Centre of Canadian Studies

Content

Our 2026 Biennial Conference will be hosted in person by ACSI at the LexIcon Library and

Cultural Centre, a cultural landmark in the Dublin suburb of Dun Laoghaire, connected to the

city centre by the DART electric commuter rail system. The Call for Proposals is for 15-

minute papers, performances, screenings or exhibits on any aspect of Canadian Studies.

We warmly welcome contributions that engage with the conference’s keynote theme –

Canadian Crossings and Belongings, or on any aspect of Canadian studies. Contributions

can be from any academic discipline or field of practice. At ACSI, we place great store on the

wide range of contributions generally seen at our conferences. For contributors who wish to

follow the conference theme, please see the outline description and sample topics below.

In Canada, a place of migration, ancestral connection, and colonisation, questions of home

are often complex. What is “home” in Canada is frequently coloured by the building or loss of

home places, and by migration experiences and stories. The resulting web of culture

clashes, cultural domination, arrivals, crossings, and departures informs how belonging is

imagined and reimagined. Canada’s stories—told and as yet untold—can be expressed

through many channels, and are contained in diverse repositories. Modes of storytelling

include ancestral oral traditions as well as digital narratives in various types of new media.

English and French mingle with Cree, Inuktitut, Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic and a host of

other languages, forming an evolving cultural mix that both unsettles and enriches the

question of what is Canada. Canada’s professed policy of multiculturalism and Québec’s

own model of interculturalism are underlain by hierarchies of power and by the realities of

lived cultural and cross-cultural experiences.

Challenges to laws can reveal tensions between recognition of ancestral or historical

entitlements and commercial or geopolitical forces, as when Indigenous land claims contest

and expose colonial frameworks. Symbolic national objects and spaces—the maple leaf,

Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, the canoe—can become battlegrounds of meaning and belonging.

Efforts to decolonise places and practices allow us to learn about and remember the

colonially-inflected human stories and experiences from which they arise. In a similar way,

engagement with migration narratives can remind us of universal human predicaments and

concerns.In this cultural landscape, understandings of heritage pass along intergenerational routes,

with the transmission of songs, stories, and survival strategies. Younger people and new

arrivals to Canada often vibrantly remix different aspects of their heritage or multiple

heritages with new forms of art, film, and protest. Linkages between the human and non-

human carry symbolic resonances, embodied in Indigenous cultures by animal guides and

companions like the raven or the bear. Such relationships create ecologies of home,

reminding us that we humans are not at the centre of our environment, but that our

environment is what allows us to exist.

Yet in Canada, efforts to frame sustainability often collide with extractive realities and

destruction of human heritage, along with sometimes more visible damage to animal habitats

and pollution of the country’s plains, lakes, rivers, and oceans. Struggles of race, ethnicity,

gender, class, and representation continue to determine who is seen, heard, and valued.

Canadian belongings are therefore made up of multiple interactions arising from the

interweaving and layering of memories, physical and virtual spaces, narrative, imagination,

cultural encounters and mobilities. These crossings and belongings are affected and

inflected by key sociohistorical specificities – sometimes traumatic, often enriching, and

sometimes both at once.

Possible topics to consider (although discussion of any area of Canadian studies outside

of the broad theme of crossings and belongings is welcomed).

Representations of home and migration

Linguistic and cultural métissage

Multiculturalism, interculturalism,transculturalism

Race, ethnicity, and representation

Conflicts, reconciliations and resistance

Cultural revivals, survivals, and reassertions

Diversities, specificities, discrimination

Heritage and new beginnings

Intergenerational transmission and cultural memory

Socio-economic hierarchies and questions of class

Laws, frameworks, and challenges to laws

Expressions of nationalism

Power and politics

Decolonizing places, spaces, and practices

Gendered questionings, queer spaces, mixings

Hybridities, identities, and alterities

Human/non-human/animal relationalities

Environmental interconnections, climate change and sustainability

Visibility and invisibility

Rights and recognition

Proposals as a 250-word abstract (in English, French or Irish, on any Canadian studies

subject) along with 5 key words, and a short biographical note, should be submitted online

via the form linked here, by the end of Wednesday 07 January 2026. It is expected that

applicants will be notified by 06 February. Keynote speakers will be announced before the

conference. A limited number of bursaries covering part of the costs of attending the

conference may be made available for emerging scholars. Details will be provided in due

course. It is necessary to be a member of ACSI in order to receive one of these bursaries.

Organisational contact: Dervila Cooke, ACSI President, Dervila.Cooke@dcu.ie