Organized by the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE), the Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) and Run for Life, the Crossroads Across the Region Scavenger Hunt involves collecting clues about the educational community and geography of the Kitchener-Waterloo region in teams of two to four people throughout the duration of Congress. The hunt, which will take participants through the two campuses, uptown Waterloo and downtown Kitchener, is self-scheduled, so delegates can complete it at their leisure. All of the locations are accessible on foot or by transit.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetThroughout Congress, the University of Waterloo’s newest high-tech accelerator, REAP (Research Entrepreneurs Accelerating Prosperity) is showcasing some of the latest interactive digital display technologies from its new ‘sandbox for serious play’ – the FELT Lab. Young talent from SSHRC disciplines involved in REAP will be on hand to show and tell.
www.reapwaterloo.ca
Increasingly, academic job candidates are asked to provide a "teaching statement" or a "statement of teaching philosophy." For many of us, our first attempts at writing such statements seem "cheesy" or inauthentic. However, there is hope, especially if you can link your beliefs to examples from your own practice. At this hands-on workshop you will work on your own teaching philosophy, and tie it to forms of evidence. No prior experience with this form of writing is assumed.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetThe Canadian Language Museum was established in 2011 to promote an appreciation of all of the languages spoken in Canada and of their role in the development of this nation. Its first project is the traveling exhibit Canadian English, Eh? which focuses on Canadians' distinctive use of English. This exhibit explores variations in Canadian English across the country, as well as influences from French and Aboriginal languages. The exhibit will be available for public viewing at several locations in 2012.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetThe Canadian Communication Association and the University of Waterloo Critical Media Lab (CML) invites Congress participants to visit its mobile exhibition (in a truck parked on WLU campus). Delegates can examine and experiment with recent interactive projects completed by the CML collaborators in the field of mobile computing and augmented reality.
Partially funded by the host universities, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo.
Take a tour of Uptown Waterloo’s “Power Corner” and witness how the site of Seagram’s original whiskey distillery and associated barrel works have been transformed into new major academic and research facilities. While you’re there, get an insider look at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and the Balsillie School of International Affairs.
Departure Location: In front of the Laurier Bookstore, in the Concourse of the Arts Building
The world is continually evolving. Are we prepared for what lies ahead?
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has embarked on a forward-thinking initiative to identify key future challenge areas for Canada, in an evolving global context. If our country is to continue to be a successful society in the 21st century, we need to think ahead and collectively imagine our possible futures in order to anticipate potential emergent issues, societal needs, and knowledge needs.
In this Big Thinking panel discussion, SSHRC invites you to join Don Tapscott, Dan Gardner and Diana Carney in an invigorating discussion on Canada’s future. Don Tapscott is one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation, media and the economic and social impact of technology; Dan Gardner is a best-selling author and award-winning columnist for the Ottawa Citizen; and Diana Carney is Vice-President, Projects at the think tank Canada 2020.
With their fingers on the pulse of Canadian and global issues, these leading thinkers are well-placed to help identify emerging issues and areas that matter to Canadians and to the world.
Attention Congress 2012 delegates and families!
Visit THEMUSEUM in Kitchener from May 26 to June 2, 2021 and save! Delegates and their families pay $10 per person (regular price is $13). Admission includes all THEMUSEUM’s permanent exhibitions as well as DINOSAURS and ADD COLOUR | A Yoko Ono Exhibition. DINOSAURS is a robotic adventure of dinosaur life and ADD COLOUR invites you to play an active role in the creative process.
http://www.themuseum.ca/main.cfm
It is well known that women within academe often carry a heavier service load than their male colleagues, and that this can reduce the time women scholars spend on research and delay their progression through the ranks. This workshop will survey the literature on so-called “institutional housekeeping” and its consequences for women scholars. Participants will consider the pros and cons of three approaches to the problem: saying no, developing research programs based on service, and supporting greater institutional recognition for service work.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetRotten with Perfection is a short filmic exploration of our nature, as symbol-using and symbol-misusing animals. The film will be displayed in a viewing room designed for one: you.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetAnna Smol will discuss translations and adaptations of Beowulf, particularly those intended for children and the general public. The discussion will focus on two eras that saw a surge in such publications—the developing and intersecting disciplines of medieval studies, and childhood studies in the pre-WWI era, exemplified in the practice known as “boyology.” The presentation will explore how contemporary adaptations of the text address our relation to the past.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetDiana Masny explores the way children simultaneously acquire two or more writing systems, to help us understand literacies as processes in a multilingual context. Her address is based on research in Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT), where literacies are conceptualized as processes through which individuals transform themselves. Literacies thus imply the act of reading, reading the world and self as texts.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetIn this talk, Eszter Szalczer offers a new reading of Strindberg’s The Stronger as a seminal experiment in the staging of the modern subject, one that prefigures the groundbreaking modernist dramaturgy of the late Strindberg and anticipates the work of Beckett and Pinter.
Sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Nordic Studies.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetUncertain World is a group exhibition developed in response to the theme of Crossroads: Scholarship in an Uncertain World. The exhibition features the works of four mid- career Canadian artists. Using the landscape as a familiar perceptual backdrop, the artwork addresses themes ranging from environmental degradation to urban sprawl, and from First Nations land claims to the Occupy movement. Uncertain World will be a timely visual complement to Congress 2012.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetIn partnership with the Royal Society of Canada
When Survival hit the stands forty years ago, Margaret Atwood was already a literary success. But it quickly became a game-changing book, in which she set out to define what is ‘Canadian’ about Canadian literature at a time when our country’s literary scene was still finding its ground. For this Big Thinking lecture Margaret Atwood will talk about the writing of Survival and will explore story as a key characteristic of human beings and code to cultures, including ours.
Margaret Atwood is a giant of modern literature who has anticipated, explored, satirized—and even changed—the popular preoccupations of our time. She is the rare writer whose work is adored by the public, acclaimed by the critics, and studied on university campuses around the world. Although her subject matter varies, the precise crafting of her language gives her body of work a sensibility entirely its own.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards including the prestigious Booker Prize. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction and non-fiction. Her 2008 non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the CBC Massey Lecture series, is now the subject of a documentary film. Her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, was published in the autumn of 2009. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination is her latest non-fiction book.
Photo credit: George Whiteside
Close Add to My Schedule TweetThis session will be of interest to graduate students who are getting ready to teach their first course as instructors. It will include a series of panel presentations by senior doctoral students, a lecturer and a newly-hired faculty member, as well as group discussions of common classroom scenarios. By the end of the session, participants will have discussed common challenges faced by first-time instructors, identified strategies for addressing them and developed ideas for getting their courses off to a great start.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetIn this plenary session, Steve Leafloor will look at the techniques and programming of “BluePrintforLife” as a way of exploring creative ways of connecting mind, body and spirit,andas a pathway to healing in remote Inuit and First Nation communities.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetModerator: John Macfarlane, Editor and Co-publisher of The Walrus
Speakers: Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law; Shirley Fecteau, Canada Research Chair In Human Cognition, Decision-Making and Brain Plasticity; Susan McDaniel, Canada Research Chair in Global Population and Life Course; Carolyn McGregor, Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics; and a panel of four graduate students of Canada Research Chairs.
For Canada to continue to be a successful society in the 21st century, we need to think ahead and collectively imagine our possible futures, anticipating potential issues and societal needs that lie ahead. Thinking Ahead – What will Canada look like in 2030?, will bring together Canada Research Chairs and their students in two lively panel discussions, during which the speakers will discuss future challenge areas for Canada over the next five, 10, and 20 years. The goal of this event is to explore the ways in which the research communities of all disciplines can contribute their knowledge, talent and expertise to understanding and shaping the future of Canada in an evolving global context.
Get a feel for being “down on the corner, out in the street” while learning about the history and architecture of Uptown Waterloo’s main street and its transformation into a vibrant, albeit sometimes contested, public space.
Departure Location: In front of the Laurier Bookstore, in the Concourse of the Arts Building
Intermediaries such as immigration consultants, recruiters, non-governmental organizations and the International Organization for Migration are playing an increasingly important role in the management of international migration. This session explores the relationship between governmental and non-governmental agencies that inhabit the emergent interstitial spaces of global migration and the governance of refugee claimants, resettled refugees and skilled labor migration. How do governmental and non-governmental agencies’ roles intersect, differ and at times conflict vis-à-vis the regulation, facilitation, resettlement and management of refugees and refugee claimants? What forms of public/private relationships are present in contemporary migration management and are they clearly demarcated? How do regulatory frameworks incorporate non-state actors into migration and refugee policy and is this by design or default? An interdisciplinary set of research presenters address these questions by focusing on the issue of third parties involved with migration.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetAward-winning researcher, writer, producer and technology expert Stephen Brier, co-director of the New Media Lab at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, will present the 2012 keynote address of the Canadian Historical Association. He will examine the changes that interactive technology has produced in presenting history, and highlight future challenges.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetIn this session, you will learn what a teaching dossier is, what items are typically included in it and how to begin the process of gathering information and writing up your personal dossier. We will also analyze sample dossiers to discover what constitutes an effective dossier.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetIn fall 2011, La civilisation du journal. Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle (The Civilization of the Newspaper: Cultural and Literary History of the 19th Century French Press) will be published (Paris, Nouveau Monde éditions). This collective volume, compiling some 60 authors from a range of disciplines (history, literature, sociology, art history, visual arts and media studies), offers a unique chance to study what may be an approach "at the crossroads" of knowledge. We will endeavour to highlight the degree to which a systematic study of 19th century newspapers (combining close and distant reading) can help examine the century's complex historical and political transformations, cultural transformations in their expression and materiality, literary and cultural innovations, and ways in which social identities have been developed and redefined. If we have been long aware of advances made by the press, here we can see what Henri Berr (pioneer of interdisciplinarity and founder in 1900 of Revue de synthèse) called "advances via the press" – and thus acquire the tools we need to face the future.
