ESF Conference „Territory, Tension & Taboo“

Join the 21st Conference of the Emerging Scholars Forum of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries! The CfP for the conference on the topic „Territory, Tension, and Taboo: Canada in Crisis“ is now open. 

Territory as a historical, legal, geographical, or cultural concept has become an essential interdisciplinary nexus within the field of Canadian Studies. Depending on the context, territory has been described as vast, empty, conquered, annexed, unexplored, constructed, claimed, or imagined, among many other adjectives. This conference aims to explore different aspects of territory through the prism of tension and taboo. This includes territorial tensions which have erupted into public conflicts that dominate(d) popular Canadian discourse (e.g. Oka Crisis, 2022 Freedom Convoy, etc.), or territorial confrontations treated as taboo, concealed, or otherwise obscured by Canada’s international reputation as a welcoming and multicultural nation (e.g. Chinese head tax, history of slavery in Canada, etc.). The conference will feature thematic panels for more advanced projects as well as an open forum for ongoing research projects. We therefore welcome emerging scholars at all levels to share their work on the multifaceted territorial crises occurring within and between many overlapping and contested territories that make up the place now known as Canada. 

The conference will take place in person at the University of Bremen on October 10 and 11. Please submit your abstracts by April 30, 2024. More information here.

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limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel
power and resistance

“Michel Foucault says: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and […] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge, 1976, p. 95)”

Gisela Febel
decolonial scholarship

“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”

Kerstin Knopf
sustained engagement

“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”

Norman Sieroka
idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff