devalue international credentials and demand “Canadian experience,” a coded exclusionary practice that privileges white, Canadian-born professionals (Karki, 2025). Intersectionality urges us to rethink who gets to belong and why. It challenges the notion of a singular, dominant identity and calls for a more inclusive, pluralistic vision. An intersectional lens reveals that belonging to a political community is not experienced uniformly. Access to rights, recognition, and inclusion depends on how multiple identities—race, gender, class, sexuality, among others—intersect. Based on the stories of eight Latin American women who migrated to Canada in search of a “better life,” I aim to uncover overlapping forms of oppression. My reflection draws on participatory observation and structured interviews conducted as part of a collaborative effort that led to the production of the docuseries Latinas’ Diary: A Journey of Strength, Hope, and Empowerment. In this presentation, I seek to show how these women have longed – and, at times, continue to long – to belong. The questions guiding my argument explore how, in practice, immigrant and refugee women experience belonging, and how they are excluded despite formal recognition.
Christian Ladores, York University, "Racial Formation in Canada: Filipino Diasporic Identity and the Politics of Transnationalism"
Christian Ladores (he/him) is a second year PhD student in political science at York University. His research explores the politics of race, racialization and diasporic identity. He is a graduate research fellow at the Centre for Refugee Studies and a Graduate Associate at the York Centre for Asian Research.
“Despite the rich history of Filipino migration to Canada, dominant racial discourses have relegated the diaspora to a set of preconceived notions about what jobs they should hold, where they should reside, and how they should integrate into society .This dissertation proposal seeks to understand the ways Filipino Canadians affirm, resist and contest processes of racialization. Utilizing theories of racial formation, this research employs a multi-sited analysis of Filipino Canadian diaspora populations in Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg to understand a) how racialization is constructed within state instruments such as immigration policy, citizenship laws, and census categorization, b) the interactions between state and non-state actors that emerge from racial discourses among the Filipino Canadian diaspora, and c) the possibilities for anti-racist solidarity with transnational social movements. At the macro-level, I will analyze legislation, policy documents, press releases, and speeches from key government departments such as Statistics Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). To support this analysis, I will conduct key informant interviews with elected officials and public servants responsible for implementing these policies. At the micro-level, I will investigate how narratives and counter-narratives of racialization are shaped through the lived experiences of Filipinos in Canada and their migration journey by conducting six to nine focus group interviews with Filipino community organizations. This project is situated within contemporary debates about belonging in Canada and how such framings shape policy outcomes. Beyond academic contributions, the findings will be significant for policymakers, advocacy organizations, and diaspora communities working to address racial inequities.”
Maddy Morris, University of California, Berkeley, "National Musk: Malodor and Canadian Nationalism in Joyce Wieland’s Sweet Beaver"
Maddy Morris is a fifth-year PhD student in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the art of the United States and Canada in the twentieth century, incorporating olfactory and atmospheric studies in relation to modern art and modernism. Maddy received her MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, in 2022, and her BA in Studio Art and Italian from Vassar College in 2014. She also served as the director of Davis & Langdale Company, an art gallery in New York, from 2016 through 2021.
“This paper explores how Joyce Wieland’s olfactory artwork Sweet Beaver complicates and unsettles her presentation of national identity. The Canadian filmmaker, painter, and multimedia artist celebrated her nation’s new bilingual unity throughout her art practice, most prominently in 1971 at her solo show at the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibition, True Patriot Love / Véritable amour patriotique, included a wide range of media from textile quilts and collages to an installation of live ducks. The show expressed an exuberance for national pride with symbols of both historic and contemporary Canada, referencing Group of Seven forefather Tom Thomson and prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s slogan, “reason over passion.” Wieland peppered bright colors, hearts, and kisses throughout the exhibition to present a schoolgirl-coded affectionate enthusiasm for Canadian identity. However, Wieland twisted this sweetness into something more complex through her manipulation of the olfactory dimension of the show. Wieland created her only perfume work, the home-brewed concoction Sweet Beaver, which she sprayed throughout the exhibition and sold as a souvenir in the gift shop. Nose-witness accounts called the fragrance cloying and aggressive, with press noting that the odor was distinctly unpleasant for visitors. This transformation of sweetness turned sickly added a dimension of criticism to the show’s ostensibly unquestioned national pride. Through this malodorous intervention, Sweet Beaver functioned as a facilitator for viewers to consider this nationalism critically. Beyond its scent capacity, the work’s symbolism drew attention to several feminist, ecological, and economic concerns for the nation and its people. Sweet Beaver proved pivotal in shifting the exhibition’s presentation of Canadian nationalism, using national signifiers as both beloved but also precarious, even dangerous, if left uncontrolled. This paper considers how Sweat Beaver utilized its malodorous, anti-aesthetic presence amidst a celebration of the nation to caution against the potential pitfalls of unbridled nationalism.”
Lynne Rennie, Alberta University of the Arts, "Access Points to Identity: Intertextuality, Intersectionality, and the Persistence of Canadian Symbols"
Lynne Rennie is a designer, educator, and researcher whose work explores branding, visual culture, national identity, and the meanings embedded in everyday objects and experiences. Drawing on perspectives from semiotics, sociology, history, and cultural studies, she examines how symbols, stories, and shared references contribute to cultural recognition and collective identity. She teaches advertising, branding, and packaging design at Alberta University of the Arts and holds a Master of Professional Studies in Branding from the School of Visual Arts. Her current research project, Drawn to Canada (on Instagram @DrawnToCanada), uses illustration, writing, and embodied research to investigate how Canadians recognize, interpret, and negotiate contemporary Canadian identity.
“Canadian identity is often interrogated through hard questions asked and answered about broad concepts such as multiculturalism, reconciliation, diversity, and national values, but the lived reality for most Canadians is that they will encounter and negotiate national identity by recognizing cultural symbols and images. Drawing on theories of imagined communities, representation, myth, recognition, and intersectionality, I argue that a true sense of Canadian identity persists in part because visual symbols remain culturally legible and important across periods of demographic, political, and social change. Symbols endure when they are capable of acquiring new meanings without losing their recognizability. An intertextual perspective helps explain how symbols accumulate layered meanings through their relationships to other symbols, stories, institutions, and memories, while an intersectional perspective reveals how those meanings are experienced differently by Canadians occupying diverse social, cultural, regional, and historical positions. This paper leverages embodied research and uses as a data set my ongoing project, Drawn to Canada, a collection of 157 (and counting) illustrations and essays created since 2024 that documents Canadian symbols, figures, places, words, and everyday objects (best viewed on Instagram @DrawnToCanada). From joyful everyday images of pop culture, consumerism, and media, all the way to thought-provoking images from history, science, or nature, these symbols function as access points through which people recognize, interpret, embrace, contest, or reject ideas of Canadian identity. Viewed collectively, the images I reference illustrate how Canadian identity is continually reconstructed through symbols whose meanings persist, evolve, and are interpreted differently across communities and generations. By examining both the symbolic relationships that connect Canadians and the diverse identities through which those symbols are experienced, this paper offers a framework for understanding how Canadian identities remain simultaneously recognizable, contested, and adaptable in an era shaped by multiculturalism, Truth and Reconciliation, immigration, and changing understandings of what it means to be Canadian.”
Mark O'Connell, Seneca Polytechnic, "Fashioning Canada: Dress, Commodity Flows, and the Material Politics of Canadian Identity"
Dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell is a professor of fashion studies at Seneca Polytechnic, Toronto. His research addresses visual culture, political economy, material culture, and fashion history. He has published widely in leading journals, and his monograph Canadian Fashion Economies was published by Bloomsbury in 2025. An artist, writer, and designer, he previously worked in-house at M.A.C Cosmetics and in men’s fashion. His current research examines Canadian fashion objects as evidence of colonization, globalization, Indigenous agency, and national identity formation. More at markoconnellstudio.com.
“This presentation examines Canadian identity through the material culture of dress, arguing that fashion objects provide an important but at times overlooked historical archive of globalization, colonization, Indigenous agency, and national self-fashioning. Canadian fashion history has frequently been narrated through colonial frameworks that privilege European influence, elite consumption, and metropolitan taste. Such narratives risk positioning Canada as a derivative fashion culture while marginalizing the sophisticated textile, garment, and adornment practices that existed before and alongside colonial society. Drawing from my monograph Canadian Fashion Economies (Bloomsbury 2025) this presentation uses object-based analysis to trace how garments and textiles participated in the making of Canada as both a society and a political economy. Case studies include Chilkat dancing blankets, beaver-felt top hats, and Hudson’s Bay trade cloth and blanket coats. Each object reveals a different dimension of Canadian identity: Indigenous trade networks and ceremonial authority, the fur trade and European imperial desire, and the transformation of trade textiles into nationalist symbols. By reading clothing as historical evidence, this paper challenges the assumption that Canadian fashion began with colonial importation or industrial modernity. Instead, it proposes that Canadian identities have always been materially negotiated through exchange, adaptation, and creative survival. Fashion objects do not merely reflect Canadian culture; they actively participate in the production of identity, and historical memory. In this way, dress history can contribute to a broader interrogation of Canadian history by revealing how objects, commodities, and archives mediate the contested meanings of nationhood.”
Sarah Ghrawi, York University, "‘Overdressed and Over-Accessorized:’ Jane Harris and the Transnational Weaving of a Postwar Canadian Fashion Aesthetic"
Sarah is a Ph.D. candidate in History. Her Ph.D. is funded by the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS). Her research explores the role of immigrant women as entrepreneurs shaping Canadian luxury spaces in Montreal and Toronto from the 1940s to the 1980s. Her academic training focuses on Twentieth-Century Canadian history, art and fashion, transnationalism, immigration and ethnicity, and oral history methodologies. She has presented her research at international conferences, such as those held at New York University, the Academia Nacional de Historia y Geografía in Mexico City, and the Universidad Autónoma del Perú in Perú.
“Jane Harris, a Jewish evacuee of Dutch descent, arrived in Montreal from London in 1940 and soon emerged as a pivotal figure in the Canadian luxury fashion scene. Harris sought to define a distinctly Canadian fashion aesthetic by blending British sophistication, expressed through high-quality fabrics, classic design, and equestrian elegance, with Canadian modesty and simplicity. Rejecting what she called the “overdressed and over accessorized” American style, she viewed Canadian women as more discerning and less susceptible to fleeting trends shaped by American cultural excess.Working between Canada and Britain, Harris crafted an entrepreneurial identity rooted in transnational exchange. Her continued ties to Britain, evident in her support for Dollars for Britain and in her sourcing of fine wool through her father’s London firm, gave her creations both material and cultural weight. Through these practices, she positioned Canadian fashion within imperial networks even as postwar Canada sought cultural autonomy. Her career illustrates how postwar fashion articulated a distinctive national expression while enabling women to navigate entrepreneurship, transcultural belonging, and cross-class ethnic solidarities.”
Lisa Seiler, York University, "Wilderness, Inclusion, and Canadian Identity: The Legacy of an Elite History in Nature-Related Groups"
Lisa Y. Seiler has recently defended her PhD in the Department of Sociology at York University. Before returning to school, she spent about twenty years in the environmental non-profit sector, where she encountered a wide range of understandings of and approaches to climate change and the natural environment. Her dissertation focuses on nature-related non-profits in Ontario and whether and how they communicate with their constituents about climate change.
“The concept of wilderness is part of the Canadian identity. The vast majority of Canadians enjoy spending time in nature and an array of local clubs exist to support them, such as hiking clubs, naturalist clubs, and more. Many of those clubs have been around for decades, as descendants of the original environmental movement. The movement, however, was founded primarily by affluent white men who generally ignored existing uses of the land in their quest to preserve and protect wilderness sites. For instance, the establishment of Banff National Park involved removing the Stoney Nakoda First Nation from the land and building a landmark vacation destination for elite tourists along the new Canadian Pacific Railway line. Recent research on nature-related groups in Ontario explores the legacy of this elite history. Interviews, surveys, and textual data revealed a continuation of white dominance and privileged access to environmental amenities. Naturalization of that privilege was defended through a Canadian identity of European descent. Like white privilege more generally, this environmental privilege did not seem to involve malintent or even awareness. Many groups were attempting to reach beyond their past to invite in others, but those attempts were often limited to hollow land acknowledgements and colour-blind welcome messages.”
James K.S. Wong, York University, "From Malls to Markets: Secondary Place-Making and the Interrogation of Layered Chinese Canadian Identities in Toronto’s 2026 Lunar New Year Celebrations"
James K.S. Wong is a PhD student in Communication and Culture at York University. His research interests include media history, ethnic and transnational media, media representation, and the Chinese and Hong Kong diaspora in Canada. He is currently developing his doctoral thesis on the postwar development of Chinese radio and cultural identities among Hong Kong and Chinese immigrants in Canada.
“Persistent images of Canadian identity, anchored in settler-community narratives, continue to shape contemporary understandings despite five decades of demographic transformation following the 1967 immigration reform and sustained movements toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. This paper interrogates these outdated conceptions by examining how post-2019 Hong Kong immigrants actively layer and reimagine their identities within spaces established by earlier immigrant cohorts. It analyses the 2026 Lunar New Year markets at Metro Square and Langham Square in Markham, Ontario, as sites of “secondary place-making,” the temporary, festival-driven superimposition of Hong Kong-specific cultural practices onto the primary place-making infrastructure of Chinese-Canadian neighbourhood malls developed by 1980s–1990s Hong Kong immigrants. Drawing on non-participant observation conducted in February 2026, the study documents how these markets deployed a distinctive repertoire legible primarily to recent arrivals. Elements included wishing trees inscribed with vernacular, code-switched messages; promotional booths for 2026 Hong Kong films; live Cantonese music performances; merchandise hybridizing Hong Kong street-sign aesthetics with GTA neighbourhoods; and stalls offering Hong Kong-style street food. These practices articulate a distinct post-2019 Hong Kong diasporic sensibility marked by political rupture, settlement precarity, nostalgia, and hybrid belonging, rather than generic Chinese-Canadian festivity. Theoretically grounded in Oldenburg’s third-place framework, Vertovec’s transnationalism, and Appadurai’s production of locality, the paper proposes secondary place-making as a conceptual tool for understanding how newer immigrant cohorts exercise cultural agency and achieve affective recognition without displacing established community anchors. By highlighting internal differentiation within the Hong Kong diaspora and inbound translocal dynamics through which contemporary homeland cultural productions are absorbed and reworked in Canadian settings, the study reveals how rapid identity shifts often fail to fully reflect layered historical tensions and generational experiences produced by successive immigration waves. The paper enriches research on Canadian identities and culture by demonstrating that “Chinese Canadian” identity is internally differentiated rather than monolithic. Eventually, it advances the interrogation of Canadian identities by demonstrating how suburban multicultural spaces function as dynamic sites for negotiating belonging, precarity, and re-imagination in twenty-first-century Canada.”
Trevor Green, York University, “Indigenous Memory, Media and the North”
Bio and abstract to be added.
Antara Dey, York University, "Beyond Butter Chicken Poutine: The Semiotics of Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food, and Canadian Food Identity"
Antara Dey is a Ph.D. candidate in the Communication and Culture program at York University, Toronto. She completed her Master of Design and Master of Public Relations and Advertising from the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Previously, she completed her Bachelor of Design in Product Design from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Delhi. Her doctoral research focuses on popular culture, food studies, consumer culture and semiotics. Her project examines the role of food in popular narratives across media objects such as film, television, music, and social media, and how these narratives influence consumers.
“Food has emerged as one of the most visible and celebrated markers of Canadian identity and diversity since the adoption of the Multiculturalism Act in 1988. Yet, while immigrant cuisines have become increasingly popular in everyday Canadian life, they are still largely recognized as ethnic food, a label that signals both inclusion and difference. This paper argues that food functions as a semiotic language through which Canadian identity is imagined and reproduced, revealing how diasporic cuisines and culinary hybrids have become integrated and not peripheral to Canadian food culture. Drawing on food semiotics, diasporic studies, and multiculturalism, the paper explores how ethnic foodways and objects continue to function as cultural signs rather than as neutral, differentiating descriptors. Using examples including butter chicken poutine, jerk chicken pizza, shawarma poutine, and sushi burritos, it highlights how diasporic cuisines are integrated into the nation’s food culture while remaining symbolically distinct from dominant understandings of Canadian food, such as maple syrup and Nanaimo bars. The paper celebrates multicultural Canadian foodways as sites where the meanings of nation, diaspora, and hybrid cultural identities converge to create a cuisine of belonging. It analyzes consumption practices and media representations of Canadian ethnic food in popular discourse to determine how Canadian food identity is evolving through these multicultural food practices. Through an exploration of the semiotics of ethnic foodways, the paper examines how contemporary Canadian food identity is continuously being reproduced through diasporic and multicultural influences rather than in isolation. By tracing the meanings attached to diasporic cuisines and culinary hybrids, the paper demonstrates how food serves as a powerful language through which multiculturalism is lived and consumed. Ultimately, foods such as butter chicken poutine are cultural signs revealing that Canadian food identity is an evolving multicultural hotpot shaped by migration, diaspora, and cultural exchange.”
Kelly Train, Toronto Metropolitan University, "Indian Jewish Women in Canada and Cultural Preservation Through Food"
Kelly Amanda Train is a Contract Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto. Her recent publications include: Strangers in a Strange Land: Indian Jewish Families in Canada in Harriet Hartman (ed.), The Jewish Family in Global Perspective (Switzerland: Springer, 2024), Indian Jewish Experiences and the Creation of Congregation BINA in Adriana M. Brodsky & Laura Arnold Leibman (eds.), Jews Across the Americas: 1492-Present (New York: NYU Press, 2023), Negotiating New Territory: Indian Jewish Women in the Family in Toronto, Canadian Jewish Studies (2018).
“This paper focuses on Indian Jewish women in Canada and the preparation and serving of Indian Jewish traditional foods as the basis for maintaining and reproducing Indian Jewish identities and cultural continuity in the Canadian Jewish community. For Jews worldwide, regardless of their specific ethnicity, their specific Ashkenazi, Sephardi or Mizrahi traditional foods serve as the basis for maintaining their Jewishness, regardless as to their degree of religiosity. Food is the very foundations for the celebration of all Jewish holidays. It is also the foundations of Jewish identities, and reflects the histories and cultures in which they historically lived. For Indian Jews, Jewish food is specifically Indian Jewish. This article explores how Indian Jewish women maintain and reproduce Indian Jewishness in Canadian society through the preparation and serving of traditional Bene Israel, Baghdadi and Cochini Jewish foods. Indian Jews represent a very small Jewish community within the broader Ashkenazi (European) Canadian Jewish community and the broader Canadian society. Traditional cultural foods serve as an important basis by which Indian Jewish women keep Indian Jewish identities alive and thriving in the Canadian Jewish community and the broader society. Many of the Indian Jewish female immigrants that had immigrated and settled in Canada were from families that were part of the professional middle class and had never been responsible for making and serving traditional dishes, after immigration learning how to cook and especially how to prepare traditional Indian Jewish cultural dishes was of utmost importance to them for a variety of reasons. Food serves as the basis for keeping Indian Jewish culture alive and being able to pass it down to their children, especially their daughters. As immigrants in Canada, keeping their specifically Indian Jewish identity alive was of utmost importance to Indian Jewish families.”
Julia Mitchell, Carleton University, "The Menu as Communicative Technology: Steak Frites, Settler-Colonial Semiotics, and Class Distinction in Ontario"
Julia Mitchell (they/them) completed their BA in English and French as a Second Language, at the University of Ottawa in 2018. After having worked in restaurants and hospitality settings for over a decade, they are now applying their experience with, and passion for, food, food sustainability, and food security, in the Master’s in Communication program at Carleton University. Additionally, they are working with The FLOW Partnership developing various communications projects. Connection and community through food and communications are integral to both FLOW and their thesis project.
