Tag Archives: Canada

Narratives of Memory, Migration, and Xenophobia

December 17, 2019

Narratives of Memory, Migration, and Xenophobia in the European Union and Canada is the distinct culmination of an intensive cross-cultural academic endeavour that explores how memories of the past are intricately intertwined with present-day realities and future aspirations. The book is based on a range of experiences that stem from a summer field school focusing on landscapes of memory in Hungary, Germany, France, and Canada, in the context of migration and xenophobia. Contributors include Canadian and European academics; directors, researchers, and educators working at various European memorial sites; as well as graduate students from a wide range of disciplines. This cross-disciplinary investigation is based on a symposium as well as a series of concert performances in Europe and Canada highlighting the complex and multi-layered narratives of memory. The ultimate goal of this scholarly undertaking is to understand how agents of memory — including the music we listen to, the (his)stories that we tell, and the political and social actions that we engage in — create narratives of the past that allow us to make sense of ourselves in the present and to critically contest and challenge xenophobic and nationalistic renderings of political possibilities.

Editors

Dr. Helga K. Hallgrímsdóttir is an Associate Professor in Public Administration and a Research Associate in the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. Her research interests are primarily in historical sociology, comparative political sociology with a focus on grassroots mobilization and social movements claimsmaking. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight grant as Principal Investigator on the link between austerity policies, economic downturn, and the rise of nationalism in Europe; and the principal investigator on a Jean Monnet Erasmus+ grant and SSHRC Connections grant on memory politics in Canada and Europe.

Dr. Helga Thorson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. She is the Co- Director of the I-witness Field School, a 4- week course on Holocaust memorialization in Europe, which she ran for the first time in 2011. In addition, she is the co-founder of “The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Confronting Racism, Antisemitism and Homophobia through Memory Work” research collective and one of the co-organizers of the group’s first conference at Central European University in Budapest in 2014, followed by a second international conference at the University of Victoria in 2015. Dr. Thorson has received numerous teaching awards including the Faculty of Humanities Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Victoria in 2012; the Excellence in Teaching for Experiential Learning Award at the University of Victoria in 2017; and most recently a 2019 3M National Teaching Award.

Free Download: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/11314

Purchase a Copy: https://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/browse/uvic+publications/9781550586503

Canada’s Parliamentary Debates online!

July 23, 2018 | Alexa Battler

One of Canada’s richest historical documents was becoming less useable every year – until a group of U of T political scientists, computer scientists and historians decided to intervene.

“You have this really unrivaled historical resource that is accumulated over time, and by virtue of its size and magnitude, is impenetrable,” says Christopher Cochrane, associate professor of political science at U of T Scarborough. “That is the status of Hansard prior to digitization.”

Since 1880, every word spoken in Canada’s Parliamentary debates is transcribed and recorded into a massive document called the Hansard. To put the size and scale of it in perspective, reading the entire thing at a pace of about a novel a day would take 66 years. Then it would take another 28 years to read everything that was added while reading the original document.

In 2013, Cochrane teamed up with two (at the time) postdoctoral fellows, two PhD students and Graeme Hirst, professor of computer science at U of T Scarborough, to create LiPad: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project. Over the years the project received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Digging into Data initiative.

for more information see: https://utsc.utoronto.ca/news-events/breaking-research/u-t-team-brings-one-canadas-most-important-documents-digital-age

The digital archives for Canada’s Parliamentary Debates are available at: https://www.lipad.ca/

Full details of the project are available in the following article:
Beelen, K., Thijm, T. A., Cochrane, C., Halvemaan, K., Hirst, G., Kimmins, M., Lijbrink, S., Marx, M., Naderi, N., Rheault, L., Polyanovsky, R., and Whyte, T. (2017). “Digitization of the Canadian Parliamentary Debates.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 849–864. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423916001165.

Finance Committee Recommends Canadian Government Funding for Open Educational Resources

Michael Geist Blog | December 20, 2017

Earlier this year, the Ontario government made a big commitment to open textbooks, investing millions of dollars to create new open texts in fields such as history, finance, politics, the environment, engineering, and the sciences. The resulting open textbook library at ECampusOntario now features hundreds of texts that are free to use for everyone. The Ontario initiative follows leadership in the open educational resource field from BC Campus and its open textbook project. The BC effort has saved students millions of dollars with adoptions by dozens of institutions putting them into use in hundreds of faculties for over 1600 courses.

For more see: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2017/12/finance-committee-recommends-canadian-government-funding-open-educational-resources/

Canadian Alliance of Student Associations recommendation at: http://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/FINA/Brief/BR9073510/br-external/CanadianAllianceOfStudentAssociations-e.pdf

Finance Committee recommendation 19: http://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/FINA/Reports/RP9312006/finarp21/finarp21-e.pdf

Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples documents digitized!

Library and Archives Canada announces the digitization of over 600 documents from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples

Established in 1991, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) travelled across Canada documenting the issues and challenges facing Indigenous Canadians and their communities. Over its six-year mandate, RCAP amassed thousands of hours of recorded testimony and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, culminating in the publication of the 1996 RCAP final report complete with a series of recommendations for a renewed relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada.

Following the conclusion of the Commission, the entire RCAP archive was transferred to the National Archives of Canada, now Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

On November 3, 2016, LAC launched a searchable database of select RCAP records, coinciding with the commemorative national forum. The database contains transcripts of more than 175 days of hearings; nearly 200 research reports; more than 100 submissions from tribal councils, organizations and interest groups; as well as RCAP publications and the final report.

LAC hopes that the RCAP database will renew interest in this important inquiry which remains so relevant today.

Search the new RCAP database now! http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/royal-commission-aboriginal-peoples/Pages/introduction.aspx