York University will be hosting many events throughout 2017 as we mark Canada's 150th birthday. Full details for each event will be released in the upcoming weeks. Come and join us.
Lead Project: Sue Winton
With “Life in the University: Past, Present and Future” as an organizing theme, we are planning a series of events in recognition of Canada 150. The events address the Government of Canada’s overarching Canada 150 theme of “Strong, Proud and Free” (Government of Canada, 2016) by recognizing the strengths and contributions of Canada’s universities. For example, Canadian universities are significant drivers of our country’s economic prosperity and account for 40% of Canada’s research and development (Universities Canada, n.d.). At the same time, the series recognizes challenges, past and present, faced by people inside and outside of the university, including issues of access, debates over purposes of higher education, and changing work conditions. All the events will include time to discuss and imagine the future of the Canadian university.
Project Lead: Sean Kheraj
“What Did Confederation Accomplish? Historical Perspectives on 150 Years of Canada” is a documentary video series that explores the achievements and consequences of Confederation over the past 150 years from multiple perspectives. Featuring interviews with expert scholars in the fields of Canadian history and Canadian Studies from York University, this video series explores the effects of Confederation in five broad themes: Indigenous peoples, environment, labour, French Canada, and women. This unique approach to thinking about the long-term consequences of the creation of the Dominion of Canada will expose viewers to a diverse set of views and understandings of Canada’s past.
Project Lead: Christopher Lortie
Open science is common in Canada. York University is already an established leader in this domain including R code, data, teaching, and inclusivity. A series of monthly podcasts culminating in a presentation at the UseR Open Science conference will be developed.
Project Leads: Noel Sturgeon
Event date/location: May 11, 2017, 1-6pm, Sandra Faire & Ivan Fecan Theatre, York University Keele Campus
Event date/location: May 12, 2017, 8am-7pm, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University Keele Campus
Website
On May 11th and 12th, 2017 York University will host the 5th Ontario Climate Symposium. This year’s symposium holds special significance, given that it coincides with Canada’s 150th anniversary and follows ratification of the Paris Agreement on climate change. The symposium provides a forum for discussions of the future we want in the next 150 years, and more importantly, of the actions needed to realize this vision. We hope to encourage the development of positive narratives of a sustainable and just future, ones that cross boundaries between Indigenous knowledge, natural and social science, law, humanities and the arts.
Project Lead: Eva Karpinski
To be held on May 15-17, 2017 at the Centre for Feminist Research as part of Canada@150, “Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas” is an international conference celebrating the achievements of York’s Professor Marlene Kadar, showcasing the larger contributions of the Canadian school of auto/biography and life writing studies to global scholarship. Focused on diversity and inclusion, this event brings together York community members and the International Auto/Biography Association Chapter of the Americas (IABAA) for three days of graduate student presentations and workshops, panel discussions, invited speakers’ talks, an activist art exhibit, and a book launch of Auto/Biography Across the Americas.
Project Leads: Leslie Sanders and Philip Kelly
Event date/time: April 24, 9:30 am to 11:30 am
Event location: Tribute Communities Recital Hall, Accolade East Building – Main Floor, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto
Website
Unity in Diversity: Fusion of Communities in Canada” is designed to carry out academic outreach to complement a large-scale Canadian Heritage Canada 150 project in school boards in Toronto. To add content to the inclusive classroom activities, artists and writers workshops and curriculum preparation in the school boards, the York activities will focus on two major minority communities: Asian Canadians and African Canadians. These activities include: 1) a high school outreach and education roundtable event titled “Exploring Transnational Tamil Identity in Canada’s Past and Present”; 2) a workshop/performance/exhibition entitled “Considering Black Canada: Sighting and Site-ing”; and 3) Multiple workshops/performances/exhibitions entitled “Unity in Diversity: Fusion of Communities”.
Project Lead: Marlis Schweitzer
Event date/time: Thursday, May 18 - Friday May 26 (this is a closed workshop)
Event location: Accolade East 207 and 209
Led by UK-based creative researchers Dani Phillipson and Helen Gilbert, in conjunction with Indigenous artist Tamara Podemski, the workshop will focus on techniques for developing performative storytelling inspired by historical research and supported by new media/ digital technology. In recognition of Canada’s 150th anniversary, the workshop will explore local histories and cultural memories of WW1 and WW2 and creatively speculate on how our participation in these international conflicts might inform our present and future as a multicultural nation with particular connections to different parts of the world. We will draw on archival and ethnographic accounts of Canadian troops, especially Indigenous soldiers and others from marginalized communities, as well as documents detailing the lived experiences of men, women, and children who served on the “homefront” in a variety of capacities. Students from different disciplinary backgrounds will develop a devised performance inspired by historical research, integrating live performance with digital elements.