“My thesis investigates an everyday, overlooked communicative technology, the online restaurant menu, as a site where anachronistic images of Canadian identity persist and are reproduced. I ask: how does the menu as medium for Steak Frites in Toronto and Ottawa encode class distinction, and how does it encode traces of settler-colonial linguistic hierarchy? Methodologically, I conduct a multimodal discourse analysis of twenty restaurant menus sampled through OpenTable, supplemented by a platform feature scan which records premium access restrictions, reservation availability, and promotional placement. Theoretically, I develop a three-layer interpretive lens: (1) a pragmatic Bourdieuian account of distinction reinterpreted through Croce’s Wittgensteinian habitus as a “grid of intelligibility”; (2) a political economy of colonial gastronomy treated as a sensitizing concept - specifically, the argument that French operates on Ontario menus as a “floating prestige signifier” detached from living Franco-Ontarian communities, a residue of linguistic hierarchy traced historically from Regulation 17 (1912) to the present; and (3) a McLuhanite attention to medium form, operationalised through multimodal grammar and enriched by Innis’s concept of media bias. The findings reveal three menu-based class positions (exclusive, aspirational, everyday). Furthermore, they specify how colonial linguistic hierarchy is altered by local ecology. Toronto menus use French more intensively (elaborate phrases like “café de Paris butter,” multiple loanwords) yet with less orthographic consistency than Ottawa menus. Diacritics are frequently missing or inconsistent in Toronto (“bearnaise” without circumflex) while Ottawa menus show greater grammatical care. I argue this pattern supports the sensitizing concept: French operates as a performative prestige code where it is least institutionally anchored; in a bilingual capital, its exoticism and thus its distinction value are tempered. Two deviant cases refine the framework further. An Ottawa restaurant presents only “Steak Frites” and a price (no cut, origin, or description) yet is priced in the mid-range, suggesting that minimalism can function as confident understatement rather than low status. A different Ottawa restaurant maintains a gourmet “Steak” section with elaborate provenance and French sauce names while relegating its French-named ‘Steak Frites’ entry to “Mains” with minimal description and a lower price. This internal stratification reveals that French prestige is not a uniform blanket effect but a resource that can be strategically allocated within a single menu, concentrated where distinction is sold most aggressively and withdrawn where accessibility is the goal. Platform features, such as the Visa Dining Collection badge in Toronto and the promotional placement of specials, encode class access before the diner reads any ingredient. This paper argues that the menu is not a neutral document but a communicative technology that materialises class and colonial power. By reading a single dish across two Ontario cities, it demonstrates how anachronistic settler-colonial hierarchies persist in the most mundane acts of choosing what to eat - and how interrogating those acts can sharpen our understanding of Canadian identities in the twenty-first century.”
Alexandra Arraiz Matute, Carleton University, "French Immersion, Multiculturalism, and the Making of the “Good Canadian Parent”"
Dr. Alexandra Arraiz Matute is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University. She completed her doctorate in Curriculum Studies & Teacher Development at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE) in the University of Toronto. She has an MA in Curriculum Studies from the same institution and a BSc in Psychology. She is a passionate community educator and organizer. Her research and pedagogical interests lie at the intersections of identity, culture, race, and migration. Past research focused on the importance of relationships in teaching and learning as a site of healing and resistance for marginalized communities in the mainstream education system. Her approach to teaching is grounded in anti-oppression, equity and feminist theories; she believes in honoring diverse knowledges while pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone to learn from each other.
“Since the enactment of Canada’s Multiculturalism Policy in 1971, official narratives of Canadian identity have emphasized diversity, inclusion, and linguistic openness. At the same time, French Immersion (FI) programs have expanded significantly across the country and have become a key site where national identity, language, and belonging are negotiated in everyday educational decision-making. This paper examines parental choice of French Immersion programs as a window into the persistence of racialized and classed constructions of Canadian identity. Drawing on qualitative data from parents navigating FI enrolment, the study explores how French Immersion functions as a form of cultural capital associated with “good parenting,” upward mobility, and respectable Canadian citizenship. While FI is often framed as universally accessible and aligned with multicultural values, parental narratives reveal how these programs are commonly perceived as elite, white, and middle-class spaces. Such perceptions shape who feels entitled to choose FI, who feels excluded, and whose linguistic resources are recognized as valuable within Canadian schooling. The analysis interrogates how dominant ideas of bilingualism—rooted in English–French settler relations and reinforced during Canada’s centennial era—continue to structure contemporary understandings of national belonging. In doing so, the paper highlights tensions between multicultural ideals and the lived realities of newcomer and racialized families, whose multilingual repertoires are frequently marginalized in favour of official bilingualism. Parental decision-making thus becomes a site where anachronistic images of Canadian identity persist, even as families adapt these narratives to a changing demographic landscape. By situating French Immersion choice within broader histories of multiculturalism, whiteness, and settler colonial language hierarchies, this paper contributes to the conference’s goal of interrogating inherited and enduring conceptions of Canadian identity. It calls for a more critical examination of how public education reproduces exclusionary norms under the guise of inclusion in 21st-century Canada.”
Agnes Whitfield, York University, "Minority francophone identities under anglophone hegemony: French-language rights in Canadian law school and judicial training curricula"
Agnes Whitfield is Professor of English and former Chair of the School of Translation at York University (Toronto, Canada). Centred initially on first-person narration in Québec and Canadian fiction her research has extended to translator agency, institutional practices in intercultural literary exchange, and voice in post-colonial translation and intercultural teaching contexts. A frequent contributor to Law360 Canada, she has a special interest in knowledge mobilization around French minority language rights in Canada. Professor Whitfield is founding editor of Vita Traductiva, an international peer-reviewed publication series in Translation Studies based at York University (https://vitatraductiva.blog.yorku.ca/).
“As set out in the Official Languages Act (1969) and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), French and English are equal, official languages in Canada. Since French is a minority language outside Quebec and in Canada as a whole, securing substantive equality for French and French-language speakers before the court has been consistently impeded by the unequal power relationship between the two languages. Minority French-language litigants continue to face numerous obstacles to equitable access to the Canadian justice system: longer wait times, additional costs and procedures, inaccurate transcriptions of trial proceedings, not to mention the lack of bilingual judges and contrary rulings tainted by unconscious or conscious bias (Office of the Commissioner of French Language Services of Ontario, 2015; Department of Justice, 2022). Since minority francophone communities comprise immigrant and indigenous members, these inequalities also intersect with other Charter rights. These obstacles reflect in part jurisdictional issues, French language rights reflecting a complex federal, provincial and territorial tapestry (Bastarache and Doucet, 2014; Cardinal, 2017; Hudon, 2013). Studies of provincial bar associations and the judiciary have highlighted the anglophone legal and judicial community’s historic resistance to French-language rights, stemming from Canada’s initial status as a British colony (Annis 2012; Cardinal 2017; Larocque and Power, 2012; Morris 2008). This paper presents a survey, carried out between 2025 and 2026, of the place of minority French-language rights in law school curricula outside Quebec and national judicial institute courses, as indicated on official websites. Results confirm that recognition and performative enactment of minority French-language rights continue to be undermined by lack of knowledge and training within the Canadian legal and judicial communities on minority French-language rights. The implications for full implementation of French-language rights in the justice system and intersections with other Charter rights will be discussed.”
Abril Liberatori, York University, "Practice What You Preach: Toronto’s Italians and the 1977 Heritage Languages Program"
Abril Liberatori is Associate Professor and holder of The Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian-Canadian Studies at York University. She serves as President of the Italian-Canadian Archives Project and Vice-Chair of the Canadian Committee on Migration, Ethnicity, & Transnationalism (CCMET). Her research focuses on twentieth-century migrations and identity formation, with a particular interest in gender, transnational, and oral history. She has published on topics such as language, memory, music, and food among Italian immigrants in North and South America. Her book, Transnational Italians and the Culture of Everyday Life was published this month with McGill-Queens University Press.
“The Ontario Heritage Languages Program (HLP) was established in 1977 by the Ontario Ministry of Education to support the teaching of languages other than English and French. The HLP was immediately popular. By 1981, over 78,000 students were enrolled in approximately 3,400 classes, covering instruction in 45 different languages. Italian has remained one of the most widely taught languages in the HLP’s history since its inception. As one of the largest and most politically active immigrant groups in Ontario, Italian Canadians were at the forefront of the movement to integrate heritage language education into the public school system, although they were certainly not the only ones. Italian-Canadian activists and organizations, such as Centro Scuola e Cultura Italiana and the National Congress of Italian-Canadians, had long been involved in Italian-language education in the city, and this foundation allowed them to mobilize quickly and play a pivotal role in the HLP, working with (and sometimes against) the provincial government in the program design, the training of instructors, and the development of specialized textbooks and curricula. The paper will explore how the Italian community in Toronto was actively involved in the development of the HLP. The community consistently urged the ministry to ‘practice what they preached’ in terms of a multicultural and multilingual society. In this sense, their advocacy can be understood in the context of a broader multicultural movement, buttressed by the effects of the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission (1963), as well as federal multiculturalism policies. This movement was centred on ongoing and often tense discussions regarding integration, assimilation, and how a nation should inhabit multiculturalism not just as an ideology, but as a lived practice.”
May Friedman, Toronto Metropolitan University, "Assembling Canadian Identity: Storying Citizenship"
May Friedman is a faculty member at Toronto Metropolitan University. Much of May’s work explores issues of fat activism and weight stigma in many different settings. Drawing from her own experiences as a fat racialized mother, May looks at unstable identities, including bodies that do not conform to traditional racial and national or aesthetic lines. Using a range of arts-based methods including digital storytelling as well as analyses of treasured garments, May has explored meaning making and representation in relation to embodiment and experience.
"This presentation offers some speculative engagements with Canadian identity through the lens of my own history. Considering the “imagined nation” as put forth by Benedict Anderson, and exploring Eva Mackey’s work on multicultural and racial exclusion within the Canadian imaginary, this presentation uses bricolage to blend autoethnographic approaches as well as the screening of a short digital story on the ways that stories—personal stories, but also the stories of citizenship tests, of canonical novels such as Anne of Green Gables, of daily headlines—can provide a thick grappling with Canadian identity. I consider the ways that citizenship is an evolving enterprise, comprised of legal frameworks but also of affective states: affection or abnegation may both reveal a deep commitment to Canadianness while indifference or arms-length respectability may presume a less intimate connection. I consider the stories that comprise my own Canadian identity, as a birthright citizen, born of brown migrants. Where am I really from, and how does the query already bring forth more questions than answers? How does my hybrid, unstable and dynamic identity fit—or misfit—within the parameters of citizenship and identity? This presentation seeks to engage with themes of both Canada and identity, separately and together, to explore some of the productive tensions which may emerge in an understanding of self and state."
Bridget Cauthery, York University, ""Folk" Ballets as Expressions of Indigenous Sovereignty"
Bridget Cauthery (PhD) is a dance and cultural studies scholar focusing on the impacts of post/neo-coloniality and the processes of globalization on contemporary and popular dance practices in the Global North. In June 2022, she embarked on a multi-year SSHRC Insight-funded project to resituate and reinvest in In the Land of the Spirits, a ballet first produced by John Kim Bell (Mohawk) in 1988. The grant funded six Indigenous undergraduate and graduate research assistants in the visual and performing arts and will culminate in a co-authored book and commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the premiere of In the Land of the Spirits 2028. Her first book, Choreographing the North: Settler affinities in contemporary dancemaking, published in 2025 by Routledge UK, examines eleven contemporary settler dance works that take the Far North as source and inspiration, analyzing the colonial imaginations and long-standing paradigms that Orientalize northern people, lands and narratives. In doing so, her work brings the Nordic theory of arcticism (Ryall et al 2010) into conversation with dance studies.
"In the 21st century, there has been a shift away from settler-led and “Indigenous-adjacent” (Roussin 2023), pan-Indigenous, “postindian” (Toll 2018) ballets that are sources of spectacle and entertainment (Bold 2022), to Indigenous-led and Indigenous-centred choreographies that enlist ballet to perform localized stories and subjectivities. With their focus on microregional, land- and Nation-based identity and story, these ballets may be regarded as examples of an emerging “folk” ballet movement across Turtle Island. These contemporary ballets transcend previous efforts to “surrogate” (Roach 1996) and “ventriloquize” Indigenous subjects (Hull 2025) to invest in ballet as an expressive medium to perform the shared beliefs, customs, stories, and cultural practices of a given community despite the form’s implicit Eurocentricity. This paper draws on the co-authors’ previous research on Indigenous-adjacent ballets produced in Canada such as In the Land of the Spirits(1988/1992) and Going Home Star (2014) to examine how traditional and contemporary Indigenous beliefs, languages and artistic expressions continue to be mobilized through ballet. As Indigenous-led ballets in Canada are on the rise, understanding how a settler form can enact social bonds within communities, prioritize preservation, and simultaneously reinforce differentiation within the settler-colonial state, becomes increasingly significant. Focusing on three recent works, the Wolastoq ballet Pisuwim produced by Atlantic Ballet in 2024, the Tla’amin ballet T’el produced by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in 2025, and the Syilx ballet Cikilaxʷm: Controlled Burn produced by Ballet Kelowna in 2026, dance scholars Amy Hull and Bridget Cauthery argue that these “folk ballets” shift reconciliation away from settler-colonial cultural determinism towards radical self-determinism that support Indigenous sovereignty through settler forms."
Lesa Fox, Trent University, "Unravelling the Sanitized Timeline: Re-weaving Indigenous Narratives to Unlearn the History of Nursing"
Hello, my name is Lesa Fox. I am Aanishnaabe. I grew up at Henvey Inlet First Nation, where my family still resides. My paternal grandfather was from Wikiwemikoong Unceeded Territory, on Manitoulin Island. I currently live in Peterborough which is the traditional land and territory of Michi Saagig Anishnabe people. I am a mother, a daughter, and auntie, a partner, a sister, and a Registered Nurse. This story is the lens in which I view the world. Growing up on a reserve, I quickly realized the inequities which existed. This realization, along with encouragement from my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother brought me into nursing. My journey in nursing started in Peterborough (at Trent University) with my BScN. I was then privileged to receive my Master in Nursing Science from Te Herenga Waka (Victoria University of Wellington- New Zealand) and am now a full-time student once again at Trent, where I am presently within my second year of my PhD within Canadian Studies. I have just completed my first comprehensive examination with distinction.
"Goal or objective: To re-story Indigenous voices and understand how the colonial machine has shaped nursing history and current practice. Background: The dominant telling of history often negates Indigenous voices and may not examine the wider social and political narratives of the time. Critical examination, silenced voices, and untold stories aid in weaving timelines with narration and understanding of nursing away from a colonial centred approach. Application of these undervalued lenses reveal a more thorough comprehension of the nursing while ensuring inclusion of the historical experiences of Indigenous Peoples. The examination of exclusion and marginalization of Indigenous Peoples is crucial for identifying and addressing ongoing inequities in nursing education and practice. Methods and approaches: A review of narratives, critical theory, and nursing education history was conducted for a comprehensive doctoral examination which is part of an ongoing examination of Anti-Indigenous racism within nursing curriculum. This a 42-textbook equivalent included stories, textbooks, articles, film, and theses. 70% from Canadian Sources. Results and discussion: The examination revealed multiple cross overs in timelines, highlighting multiple coexisting realities influenced by politics and society. One specific example- in the same year (1942) that CASN was being formed, experiments were conducted on Indigenous Peoples in Indian Hospitals, with one such experiment on a 1-year-old child receiving streptomycin into her skull which resulted >1,200 medical articles 5 years following. Other examples have been collated and placed into a timeline (see attached photo). Conclusion or summary: At the same time the role of nursing was developing, and becoming more formalized and acknowledged, Indigenous Peoples and Communities were facing colonial forces which purposely constricted their movements and aimed to assimilate them. Despite Indigenous Peoples’ foundational contributions to healthcare and healing on Turtle Island, the nursing profession has historically aligned—and continues to align—with colonial structures. The Indian Act, Indian Hospitals, and Residential Schools are just a few."
Michelle Hogan, University of Saskatchewan, "Beyond Deficit Narratives: Middle-Class Urban Indigenous People and Contemporary Canadian Identities"
Michelle Hogan is an Anishinaabe scholar from Batchewana First Nation and a PhD candidate in the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (High Honours) in Indigenous Studies from First Nations University of Canada and a Master of Arts in Native Studies from the University of Saskatchewan. Her current doctoral research examines Mino-Bimaadiziwin (the Good Life) among middle-class urban Indigenous people living in Saskatoon. Her work seeks to challenge deficit-based narratives and contribute to broader understandings of Indigenous experiences in contemporary Canada. Michelle's research interests include Indigenous wellness, urban Indigeneity, Indigenous science, Indigenous women and gender, and Anishinaabe Studies.
"Even prior to Confederation, dominant constructions of Canadian identity have frequently positioned Indigenous peoples within narratives of poverty, marginalization, rurality, and social crisis. While these realities require continued attention, they have also contributed to a limited public understanding of Indigenous experiences and identities in contemporary Canada. As a result, Indigenous people living in the city who experience socio-economic stability, educational attainment, and professional success often remain largely invisible within both academic literature and public discourse. This presentation contributes to ongoing conversations about Canadian identities by demonstrating how urban Indigenous people are actively redefining Indigenous presence within contemporary Canada. This presentation draws on ongoing doctoral research examining Mino-Bimaadiziwin (the Good Life) among urban Indigenous people living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Using surveys, interviews, and Indigenous methodologies, the study explores how Indigenous people who self-identify as living with comfort and stability understand wellness, culture, spirituality, and identity in urban environments. Participants include employed professionals, skilled workers, educators, health-care workers, public servants, and post-secondary students who are not experiencing urgent unmet needs. Their experiences reveal the limitations of older national narratives and highlight the need for more nuanced understandings of Indigenous identity that reflect the realities of the twenty-first century. Participants describe complex and dynamic identities that integrate education, employment, family responsibilities, cultural practices, spirituality, and community engagement. Many participants understand socio-economic well-being as one component of Mino-Bimaadiziwin, alongside relationships, cultural continuity, and responsibilities to family, community, and the natural world. The presentation argues that the continued absence of urban middle-class Indigenous experiences from discussions of Canadian identity reflects broader colonial assumptions about who Indigenous people are expected to be. These assumptions influence public discourse, policy development, media representation, and even academic research, where Indigenous success is often overlooked or treated as exceptional. By examining the experiences of Indigenous people who have achieved relative socio-economic stability while maintaining meaningful cultural identities, this research complicates simplistic binaries between tradition and modernity, urbanity and Indigeneity, or economic success and cultural authenticity."
Ava Redmond, York University, "“Canada’s Team”: 2025 Toronto Blue Jays Fandom, Canadian Nostalgia, and Sports Nationalism"
Ava Redmond is a PhD student in the Joint Communication & Culture program at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. She received her Honours Bachelor of Arts in Political Science at the University Victoria, and her Master of Arts in Political Science from York University. Her undergraduate thesis examined K-pop fans organizing for Black Lives Matter in 2020, and her MA research examined two instances of fandom activism with K-pop fans and Swifties. She is broadly interested in the intersection of politics and pop culture, music, film, and sports fandom culture, and fandom identity formation. Her PhD dissertation will focus on the negotiation of Filipino/a/x diasporic identities through their participation in Asian media fandoms.
"In 2025, the Toronto Blue Jays headed to the World Series–a feat that they had not accomplished since 1993. Their playoff run spurred excitement across Canada, with Game 7 of the World Series becoming the most-watched Rogers broadcast ever, with over 18.5 million Canadians tuning into the game (Sportsnet Staff, 2025). As the underdogs of the postseason, the 2025 team charmed Canadians with their discussions of their love of their fans, but also their love for their teammates. Their eventual loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers was felt across Canada. This paper aims to explore how Blue Jays fans felt connected to the 2025 team through news coverage during their postseason run, and whether or not Canadians resonated with the idea of the Blue Jays as “Canada’s team”. I aim to conduct a Proquest database search using the terms “Toronto Blue Jays fans”, to uncover how journalists told stories about the Toronto Blue Jays fandom. I will limit my search to October 4th, 2025, until November 8th, 2025. This period marks when the Blue Jays began their playoff run, to a week after they lost the World Series. To offer a localized analysis, I selected Toronto Star, covering the city that the Blue Jays play in. I also selected CBC News and The Globe and Mail as national news sources to encompass national viewpoints. This research will be led by the following questions: How did news coverage about the Toronto Blue Jays’ postseason run describe the Blue Jays and their fandom? Did fans connect to the Blue Jays as “Canada’s team”? How were fans described–bandwagon and lifelong fans alike? What does this news coverage say about Canadian sports nationalism?"
