Hi/Stories at the Crossroads: Intersectionality and Canadian Narratives

International Symposium (online)
Hi/Stories at the Crossroads: Intersectionality & Canadian Narratives
Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University | May 22, 2026

Intersectionality, as a framework for understanding how multiple social identities and systems of inequality overlap to shape people’s experiences of privilege and oppression, helps explain why the effects of different forms of discrimination are not experienced in isolation but interact in complex ways.  Engaging intersectionality in Canadian narratives involves looking at how overlapping identities (race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, indigeneity, immigration status, etc.) shape characters, communities, and storytelling across genres and media. We are interested in exploring complex colonial and Indigenous sovereignties; multicultural and multilingual fabric; regional diversity and geography; policy and institutional contexts; Indigenous resurgence and reconciliation discourse; diverse media ecosystems and formats; histories of migration, bilingualism, and transnational connections; and Canada as a social project. 

This international symposium hopes to open a discussion about the possibilities and limitations that various intersectionality theories set for practicing literary and cultural analysis. 

We invite you to join us ONLINE on Friday, May 22, 2026.
Click on the following link to register (free):
https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/qOBLmgdQRYO0NVEHS0cQcw

This event is co-organized by the Institute of Literature and New Media, Faculty of Humanities, University of Szczecin; and Institute of Romance Studies, Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw.

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SCHEDULE

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For further information, contact Carolyn Podruchny, carolynp@yorku.ca or Weronkia Suchacka, weronikasuchacka@gmail.com

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BIOS

BENJAMIN BEAUCHEMIN
Benjamin Beauchemin is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. He wrote his SSHRC funded master’s thesis Living Through Extinction: The Métis Buffalo Hunting Memoir at York University. He published an article titled “Reconsidering L’espace de Louis Goulet” in Pawaatamihk: Journal of Métis Thinkers. He has also co-published an article on land restoration in Refractions: A Journal of Postcolonial Cultural Criticism alongside other members of the 440 Collective. Benjamin was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation.

JANE CLARE COOPER
Jane Cooper is a professional researcher and writer whose interests span from local history to international politics. For more than twenty-five years, she has been bringing to life stories from the past and present, drawing on extensive research and hands-on experience in Canada and abroad. Her publications include a  non-fiction political thriller about monitoring Ukrainian elections (in press, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024); two edited collections of historical correspondence (JMD Media, 2011 and Osgoode Township Museum, 2014); a full-length historical biography (Freisen Press 2017); five literary essays (Queen’s Quarterly, Spring and Fall 2019, Winter 2021; Opera Canada, 2019; Alberta History, 2012); and twenty-five public policy reports (The Conference Board of Canada, 2016-2022.)

PILAR CUDER-DOMÍNGUEZ
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Huelva, Spain. Her research interests are the intersections of gender, genre, nation, and race from decolonial, anti-racist, feminist methodologies. Some recent publications on Canadian literature are "Esi Edugyan: Black Fugitivity and the Possibility of a Second Life" in The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature (2024), edited by Andrea Davis and Leslie Sanders; and "Undoing Slavery’s Anonymity: The Politics of Identification in Twenty-First Century Black Canadian Poetry" in  Literature, Critique, and Empire Today 59.2-3 (2024).

SARA DEL ROSSI
Sara Del Rossi is a lecturer and researcher at the Institute of French Studies at the University of Warsaw. Member of the ECO/EGO and MICROFORMA research groups, she is the author of Où va le kont ? Dynamiques transculturelles de l’oraliture haïtienne (L’Harmattan, 2022) and several articles on Haitian oraliture and its contemporary forms. Her research is framed within an intersectional and decolonial perspective, and also focuses on Indigenous literatures in French, migration writing, theatre, neo-oral forms, as well as children’s and young adult literature.

SUSAN DION
Susan Dion is a Lunaapew-Potawatomi scholar with Irish/ Quebecois ancestry who has been working in the field of education for more than thirty years. Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University, her research focuses on Lunaapeew Language, History and Culture; and Indigenizing, Decolonizing and Realizing Indigenous Education. Her publication, Indigenous Students and Settler Teachers Caught in the Double Bind of Settler Schooling received the  2025 Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies Outstanding Publication Award. Dion is an active Lunaape language learner. Learning the language with family and community is a project that brings together her academic work and her commitment to Lunaapeew recouperation.

VIVIAN M. MAY
Vivian M. May, author of Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist (2007) and Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries (2015), is Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Syracuse University, where she leads the university’s Humanities Center as well as the Central New York Humanities Corridor, an 11-university collaborative research consortium.

LAURA MOSS
Laura Moss is Professor of English in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC where she primarily teaches Canadian and African literatures, the literary and cultural history of Canada, postcolonial and anti-colonial writing, and environmental humanities. 

MICHAŁ OBSZYŃSKI
Michał Obszyński is an associate professor at the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of Warsaw. His academic interests focus on francophone literature from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa, particularly on topics such as francophone literary discourse, literary manifestos and programs in francophone regions, as well as literary representations of colonies. He is the author of the book Manifestes et programmes littéraires aux Caraïbes francophones (Brill, 2016), and he also co-edited the collective volume Déchiffrer l’Amérique. Mélanges offerts à Józef Kwaterko (Presses of the University of Warsaw, 2020). More recently, he co-edited the collective volume Le Canada et l’imaginaire du Nord: enjeux géopolitiques, identitaires et esthétiques (Harassowitz Verlag, 2024). He also carried out a research project on the ideological determinants of the status of Afro-diasporic writers and literary texts in the debates of literary congresses and Pan-African festivals from 1945 to the present day.