Project Leads: Brandon Vickerd
Event date/time: May 18-20, 2017
Event location: Multiple locations, please see event website for details
Public Art: New Ways of Thinking and Working symposium will be hosted by the Department of Visual Art and Art History at York University on May 18, 19, and 20, 2017. Going Public will offer a forum for emerging research, challenging debate and the establishment of a sustained dialogue in the discipline of public art from the perspective of both studies and practice. This will be accomplished by including a wide range of Canadian cultural, political, social, and pedagogical perspectives across the disciplines of visual arts, architecture, art history, city planning, engineering, and urban studies.
Project Leads: Leslie Sanders and Philip Kelly
Event date/time: April 24, 9:30 am to 11:30 am
Event location: Tribute Communities Recital Hall, Accolade East Building – Main Floor, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto
Website
Unity in Diversity: Fusion of Communities in Canada” is designed to carry out academic outreach to complement a large-scale Canadian Heritage Canada 150 project in school boards in Toronto. To add content to the inclusive classroom activities, artists and writers workshops and curriculum preparation in the school boards, the York activities will focus on two major minority communities: Asian Canadians and African Canadians. These activities include: 1) a high school outreach and education roundtable event titled “Exploring Transnational Tamil Identity in Canada’s Past and Present”; 2) a workshop/performance/exhibition entitled “Considering Black Canada: Sighting and Site-ing”; and 3) Multiple workshops/performances/exhibitions entitled “Unity in Diversity: Fusion of Communities”.
Project Lead: Solange Belluz
Event date/time: May 23
Event location: Glendon Campus, 2275 Bayview Ave, North York, ON, M4N 3M6
Website
In collaboration with Ontario’s French-Language school boards, Glendon Campus will organize the “French Language Olympics” (Olympiades Linguistiques) during which teams of high school students from across the province will participate in a series of activities, in French, in order to improve their language skills (oral and written). A final (regional) competition will be held at Glendon Campus during the Toronto Francophonie Forum in May 2017. The French-language Olympics programming will include French-language skills development, and address a variety of topics related to French-Canadian history and culture, diversity and inclusion, Indigenous people and youth.
Forum de la francophonie, 4e édition : Redécouvrir l’histoire de la francophonie torontoise
Come rediscover the history of Toronto’s Francophone culture at University-College Glendon. The 4th edition of the ‘forum de la francophonie’ will honour the rich and surprising history of Toronto’s Francophones. It is an opportunity to shine a light on certain French-language establishments from around the city. The Honourable Marie-France Lalonde, Minister responsible for Francophone Affairs, as well as Ontario’s French Language Services Commissioner, Mr. François Boileau, will be present with us to celebrate the rich history, both past and present, of Toronto’s Francophonie.
Project Leads: Leesa Fawcett & Anna Zalik
In Canada and globally, contests over access to marine resources are intensifying. States, firms, diverse user groups and conservation agencies are scrambling to claim resources in an environmentally, technologically and politically dynamic world. This workshop will build a network of interdisciplinary scholars to explore the political-economic and ecological principles that oversee new resource practices that are at once transforming the physical features of ocean spaces and the (geo)political access to them at scales from local to global. The interdisciplinary workshop will train future workers and distribute produce academics and practitioners involved in ocean management and sustainable use research and policy.
Project Lead: Stacy Allison-Cassin
Event date/time: Thursday, May 25
Event location: University of Toronto
Wikipedia is an information “first stop” for many Canadians, yet Canadian content is relatively underrepresented. This is especially problematic when looking at the coverage of topics on music in Canada in Wikipedia and compounded for underrepresented areas related to factors such as gender and racialized minorities. The “Music and Belonging in Canada at 150 Wikipedia edit-a-thon” is a multifaceted project which pairs the professional skills of librarians and archivists with local music communities to improve the amount and quality of the content about Canadian music in Wikipedia, thereby increasing the accessibility to music heritage of all Canadians.