Scott J. Wilson, University of Regina, "Elbows Up! Canadian Identity and Hockey as Resistance to Political and Existential Threats in Jeff Lemire’s Essex County"
Scott J. Wilson is an English Instructor and the Coordinator of Luther College at the University of Regina's Writing Across the Disciplines Program. His teaching and research are about writing and reading pedagogy: learning outcomes, meaningful writing assignments, methods of providing feedback, soundwriting as academic writing, the link between writing, identity, and citizenship, as well as generative-AI writing tool and cognitive offloading/atrophy.
"Dale Jacobs and Greg Paziuk explore how hockey is essential to Canadian identity and how Jeff Lemire, in Essex County, uses the comics medium to depict hockey culture across generations. In addition, Katie Mullins argues that Lemire can visually and spatially depict the embodied experience of hockey players in order to demonstrate the importance of the body in “imagination, memory, and multiple temporalities” across generations. Therefore, hockey is ingrained in Canadian identity, culture, bodies, and memories across generations and as Lemire suggests, can be used to mend relationships. I will revisit Lemire’s Essex County in light of political conflict between the United States and Canada spawned by President Donald Trump’s threats against Canadian sovereignty as well as anthem booing and other “trash talk” about the 2025 4 Nations Face Off, and the more recent rhetoric surrounding a tariff trade war and hockey violence language like “elbows up!” (which evokes the collective hockey memories Lemire often uses). Lastly, changing opinions around hockey legends like Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky, who are alluded to in Lemire’s work, after their support of Trump, are significant in that they show how while Lemire’s work, as others have suggested, implies a community around hockey and hockey memories, those core memories that shape identity can shift and create or heal trauma. Ultimately, I will show that despite the recent disruptions to and threats to Canadian identity and Canadian sovereignty, it was the 4 Nations Face Off that created a necessary boost to Canadian patriotism—a type of Canadian family bonding seen in Lemire’s work—but also one that Lemire suggests can only come from Canadian hockey—in and outside of comics."
Andrew Alexander Monti, Trent University, "Multiculturalism vs White Nationalism during the Fifa World Cup of Soccer"
Andrew Alexander Monti (PhD) teaches introductory and upper level courses in the Communications Program at Trent University Durham GTA, including AIST3004 Artificial Intelligence in Communication and the fourth year professional communication placement course. His research interests lie in the areas of computational propaganda and social media misinformation. Dr. Monti is currently leading a SSHRC Insight Development Grant funded project on social media misinformation that applies LLMs to test and validate misinformation classification codebooks together with Dr Bilal Momani from the COIS program.
"Section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Right and Freedoms states that the Charter must be interpreted in a manner that enhances, promotes and protects “the multicultural heritage of Canadians.” But this tenet is now under attack by conservative political parties and far-right organizations espousing ethno-supremacist and white nationalist beliefs, such as the People’s Party of Canada and Second Sons. This paper will offer the preliminary results of a systematic analysis of xenophobic propaganda by leaders Maxime Bernier and Jeremy Mackenzie on X (formerly Twitter) in the context of the FIFA World Cup of Soccer 2026, widely regarded as the greatest sporting event in the world during which countries come together to celebrate their national teams and players irrespective of their individual backgrounds. As both leaders have exploited social media platform affordances to declare that “Multiculturalism is a failure!” (Bernier 2026) and that “"Libs" = migrant voting blocks” (Mackenzie 2026), this research project will monitor their social media posts on X in the period between Friday June 12 and Wednesday June 24 (covering Canada’s World Cup matches against Bosnia and Herzegovina, Qatar and Switzerland) predicting that in the context of these games they will employ “framing bias” (Entman 2007) to exploit the attention surrounding the sporting event to disseminate anti-multicultural content among their followers. The data will indicate how “Canada” and what it means to be a “Canadian” are actively and deceptively contested five decades after the enactment of the Multiculturalism Policy. And the project will use computational methods to examine the comment sections, reactions and conduct a sentiment analysis on public engagement with anti-multicultural content."
Ryan Kraft, York University & Toronto Metropolitan University, "We Were Here: A Canadian Perspective on Memorializing 9/11 in Theatrical Performance"
Ryan Kraft is an American Sign Language (ASL)-English Interpreter, and recently completed a Master of Arts in the Communication and Culture Joint Program at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada. Ryan’s research explores the intersection of communication and interpreting, exploring how media representations of interpreters impact interpreters working in the Canadian context.
"This paper considers the development of theatrical performance as a space to process trauma and memorialize narratives related to the events of September 11, 2001 as they were experienced in Gander, Newfoundland and surrounding communities. The evolution of how 9/11 is depicted on stage is examined in productions The Guys, The Mercy Seat, Recent Tragic Events, and WTC View, before focusing on an in-depth analysis of the Broadway musical Come From Away and a subsequent seasonal local production in Gander, Newfoundland. By exploring the background and development of the musical, including the sensitivity taken towards positioning the show for an American audience, I argue that the musical establishes itself as a site for co-constructing space and relationships, shifting deep seated memories related to 9/11 and expanding beyond narratives of destruction typically associated with that day. Those are filtered through a Canadian lens that centres the experience of those who were stranded in Gander and surrounding communities on 9/11 and the days that followed. An annually mounted production in Gander uniquely takes that legacy one step further by incorporating personal and lived stories dating back to 9/11 in that location. In considering Canadian identity and how this musical—the most successful Canadian musical of all time—has showcased the strong bonds of kinship and kindness modelled there by Canadians, this paper examines how this approach provides an additive element which creates a legacy that is living and lasting, building further on this co-construction of space with each successive performance."
Andrew Nurse, Mount Allison, "“Abandoned New Brunswick:” Social Media, Contemporary Ruins, and Rural Identity in the Maritime Provinces"
Andrew Nurse teaches in the Indigenous and Critical Canadian Studies program at Mount Allison University. His recent work has been published in Acadiensis, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, activehistory.ca and the new Acadiensis podcast. Part of his current research focuses on historical practices and public memory.
"The last several years have seen the growth of social media groups that explore a shared fascination with the Maritime region’s “abandoned” heritage. One example is “Abandoned New Brunswick,” a Facebook group with over 6 500 group members. Members take pictures of abandoned buildings – often, but not always, houses and usually in rural locations – that are posted to the group’s Facebook page. This paper explores “Abandoned New Brunswick” as a case study into the interaction of social media, public memory, and personal recollection. It argues that increased interest in abandoned places is conditioned by several factors that create a series of relationships with the past, but which also speak to contemporary rural identities. Posts are often accompanied by comments that provides space for personal reflections and conversations about the past, place, and its on-going relevance. This paper begins with an overview of “abandoned” social media groups, their memberships, and focus. It then connects current interest in abandoned buildings to a longer western tradition of representing ruins as an element of sublime experience. Abandoned social media groups, this paper argues, are connected to this tradition but also show how current interest in what is presented as a decaying past is connected to processes of regional political economy, such as: out-migration, re-industrialization, changing employment patterns, and family dislocation. These processes, this paper argues, gain a contradictory set of meanings through social media abandoned groups that at once lament the processes of history but also re-affirm connections to place, often across generations and geography. It becomes, however, a mutated identity in which place and home take on other, sadder meanings."
Brenda Sailsman, York University, "Household Technology in the Canadian Home: Domestic Artifacts and Social Change in the 1950s and 1960s"
Brenda Sailsman is a graduate student in the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research draws on Marxist theory, feminist media theory, and cultural studies to explore how these approaches intersect with media history, the political economy of communication, popular culture, advertising, and race. She investigates how these frameworks reveal the ways media systems reproduce ideology, sustain capitalism, and influence cultural practices. Brenda graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Media Studies from York University.
"Mail-order catalogues were a central fixture in Canadian households. They played a significant role in Canadian culture, communication, and commerce from the 1880s until their discontinuation, and are now considered historical artifacts. Eaton’s and Simpson’s/Simpsons-Sears catalogues, were widely distributed communication texts that transformed how Canadians envisioned the modern home. Reaching rural, urban, and suburban households, they became a nationalizing force in a geographically vast and unevenly connected country. Appliances such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners, floor polishers, and clothes irons were marketed as tools for women and depicted as symbols of progress, convenience, and good housekeeping. The catalogues served as domestic guides that produced narratives about what a modern Canadian family needed. Eaton’s and Simpsons/Simpsons-Sears were not simply retailers but doubled as cultural institutions whose influence depended on the infrastructures that defined Canadian life. Eaton’s catalogues especially, acted as a nation-building medium that helped define Canadian identity, and made a point of welcoming new immigrants inside its pages. They promoted a shared vision of that identity as consumerist, middle class, and white. Eaton’s and Simpson’s/Simpsons-Sears also established a kind of national calendar by releasing synchronized catalogues, so that a homemaker in rural Alberta could be looking at the same pages at the same moment as a middle class shopper in downtown Toronto. This research paper investigates how Eaton’s and Simpson’s/Simpsons-Sears catalogues represented household technologies and domestic artifacts, and how these representations worked to transform the relationship between technology, gender, and modernity in the Canadian home in the 1950s and 1960s. Through visual and aspirational rhetoric, and depictions of labour-saving devices, the catalogues helped construct ideals of domestic life. More broadly, the paper considers how these representations contributed to producing and circulating gendered expectations surrounding women’s unpaid household labour in the context of postwar consumer capitalism."
Jonathan Osborn & Amy Hull, York University, "Demon Night in Canada"
Dr. Jonathan Osborn (Toronto): A Toronto-based artist, researcher, and educator who serves as contract faculty at York University. He holds a PhD in Dance Studies and focuses on human-nonhuman relations, choreography, and museum studies.
"DEMON NIGHT IN CANADA: Demonic Figures and the Landscape of Canadian Anxiety This paper argues that demons in Canadian horror cinema function as barometers of national anxiety, revealing how sociopolitical concerns are translated into supernatural narrative form. While Canadian horror has been productively studied through frameworks such as body horror, national identity, and cultural marginality (Beard 2001; Handling and Vézina 2013), the demon has received comparatively little sustained attention as a figure through which filmmakers negotiate social tensions. Focusing on *The Brood* (1979), *The Shrine* (2010), *Anything for Jackson* (2020), and *L’Inhumain* (2021), this paper traces a genealogy of demonic representation in Canadian cinema from the late twentieth century to the present. Drawing on Robin Wood’s conception of horror as the return of the repressed (1986) and Adam Lowenstein’s account of horror as a site of historical trauma (2005), we argue that the demon emerges at moments of social uncertainty, embodying anxieties that exceed reflect broader national conditions. In the late 1970s, *The Brood* locates demonic forces within family and institutional structures, reflecting anxieties about domestic instability, therapeutic culture, and political authority. By the early twenty-first century, Canadian horror increasingly mobilizes demonic narratives to express concerns about fragmented social cohesion amid religious extremism, economic precarity, and cultural polarization. In *The Shrine*, demonic evil links to fears of fanaticism and communal breakdown. More recent films shift inward. *Anything for Jackson* situates demonic forces in intimate space, linking possession to grief, isolation, and the erosion of care. *L’Inhumain* extends demonic horror into colonial and Indigenous contexts, where the supernatural articulates historical trauma and the persistence of colonial structures. Unlike many American narratives that externalize evil as a force to be defeated, Canadian films frame the demonic as symptom of unresolved social contradictions.."
Hailey Baldock, York University, "What Kind of Society? Anti-Pornography Protest and Canadian Identity in the Late Twentieth Century"
Hailey Baldock is a PhD Candidate in the history program at York University. She is interested in twentieth century Canadian women's history, with a focus on women's protest movements and their interactions with the media. Her dissertation research explores Anti-Pornography protests in Ontario during the 1960s-1990s, looking particularly at how new media technologies both informed and complicated these protests.
"Anti-pornography activism in Ontario has often been framed as a moral or religious campaign against obscenity. However, this paper argues that debates surrounding pornography were also debates about Canadian identity and the kind of society Canada imagined itself to be. Focusing on Ontario from the 1960s into the 1990s, this paper examines how activists, feminist organizations, religious groups, and legal institutions positioned pornography as a question of public harm, social responsibility, and national values. Central to this analysis is the Canadian approach to freedom of expression, as Canadian anti-pornography activism increasingly relied on the language of collective welfare, gender equality, and community standards. The paper explores how this framework emerged through activist and media discourses, as well as through legal developments such as the Fraser Committee on Pornography and Prostitution (1985) and R. v. Butler (1992), which redefined obscenity in terms of social harm rather than morality alone. By situating anti-pornography activism within broader discussions of nationalism and moral regulation, this paper demonstrates that pornography debates became a site through which Canadians negotiated the boundaries of acceptable citizenship, sexuality, and public culture. Overall, the paper argues that anti-pornography activism reveals enduring tensions within Canadian identity between freedom and regulation, and individual rights and collective responsibility."
Shahbaz Khayambashi, Independent Scholar, "Distinctly Canadian: Anglophone Canadian Cinema and Subversion of American Genres"
Shahbaz Khayambashi (independent scholar) is an academic, artist and author who holds a PhD from York University. Their research deals with death in the media and the use of imagery in protest and their work has been published academically in journals including Mortality, Omega: Journal of Death and Dying and Pop Culture Review, and non-academically in Academfic and Black Sheep. They have also built a career in the experimental film and video scene, as both a curator and an artist. They have a work that can be found in the upcoming book, Serial Killers: Fact into Fiction.
"It is a common argument, even in Canada, to suggest that Anglophone Canadian cinema does not have a distinct culture of its own. While Francophone cinema and the various other Canadian cinemas—experimental, diasporic, etc.—have developed niches for themselves, Anglophone Canadian cinema continues to exist outside of a distinct cultural space. However, it is exactly this exclusion that I believe places this cinema within a distinct cultural context. Anglophone Canadian cinema’s cultural position is its rejection of Americanness through its placement of its imagery within a distinctly Canadian context, while also appropriating American conventions and imagery, particularly within genre cinema. This is done most blatantly by setting films Canadian metropoles and ensuring the inclusion of cultural imagery as a sort of character in the film. For example, Toronto plays an important role (as itself, unlike in Hollywood cinema) in films like Videodrome, Last Night and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. However, this rejection of Americanness is more latently placed in the films’ narratives themselves as a further rejection of American conventions. For example, where Americans would fight to their last breath to stop the apocalypse, Canadians in Last Night simply gather to watch it happen. Where Americans would use time travel to do something heroic, Canadians in Nirvanna use it to attempt to play a show at a small venue. In this paper, I would use a series of such examples to demonstrate the rejection of American exceptionalism in genre conventions to explain why Anglophone Canadian cinema’s indistinguishability from American cinema has actually led to it become a distinct cultural artifact."
Sherry Yu, University of Toronto, "Approaching Canadian Identities from Collaborative Journalism Perspectives"
Dr. Sherry S. Yu is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, with a graduate appointment in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Dr. Yu’s research explores media and journalism in multicultural societies from critical, comparative, and collaborative perspectives. She is the author of Diasporic Media beyond the Diaspora: Korean Media in Vancouver and Los Angeles (2018, UBC Press) and the co-editor of Ethnic Media in the Digital Age (2019, Routledge) and The Handbook of Ethnic Media in Canada (2023, McGill-Queen’s University Press).
"The lack of attention to building a shared culture and history in multicultural societies manifests in a disconnect across ethnocultural groups—including those of European origin—across socio‑cultural, economic, and political domains. In the field of media, this disconnect is reflected in the persistent mis‑ and under‑representation of ethnocultural minorities in mainstream media, alongside the relatively isolated production and circulation of news by an estimated 600 to 1,200 ethnic media outlets across Canada, depending on the sources cited. These media outputs often remain within limited linguistic or ethnocultural community boundaries, without adequately reaching a wider audience. Addressing this disconnect in media practices and the resulting gaps in public discourse, this paper proposes a scholarly inquiry into collaborative journalism between mainstream and ethnic media as a means of fostering more inclusive forms of journalism. Rather than focusing on retrospective questions of what Canadian identities are and how we have arrived at the present—struggling with both ambiguity and ambivalence—this study emphasizes prospective strategies that help facilitate public discourse on shared issues through diverse perspectives. A case study of ByBlacks.com—an award‑winning digital publication targeting Black Canadians—is revisited to inform the discussion of Canadian identities from the perspective of collaborative journalism. The analysis highlights both the opportunities and challenges that ethnic media encounter when collaborating with mainstream media, particularly in contexts shaped by the ambiguity and ambivalence of Canadian identities. Ultimately, the study offers practical considerations for advancing collaboration, contributing to inclusive journalism practices, and building what may be described as a more “common” Canadian identity grounded in shared yet diverse perspectives."
Mary Ann Boateng, Toronto Metropolitan University, "Community, Housing and Crime: Framing the News Coverage of Lawrence Heights and Rexdale Community”
Dr. Mary Ann Boateng is an Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at TMU. Her research centres around themes of media, power, class, race, space and Canadian identity. Her current research explores how space and its representation shapes how we understand the cities like Toronto. She holds a PhD from th York-TMU program in Communication and Culture.
"Lawrence Heights is a community in North York that has undergone immense change since it was first built at the tail end of the 1950s. As the second public housing community ever built in Canada, it received both negative and positive news media coverage from that changed with the passage of time. By studying the intersection of media, housing, community and crime, my paper sheds light on how mainstream and independent new sources contribute to stereotypes and metaphors that influence the public perception of Lawrence Heights. Using 9 variables, my paper determined that Black news media like Share and Contrast told a more nuanced story of the area post 1970. Moreover, independent news was also pivotal in telling the story of how the community came together to advocate for their rights and ensure they reclaimed their right to the city."
Marlene Murphy, York University, "Food for Thought: How a CBC campaign to support food banks shapes an identity narrative"
Marlene Murphy is a PhD student in the Communication and Culture program at York University. Her research is on local television news, work that follows decades as a CBC news journalist.
"This exploratory research is interrogating a collaboration between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and local food banks, and the messaging it generates around Canadian community and identity. The CBC’s annual fundraising campaign, with its slogan directing Canadians to “Make the Season Kind,” is promoted across the public broadcaster’s platforms for several weeks. The stated purpose is raising awareness of food insecurity in Canada and raising funds for local food banks. The campaign goes beyond a news and information focus at local CBC stations, and includes considerable public engagement, from a day where programming is broadcast live from publicly accessible locations, to performances by local artists and school groups. The stations choose what stories are told, whose voices are heard, and whose are set aside as unsuitable. These events situate the stations as active participants in civic life, raising questions about whether they are shaping community identity and priorities rather than reflecting it. As a national initiative, the CBC campaign addresses the seriousness of food insecurity, but the emphasis on the positive impacts of supporting food banks and the individual stories of individuals who have been helped by them leaves little space for voices that disrupt the narrative of “caring Canadians” donating millions of dollars. Instead, it shapes a message that there is a shared Canadian identity that responds with support and sympathy for those in need, largely ignoring the voices of those who object to food banks on political or ideological grounds. This work will examine how “Making the Season Kind” provides a simplistic representation of Canadian identity that shuts out voices that complicate the narrative."