Ideally located in the heart of southwestern Ontario, close to the largest First Nation in Canada, Brantford Ontario was one of the most significant manufacturing centers in 19th-century Canada. After de-industrialization took hold, Brantford was left to reinvent itself. The arrival, beginning in 1999, of Laurier, Nipissing University and Mohawk College, catalyzed sweeping changes. Join us for a discussion of how education can spur urban renewal and economic transformation.
15:00 Leave Waterloo
16:00 Panel discussion
17:00 Networking reception (Light meal provided)
18:00 Tour: Downtown Brantford, Brant County Museum or Casino or Military Museum
20:00 Bus leaves to go back to Waterloo
For more information, or to register, go to www.laurierbrantford.ca/congress2012
What happens to a social movement when it “goes professional”? Does its ability to bring about change improve? How do movement leaders stay true to their original aims? This session includes scholars examining the professionalization of social movement organizations in the disability, women’s rights, anti-poverty, environmental or child care movements.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetThis provocative, multi disciplinary panel brings together a number of researchers with important expertise on census related issues and tackles the question of "Why do we still need a census?" The debate is intended to generate dialogue based on both Canadian and US experiences of recent change in census data collection, and explore the question of how this will affect research and policy development. Recent census changes in Canada have sparked vigorous debate and this panel will provide an opportunity to further this dialogue.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetAlthough Canada has a long and distinguished history of producing media texts for children (children’s television, film, music, magazines and video games), that history is often invisible. This roundtable of scholars and practitioners will begin to recover the history of Canadian children’s media industries.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetWomen’s early twentieth-century Chinese journals offer unparalleled access to details of everyday life. Particular methodological approaches and digital innovations facilitate access to this rich material and to the periodical press more broadly. In this presentation, Joan Judge will assess such women’s journals as nodes of social interaction by analyzing their more “porous” sections, including readers’ columns and social surveys.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetJoin Ensemble Polaris for a uniquely Canadian spin on traditional tunes from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark, and original music inspired by “the idea of North.” Comprised of expert performers from a variety of musical traditions and backgrounds, Polaris incorporates an eclectic palette of musical influences, colours and techniques in their sound.
Partially funded by the host universities, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo.
Recent geographical scholarship has adopted intersectional analysis as a dominant paradigm. But the road to intersectionality has been politically fraught and methodologically challenging. This presentation by Audrey Kobayashi (Suzanne Mackenzie Memorial Lecture) recounts some of the conversations that took place along this road.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetDuring Congress 2012, we’re joining the Community, Campus and Congress in the CONNECTENT (at the corner of Father David Bauer Drive & Erb Street) for a celebration of local foods, beverages and entertainment. We invite you to celebrate on three different evenings —May 28th, 29th and 30th— under the same rooftop from 18:30 until 21:30.
Make the connection! Buy your tickets today at http://congress.catertrax.com
In partnership with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
The current global economic crisis is not just cyclical, but rather symptomatic of a deeper secular change. There is growing evidence that we need to rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, but now have come to the end of their life cycle.
At the same time the contours of new enterprises and industries are becoming clear. With the Internet, society has at its disposal the most powerful platform ever for bringing together the people, skills and knowledge we need to ensure growth, social development and a just and sustainable world. And all around the world there is the first generation to “grown up digital” are entering the workforce and becoming citizens. These “digital natives” are a powerful force for change.
People everywhere are collaborating like never before. From education, science and the humanities to new approaches to citizen engagement and democracy, sparkling new initiatives are underway, embracing a new set of principles for the 21st century -- collaboration, openness, sharing, interdependence and integrity.
Don Tapscott, for 3 decades arguably the world’s leading thinker about the impact of the digital revolution on business and society, argues that this is an age of participation where the humanities and social sciences have a central role to play.
Close Add to My Schedule TweetThe Multicultural Cinema Club will hold its spring film festival during Congress and will showcase international films focusing on the theme of “uncertain worlds.” A local film buff will introduce the films and a short discussion will follow each screening.
Free. The Registry Theatre, 122 Frederick Street, Kitchener.
Partially funded by the host universities, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo.
An evening of short plays in the Strindberg tradition honouring the centenary of August Strindberg's death: Strindberg’s The Stronger; Harold Pinter’s Monologue; and a new play by Cape Breton dramatist Lindsay Thompson that brings the conflicts that power Strindberg's and Pinter's plays into the 21st century.
Admission is free.
With generous support from the Swedish Institute.