Project Leads: Leslie Sanders and Philip Kelly
Event date/time: April 24, 9:30 am to 11:30 am
Event location: Tribute Communities Recital Hall, Accolade East Building – Main Floor, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto
Website
Unity in Diversity: Fusion of Communities in Canada” is designed to carry out academic outreach to complement a large-scale Canadian Heritage Canada 150 project in school boards in Toronto. To add content to the inclusive classroom activities, artists and writers workshops and curriculum preparation in the school boards, the York activities will focus on two major minority communities: Asian Canadians and African Canadians. These activities include: 1) a high school outreach and education roundtable event titled “Exploring Transnational Tamil Identity in Canada’s Past and Present”; 2) a workshop/performance/exhibition entitled “Considering Black Canada: Sighting and Site-ing”; and 3) Multiple workshops/performances/exhibitions entitled “Unity in Diversity: Fusion of Communities”.
Project Lead: Marcel Martel
Event date/time: June 9-11, 2017
Event location: York University - 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Website
2017 is the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation. To mark this important event, the 2017 Ontario Provincial Heritage Fair at York University is organized around the theme of “Ontario 150,”celebrating the province’s diversity and role as a founding province in Confederation. Youth projects from 20 regions across Ontario will be presented in a special showcase on June 10th. After sharing their projects with experts and the public in the morning, these students will attend a series of workshops on campus.
Project Lead: Colin Coates
Event A: Saturday, June 10, Provincial History Fair (Founders College, Assembly Hall), 11:45am
Event B: Friday, October 13, 150 Ideas that Shaped Canada Conference (Schulich Building, Executive Learning Centre), 5:00pm
Website
The Confederation Debates project teaches Canadians to consider the establishment of provinces and Indigenous Treaties as equally important founding events that inform present-day relationships. For the first time, we are bringing together the provincial and federal legislative debates concerning each province’s entry into Confederation (1865-1949) as well as the Numbered Treaties (1871-1921) texts and negotiation records. The project democratizes access to these documents, puts them into dialogue with each other and with current debates, and reproduces small portions in various deliverables to encourage youth to engage future political challenges, promote diversity and inclusion, and support reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
Project Leads: Xueqing Xu & Jessica Tsui-Yan Li
Highlighting York University’s expertise in the fields of Asian research and Canadian studies, “Retrospect and Prospect: Symposium on Chinese Canadian Literature and Media” (July 20-21, 2017) will explore literary and media representations of the Chinese diaspora in Canada’s 150 years of nationhood, including: how diverse cultural encounters impact Chinese Canadian writers in illustrating cultural identities; how ethnic Chinese literature and media guide the reader to certain social and political agendas; how the Chinese communities’ conscience is voiced in transcultural and transnational contexts; and how the intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity are approached in the narration of the history of Chinese Canadians.
Project Lead: Andrea Davis
Event date/time/location: November 10, 2017: Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Austin Clarke, 6 - 9pm, Daniels Spectrum, Regent Park
November 11, 2017: Remembering Austin Clarke—Canadian Literature post-1960, 9am - 4:30pm, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto ON, M3J 1P3
The Jean Augustine Chair in Education, the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas, and the Department of Humanities in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies offer a series of workshops highlighting the contributions of African Canadians to the economic, political and cultural development of Canada. The Evolving Meanings of Blackness in Canada Symposium launches the series on February 17-18, 2017, followed by a Caribana and Black Expressive Cultures workshop on July 21, 2017. The final event in the series is a conference in honour of the legacy of African Canadian author Austin Clarke on October 27-28, 2017.
Project Leads: Donald Ipperciel & Francis Garon
Event date/time: September 29 - 30
Event location: Glendon Campus
In the context of the 150th anniversary of Canada, Glendon will organize a conference that will bring together 40 academics, practitioners, activists, and students around the evolution of Canada’s constitutional practices and conventions. More precisely, the conference will be organized around three main themes: 1) foundational values and rights, 2) democracy and institutions, and 3) policy-making and policy issues. The idea is to explore, for each theme, the practices and the conventions that have defined the Canadian political experience throughout its history, and to question if they are still relevant for today’s issues and context.
Event date/time: September - December 2017
Event location: York University, HNES Building
Conceived by Toronto artist and activist Farrah-Marie Miranda, Speaking Fruit is a mobile, roadside fruit stand and design studio that feeds the movement for migrant farmworker rights.