Barry Rooke, Executive Director of the National Campus and Community Radio Association/Association nationale des radios étudiantes et communautaires (NCRA/ANREC), “Community Media, Local Journalism and Canadian Identity: Public Information, Trust and the Role of Community Radio”
Barry Rooke, CAE, is Executive Director of the National Campus and Community Radio Association/Association nationale des radios étudiantes et communautaires (NCRA/ANREC), which represents approximately 120 campus, community and Indigenous not-for-profit radio organizations across Canada. His work focuses on broadcasting and journalism policy, government relations, sector development and the sustainability of locally governed media. Barry oversees national initiatives related to local journalism, public-interest advertising, music distribution, training and emergency broadcasting. He has contributed to federal regulatory and policy processes concerning broadcasting, journalism funding, online news, cultural policy and public communications. His work emphasizes the role of community media in strengthening local identity, democratic participation, cultural expression and access to trusted information.
"Campus, community and Indigenous not-for-profit radio stations play an important but often overlooked role in shaping Canadian identity. These locally governed broadcasters provide space for communities to tell their own stories, reflect local cultures and languages, and participate in public life; particularly in rural, northern, Indigenous, Francophone, multilingual and otherwise underserved communities. This presentation will examine community radio as both a media platform and a form of local public infrastructure. It will consider how community broadcasters contribute to identity formation through local journalism, civic information, cultural programming and emergency communication. It will also explore how commercial media closures and consolidation are increasing the importance of locally rooted, community-governed sources of trusted information. Drawing on the national work of the National Campus and Community Radio Association/Association nationale des radios étudiantes et communautaires (NCRA/ANREC), the presentation will discuss several current policy and funding developments. These include the Local Journalism Initiative, the emerging role of the Canada Journalism Collective and funding arising from the Online News Act, access to federal government advertising and public-information campaigns, and the role of community stations in emergency broadcasting and community preparedness. The presentation will argue that decisions about journalism funding, government communications and broadcasting policy influence not only which news organizations survive, but also which communities are able to see and hear themselves represented within Canada’s media system. Recognizing community media as essential democratic and cultural infrastructure is therefore central to understanding how Canadian identities are created, communicated and sustained."
Carolyn Steele, York University, "From Audience to User: The NFB and the Development of Canada’s Technological Imagination"
Dr. Carolyn Steele is Associate Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Department of Humanities at York University. A critical technophile and interdisciplinarian, Dr. Steele’s interests include the NFB’s educational unit Studio G, interactive and immersive art forms, digital humanities and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Her award-winning interactive media installations have been presented widely, including Istanbul, The Ontario Science Centre, and MIT.
"The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has played a major role in shaping Canadian media literacy and citizenship, especially through educational multimedia productions of Studio G—also known as the Filmstrip Unit. These innovation productions emerged from repurposed personnel and equipment from WW2 propaganda efforts, but it took the transformative zeitgeist of Expo ’67 for Studio G’s burgeoning importance to be fully realized. The fascination with interactive media as a mode of individual actualization crystalized through Expo ’67 and the opening of the Exploratorium in the States, was embedded in radical reforms Canadian curricular policy, requiring radical revamping of educational support materials. As the most prominent producer of Canadian educational media, Studio G was uniquely positioned to take the lead in training technologically adept Canadian citizens, equipped to actively engage in a rapidly changing world. Evolving from humble media such as audio-enhanced slides and filmstrips, to interactive VHS, laserdiscs, online learning games, and immersive VR—Studio G productions introduced students and educators to increasingly sophisticated forms of interactive multimedia. Unlike the ubiquitous educational films controlled by teachers, interactive media requires students to make independent decisions about content pacing, sequencing, and navigation, shifting from passive recipients of information to active participants in the meaning making process. Beyond the development of operational skills, educational multimedia fostered a national “technological imagination,” the capacity to think with and through technology, which has been posited as a “cultural imperative of the highest order” (Balsamo 2011, p. 6). Drawing on the methodologies of media archelogy (Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011), this paper traces the formative role the NFB and Studio G played in cultivating media literate Canadians as the country transformed into the digital age."
Paul S. Moore, Toronto Metropolitan University, "Broadcasting Cinema History: The NFB and CBC in the Canadian Film Archive"
Paul Moore's media histories of cinema exhibition in North America, appearing in Film History, Early Popular Visual Culture, and in Canadian Journal of Film and Media Studies, have focused on the relation between audiences and publicity. He is coordinator, with Jessica Whitehead, of the Canadian subcollection of the Media History Digital Library, and is currently writing an updated history of cinema in Canada.
"Canada’s viewing, reading, and fair-attending public was confronted with a new narrative in 1963: the country had its own film history, although nobody had bothered to tell it before. For 15 years already, since the Massey Commission, picture industry pioneers and ciné-club and society leaders had been calling on government to create a film archive. In 1963, their frustrated efforts turned instead to raising public awareness, introducing a story of Canadian cinema through magazine features, newspaper articles, a new encyclopedia entry, radio interviews, but also several CBC radio and television broadcast and two NFB productions. Film history was pushed into public view—Canadian cinema had a story worth telling and possessed a moving picture archive worth preserving, initiating a period of public consciousness and policy interventions for the film industry. My paper will survey the network of aligned interest and collaboration in 1963 between Hye Bossin (editor of Canadian Film Weekly) and Bill Galloway (archivist at NFB). Bossin’s Canadian Picture Pioneers celebration of sixty years of the industry was supported by a museum installation in Toronto, a slate of newspaper articles, and an NFB documentary, Anniversary (Weintraub, 1963), which played before first-run features in cinemas coast-to-coast. Complementing that celebration, NFB archivist Bill Galloway worked with pioneer newsreel and documentary directory Gordon Sparling to create a special installation, Canada on Film, for public fairgrounds. Canada on Film was pitched as ‘sixty years in six minutes,’ and juxtaposed several dozen films from 1898 in the Klondike to 1940s WWII, shown on 13 projectors in audio-visual surround in a special auditorium. My presentation asks how the resulting film history differed from other areas of Canadian nationalism and nostalgia officially formulated in the years leading up to the 1967 Centennial, reflecting upon residual legacies still evident in academic frameworks for Canadian cinema."
Cyrus Sundar Singh, Global Migration Institute, Toronto Metropolitan University, "Navigating the Hyphen: Unpacking the film within a film within a culture"
Dr. Cyrus is an AcademiCreActivist: a Gemini Award-winning filmmaker, scholar, composer, singer-songwriter, author, published poet, and changemaker. From the Award-winning National Film Board of Canada’s documentary debut Film Club (2001) to the live-documentary world premieres: Brothers In The Kitchen (2016) and Africville in Black and White (2017/18), Cyrus’ multidisciplinary outputs of scholarly research, publications, and creative productions have taken him around the world including Senegal, South Africa, India, Israel, Spain, Sri Lanka, Haiti, and Jamaica. A Research Fellow with the Global Migration Institute,TMU, Cyrus successfully conceived, mentored, and produced over 60 multimedia projects with graduate students across Canada.
"The Multiculturalism Act of 1971 was proclaimed one-week after my parents, siblings, and I arrived in Canada as immigrants. Under that Policy we could hold on to our ethnicity, distinct clothing, our mother tongues and freely practice our different religions. We did not have to assimilate! “We are free to be ourselves” but in the schoolyards our distinct identities made us easy targets. Our culture clashes were the necessary processes through which we negotiated our places and staked our claims. Once we staked our claims, however, we became a threat to the larger community of Euro-Canadians. That experience triggered the fond memory of my grade seven history teacher, Mr. Hans Niederreiter who successfully engaged us in Canadian history by using various participatory methods. He also organized an after-school film club and mentored us in the making of our own history-based short-film Ohh Canada (1974) -- an award-winning Super 8mm film made by a group of grade seven students in an after-school film club at King Edward Public School. Through the making of the film, the students explored their sense of identity and belonging as immigrants and Canadians of non-European descent. I was one of those students. 25 years later, I reunited the kids and the teacher in order to explore in depth the legacies of our belonging through my Gemini Award-winning documentary debut with the National Film Board of Canada, FilmClub (2001). In 2026, on the 25th anniversary of Film Club, Interrogating Canadian Identities 2026 Conference provides an ideal forum to unpack the film within a film within a culture that proudly waves the Maple as a symbol of cultural diversity and pluralism through unpacking our sense of belonging to Canada."
Gail Vanstone, York University, "Interrogating Canadian Identities Through Canadian (Feminist) Film"
Gail Vanstone is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities, York University, Toronto. She works at the intersection of feminist theory and women’s documentary film production. She is author of D is for Daring (2007), a history of Studio D, feminist film unit at Canada’s National Film Board; and, with Brian Winston and Wang Chi, The Act of Documenting (2017). Published essays: “‘Scriptrix narrans’: Digital Documentary Storytelling’s Radical Potential” (2018) and, with Winston, “’This would be scary to any other culture…but to us it’s so cute?’: Radicalism of Fourth Cinema Studies in Documentary Film, (2019) and “Are We on the Same Page Here? Moving Beyond “Us” and “Them”” in Women and Global Documentary Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (2025).
"In 1981, Kathleen Shannon Executive Producer of Studio D feminist film studio in the NFB (National Film Board of Canada) rebuked authors of the Applebaum-Hébert Report submitted to Canada’s Federal Cultural Review Committee, accusing them of a narrow view that “doubly colonized” women in Canada. An examination of a number of Studio D films (Shannon’s Like the Trees (1974); Beverley Shaffer’s My Name is Susan Lee (1975); Dora Nipp’s Under the Willow Tree (1997); Dorothy Todd Hénaut’s Firewords (1986) and Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie’s Forbidden Love (1992)) interrogate identity in Canada, reflecting historical tensions, relations with Indigenous peoples and, through various waves of immigration, asks how we construct ideas about national identity. This handful of Studio D films pins a series of relevant issues examined from a series of first-person perspectives that lay the ground, a legacy of sorts, for filmmakers today to take up these debates. Indeed, a cluster of current Canadian films explore such questions of identity through anthropologist Dara Culhane’s prism, shaped “by our own embodied, lived experiences and our entanglements with cultural beliefs and practices, histories and social/political relations ”. I am interested in investigating how these films suggest a methodology tracing these embodied processes as they move through zones of entanglement that yield insights about power and knowledge, leading us to Culhane’s questions: How do we know what we know? What knowledge, whose knowledge counts, and why?"
Melika Motevallipoor, University of Montreal, "Visible Yet Unsettled: Migrant Womanhood, Multicultural Recognition, and the Limits of Canadian Belonging in Contemporary Screen Media"
Melika Motevallipoor is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the Université de Montréal. Her research examines gender, identity, spectatorship, and audiovisual representation across cinema, digital media, and contemporary screen cultures. Working at the intersection of feminist film theory, media studies, and questions of migration and embodiment, she is particularly interested in how images produce, regulate, and unsettle identities. Her current doctoral work explores performativity, the cinematic body, and the politics of visibility in relation to gendered and diasporic subjects. She has presented her work at international conferences in film and media studies.
"womanhood as a privileged sign of national inclusivity while simultaneously leaving the terms of belonging unresolved. Rather than treating multiculturalism as a stable policy achievement, the paper approaches it as an image regime: a set of visual, narrative, and affective conventions through which Canada represents itself as welcoming, diverse, and reconciled. Focusing on the figure of the racialized migrant woman—particularly Middle Eastern and Iranian diasporic subjects—the paper asks how Canadian identity is made visible through stories of arrival, gratitude, resilience, and integration, and what forms of discomfort or exclusion these stories displace. The analysis brings together feminist film and media studies, diaspora studies, and theories of national identity to examine selected examples from contemporary Canadian audiovisual culture, including public-facing media, documentary/fictional representations, and institutional cultural discourse. It argues that migrant women are often positioned as evidence of Canadian openness: their presence confirms the nation’s multicultural self-image. Yet this visibility is conditional. The acceptable migrant subject is frequently one who translates her difference into resilience, trauma into inspiration, and displacement into gratitude. Such narratives can obscure ongoing racialization, class precarity, linguistic insecurity, and the pressure to perform belonging in ways that are legible to dominant Canadian publics. By interrogating the gap between representation and lived belonging, the paper contributes to debates on Canadian identities after the 1971 Multiculturalism Policy and in the broader context of diversity and inclusion. It proposes that Canadian identity today should be understood not as a coherent national essence, but as a contested screen: a space where hospitality, difference, settlement, and exclusion are continually staged, negotiated, and questioned."
Rebecca Gimmi, University of Toronto, “Expanding the Parallel: 1990s Identity Film Festivals and the Next-Generation Toronto Mosaic”
Rebecca Gimmi’s work for 20 years+ years has focused on producing contemporary Canadian art and audience outreach in her roles at the Art Gallery of York University, The Power Plant, Tate Modern and Britain, C Magazine, Images Festival and the Justina M. Barnicke
Gallery, and the federated Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Currently she is International Projects Officer, in the Dean’s Office, Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto supporting faculty and international partnerships. She holds the
first joint MBA in Art and Media Administration from the Schulich School of Business and MA in Art History from York University. Additionally she is a tenants rights advocate as a founding member of No Demovictions.
This presentation interrogates the visual art counter-culture against the state-sanctioned Canadian cultural "mosaic" established during the 1967 Centennial, and its longlasting effects. While Centennial-era frameworks focused on coalescing and promoting identity symbols, the experimental and social justice ethos of the visual artists developed an ecosystem and infrastructure which were training grounds for administrators, staff and audiences looking for even more visibility of marginalized voices in Artist-Run Centres. By the 1990s, a generation of racialized, queer, and marginalized curators, cultural managers, and moving-image artists continued the ethos of ARCs with a DIY aesthetic initiated self-determined "parallel institutions" through establishing identity-focused film festivals Focusing on the emergence of Toronto identity-based screen spaces, such as the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and South Asian Visual Arts Collective, this paper explores how these organizations bypassed dominant media frameworks. Through theatrical screenings, gallery presentations, and local public installations, these festivals embedded equity, accessibility, and cultural specificity into their core operations and programming. Finally, this presentation addresses a critical contemporary crisis: the 1990s media arts archive is threatened by deteriorating physical files and rapid data storage migration, even though these were often the very forms and materials artists were experimenting with and on, without considering the temporarility of forms and sites. This research contributes to a broader reimagining of Canadian art history, positioning media arts organizations, parallel public programming, and grassroots audience outreach as the true architects of a living, evolving, and continuously interrogated and difficult to define Toronto artistic landscape.
Brian Fauteux, University of Alberta, "Canadian Content in the Streaming Media Era: Popular Music, Identity, and Satellite Radio"
Brian Fauteux is Associate Professor of Popular Music and Media Studies at the University of Alberta. He studies music industries and music radio and is currently a co-investigator on a research project that investigates public infrastructure in the digital music industries. He is the author of Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio (2015) and Music in Orbit: Satellite Radio in the Streaming Space Age (2025).
"The role and definition of Canadian Content regulations for the streaming media era has been a topic of debate in recent years. However, similar discussions unfolded when satellite radio was licensed in Canada in the 2000s. This presentation will discuss issues, concerns, and questions pertaining to the role and relevance of Canadian content on radio in the twenty-first century. More precisely, it will discuss the ways that both Canadian Content and popular music artist legacies become packaged and circulated as music channels on satellite radio, raising questions about: how legacies persist in the streaming media era, how catalogs of music become commodities to circulate and re-cycle in the contemporary media industries, and how the music of popular Canadian artists distills tensions around broader debates about cultural protectionism and cultural policy for music by Canadians outside the parameters of legacy broadcast media. Among the ever-expanding list of channels available to subscribers of SiriusXM, a North American satellite radio service, is The Tragically Hip Radio. Like the many band- or artist-based channels offered by SiriusXM, The Tragically Hip Radio plays music from the band’s catalog as well as rare or exclusive live recordings and interviews. As well, this presentation argues that the packaging of Canadian music on an artist-based channel reflects a mode of conflating ideas about identity in Canadian Content with artist brands and their music catalogs."
Christopher Cwynar, Trent University, "Making Canadian Music and Making Music ‘Canadian’: Popular Music and Canadian National Identity During the Rock Era"
Christopher Cwynar is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Communications program at Trent University Durham GTA. He holds a PhD in Communication Arts (Media and Cultural Studies) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cwynar's primary research interests involve public and public service media, podcasting, and popular music. His work has appeared in a number of journals and edited collections including Media, Culture & Society, Popular Communication, the International Communication Gazette, The Radio Journal, and the Journal of Radio & Audio Media.
"This paper examines the discursive construction of ‘Canadianness’ in English-Canadian popular music in relation to the evolution of the Canadian music industry and music media. It argues that the emergence of the Canadian independent music industry in the 1990s established the basis for the valorization of certain Canadian popular music acts by American critics due in part to their ex-centric nature. This trend then took hold in earnest with the rise of independent music in the 00s as the web and high-speed Internet transformed the recording industry and music media. Canada’s peripheral cultural and economic status had been a liability during earlier periods (the so-called “branch plant” era), which was characterized by Canadians’ initial skepticism about the quality of homegrown talent and veneration of those artists who had been externally validated through U.S success (Edwardson, 2009; Wright, 1987). However, as an anti-mass form of mass culture, the rock genre culture positioned the genre as a non-commercial artform in relation to a caricature of pop as an industrialized, commercialized, and feminized commodity (Keightley, 2001). Canada’s long-lamented position on the cultural and economic periphery thus evolved to become a positive quality that imbued many artists of the 1990s and 2000s with an extra degree of artistic credibility in line with rock culture. By the 2000s, the discursive construction of ‘Canadian’ popular music was not so much about Canadianizing artists who’d been successful elsewhere as it was about making sense of a putative ‘national scene’ that was attracting attention from the United States and throughout the world. References Edwardson, R. (2009). Canuck rock: A history of Canadian popular music. Univ. of Toronto Press. Keightley, K. (2001). Reconsidering Rock. In S. Frith, W. Straw, & Street, John (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (pp. 109–142). Cambridge University Press. Wright, R. (1987). “Dream, Comfort, Memory, Despair”: Canadian Popular Musicians and the Dilemma of Nationalism,. Journal of Canadian Studies, 22(4), 27–43."
Christine Cooling, York University, "“Canadian Is Not a Genre”: Dine Alone Records, Alexisonfire, and the Politics of National Identity in Music"
Christine Rose Cooling is a PhD student in Communication & Culture at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. She previously completed her Master of Arts in Communication & Culture and her Honours Bachelor of Arts in Communication & Media Studies at York University, where she was awarded the Governor General’s Silver Medal at convocation. Her research interests include broadcasting and cultural policy, Canadian music, and technology, culture, and national identity.
"Canadian content regulations classify music nationally, award shows classify music nationally, record stores classify music nationally, and streaming services classify music nationally. Dine Alone Records emerged from the Southern Ontario music scene around Canadian acts such as Alexisonfire, eventually becoming one of the country’s most visible independent labels. Yet, the label describes its community as “music lovers and industry haters”—a stance that resists conventional logics of commercialization and success in popular culture. Perhaps nowhere are the creativity and interconnectedness inherent within the “indie consciousness” (Hibbett, 2005) more evident than in its philosophy. Incidentally, Dine Alone is also known for the subversive slogan, “Canadian is not a genre.” On one hand, Canadian music is routinely grouped under the category of "Canadian" through mechanisms such as CanCon regulations, the Junos, funding programs, and national music journalism. On the other, Dine Alone reject the idea that nationality should operate as a meaningful aesthetic category. The label's roster spans post-hardcore, folk, indie rock, punk, pop, and alternative, showing that "Canadian" is only a descriptor of origin rather than style. Alexisonfire—one of the first bands in Dine Alone’s roster—is widely regarded as a defining post-hardcore Canadian band of the twenty-first century, and neither their sound, lyrics, nor visual identity conform to traditional representations of Canadian culture. Still, the band constantly recognizes its hometown beginnings in St. Catherine’s and embraces their own vision of Canadianness. Using Dine Alone and Alexisonfire as a case study, this paper interrogates what it means to claim that "Canadian is not a genre" while building a distinctly Canadian music institution, examining how Canadian identity is negotiated by artists and institutions that simultaneously benefit from and resist any static national categorization."
Liz Poliakova, York University, Communication and Culture, "Canadian voices in romance publishing: Exploring authorial agency and self-publishing romance fiction"
Liz Poliakova holds a PhD in Communications and Culture from York University. Her research interests include self-publishing, the history of the Canadian book trade, and gender studies. Her work has appeared in The Conversation and New Media and Society.
"After the 2014 acquisition of Harlequin, no Canadian presses specialize in romance. As a result, Canadian romance authors must choose whether to seek an agent, approach foreign presses, or self-publish. Since foreign presses are usually large conglomerates with limited diversity (Hesmondhalgh, 1996), digital self-publishing is an appealing option for authors wanting to break away from conventional genre standards. Instead of focusing on characters that would appeal to a mainstream market, Canadian romance self-publishers produce diverse content. Without access to online tools to create and share their work, Canadian female self-publishers would have to cater to a mass audience. Christine Larson (2024) notes that romance authors, in particular, have historically had a close relationship with their readers. My study builds on this argument and adds that this relationship has only strengthened with the introduction of online platforms. Self-published authors produce niche content with their readers in mind. For instance, Jackie Lau was excited to focus on Chinese-Canadian characters when she began her self-publishing journey. This move represents the contemporary drive to produce #ownvoices content, authors writing about characters who represent their own community. I used critical case sampling to reach out to Canadian female self-publishers who are active in the public eye and advocate for self-publishing. I recruited and interviewed 5 Canadian romance self-published authors who responded to my request. Based on my findings, I argue that the process of contemporary digital self-publishing grants the Canadian female self-publisher agency and freedom of expression by facilitating a direct connection to their readers, made possible by platformization."
Claude Denis, University of Ottawa, "On the Canadianness of Mexican Gothic: The Canada Reads Edition"
Claude Denis is Professor Emeritus in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa. He is the author of We Are Not You. First Nations and Canadian Modernity (1997) and of many articles and book chapters, and editor of two books. He has worked on federal politics and nationalisms in Canada and on Mexican politics, with a focus on the interplay between democracy, citizenship, security and human rights; and on Indigenous politics and francophone minorities in Canada. He is currently working on the interface between art, politics and society, especially in Mexico; and on contemporary sociological theory. He has been editor of the International Journal of Canadian Studies, and a member of the editorial boards of several international journals. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the U. of Toronto.
"Silvia Moreno-Garcia (SMG), the author of the novel Mexican Gothic (2020), has described herself as “Mexican by birth and Canadian by inclination.” She immigrated to Canada as a young adult and within a few years became an internationally successful writer, both commercially and critically. Mexican Gothic, set entirely in Mexico in the 1950s, is her most commercially successful novel and was one of five finalists on CBC’s Canada Reads in 2023. Of the five, it was the only one to have no ostensible Canadian content. The program, which affirms a strong and explicit commitment to social and literary diversities, framed that year’s competition with the slogan “one book to change your perspective,” in addition to its general question: “What is the one book that all of Canada should read?” This paper explores how Canada Reads construed Mexican Gothic as Canadian and the impact this had on the book’s performance in the competition, and more broadly how that construction may or may not be sustainable. As such, the paper addresses both the novel and its author themselves, and the way the CBC program dealt with them. Two features of the novel’s place in the program stand out: that SMG is indisputably Canadian and, less obviously, that Mexican Gothic’s critique of colonialism and white supremacy in Mexico opens space for Canadians to discuss the same difficult issues here with the benefit of some distance. Several questions follow: What do the novel and its author tell us about colonialism and white supremacy in Mexico? How does this resonate with the Canadian experience? How does Canada Reads take it up? Finally, what does all this tell us about the Canadianness of Mexican Gothic, both inside and outside of Canada Reads?"
Lewis Sang & H.D. Wilshire, University of Toronto, "Who Put Geopolitics in My Hockey Romance? Canadian Nationalism and Identity Politics in Heated Rivalry"
Lewis Sang is a PhD student in the School of Information at the University of Toronto, with a Masters in Digital Humanities from the University of Alberta. His research interests include sports, nationalism, fan practices, and how esports and video games intersect with mainstream culture. He is also a lifelong long-suffering fan of the Edmonton Oilers and trying to learn baseball by watching the Toronto Blue Jays, to some degree of success. HD Wilshire is a MA student in English at Southeastern Louisiana University. Their interest is in analysis of contemporary poetry and prose.
"Heated Rivalry, the television show adapted from Rachel Reid’s novel, has become a global phenomenon. Lauded as uniquely Canadian media, the show joins Kim’s Convenience and Schitt’s Creek as successful cultural exports (Stevis-Gridneff & Burston, 2026). Much of the cultural focus, however, is on the show's influence on queerness in sport, often neglecting the nationalist themes within in lieu of emphasizing production and consumption as patriotic practice. The series’ use of hockey—a pillar of Canadian culture—participates in meaning-making of the image of the nation, however intentional. Situating analysis of the show within the study of sport as a nation building project (Allison, 2000), specifically the contestation and negotiation of the Canadian identity in hockey (Watson, 2017; Wong & Dennie, 2021), is especially important given how Heated Rivalry and traditional hockey markets have influenced one another since the show’s release (Gentille, 2026; McKenzie, 2026). Subsequently, the popular phenomenon of Heated Rivalry cannot be fully understood without examining how the show challenges—and endorses—an image of "Canadianness.” We argue that Heated Rivalry presents a commodified version of the Canadian identity that smooths over existing conflicts between queerness, race, and politics in the Canadian imaginary. The series explicitly presents Canada as the progressive alternative to America and Russia while reinforcing problematic narratives about immigrants, racialised minorities, and perceived geopolitical threats that have also been historically constructed through the real-life sport. We also compare the show to similar narratives in professional hockey, including the histories of Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, the inspirations for Heated Rivalry’s main characters. As part of the campaign for Canadian content for global audiences (Morrison, 2026) complicated by growing populist politics and nationalist sentiment, Heated Rivalry’s depoliticalisation of the Canadian identity reinforces and normalises these systems of domination."
Alyson Steele, York University, "Eh, That's Our Music: Canadian Artists and the Battle for Master Rights"
Alyson Steele is an MA student in the Joint Communication & Culture Program with York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. She completed her BA in Sociology and Gender and Women Studies. As she continues to enhance her research abilities, professional and academic skills, she aims to use her Sociology background to understand the relationships between fans and icons in the music industry. Her research is driven by a deep curiosity about how the media shapes our perception of the world. Her research areas include Media history, Entertainment media, and Fan Studies.
"Since Taylor Swift announced her Taylor’s Version project in 2021 as a means of reclaiming ownership over her master recordings, public and industry discussions surrounding artists’ rights and music ownership have intensified. While much of the existing scholarship focuses on the United States, comparatively little research examines the history and significance of music ownership rights in Canada. This paper seeks to address that gap by exploring how prominent Canadian musicians, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Justin Bieber, Gordon Lightfoot, and more have navigated and challenged systems of ownership in pursuit of control over their recorded works. The paper begins by outlining the legal distinction between the two primary forms of music copyright: musical compositions and sound recordings. The musical composition accounts for the lyrics, the written music, essentially the steps for how to play the song. The sound recording is an audio capture of the musical composition being performed. The songwriter(s) first own the copyright of the musical composition, and the performer initially owns the sound recording (Herman, 2021, p. 241). The owners of sound recordings possess fewer rights than those who own the musical composition. The master recording is the original sound, and the copyrights of the recording artists are known as the master rights or “masters”. All later copies made of the recording come from the original master recording, meaning whoever owns the master recording has control over licensing of the recording, who can use it, when, why and for how much (p. 242). This paper traces the evolution of music ownership practices in Canada and examines the efforts of Canadian artists to regain or maintain control over their master recordings. It also considers the impact of the 2008 Universal Studios fire, which reportedly destroyed thousands of master recordings, including works by Canadian artists, raising important questions about preservation, accountability, and ownership. By situating contemporary debates within a Canadian context, this paper contributes to a broader understanding of artists’ rights, cultural heritage, and the ongoing struggle for ownership and control in the music industry."
Sachi Fukuda, Sophia University, Graduate School of Global Studies, "Learning Across Difference: The Expansion of Positionalities and Intersectional Solidarities in Japanese K-pop Fandom"
Sachi is an MA student in Global Studies at Sophia University, Japan. Her research focuses on intersectional solidarity and how people become engaged with issues affecting communities other than their own. She plans to pursue a PhD in Canada, exploring the intersections of disability and migration. Beyond academia, she has been involved in various activist initiatives, including collaborations with the General Union of Palestinians with Disabilities and the Manganese intersectional queer feminist collective. She has also worked as a researcher and program evaluation specialist at SMJ, a leading Japanese NGO supporting migrants and refugees.
"This research examines the process through which socially conscious K-pop fans expand their perceptions of positionality within the Japanese-speaking online K-pop fandom. The author conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with 10 participants, each lasting approximately one and a half to three hours. Participants represented diverse social positions across gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, education, employment status, and region. Most participants were interested in discrimination and colonialism while reflecting on both their dominant and marginalized social positions. The author identified three primary findings. First, participants expanded their perceptions of positionality through frequent interactions with other fans. They encountered unfamiliar issues in which they occupied dominant positions and learned ways to engage with multiple social issues. Second, K-pop fandom serves as a gateway for ethnic/racial majority Japanese fans to develop interest in the history of the Korean Peninsula and racism against Zainichi Koreans, an ethnic Korean minority with historical roots in Japan's colonial rule of Korea. For many participants, recognizing colonial responsibilities would have been difficult without catalysts such as K-pop. By becoming K-pop fans, they came to recognize their positionality as oppressors while interacting with other fans within a caring network. Third, through learning about colonial responsibilities toward the Korean Peninsula, participants developed an understanding of colonial patterns and expanded their interest and engagement in other issues, such as Palestine, Ainu issues, and immigrant detention. Participants frequently found connections across different forms of oppression and discrimination, understanding social issues through common structural similarities rather than as isolated cases. This research demonstrates how individuals negotiate their positionalities across multiple axes of privilege and marginalization through the interaction in the K-pop fandom. It further highlights how fandom can facilitate intersectional learning and engagement with social issues, suggesting alternative pathways toward solidarity across differences that may also have relevance in multicultural societies such as Canada."
Aidan Moir, McMaster University, "“Canadian Icons” and the Transition of Iconicity from Legacy to Digital Media"
Aidan Moir is an Assistant Professor (CLA) in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University. Her research analyzes the relationship between legacy media and digital culture in shaping how iconic identities and campaigns circulate across popular media.
"In 2024, Ann Powers, a music critic for National Public Radio, released Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, a biography critically analyzing the Canadian singer-songwriter’s career, celebrity persona, and cultural impact. In an interview promoting the biography with The Globe & Mail, Mitchell is not only described as a “Canadian icon,” but Powers also labels her as a “cultural influencer,” employing contemporary language of the digital economy to describe a persona who originates from an older legacy media environment. In other media interviews, Powers cites elements such as fan parasocial connections to Mitchell and the singer-songwriter’s impact on other artists including Taylor Swift as characteristics underscoring her iconicity. However, these aspects are not inherently “Canadian,” nor do they justify Mitchell’s label as a “Canadian icon.” Similar language blurring iconicity, celebrity, and influence has also been employed to examine other notable Canadian celebrities, such as Catherine O’Hara. As a scholarly concept, cultural icons are challenging to define due to numerous competing interpretations and understandings. This academic debate becomes even more challenging when applied to the Canadian context, where very few figures truly embody the status of “Canadian icon.” Through a critical analysis of recent legacy media coverage, social media, and other related promotional material situating notable personas as “Canadian icons,” this paper argues that this popular framing functions as an empty signifier, underscoring the national tensions and complexities negotiated by these labels. Attention is directed towards how contemporary language of celebrity and influencer culture is employed to reshape how popular discourse determines who is considered a “Canadian icon” with cultural influence, and whether these labels contribute any meaningful role for constructing national identity."
Rami Soudah, York University, "Harmony in Exile: Arabic Music in Canada"
Rami Soudah is a first-year History PhD student at York University, based in Toronto. He has received a Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Toronto, and a Master’s degree in History as well from Waterloo University. He is currently pursuing his PhD in topics of Arabic music and history, with research focusing on the history of the Near East Broadcasting Station, originally based in Palestine, then Lebanon, and its nature as a BBC-run propaganda station. He is interested in various topics, primarily of Arabic music, film, and culture, and SWANA political and social histories.
"This research attempts to establish a connection between Arab musicians based and active in Canada and their identities and how that impacts the music they perform and make. By interviewing an undetermined number of Arab-Canadian musicians on their backgrounds, reasons for migration, history with playing and making music, and their influences and experience in making and performing music here, this study finds that the multiculturality and diversity of Canada makes it an ideal landscape for musical experimentation and growth, and the introduction of Arabic music to the scene has allowed not just local, non-Arab musicians to experiment with complex non-Western musical theories and sounds, but has led Arab musicians to rethink their own understanding of their musical identities."
Christine Cooling and Alexander Martin, York University, "From CanCon to Algorithms: Promoting Canadian Culture in the Platform Age"
Christine Rose Cooling is a PhD student in Communication & Culture at York University, specializing in Canadian broadcasting policy, Canadian music, and technology and identity. Alexander F. Martin is a PhD candidate in Science & Technology Studies at York University, specializing in emerging technologies and threats.
"Canada is facing unprecedented challenges to cultural sovereignty in the platform age. As recommendation algorithms and artificial intelligence increasingly shape how citizens access information and culture, longstanding questions about promoting a distinct Canadian culture and identity have re-emerged in new forms. Recent policy decisions by the Carney government have intensified these debates; in June 2026, the government directed the CRTC to review its framework for the Online Streaming Act's implementation, while announcing $600 million in direct support for Canadian cultural industries. This followed the June 2025 decision to rescind the Digital Services Tax amid broader Canada–United States trade negotiations and the earlier Online News Act that saw Meta refuse to negotiate and block Canadian news links across its platforms entirely in August 2023. This paper situates these developments within Canada's longer communications policy tradition. Beginning with the Aird Commission of 1929 and the subsequent creation of the CBC/Radio-Canada in 1936, Canadian governments have viewed communications policy as a means of preserving Canadian voices and identity within a North American media environment dominated by American content. Today, however, the challenge has shifted from broadcasting to digital platforms and AI systems that increasingly determine what content citizens discover, consume and trust. We argue that sovereignty is not simply a question of regulating technology companies but of ensuring that Canadian culture remains visible and accessible in an increasingly fragmented online environment. As Canada develops new approaches to platform governance, online safety and artificial intelligence, policymakers should place renewed emphasis on discoverability, Canadian content (CanCon), and cultural sovereignty. The future of Canadian identity may depend not only on what content is produced, but on whether Canadians can find it at all."
Miles Weafer, York University, "Managing “Proximity”: CBC’s ongoing negotiation of audience input online"
Miles Weafer is a PhD candidate (ABD) in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture at York University. His dissertation examines CBC’s promotion of digital, online service expansion amidst the financial precariousness and government criticism characterizing Harper’s majority reign (2008–2015). Engaging Canadian media scholarship, including critical analyses of new media’s promotion in popular, nationalist rhetoric, Miles habitually returns to broadcasting’s strategic orientation of space and time, and to the nationalist-utopian vision of media routinely colouring changing transmission practices in Canada.
"In October 2025 CBC/Radio-Canada published their latest five-year strategy, CBC, Here for Canada. Projecting towards 2030, and evoking rhetoric of interactive, engaging online “spaces” (p. 8) expressed since the 2015-focussed “Everyone, Every way” (CBC, 2011, p. 5), CBC’s 2030 strategy espouses ambitions to feature "divergent opinions and perspectives" (p. 1) including those from geographically outlying or culturally marginalized communities. Yet, aside from leveraging the term "proximity" to characterize a vision of local extension and audience engagement to be achieved online, the 2030 plan offers little in terms of renewed vision for CBC. Despite its forward-looking language, CBC’s 2030 plan evokes the unfulfilled, utopian promise of dialogical user engagement accompanying the network’s prioritization of online service extensions since 2014. Expressed aims to expand network coverage in outlying regions and localities (CBC, 2025, p. 5) continue CBC's longstanding mobile and digital-first priorities established amidst economic crisis in 2012 and directed at local expansion since 2016. This paper contrasts the network’s vision of inclusive, dialogical online services and increased local “proximity” with CBC’s intensified and ongoing management of online users comments. I suggest the 2030 strategy’s acknowledgement, and the network’s managed inclusion, of marginal perspective including local perspectives, demonstrates CBC’s ongoing negotiation of its own margins. CBC’s demonstrated ability and willingness to manage published online feedback on the network attest to the enduring role of established institutional priorities, practices, and tensions in delineating network services today – including the broadcaster’s foundational concerns with local-national cultural alignment and widespread, unilateral content distribution. Amidst criticisms of the Crown corporation’s political bias, I conclude that CBC remains equally stifled by the broadcaster’s ingrained tendency towards centralized control and standard distinction between producers and audiences (Baudrillard, 1981; Salter, 1981)."
Fatima Husain, York University, "Signals of Belonging: Toronto Campus-Community Radio, Afro Caribbean Sound, and Canadian Identity"
Fatima is a PhD candidate in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York University. Based in Toronto, she is a creative and cultural media producer, educator, and researcher with over sixteen years’ experience in journalism, broadcasting, digital media, and equity driven training. Her work amplifies racialized, marginalized, and BIPOC voices through community centred production, editorial leadership, and inclusive practice. She teaches media, advises governance and community media projects, and leads training initiatives. Her doctoral research examines transmedia, AI, and Canadian media policy, emphasizing ethical, community driven approaches to technology and cultural preservation.
"Anchored to CHRY FM and CIUT FM’s 40 year milestones and periodizing 1967–2025, this research follows playlists and diasporic talk to expose how grassroots broadcasting contested Canadian imaginaries. This study examines how Afro Caribbean programming on two Toronto Campus Community stations, namely CHRY FM (VIBE 105) and CIUT FM, intervened in and reshaped dominant narratives of Canadian identity from the post-centennial era through the present (1967–2025). Drawing on publicly available archival materials, assembled from program schedules, station retrospectives, Earshot/NCRA charts, newspaper archives, CRTC filings, and available audio, the research traces the circulation of Reggae, Soca, Dancehall, Calypso, and diasporic talk programming across successive institutional and policy moments. Methods combine archival Metadata Coding (show titles, timeslots, genre, and language markers), Paratextual Discourse Analysis of station and program descriptions, manual thematic coding of playlists and blurbs, and close listening to a purposive audio sample. Sampling is comparative across analytic periods to capture pre and post institutional shifts, such as CHRY-FM’s rebranding and CIUT-FM’s evolving multilingual programming, while remaining documentary and non-intrusive. The findings show that Canadian Campus-Community radio operated as durable cultural infrastructure for Afro-Caribbean identity formation and intergenerational transmission. Programming practices on these airwaves frequently contested or filled gaps left by official multicultural narratives and regulatory frameworks, even as institutional pressures and digital transitions complicated preservation and visibility. By situating these micro-histories within broader timelines of multicultural policy, CRTC regulation, and the TRC Calls to Action, the study argues for archival justice: the formal recognition, preservation, and integration of campus-community radio’s Afro-Caribbean sound archives into Canadian heritage narratives. The study concludes with practicable recommendations for station archives and university repositories to ensure these sound histories are preserved as evidence in ongoing debates about who counts as Canadian."
Sujaya Devi Rampersad-Singh, University of Toronto, "Curation and Continuity: The Role of Indo-Caribbean-Canadian Instagram Influencers in Identity Maintenance"
Sujaya Devi Rampersad-Singh is a PhD student, Research Fellow, and Course Instructor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, specializing in Media, Technology, and Culture. Supervised by Dr. Sherry Yu, her doctoral research analyzes how the Indo-Caribbean Canadian diaspora negotiates community, identity, and heritage through ethnic and digital media. She has served as a Research Assistant for the Digital Ethnic Media Hub and a SSHRC-funded diasporic youth project. A Canadian-Trinidadian author and cultural producer, Sujaya published Write Left (2017) and Devi(l) (2021), and hosts the podcast Our First Page, bridging scholarly inquiry with creative storytelling.