CAROLYN PODRUCHNY
Carolyn Podruchny, PhD, is Deputy Director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies and a Professor of History at York University. Her research focuses on the relationships forged between Indigenous peoples and French colonists in northern North America. She is preparing a scholarly edition of the writings of the fur trader and North West Company partner John McDonald of Garth. She also co-edited two collections about Indigeneity in the Philippines, one with the University of Hawai’i Press and the other with the University of the Philippines Baguio Cordillera Studies Centre. Recent articles have explored Metis women’s history in 19th-century buffalo brigades. She has served as co-editor for the Journal of the Canadian History Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada and Histoire sociale / Social History (for which she is currently the director) and she co-edits a series with McGill-Queen's University Press.

JULIE RAK
Julie Rak (FRSC) holds the Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her latest book is False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction (2021). She has written extensively on nonfiction, including Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013) and Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004). With Sonia Boon, Candida Rifkind, and Laurie McNeill she wrote The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2022). She holds a SSHRC IDG grant on contemporary journaling as a postdigital practice and is a team member on the SSHRC Project Reading for Our Lives.

CARLA RICE
Carla Rice is Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair in Feminist Studies and Social Practice and Founding and Academic Director of the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada). She specializes in feminist, difference, decolonial and disability theory and in research creation methodologies with a focus on changing systems and fostering social well-being and justice. Her work has received national and international recognition, including induction into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, the British Psychological Society’s Outstanding International Researcher Prize, and Ontario’s Lieutenant Governor’s Heritage Award.

AGNIESZKA RZEPA
Prof. Agnieszka Rzepa is head of the Canadian Literature Research Unit at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. She has taught and conducted research on Canadian literature since the early 1990s, focusing on contemporary Canadian novel and short story, Canadian postcolonial studies, as well as Indigenous and Black Canadian literatures and Canadian life writing. Her publications include the monographs Feats and defeats of memory: Exploring spaces of Canadian magic realism (2009) and The self and the world. Aspects of the aesthetics and politics of contemporary North American literary memoir by women (2018; with Dagmara Drewniak and Katarzyna Macedulska). She is founding member and former President of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies.

WERONIKA SUCHACKA
Weronika Suchacka holds a PhD from the University of Greifswald, Germany. She is a recipient of the Stiftung für Kanada-Studien Research Prize (2009), the Junior Fellowship at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald (2014-2015), and the Visiting Professorship at the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University (2026). She is an assistant professor at the University of Szczecin, Poland, where she co-founded the Szczecin Canadian Studies Group (2011). She also taught at the University of Greifswald and the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on contemporary Canadian literature, specifically ethnic/diasporic writing in Canada, space, and intersectionality. She contributed to Unbound: Ukrainian Canadians Writing Home (ed. by Lisa Grekul and Lindy Ledohowski; 2016), the winner of the 2018 Kobzar Literary Award; and her most recent publication, Identity and Poetics of Ukrainian Canadian Literature: En Route (co-ed. Mariya Shymchyshyn; Routledge, forthcoming) continues her primary research interest in English-language Ukrainian-Canadian writing.

ROBERT ZACHARIAS
Robert Zacharias is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of English at York University in Toronto. His publications include Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature (U Manitoba) and Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism (Penn State), which was shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism. He is editor of After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America (Penn State), and co-editor, with Smaro Kamboureli, of Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (Wilfrid Laurier). His most recent work includes a SSHRC-funded project in literary tourism in Canada.

MARUSYA BOCIURKIW
Marusya Bociurkiw is a writer, curator, filmmaker and Professor Emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University. She got her start as a filmmaker in the 1980’s experimental video/film movement and has since directed or co-directed eleven films and videos. She has published essays and articles in The Globe & Mail, Now Magazine, Xtra!, Rabble, The Canadian Journal of Communication, and many other academic and literary publications. Her 6 books, the most recent of which is Food Was Her Country: The Memoir of a Queer Daughter, span several genres and have won or been shortlisted for several awards. Her 2015 film, “This Is Gay Propaganda: LGBT Rights & the War in Ukraine” (2015) screened in 13 countries & was translated into four languages. Her latest film, the award-winning “Analogue Revolution: How Feminist Media Changed the World” examines the role of analogue technologies in feminism and social change. It was nominated for best documentary by the 2025 Canadian Screen Awards. From the recording and rewriting of family foodways to the auto-ethnographic examination of feminist video collectives in Canada - her work broadly concerns itself with the narrativizing of archives, and their corrective role in national memory.

GEORGE ELIOTT CLARKE
The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke hails from Windsor, Nova Scotia, as of 1960 Clarke is also a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature, with two major tomes to his credit: Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002) and Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature (2012). A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard. He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. His recognitions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Fellowship (US), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and International Fellow Poet of the Year, Encyclopedic Poetry School 2019. His acclaimed titles include Whylah Falls (1990, translated into Chinese), Beatrice Chancy (1999, translated into Italian), Execution Poems (2001), Blues and Bliss (selected poems, 2009), I & I (2008), Illicit Sonnets (U.K., 2013), Traverse (2015), Canticles II (MMXX) (2020), Canticles III (MMXXII) (2022), and J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence) (2021). Clarke penned the libretto for James Rolfe’s triumphant, tragic opera, Beatrice Chancy (1998), plus two lyrics for Four the Moment’s 2022 Polaris Heritage Prize-winning album, We’re Still Standing (1987).