Speaking Fruit is stationed on YorkU’s campus (HNES Building) on the terrace outside the front doors of the Faculty of Environmental Studies, adjacent to the Native Garden. Performing as an experiential learning hub and co-curricular platform for the course Food, Land and Culture, Speaking Fruit hosts workshops, artist talks, and lectures. In partnership with Regenesis and YUM, and Jane-Finch based organizations the Afri-Can Food Basket and Promoting Economic Action and Community Health (PEACH).
Project Leads: Philip Monk & Emelie Chhangur
Migrating the Margins: Uploading the Toronto of Tomorrow is a hybrid exhibition-conference examining the future look of the city as imagined by artists of immigrant families who grew up in the suburbs. Not about the suburbs, it is an examination of aesthetic practices developing there. Decades of migration to the suburbs is now beginning to shape the discourse and aesthetics of Toronto’s future, based as it is on the idea of cultural mixture that a mixed population eventually brings about. The margins are not migrating to the centre, to downtown, that is; its artists are becoming central to the debate on what the cultural future of Toronto is.
Event date/time: September 15 - December 3, 2017
Event location:
A montage of text, found images, and narrative taken from a discarded social science textbook entitled The People We Are: Canada’s Multicultural Society (Gage, 1980), Taking a page... questions the Canadian immigrant paradigm by offering up a historiographical lesson on notions of belongingness. By “taking a page” from a discarded social science textbook entitled The People We Are: Canada’s Multicultural Society (Gage, 1980), the artist collective begins a process of re-imagining immigrant-settlers’ positionality by framing education as a primary tool of colonial story-telling.
Event date/time: September 16 - 17, 2017
Event location:
AGYU plays host to an Ambulatory Symposium of workshops, screenings, discussion, and performances. Activating the far corners of Keele campus, participants explore the histories and environment of the region – moving between the gallery, Black Creek Community Farm, Crossroads Gallery, and Stong Farmhouse. As we gather and move around campus—activating works by Farrah Miranda and Sister Co-Resister—York academics/ artists Syrus Marcus Ware, Gloria Swain, and Min Sook Lee guide our investigations and re-map spaces.Suburban Hospitality is co-presented with FES and programmed by Suzanne Carte, Emelie Chhangur, Lisa Myers, Honor Ford-Smith.
Event date/time: September 17, 2017, 1pm
Event location:
Can walking be political?
This discursive walking salon is focused on walking side-by-side with Indigenous, 2-spirit, and trans lives. As an act of Indigenous sovereignty (land, culture, and people) that also migrates the physical margins of York’s campus, this ambulatory salon centres the points of view of Indigenous social thinkers: Nettie Lambert, Shane Camastro (Titiesg Wîcinímintôwak Bluejays Dancing Together Collective), Janet Csontos, and Lisa Myers. Together we work through concepts of belonging, what it means to deconstruct the proprietary understanding of land, and find ways to question Canada’s immigrant paradigm and treaty partnership identity.
Project Lead: Ian Garrett
Event date/time: October 1 - November 18
Climate Change Theatre Action 2017 is a series of worldwide readings and performances of short climate change plays presented in support of the United Nations 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP23) in October and November 2017. The 2017 round of this biennale event will be focused on environmental issues related to Canada and Canadian theatrical talent to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation. As the home of one of Canada’s preeminent and most comprehensive theatre departments, York University will serve as a hub for this event and host performances, symposia, and develop the educational and research foundation for the CCTA.
Project Lead: Colin Coates
Event A: Saturday, June 10, Provincial History Fair (Founders College, Assembly Hall), 11:45am
Event B: Friday, October 13, 150 Ideas that Shaped Canada Conference (Schulich Building, Executive Learning Centre), 5:00pm
Website
The Confederation Debates project teaches Canadians to consider the establishment of provinces and Indigenous Treaties as equally important founding events that inform present-day relationships. For the first time, we are bringing together the provincial and federal legislative debates concerning each province’s entry into Confederation (1865-1949) as well as the Numbered Treaties (1871-1921) texts and negotiation records. The project democratizes access to these documents, puts them into dialogue with each other and with current debates, and reproduces small portions in various deliverables to encourage youth to engage future political challenges, promote diversity and inclusion, and support reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