"The Indo-Caribbean-Canadian community occupies a complex, double-diasporic space that is frequently obscured within mainstream Canadian media and flattened within broader South Asian or Caribbean narratives. This unique positionality, shaped by historical migrations from South Asia to the Caribbean and subsequently to Canada, makes the maintenance of a distinct cultural identity a highly dynamic endeavor. Recently, digital platforms, particularly Instagram, appear to have emerged as critical sites where this identity is actively negotiated, curated, and sustained. This paper investigates how Indo-Caribbean-Canadian female influencers utilize digital content creation to construct and maintain a distinct diasporic identity. Employing a qualitative media mapping framework alongside a targeted case study of prominent creators, the research analyzes the visual and textual strategies deployed on the platform. By examining curated aesthetics, ancestral storytelling, and community engagement within captions and comment sections, the study explores the everyday digital labor dedicated to cultural preservation. Preliminary observations suggest that these influencers may function as vital cultural intermediaries, translating complex histories of indentureship, displacement, and hyphenated Canadian belonging into accessible digital forms. The findings indicate that their platforms do not merely showcase lifestyle content, but rather serve as active, decentralized digital archives that help a younger cohort navigate and maintain generational memory against historical silences. Ultimately, this work contributes to platform and diaspora studies by evaluating influencer culture as a meaningful site for identity construction and community survival."
Richard Martínez Loyola, Western University, "Beyond the Monolingual Mindset: Multilingualism as a Pedagogical Resource in Higher Education"
Richard Martínez Loyola is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Education at Western University. He completed his master's in Hispanic Studies at Western as well, where he explored the role of motivation in beginner Spanish as a foreign language courses.
"The topic of multilingual identity has gained much attention in recent years due to globalization and migration patterns, with proficiency in multiple languages perceived as advantageous. In Canada, according to the 2021 census, about 8.3 million individuals identified as a speaker of a language other than English or French, which accounts for approximately 25% of the country’s population. In the foreign language classroom, previous research (e.g., García & Sylvan, 2011) claims that, although multilingualism is becoming more of a norm, language learning pedagogy typically follows a monolingual mindset, in which learners are expected to only use one language within the classroom. Following multilingualism as the theoretical basis, the current presentation draws on a case study which focuses on one foreign language commonly taught in Canadian higher education classroom: Spanish. In specific, the focus is placed on the type of learning activities that can be employed to propel student motivation. The study presented also features the participation of 256 undergraduate students, all of which were enrolled in a beginner Spanish course and completed two online questionnaires: a Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (Marian et al., 2007) and a motivational factors questionnaire (Ryan, 2009; Taguchi et al., 2009). Both questionnaires sought to obtain data on students’ language backgrounds, in addition to how their identity plays a role in their learning of Spanish. Most participants (n=235) reported knowing a second or even a third language (n=186), highlighting that the linguistic landscape present in Canada only translates to a linguistically diverse classroom. Such study serves to underscore the country’s commitment to embracing multilingualism in multiple domains, while emphasizing the potential of pedagogical practices that leverage students’ multilingual resources to foster motivation and engagement in higher education classrooms."
Corey Orszak, York University, "Presenting Canadian Studies for Peer Review"
Corey Orszak is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, York University.
"Foundational to the creation of the discipline of “Canadian Studies” was the 1968 publication of What Culture? What Heritage?, the final report of the National History Project (NHP). Begun in 1965 as a Centennial project commissioned by the private Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, the NHP was mandated to produce a comprehensive study of Canadian History education. Armed with a battery of social-scientific premises, a significant endowment from Trinity College, and uncommon access to Canadian classrooms, NHP project director A.B. Hodgetts and his small team accumulated over two years a massive collection of data on curricular materials, teacher education, and pedagogical styles commonplace to the teaching of Canadian history and Canadian civic culture. The NHP team lacked, however, both academic training and academic credibility. This would be provided by the new Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE, est. 1965). Desirous of a project capable of demonstrating its commitment to the specific needs of Ontarios’ educative populations, OISE offered in 1967 to facilitate completion of the NHP by shepherding the NHP’s massive dataset into an argument possessing, through academic affiliation and peer review, the academic (and so scientific) credibility required to grant authority to the NHP’s recommendations for the future of civic education in Canada. Using archival records from the research, writing, and publication of What Culture? What Heritage? by OISE in 1968, this paper outlines the process by which the NHP was transformed from a private centennial project into an academic argument for the necessity of creating a unique discipline of Canadian Studies."
Ian Cameron, University of Saskatchewan, "Performative Reconciliation and the Neoliberal Academy: Interrogating Institutional Erasure on the Academic Conference Circuit"
Ian Cameron is a graduate researcher at the University of Saskatchewan pursuing advanced studies with a focus on historical research and oral narratives. His work critically examines institutional structures, power dynamics, and the intersection of memory and representation within the Canadian settler-colonial landscape. By focusing on how historical tensions and cultural policies manifest in contemporary academic environments, his research seeks to bridge the gap between performative institutional frameworks and structural reality.
"In the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Calls to Action, Canadian universities have increasingly adopted the vocabulary of decolonization, ‘Equity, Diversity & Inclusion’, and institutional Indigenization. However, a stark divergence exists between performative administrative rhetoric and structural reality. This paper interrogates the phenomenon of “reconciliation inclusion” within the neoliberal university framework, exploring how academic institutions utilize high-profile, federally funded conferences on Indigenous-settler relations to accumulate cultural capital while simultaneously enacting structural violence against actual Indigenous academic spaces. I argue that institutions frequently treat the discipline of Indigenous Studies as a disposable corporate line item. This paper examines how administrators weaponize manufactured financial crises to bypass bicameral academic governance and systematically defund marginalized fields, using a primary case study of recent policy shifts, specifically the administrative suspension of foundational undergraduate programs under the guise of strategic fiscal austerity. When universities prioritize corporate donor models, real estate expansion, and superficial compliance checklists over the retention of Indigenous faculty and the safety of Indigenous students, “decolonization” becomes mere window dressing designed to mask ongoing institutional erasure. Furthermore, this paper critiques the systemic expectation for Indigenous scholars to repeatedly perform trauma for predominantly settler academic audiences within spaces that actively dismantle their academic homes. By weaponizing the conference’s own call to examine “changing and contested ideas of Canadian identity,” this presentation holds up a critical mirror to the academy. It demands a rigorous re-evaluation of how academic institutions can legitimately host dialogues on historical tensions while actively perpetuating colonial and corporate erasure within their internal governance structures."
Eric Wilkinson, University of British Columbia, "Organic Progress and Canada's National Identity"
Eric Wilkinson is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia. He primarily researches ethics and political philosophy, with particular focus on Canada's national identity, multicultural theory, and the history of Canadian philosophy. His work has appeared in the American Review of Canadian Studies, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, and Philosophical Topics, among other journals. Some recent publications include: "The Possibility of Multicultural Nationhood," "Recovering Classical Indigenous Philosophy," "Complicity in the Nation's Past Actions," and "A Brief History of Canadian Political Philosophy." He also frequently contributes articles about Canadian politics and Canada's national identity to public-facing current affairs outlets like Canadian Affairs, Canadian Dimension, and The Conversation. In 2026, he co-edited with Elizabeth Trott a special issue of the journal Dialogue entitled "Envisioning Canada." The special issue brought together articles on the history of Canadian philosophy as well as philosophical reflection on contemporary problems facing Canada.
"How should we understand the evolution of Canada’s national identity and the relationship between plurality and that identity? These should be understood in terms of organic progress. The concept of organic progress contains both a descriptive and normative dimension. The descriptive component concerns how new conceptions of the nation grow out of previous ideas and iterations of the national identity. Meanwhile, the normative dimension holds that this process of reform is ethically preferable to alternative ways in which a national identity can change. In this paper, I explain the evolution of Canada's national identity in terns of organic progress, and illustrate how it can and should evolve further, into a more just society. At Confederation, the early “deux races” conception of the Canadian identity recognized a kind of plurality, with the English and French viewed as partners in creating what George-Étienne Cartier termed a new “political nationality.” Yet, this conception neglected the place of Indigenous peoples and settlers who were of neither British nor French descent. By the early twentieth-century, these exclusions became untenable, leading to mosaic views of Canadian nationhood. These were precursors to multicultural theory and the eventual adoption of official multiculturalism. In a similar vein, the reconceptualization of the place of Indigenous nations within Canada that affored them greater recognition built upon this notion of plurality, as well as nation-to-nation treaties. Earlier values and institutions were dialectically reinterpreted to build a more inclusive national identity. The framework of organic progress also points to how Canada can further develop toward a more just future. The value of plurality contained in the present Canadian identity can be teased out further to achieve a properly multinational, multicultural, decolonial, cohesive national identity. The notion of organic progress also instructs us that progress must be fought for, and how that can be done. The values and character of a nation can be dialogically renegotiated, but that requires a willingness to argue in the public sphere for that change."
AJ Cordeiro, Toronto Metropolitan University, "Captured Infrastructure, Persistent Identity: Why Settler-Canadian National Narratives Outlast the Population They Claim to Represent"
AJ Cordeiro (he/him) is an assistant professor & researcher at the RTA School of Media (The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University). His main scholarly focus is on developing ethical, transparent AI approaches to strengthen democratic participation and deepen public understanding. Through interdisciplinary, practice-based research, he examines the impact of digital systems on accessibility and civic life, prioritizing transparency, human judgment, and clear communication over automation or surveillance. His public work connects creative technology to critical issues of power and governance.
"Why do anachronistic, 1967-centennial-era images of Canadian identity persist in contemporary public discourse despite five decades of demographic transformation? Dominant analytic frames in Canadian studies treat this persistence as cognitive-cultural lag (slow-changing schemas of national selfhood) or as politically motivated defence (the strategic reproduction of settler imaginaries by actors who benefit from them). Both frames capture something real yet locate the persistence at the consumption or contestation layer, downstream of an unanalyzed production layer. This paper proposes a third, complementary explanation. The persistence is a feature of production capture: a condition in which the credibility infrastructure that authorizes public claims about national identity has been preserved in surface form while its democratic function has been redirected away from the pluralism the country's transformed population now requires. Canadian media's credibility infrastructure (public-broadcaster mandates, beat architectures, ownership configurations, curricular review, and educational publishing markets) was institutionalized during the centennial settlement (Massey Commission to Multiculturalism Policy, 1949–71) around settler-Canadian historiographic frames. Subsequent interventions (Multiculturalism Policy, Charter, RCAP, TRC, DEI initiatives) rhetorically updated the country's self-image while operating as overlays on the unrestructured production architecture. Four cases illustrate the pattern: the CBC (state-adjacent capture), the English-Canadian metropolitan press (elite source capture), educational publishing (ownership capture), and Quebec's distinctive institutional architecture (a convergent pattern through a different configuration). The paper situates the framework against the strongest counter-considerations (APTN's structural significance, RCAP/TRC as themselves structural interventions, Indigenous-led media as counter-cases) and argues that recognizing identity-discourse production as capturable infrastructure reframes the policy conversation from contesting representations to interrogating who produces them, through what institutional routines, on whose authority."
Richard Nimijean, Carleton University, "A “post-national country with no core identity”? The Politics of Reframing the Canadian Identity"
Associate Professor (Teaching Stream), Canadian Studies, Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His most recent publications are “Why Mark Carney Is Pushing ‘Fortress North America’ Amid Deep Canadian Distrust of the U.S.” The Conversation, May 26, 2026. https://theconversation.com/why-mark-carney-is-pushing-fortress-north-america-amid-deep-canadian-distrust-of-the-u-s-283434, “The Elephant Still Twitches: Trudeau’s Management of Canada–U.S. Relations in the America First Era.” In The Trudeau Record, edited by Laura Macdonald, Katherine Scott, and Stuart Trew, 255-267. Halifax: Lorimer, 2024, and “An Accidental Canadianist: How my career in Canadian Studies all began.” Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies 4 (August 2024):139-144. https://acnzsn.org/journal/jacanzs-volume-4-august-2024/an-accidental-canadianist-how-my-career-in-canadian-studies-all-began/
"“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada…There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state” (Justin Trudeau, cited in Lawson 2015) Justin Trudeau’s statement after his 2015 federal election victory reflects his effort to connect his platform to an evolving Canadian national identity - “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” - and to frame Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s policy agenda as outside the Canadian consensus (Nimijean 2017). Critics contended that it undermined historic (and often nostalgic) notions of the Canadian identity and has transformed Canada for the worse. It could lead to the eradication of national identity (Todd 2016). It led to “raced-based politics” (Malcolm 2019) and fuelled “hate in the streets…in a pride-starved country” (National Post 2024). It was part of a “cynical gutting of Canadian history” (MacKay 2023). It is still used politically today. Pierre Poilievre’s major speech to the January 2026 Conservative Party convention twice referred to the consequences of a postnational identity while not once mentioning Donald Trump and his threats to Canadian sovereignty, which was top of mind for most Canadians. I show how this case reflects the growing importance of domestic brand politics in Canada (Nimijean 2014). Neoliberalism and globalization have led to growing policy homogeneity despite rhetorical differences in party platforms. In this environment, political actors use national identity to portray opponents as outside the Canadian consensus. This ignores the nature of national identity and how it evolves (Smith 1991). I conclude by examining how Prime Minister Carney is using a nostalgic vision of national identity to advance an agenda that critics contend undermines a sense of the Canadian identity."
Davis Vallesi, McMaster University, "Trudeau Squared: An Analysis of the 1972 and 2021 Federal Elections"
Davis Vallesi is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in Communication & Culture at York University. His dissertation “Trudeau Squared: An Analysis of the 1972 and 2021 Federal Elections” comparatively examines campaign newspaper coverage and political party platforms. He currently works for the Public Service of Canada and is also a sessional instructor at McMaster University, teaching the course “Communication for Campaigns and Elections”.
"Canadian federal elections are important exercises in which our national identities are debated and interrogated. Amidst changes to the cultural, economic, and technological landscape of Canada, the comparison of federal elections allows for an understanding of how governing priorities have evolved. This objective guided the comparative analysis of media coverage and Liberal Party campaign platforms for the 1972 and 2021 federal elections. This research not only tracked the types of political issues to better understand governing priorities but also strived to understand how such issues achieved prominence and were subsequently interrogated. The political topics most frequently discussed for both the 1972 and 2021 elections often had an economic slant, encompassing subjects such as employment, and taxes; this political prioritization of economic factors may further contextualize our understanding of the colonization of Indigenous lands and the evolution of immigration policy throughout the twenty-first century. Beyond tracking the prominence of political issues, my scholarship examines how these issues were presented within the pages of newspapers, measured according to metrics of journalistic norms. One finding relates to a rise in opinionated journalistic formats alongside a drop in objective news pieces for the 2021 election. This has implications for understanding how the media facilitates an interrogation of Canadian identity, given that journalists are more often persuading readers of a single disposition rather than consulting a wide variety of perspectives surrounding political issues. The newspaper articles and Liberal Party platforms had a more adversarial tone for 2021, which surfaced in the quotations of political actors. This indicates how the interrogation of Canadian identities through media and political spheres is becoming more argumentative, potentially influenced by shifts in the media industry and habits of news consumption. The analysis of media will continue to hold importance in understanding the interrogation of Canadian identity during election periods."
Gabriel Maracle, Carleton University, "Banality of Colonialism: Cooptation of First Nations self-determination through Pretendianism"
I was born and raised in the unceded Algonquin territory now known as Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I am Kanien'kehá:ka and, like my father, am a citizen of the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. My mother is non-Indigenous from southern Ontario. I have a Ph.D. in Indigenous Studies from Trent University. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, focusing on Indigenous governance. This work involves understanding how we as Indigenous people govern ourselves through traditional practices and approaches and how that relates, or doesn't, to the Canadian state.
"Over the better part of a decade, Indigenous communities continue to navigate the churn of prominent individuals being revealed as either misattribution or misrepresenting their Indigenous identity, ancestry, and connection to communities. People, commonly referred to as pretendians, have been uncovered in numerous prominent positions across Canada. Foundational academics whose works have been the spine of future research, to artists whose work and mentorship has shaped how Indigenous art and culture is understood and interacted with, have been revealed to have dubious identities. This phenomenon intersected with arts, government, academics, and leadership, and continues to do actual harm to our communities, through the distortion of lived experiences, to paranoia and fear from people who are genuinely reconnecting to their communities and peoples. This article looks at the historical context of where the phenomenon of pretendianism comes from and how it intersects with First Nations efforts of exercising self-determination. It interviews these contexts together to create a space that allows non-Indigenous people opportunities to take identities from First Nations communities. By providing analysis, this paper argues that the phenomenon is an extension of the normalization of colonization through settler-violence. It is a part of the long and continuous history of how Indigenous people are able to claim community members, as well as how policies have shaped Indigenous identity to be a matter of race rather than citizenship, depoliticizing Indigenous identities. The authors seek to discuss the importance of this issue to First Nations communities, the harms that come from it, and how to address this issue."
Angelina Weenie, University of Prince Edward Island, "In the Midst of Being and Identity"
Dr. Angelina Weenie is Plains Cree from Treaty 6 territory, Saskatchewan, Canada. She currently serves as the Dean of Indigenous Knowledge, Education, Research, and Applied Studies, at the University of Prince Edward Island. UPEI is located on the unceded land of the Mi’kmaq people.
The intent of this paper is to work toward greater clarification and understanding of Indigenous identity. Through history there have been different terms which have been used to identify Indigenous people. It is held that there are misconceptions which serve to obscure our being and identity. For the most part, the names we are given by external sources misrepresent who we are and bear little insight into our being. For this purpose, it is important to trace identity and how we name ourselves. An Elder recently shared how Christopher Columbus called the people he encountered as “indios.” The connotation of this name still exists today. We are named as Indians by virtue of the Indian Act of Canada (1876) and since that act has not changed, we are Indians. UNDRIP, (2007), the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, has also impacted the ways we are identified. Now we are referred to as Indigenous. However, it remains that stories of our identity have significance. It is our own cultural and spiritual processes which bear consideration. It is proposed that being and identity is about telling our own story and from our own epistemologies and ontologies. I am néhiyaw. In the Cree language this translates as four direction people. This implies and creates a very different meaning to who we are and how we see ourselves. Naming ceremonies provide a deeper insight into being and identity and will be discussed. The Elder further related identity, as “that place that Indians talk about.” He shared that it is about “going straight to the light.” This is a worldview which informs identity. This aspect will be further explained. This discussion will include fraudulent identity claims and how that process has shaped why being and identity matters.
Leo Wei, Trent University, "Story at the intersection of Transmedia (TS) storytelling and Public Pedagogy"
Leo Wei is a filmmaker and emerging researcher whose work focuses on visual storytelling and the ways media can foster dialogue and understanding across diverse communities. Drawing upon his undergraduate background in Film and Television from Sheridan College, he explores the intersections of creativity, education, and social engagement. Leo is also the creator and host of The Perceptive Storyteller, a podcast featuring conversations with emerging creatives and storytellers whose work inspires reflection, connection, and discussion.
"Stories have shaped who we are and how we connect with one another. Since the Stone Age, our ancestors have been storytellers, communicating through murals painted on cave walls. In modern times , stories are continuing being unfold through everyday practices. This research examines three spaces in Toronto: Great Fountain Fast Food, a Hong Kong-style fast food restaurant in Scarborough where the family food business acts as a site of gratitude, hardship, and resilience ; Toronto Jiu-Jitsu Club, a martial arts club where discipline and mentorship foster lasting relationships; And Simardone Design is a reclaimed, upcycling furniture design studio that salvages discarded building materials and transforms them into fully customized, unconventional modern pieces. Rather than viewing these sites solely as businesses, this study understands them as the community spaces where relationships are formed through shared participation. In Chinese traditions , foods are more than just a cuisine. It is a flavour, memory, and care that words often cannot convey. Anna at the Great Fountain Fast Food is part of this ongoing story. She assists her parents in running a Hong Kong style fast food restaurant in Scarborough and utilizes social media to show behind-the-scenes in the kitchen, highlighting the people behind the food to attract more customers through the door and connects long-time customers with younger generations. She did this out of love and gratitude for her parents as a way to show her appreciation. This not only creates a digital space where culture, memory, and community continue to thrive, but also preserved her family’s culinary traditions. Toronto Jiu-Jitsu Club demonstrates how jiu-jitsu embodies commitment, mentorship, concentration, and respect. People of all ages, sizes, and backgrounds train within this shared space, where lower belts roll with higher-ranked practitioners, younger members train alongside older members, women participate in women’s-only classes, and children train on the same mat with their dad or mom. The club’s “Daddiest Dad” and “Mom Gang” groups further cultivate this sense of community, where members sometimes come together to celebrate achievements and support one another. These relationships strengthen group cohesion and align members around shared goals. The gym is no longer just a place—it is the people who make it matter, creating connection, consistency, and support both on and off the mats. Simardone Design , illustrating how sustainability, creativity, and craftsmanship become forms of community engagement. Michael built using reclaimed architecture pieces and transforms discarded materials into new architecturally striking custom furniture works, Its practice emphasizes the preservation of historical architectural details, allowing each work to retain traces of its original context while being reimagined for contemporary use. Together, these spaces suggest a shift in understanding of public pedagogy. This project proposes that craft first cultivates community. As communities develop, they become third spaces where cultural practices, informal learning, and everyday encounters generate public pedagogies. Within these spaces, boundaries between teacher and learner, host and participant, become blurred as knowledge is collectively produced through dialogue, collaboration, and shared experience. And for many immigrant communities, gathering within culturally familiar spaces is not a form of exclusion but a strategy of care, resilience, and belonging, creating a home away from home while negotiating life within a diverse Canadian society. However,recognition is not the same as protection , while multiculturalism promotes diversity , communities should still actively concerning their voices, advocate for a seat at the table. Methodologically, this project drawing from Henry Jenkins’ theory: Transmedia storytelling , The term Transmedia was first coined through Henry Jenkins (2006) in Convergence Culture. He suggested that transmedia (TS) narratives create an interconnected world which differs from story adaptations. TS is a method that breaks down narrative barriers; the key narrative components are distributed across various platforms. This structure invites the audience to engage with the story actively as co-creators rather than spectators. And this study advances as Critical Confucianism, framed through the integration of Confucianism and Critical Pedagogy, and bridged by sentipensante pedagogy. This combination reconceptualizes learning as both relational and critically engaged. Ontologically, learning is understood as a relational process of becoming, where human beings are constituted through social, cultural, and interdependent relationships. Epistemologically, knowledge is produced through lived experience, dialogue, and praxis within everyday social life, rather than being confined to formal educational institutions. So, this paper asks: How do urban practitioners’ daily practices foster community, and how does an interactive documentary mediate that community as a form of public pedagogy? By documenting community as a living process of participation, collaboration, and cultural transmission, this project argues that hyphenated Canadian is not a fixed national narrative but an evolving mosaic continues reconstructed through the everyday practices of diverse communities."
Carmen Victor & Kate Carder, Yorkville University, "Creative Practice in Canada: Pedagogical challenges for an Interdisciplinary Student Body"
Carmen Victor (she/her) teaches in the arts, humanities, and social sciences at universities in and around the Greater Toronto Area, currently in the Bachelor of Creative Arts Program at the Toronto Film School/Yorkville University and in the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University. Victor's research is concerned with experimental media of the circumpolar North, the geopolitics of landscape, and fostering Global North/South dialogue through the medium of film. Victor's writing has appeared in a variety of publications including Ciel Variable, TOPIA, Canadian Theatre Review, Prefix Photo, PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas, Canadian Journal of Film and Media Studies, KRIT magazine, and she has edited chapters in books Sculpting Cinema (Pleasure Dome, Toronto) and Kelly Richardson: Pillars of Dawn (Kerber Verlag, Berlin). Her first single-authored book is forthcoming with Intellect (UK) in 2027. As part of “Interrogating Canadian Identities/ L'identités canadiennes—une interrogation (ICI)," Victor is a member of the 'Canadian Identity in Indigenous, Multicultural, and other Communities' and 'Canadian Identity and Communities in the Media' research clusters.
"In 2025, I developed a new course titled Creative Practice in Canada, which was designed for an interdisciplinary student body and examines the development and current state of creative disciplines across Canada. In my course, students explore examples from various media and other modes of creative expression within historical, social, and contemporary milieux—specific to the Canadian context. As vast and diverse as Canada is, there is no monolith or heterogeneity of geography, ethnicities/heritage, communities, or creative interests. This presents a set of particular challenges that my course aims to overcome and address such that students come away with a sense of how their unique creative practice will contribute to Canada’s cultural ecosystem. Weekly units of study consider artists, movements, trends, and cultural moments that characterize Canadian creative practice such as the built environment, urban and rural landscape representation, art systems, genre cinema, public sculpture as well as incorporation of other interdisciplinary elements. Throughout the course students are assigned a number of scaffolded assignments that encourage them to explain specific artistic cultural theories, historical movements, and institutions that shape Canada’s creative industries and/or artistic communities with an aim to help students assess their own cultural, economic, and intellectual position as artists living and working in Canada. The challenge is to create community—where it has been dispersed due to external forces beyond anyone's control, thus in addition there is an emphasis on collaboration. This proposed presentation shares pedagogical strategies and approaches to engage students with diverse creative interests in light of changes to the Canadian population writ large, the Calls to Action stemming from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), and imperatives toward greater accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion."
Breanna Kubat, Carleton University, "Thinking About Canada: Potentials, Responsibilities, and Cautions"
Breanna Kubat (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Canadian Studies at Carleton University. Situated within broader social justice movements and demands for historical redress, her doctoral research seeks to theorize the conditions under which institutional change occurs. Adopting a transnational and comparative (Canada and England) approach to theorize student activism in relation to institutional renaming and calls for universities to reckon with their connections to colonization, imperialism, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
"In 1975, To Know Ourselves: The Report of the Commission on Canadian Studies, commonly known as the Symons Report, was released, arguing that the expansion of the discipline of Canadian Studies was central to national growth and prosperity. Marking the 50th anniversary of The Symons Report’s publication, Canadian Studies scholars have hosted conferences (Canadian Studies at Zero Point, Yet to Know Ourselves: Reimagining and Renewing Canadian Studies) and released Calls for Papers (Journal of Canadian Studies, International Journal of Canadian Studies) calling for a critical reflection on the implementation, relevance, and future of the Symons Report, and the discipline of Canadian Studies more broadly. In conversation with, and expanding on, these discussions of how Canadian Studies has evolved and its future(s), I theorize what it means to think about Canadian identity within and beyond the university, including potential social utility and cautions. Specifically, I ask: how can conversations about Canadian identity be mobilized to make visible and challenge hegemonic articulations of power operating in and around the Canadian state? What responsibilities do we have as Canadian Studies scholars to ensure that our work does not reproduce narratives of Canadian exceptionalism or promote the settler-colonial project? What might this look like in and outside of the classroom? This presentation is in connection with an early draft I am writing for Journal of Canadian Studies’ Special Issue: Towards a Critical Canadian Studies."
Ibrahim Berrada, Northern Arizona University, "From Roads to Resources to Arctic Sovereignty in an Era of Climate Change"
Ibrahim worked as a parliamentary staffer for several Canadian Members of Parliament, handling various national and international portfolios. His most recent political role supported the Minister of Public Services and Procurement before returning to complete his MA in Canadian-American studies at Brock University and SUNY at Buffalo (Joint Program) and his PhD in Human Studies, Culture and Society at Laurentian University. Ibrahim has taught at several universities in Canada and the United States and is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor in Sociology at Northern Arizona University.
"The Arctic has historically served as an imagined frontier, a source of economic opportunity, and a site of political renewal. These narratives have repeatedly resurfaced during periods of economic uncertainty, geopolitical competition, nation-to-nation tension, and renewed state interest in northern development. Historically, the North has been portrayed as a barren, resource-rich landscape awaiting development and settlement. Such imaginaries have informed Canadian nation-building projects, from John Diefenbaker’s “Roads to Resources” vision to modern Arctic sovereignty initiatives. Intensifying climate change and increased international attention to viable Arctic shipping routes have contributed to renewed state-sponsored rhetoric emphasizing Arctic sovereignty, resource extraction, and northern development. These rhetorical strategies reproduce colonial assumptions embedded within earlier northern and Arctic imaginaries while simultaneously reshaping contemporary understandings of the Far North and its future. Enduring myths of northern exceptionalism continue to shape resource governance in Canada’s Arctic. Nevertheless, community-led development initiatives require a reimagining of northern and Arctic imaginaries, one that better reflects Indigenous self-determination, local governance, environmental realities, and the geopolitical complexity of the Far North. To explore these tensions, the paper examines the proposed Inuit-led Grays Bay Road and Port Project (GBRP), which seeks to construct a deep-water port and a 230-kilometer all-season road connecting the Arctic Ocean to northern resource deposits and remote communities. The GBRP serves as a contemporary case study for examining tensions among economic development, Arctic sovereignty, environmental sustainability, and Indigenous self-determination. In doing so, it demonstrates how Indigenous-led initiatives challenge state-centered and corporate-backed approaches to northern development while contributing to the emergence of new northern and Arctic imaginaries."
Natalia Aspra, York University, "Financial Incorporation and the Obscuring of Settler-Colonial Land Relations: Household Portfolios, Pension Funds, and Land-Intensive Accumulation in Canada"
Natalia Amin Aspra Rubi is a PhD candidate in Sociology at York University whose research focuses on mixed-methodological approaches to examining the relationship between migration and senses of belonging. Their work explores how multiculturalism, settler colonialism, and national identity shape contemporary forms of inclusion and exclusion in Canada. Their current research examines the relationship between household finance, settler-colonial land relations, and Canadian identity through analyses of pensions, property, and financial citizenship.
"This paper studies how Canadian belonging is secured through financial participation tied to settler-colonial land relations. Using pooled data from the 2016, 2019, and 2023 Survey of Financial Security alongside an interpretive analysis of pension funds, registered savings accounts, and institutional investment portfolios, the paper argues that ordinary household finance remains materially grounded in land-intensive accumulation concentrated on Indigenous territory. In Canada, instruments like pensions, RRSPs, TFSAs, mutual funds, and bank deposits are framed as politically neutral mechanisms of prudent citizenship and middle-class inclusion. This paper argues that such neutrality is ideological. The institutional intermediaries managing household savings allocate substantial capital toward sectors dependent on extraction, infrastructure, real estate, and property-secured finance. As direct homeownership becomes increasingly inaccessible, particularly for renters and younger populations, incorporation into national belonging increasingly occurs through mediated financial forms rather than through direct property ownership itself. Yet these forms remain dependent on the ongoing organization of Indigenous land into investable territory. Bridging scholarship on financialization with settler-colonial political economy, the paper argues that finance does not displace colonial land relations but reorganizes and obscures participation within them. Financial citizenship therefore operates not only as an economic arrangement but as a mechanism through which belonging within the Canadian nation is stabilized and normalized. The ordinary practices of saving, retirement planning, and wealth accumulation become modes through which households participate in settler-capitalist accumulation while remaining institutionally distanced from the territorial conditions that make those returns possible. The paper contributes to debates on Canadian identity, multiculturalism, and reconciliation by demonstrating how inclusion within the national economy continues to rest on materially unequal and colonial territorial foundations."
Chika Odoemelam, York University, "Diaspora Media: How Igbo-Canadian Diaspora Uses Cross-border Media to Integrate and Handle Cultural Identity and Political Participation"
Mr Chika Ebere Odoemelam is a PhD student in the Department of Communication and Cultural Studies at York University, specializing in media framing, political activism, and diaspora studies. His degrees from IMT Enugu, Nigeria, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia, and McMaster University, Canada, demonstrate a solid foundation and credibility, encouraging confidence in his academic background among potential supervisors and conference organizers. He runs online tutorials for students across several continents, where he helps to articulate and understand research methods, data collection and analysis, media theories, media and society, and political activism. Mr Odoemelam has published many articles in reputable journals. His latest publication, titled “Media Framing of the Indigenous People of Biafra’s
(IPOB) Agitation for the Restoration of Biafra: A Case Study of Two Nigerian Newspapers (2017-2022),” was published by the African Journalism Journal in March 2026. Mr Chika Ebere Odoemelam is a student member of the Canadian Communication Association and a prominent member of the Igbo-Canadian diaspora.
This study explores how Igbo-Canadian diaspora communities in Toronto and Hamilton use specific cross-border media platforms, such as WhatsApp, to maintain their cultural identity, foster a sense of belonging and connection, influence politics in their host country, Canada, and in their native land, Nigeria, and navigate integration. The paper used content analysis as a research method to examine WhatsApp groups of Igbo-Canadian diaspora members in Toronto and Hamilton as diaspora-oriented media platforms. WhatsApp media was chosen for this study because it is the most common medium among members, readily available and accessible, and used by almost all Igbo-Canadian diaspora members in Toronto, Hamilton, and Nigeria, their native land. The results of the study revealed that Igbo-Canadian diaspora media platforms operate as cross-border media by maintaining their cultural identity through shared cultural narratives, serving as practical contacts for educational guidance, as platforms for political mobilization during protests, and as a media sphere for jobs and native land elections. In addition, the study provides an articulated view of cross-border media spaces that connects everyday Igbo-Canadian diaspora media conversations to cross-border politics and emphasises governance and security as essential ingredients of diaspora social life.
Kaylee Brink, Independent Researcher, "Canadian Multiculturalism, Identity, and Reconciliation: Evidence from a National Survey"
Kaylee G. Brink (white North American settler) is an interdisciplinary researcher who focuses on intergroup relations, settler colonialism, structural violence, national identity, and collective memory. Her PhD dissertation examined settler-focused barriers to reconciliation in Australia and Canada at the societal and individual levels.
"Indigenous-settler reconciliation seems to enjoy widespread support, yet progress has stalled. At the same time, multiculturalism, a concept that celebrates diversity and equality, is a point of pride for many Canadians. Should reconciliation not be included in Canada’s imagining of multiculturalism? This study aimed to analyse the possible relationship between symbols of Canadian multiculturalism and support for further reconciliation using responses to a representative survey of non-Indigenous Canadian adults (n = 5,203). Political affiliation, knowledge of residential schools, and demographic variables were also analysed. Only one multicultural variable was a predictor of support for further reconciliation efforts, along with measures of political ideology, home language, and views on individual responsibility for reconciliation were meaningful. Components of individual identity are more influential in reconciliation support than the collective (multicultural) identity. This contrasts many claims by citizens and the federal government alike, that multiculturalism is an important part of Canadian identity. The study revealed that while multiculturalism is a touchstone of Canadian identity and pride, it may have a minimal role in reconciliation, positive or negative."
Sam Tecle, Toronto Metropolitan University, & Alpha Abebe, McMaster University, "Beyond Multicultural Framings: Black Horn x Black Canada and the Multiplied Meanings of Belonging" *based on edited volume, in progress
Sam Tecle’s research and scholarly work spans across the areas of Black and Diaspora Studies, Urban Studies, and Sociology of Education. His work focuses on the analysis of diverse experiences, trajectories and expressions of Blackness, grounded in particular histories of racialization, colonialism, community formation and resistance.
"Public and scholarly discourse surrounding Horn of Africa diasporas in Canada has long been trapped in settlement, integration, and assimilation frameworks. This preoccupation - a direct legacy of Canada’s 1971 Multiculturalism Policy - tends to relegate these communities to the status of perpetual newcomers. Consequently, dominant narratives of Canadian identity fail to recognize how diasporas from the Horn of Africa are foundational to the contemporary making of Black Canada and the nation writ large. Our set of papers interrogates these anachronistic frameworks by introducing the conceptual heuristic of the “x” in Black Horn x Black Canada. Moving past underwhelming and overutilized “diversity and inclusion” framings, we explore the “x” as both a meeting point and a multiplier - a space where layered histories of migration and memory from the Horn encounter, disrupt, and co-constitute existing Black Canadian realities. Grounded in cultural production, artistic expression, and community-based solidarities, this project traces how Black diasporic Horn presences actively reshape Canadian urban landscapes, literature, and social movements (from anti-Black policing to housing precarity). By focusing on the sonic inheritances of artists like The Weeknd and Mustafa the Poet, literary presences in the works of Dionne Brand, and grassroots community-based political alliances, we argue that Horn diasporas do not merely "diversify" Canada; they fundamentally unsettle state-sanctioned assumptions of race, ethnicity, and difference. In doing so, our set of papers addresses the core tension of the ICI conference by challenging 20th-century myths of Canadian multiculturalism and offering a generative, 21st-century framework for understanding Blackness and belonging. Ultimately, we demonstrate how migration and memory from the Horn of Africa continue to make, mobilize, and move Black Canada."
Sasha Valgardsson, Carleton University, "Beyond the cultural box: Resistant narratives and polycultural identity construction"
Sasha Valgardsson is a doctoral candidate in International Management at the Sprott School of Business, Carleton University. Her research examines multiculturalism, polyculturalism, and sensemaking—exploring how cultural and cognitive influences shape openness and inclusion in multicultural environments. Drawing on qualitative approaches that integrate reflexivity and artistic methods, her work centers the lived experiences of belonging, whether tied to cultural identity or the workplace.
"Multiculturalism is a cornerstone of Canadian national identity—an ideology that calls for the recognition and celebration of cultural differences, inviting cultural groups to maintain their distinctive identities. Yet as rates of global migration and cultural mixing continue to rise, an increasing number of individuals identify across multiple cultural traditions, challenging the categorical assumptions embedded in this master narrative. We draw on interviews with 27 multicultural individuals in Canada to investigate how they engage with the multiculturalism master narrative—shared cultural scripts shaping individuals’ identity narratives. This master narrative, stemming from distinct, measurable, and categorical notions of culture, encourages the preservation of distinctive cultural identities, at times hindering those who identify with partial, fragmented, or hybrid cultural influences to foster their cultural plurality and sense of belonging. Our analysis revealed three recurring storylines composing the multiculturalism master narrative that our participants drew on and simultaneously contested: (i) the story of culture as static and preserved, (ii) the story of culture as complete, and (iii) the story of culture as distinctive and categorical. Our findings suggest that individuals who embraced polycultural perspectives through crafting resistant narratives were empowered to intertwine and hybridize their cultural influences in a way authentic to them. These individuals described alleviated pressures associated with not meeting constraining cultural markers. Drawing on scholarship on narratives, identity work, and partial and plural cultural influences, the results from this study offer implications for practitioners and educators working with individuals with multiple cultural influences to foster a greater sense of belonging."
Gabriela Martinez Loyola, Western University, “Multiculturalism Revisited: Heritage Language Communities and Belonging in Canada”
Gabriela Martinez Loyola is a fourth-year PhD Candidate at Western University. Her research examines the categorization and perceptions of Caribbean Spanish, focusing on the roles of language experience, gender, and exposure. Her broader interests include linguistic diversity, heritage language maintenance, and the experiences of immigrant and heritage speaker communities in Canada. She explore how institutional practices and societal attitudes shape language use, identity, and belonging, and advocates for greater linguistic inclusivity across language varieties in research, pedagogy, and society at large.
"Canada’s longstanding commitment to being a multicultural nation continues to inform dominant narratives of national identity and what it means to be Canadian. However, these narratives sometimes obscure tensions between ideals of inclusion and the lived linguistic realities of immigrant and heritage language communities. This presentation interrogates such constructions of Canadian identity by examining the position of heritage languages within Canadian institutions, with particular attention to Spanish-speaking immigrant and heritage communities. A substantial portion of Canada’s population speaks a language other than English or French at home; yet these heritage and minority languages can face marginalization across key societal domains, including education, healthcare, media, and public life. Despite official commitments to diversity, dominant norms frequently privilege assimilation into English or French, creating pressures that contribute to language shifts and, in some cases, language loss. These dynamics are especially evident among heritage speakers, individuals who either immigrated at a young age or were born in Canada and raised in households where a heritage language is spoken. Heritage speakers must navigate complex cultural and linguistic expectations while negotiating their sense of belonging within Canadian society. Drawing on these experiences, this presentation examines: (i) the structural and social factors that promote or hinder heritage language maintenance and (ii) strategies and resources that can be implemented at different individual and institutional levels. Ultimately, this presentation argues that meaningful support for heritage language maintenance is essential to reimaging Canadian identity in the 21st century. Moving beyond celebratory multiculturalism requires recognizing and addressing the systemic conditions that shape linguistic hierarchies and affect the transmission of cultural knowledge across generations."
Angela Tozer, University of New Brunswick, "Inclusion into what? The elision of colonialism in Canadian historical methodology”
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of New Brunswick, and I specialise in Canadian history with a focus on the 19th century. My research explores the relationship between capitalism and settler colonialism. My book, The Debt of a Nation: Land and the Financing of the Canadian Settler State, 1820–73 (UBC Press, 2025) was shortlisted for the 2025 Wilson Book Prize. My work has appeared in several places including Settler Colonial Studies, Journal of Canadian Studies, and Studies in Political Economy (forthcoming).
"This paper explores Canada as an imperial power currently invading the territories of Indigenous nations, and how Canadian historians are implicated in this imperialism. I focus on Canadian history making as one tool of imperialism that erases imperial violence in historical narratives about Canada, and, instead, produces narratives about naturalized settler identities. This identity rendering often positions Indigenous peoples as one population within Canada's multicultural framework, and disregards the sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous nations. At the same time, the work that Canadian historians do can have real-world material impacts on Indigenous peoples and their nations. For example, when historians act as expert witnesses on land claims cases they have the potential to deeply impact the jurisdiction of Indigenous nations over their territories and homelands. This paper maps a methodology for Canadian history that aims to capture colonial power dynamics by centering responsibility and accountability to community as one way to capture the imperial power dynamic at play."
Sheryl Johnson, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, "Our Home on Native Land(s): Positionality and Ethical Responsibility in the Canadian Nation-State"
Sheryl Johnson, PhD is an Assistant Professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California. She is a social ethicist focused on economic, political, and gender justice. She serves at the Chair of the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Graduate Theological Union.
"This paper interrogates Canada as both a common place of celebrated multicultural welcome and a deeply contested space marked by settler colonialism, racialized exploitation, and global environmental harm. Reframing the national anthem’s claim to “our home and native land” as “our home on native land” exposes how Canada’s self-image as a benevolent, peacekeeping, refugee-welcoming nation obscures its entanglement in structural violence—historically toward Indigenous peoples and presently through global economic systems that displace vulnerable communities. Drawing on ethical positionality, relational ethics, and scholarship on the white saviour industrial complex, the paper argues that Canadians—and especially Canadian Christians—often imagine themselves as Good Samaritans offering neutral help, rather than as implicated actors whose economic, political, and ecclesial structures contribute to the very crises prompting migration. The analysis examines how Canadian mining companies, global economic policies, multicultural narratives, and faith-based refugee sponsorship programs interact to produce a moral imaginary of innocence even as they perpetuate environmental devastation, labour exploitation, and racialized inequality at home and abroad. In dialogue with Indigenous critiques that distinguish between “allies” and “accomplices,” the paper suggests that Canadian justice work too often romanticizes welcome while avoiding necessary confrontation with structural complicity. By situating Canada within a web of contested spaces—from stolen Indigenous lands to global extraction zones and the hidden labour sites of temporary migrant workers—the paper calls for a reimagined national and ecclesial posture. Canadians must embrace a more honest, accountable, and decolonial ethical stance that recognizes shared creatureliness, acknowledges harm, and seeks solidaristic forms of repair."
Gokul Krishnan, University of Kerala, "Rupturing the Colonial Clock: Temporality, Postmemory, and Historiography in Canadian Indigenous Graphic Narratives"
Gokul Krishnan G. S. is a doctoral candidate at the All Saints’ College, University of Kerala. He completed his MPhil at the Institute of English, University of Kerala. His research interests include cricket writings, Canadian studies, comics studies and heritage studies. His articles have appeared in journals such as Caribbean Quarterly, and English Forum, and in a collection of essays published by Yale University Press. His ORCID can be found at: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5814-0534
"This paper studies select texts from the Canadian Indigenous graphic narratives corpus to analyze their negotiation of temporality, wherein the colonial linear-progressive timeline, one that relegates Indigenous peoples to the status of mere historical subjects, is critically confronted. These texts rupture the colonial framework of time and construct a schema in which history operates as lived reality, deploying the formal affordances of the comics medium through the incorporation of historical materials such as newspaper clippings, photographs, objects, maps, and treaties. The narratives, which include significant texts such as UNeducation by Jason Eaglespeaker, A Girl Called Echo by Katherena Vermette, and This Place: 150 Years Retold, are either memories of residential school survivors or postmemories of intergenerational survivors. Here, recollection becomes an act of processing and confronting the colonial past. The paper situates the emergence of this corpus within two converging vectors: the establishment of Indigenous publishers, and the heightened socio-political climate shaped by landmark movements and institutions including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Idle No More, and the ongoing reckoning with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis. Together, these forces rendered the graphic narrative form a culturally and politically resonant mode of Indigenous storytelling in twenty-first century Canada. The paper further examines how the temporal nuances of the corpus allow its creators to deploy the comics medium as a historiographical practice. The paper employs a mixed methodology of critical discourse analysis and visual analysis."
Iyanuoluwa Akinrinola, Trent University, "Recognizing Africa and Honouring Canadians of African Descent: Reimagining Canadian Identity Through Educational Representation and Curriculum Policy"
Iyanuoluwa Akinrinola is a Ph.D. student at Trent University’s Interdisciplinary Social Research (IDSR) program. Her research, Teaching Against the Colonial Grain: Reimagining K–12 Teacher Education Through Afrocentrism and Mindset Transformation, focuses on how dismantling Anti-Black Racism pedagogical practices can be integrated into pre-service teacher education enrollment and program standards in Ontario. She aims to explore what current practices and beliefs remain obstacles to decolonizing anti-racist teaching and learning pedagogy in pre-service Teacher Education programs and how pre-service teacher candidate programs and in-service teacher professional development programs incorporate deconstructing colonial teaching beliefs and practices and adopt multicentered positive representations in Education, particularly regarding the narrative of Black History and Black Capacity in Canada.
"Recognizing Africa and Honouring Canadians of African Descent: An Educators’ Resource for Grades 4-12 is a pan-Canadian educational resource that invites a critical re-examination of how Canadian identities are constructed, represented, and reproduced through curriculum and educational policy. Developed to support educators in bringing richer, more accurate, and more affirming understandings of Africa and people of African descent into K-12 classrooms, the resource responds to a central question that resonates with contemporary debates about Canadian identity: How can education challenge inherited colonial narratives and cultivate more inclusive understandings of who belongs within the Canadian story? Positioned within the broader context of Canada's official multiculturalism policy, ongoing commitments to equity and inclusion, and the calls for educational transformation emerging from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this resource interrogates the historical and contemporary underrepresentation of Africa and Black Canadian experiences in school curricula. It argues that dominant educational narratives — much like those circulated through media and public discourse — have often reproduced narrow, deficit-based portrayals of Africa as a site of crisis, poverty, or humanitarian need, while simultaneously marginalizing the histories and contributions of Canadians of African descent. In doing so, these representations have helped shape limited conceptions of Canadian identity that privilege settler-colonial narratives and obscure the country's longstanding Black presence. At its core, the resource serves as an intervention into these enduring representations by bridging African Studies scholarship with K-12 education. Drawing on the six historical thinking concepts developed by Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, it encourages students and educators to engage in active historical inquiry rather than passive consumption of established narratives. As the introduction explains, the resource aims to support learners in "engaging, exploring, and facilitating inquiry and reflection on the decolonial history of Africa, African identity, and contributions by people of African descent to Canada." Through accessible entry points, it presents Africa as a continent of extraordinary diversity, innovation, and global significance — exploring ancient civilizations such as Kush, Aksum, Ghana, Mali, and Dahomey; engaging with African philosophies and oral traditions; examining the histories of the African diaspora; and celebrating the achievements and contributions of Canadians of African descent. In doing so, it challenges the exclusions and silences that have long shaped mainstream understandings of both Africa and Canada."
Amanda Fowler, Memorial University of Newfoundland, "Teaching in Nunatsiavut: Exploring the Perspectives of Newcomer Educators in Inuit Schools K-12"
Amanda Fowler (she/her) is a Canadian-born settler and Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Arctic and Subarctic Futures at the Labrador Campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research examines the experiences of newcomer educators working in Inuit schools in Nunatsiavut, within Inuit Nunangat, with a focus on cultural humility and cultural safetyHer research contributes to understanding teacher recruitment, retention, and support in northern and Indigenous contexts, and advances approaches that honour Inuit ways of knowing while strengthening relationships among educators, schools, and communities. Amanda works with the provincial school board in Happy Valley-Goose Bay and is committed to research that informs policy and practice, advances culturally sustaining pedagogy, and supports those who call the North home—whether lifelong, new, or temporary.
"This research examines the perceptions and experiences of newcomer educators—defined as individuals who have arrived in Canada within the past five years through permanent or temporary immigration pathways—working in K–12 schools in Nunatsiavut, Nunangat, in Newfoundland and Labrador. Amid persistent teacher shortages across Canada, northern Indigenous communities have increasingly turned to international recruitment to staff local schools. In some Nunatsiavut schools, newcomer educators now occupy more than half of all certified teaching positions, reshaping the professional and cultural landscape of education in the region. This qualitative study addresses the question: How do newcomer educators perceive and approach the integration of Inuit knowledge and perspectives into their teaching practices? Examining the intersection of newcomer teacher identity and Inuit education through a lens of cultural humility, the study addresses a gap in research that has largely focused on urban multicultural settings within settler contexts. Findings aim to inform teacher onboarding programs, professional learning initiatives, and provincial policy efforts that support culturally sustaining pedagogy in northern schools. Ultimately, the research contributes to Inuit self-determination by identifying ways educational environments can honor Inuit worldviews while supporting newcomer educators in developing culturally safe, responsive, and relational teaching practices. In doing so, the study invites interdisciplinary dialogue on migration, Indigeneity, and the future of education in northern communities. The research is informed by a reflexive awareness of the researcher’s positionality as a Canadian-born settler educator working within Inuit educational contexts."
Jennifer Adams, University of Calgary, "Black Students' Experiences and Identities in STEMM in Canada"
The BlackEpistemologies Team represents three provinces (AB, ONT and NS) and 5 researchers who are examining the experiences of Black students in STEMM as a part of a cross-border collaborations. Researchers include, Dr. Jennifer D. Adams and Dr. Terrell Morton (PIs) and Dr. Thelma Akea, Sussan Anukem, and Samira Samater (RA's).
"Black students and professionals remain underrepresented and underexamined in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) pathways in Canada, despite increasing national attention to equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-Black racism in postsecondary education and scientific careers. While existing literature has examined Black students’ broader experiences in Canadian higher education, less is known about how Black identity, migration background, gender, schooling pathways, mentorship, and institutional structures shape participation and persistence in STEMM. To address this gap, we conducted a preliminary literature review of Black experiences in Canadian STEMM pathways. The analysis included 18 relevant sources, consisting primarily of peer reviewed articles, supplemented by Statistics Canada reports that provided national demographic and educational pathway data. Sources were examined according to education level, STEMM focus, population group, Canadian context, identity variables, gendered experiences, migration background, institutional support, and reported gaps. Findings show that Canadian research on Black experiences in STEMM remains limited and fragmented. Several patterns emerged: Black students are often treated as a homogeneous group; STEMM exclusion can begin before postsecondary education through mathematics and science pathways; barriers occur across entry, persistence, graduation, graduate study, and career transition; gendered experiences are visible but not yet deeply theorized; and African, Caribbean, African Nova Scotian, Canadian born, immigrant, and international Black experiences require clearer distinction. Mentorship, representation, race-based data, belonging, and institutional accountability also emerged as recurring supports. This preliminary review highlights the need for Canada centred research that attends to the diversity of Black experiences and supports more context specific STEMM equity interventions."
Felix Odartey-Wellington and Sarah MacRae, Cape Breton University, "Canadian Identity as a Media-Ecological Construction: Student Perspectives from Cape Breton"
Felix Odartey-Wellington is a Full Professor of Communication at Cape Breton University. Sarah MacRae is a Senior Lab Instructor (Communication) and Assistant Dean, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Cape Breton University. Grace MacNeil is a Lab Instructor (Communication) Cape Breton University.
"Canadian Identity as a Media-Ecological Construction: Student Perspectives from Cape Breton Felix Odartey-Wellington, Cape Breton University Sarah MacRae, Cape Breton University Grace MacNeil, Cape Breton University At a time when Canadian identity is increasingly problematized by internal dynamics linked to immigration, the Calls to Action stemming from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), and heightened awareness of Canada’s colonial history, as well as by external pressures on Canadian nationhood, this paper examines how students at a rural Canadian university make sense of national identity. It situates this inquiry within a contemporary media ecology shaped by the transition from traditional to digital media environments, asymmetrical global flows of cultural production, and evolving demographic patterns. Drawing on six focus groups with 25 students studying a media course at Cape Breton University in March 2026, the study uses Saldaña’s structural coding approach and interprets findings through a combined framework of media ecology and cultural and media imperialism. Media ecology highlights how media environments shape perception and belonging, while cultural and media imperialism underscore how dominant producers, particularly the United States, structure the circulation and visibility of cultural content. Within this context, Canadian identity persists as a repertoire of symbolic markers such as hockey, the maple leaf, and politeness. These markers circulate as portable forms across media environments, yet evolving demographic conditions render them increasingly anachronistic and essentializing. Rather than revealing only a low visibility media environment, the data point to a nuanced participant awareness that Canadian identity is actively constructed through media. Participants describe identity as produced, circulated, and at times imposed through advertising, policy, and media platform logics, rather than as an inherent cultural essence. This awareness is reflected in statements such as “resisting stereotypes through stereotypes, fighting fire with fire,” where stereotypes are both critiqued and strategically deployed. Mediated stereotypes thus function as communicative shorthand, enabling participants to negotiate identity while simultaneously exposing its constructed nature. Participants further locate identity at regional and community levels, revealing a scale mismatch between mediated representation and lived experience. Canadian identity emerges not as fixed but as assembled within its media ecology."
Nir Hagigi, York University, "Beyond the Ashkenazi Mosaic: North African Jews and the Construction of Canadian Jewish Identity"
Nir Hagigi is an MA candidate in Political Science at York University, where he is also pursuing a Graduate Diploma in Advanced Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His research focuses on the history of North African Jewish communities, with particular attention to Tunisian Jewish migration, diaspora, and memory.
"Within Canada, dominant representations of Jewish identity have historically been shaped by Ashkenazi experiences, producing what scholars have termed "Ashkenormativity": the assumption that Eastern European Jewish histories, cultures, and political experiences are representative of Jewish life as a whole (Butnick et al, 2019; Jackson et al. 2022; Benor, 2024). My presentation will examine how Ashkenormativity has shaped the construction of Canadian Jewish identity in public institutions, communal organizations, and collective memory. Drawing on scholarship on Jewish diversity, multiculturalism, and representation, as well as examples from museums, educational initiatives, and community institutions, it explores the relative absence of Mizrahi, Sephardi, and other non-Ashkenazi Jewish histories from dominant narratives of Jewish life in Canada. While Canadian multiculturalism has encouraged the preservation of ethnic and religious identities, it has often obscured internal hierarchies by presenting communities as culturally homogeneous. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which public representations of Jewishness privilege European (and, oftentimes, Zionist) narratives while marginalizing alternative histories, including those of Jews from Southwest Asia and North Africa. These omissions shape not only how non-Jewish Canadians understand Jewish identity, but also how Jewish communities understand themselves and their place within the Canadian multicultural mosaic."
Curtis Robinson, Brandon University, "The Canadian State and the Politics of the Ukrainian Press in the Great War"
Dr. Curtis Robinson got his PhD at Memorial University in 2019 studying intelligence and German-Canadian communities in the First World War. With the pandemic coming a year later he is now starting over and teaching Canadian history, World History and international relations at Brandon University and switching research fields to Canadian liberalism, the state and media relations. When he's not teaching history or researching he teaches music and paints houses.
"It is often easy to forget that it is not a new phenomenon for new Canadians to bear the burden of their past when integrating into a new society. Today Ukrainian and Russian communities in Canada are forced to engage in public discourse following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that threaten their families and, in some cases, threaten them here. We must remember too that their ancestors held similar discussions one hundred years ago when Ukraine attempted to gain independence from Russia at the end of the Great War. The Canadian State through the mechanism of the Wartime Censor would, at that time, find cause for alarm for Canada’s war effort. This paper examines how the printer class of Ukrainian immigrants (or Ruthenians to use the historic term) in western Canada tried to navigate the spectrum of acceptable public discourse at a time when their country of adoption as allied to the Tsar, a regime from which many had deposed and fled after the 1905 Revolution. Case studies will include the American Svoboda which circulated in Canada and advertised sending money to Ukraine via Austria in defiance of the War Measures Act. It will also include the Ukrainian Voice, the publication of the Ukrainian Teachers Association which challenged the government of Manitoba’s crusade against foreign language education, and the socialist publication Roboczyd Narod (Working People) which, under the editorship of Pavlo Kratt, took an anti-war stance. All of them as well would condemn the Canadian government’s internment policies especially after the former editor of Narod was interned in Brandon Manitoba for travelling East without papers. In February 1917, the Tsar was overthrown and the Central Rada declared Ukrainian independence in Kiev. Ukrainian editors in Canada were forced to weigh in as Ukrainian immigrant readers were anxious to hear events abroad. Again, the Canadian state was concerned that their hatred of the Tsar and the Kerenskii provisional government would harm the war effort. The final straw from the Ukrainian Press was the Red Scare after the October Revolution. Pavlo Kratt was out as editor and Popvich was in and aggressively argued that the Ukrainian working class would finally be freed by the Bolsheviks. Privy Council Order 2381 or October 1918 ordered all “enemy language” newspapers be shut down (the official list included German, Austrian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Estonian, Syrian, Croatian, Ruthenian and Livonian). The measure was designed to deplatform foreign socialist agitators in the Canadian Press just as the Labour Revolt began. As a final measure, the state would try in 1919 to deport Ukrainian press editors who participated in the Winnipeg General Strike."
Christopher Anderson, Wilfrid Laurier University, "Canada as a Country of Displacement/Refuge: Engaging the Settler Colonial Context of Canadian Refugee Politics and Policies"
Christopher G. Anderson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University. His teaching and research revolve around Canadian politics and policy, especially in the areas of immigration, refugees, citizenship and multiculturalism.
"With 1967 came the onset of a new perception of Canada as a country of refuge, which found perhaps its most explicit validation two decades later when the Canadian people were awarded the UNHCR’s prestigious Nansen Refugee Award in 1986 for their role in resettling thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia. With well over 1 million refugees now resettled in Canada since the country’s centenary, this perception remains an important part of how Canada and Canadians often understand and present themselves to one another and to the world. While the unevenness and limitations of Canada’s response to refugees during the last 50 years are often noted, the idea of Canada as a country of refuge remains a powerful rhetorical and political device – as was seen clearly, for example, in the case of the Syrian refugee movement. Extending previous work exploring inherent tensions in Canada’s response to refugees stemming from the liberal-democratic context within which it operates, this paper pushes further to explore the settler colonial origins and reality that define Canada as a country of displacement. By placing Canada’s refugee politics and policies within this context, the country’s settler colonial history is kept at the centre of the analysis, the centuries-old forms and foundations of “Othering” within Canadian discourse and practice are made more visible, and the potential for developing alternative mechanisms of providing refuge that seek to acknowledge and honour Indigenous histories and ways of knowing is made possible."