May 12, 2025

8:00-9:00 AM: Breakfast and Mingling

9:00-9:30 AM: Welcome & Land Acknowledgment 

  • Elder Mary Lou Smoke (Ojibway)

  • Organizers Miranda Leibel, Will Kujala, Phil Henderson

9:30-11:00 AM: To Know Whose Selves? The Legacies of Canadian Studies as a Project of Self-Knowledge  

  • Daisy Raphael and Justin Leifso, “To Know Whose Selves? Locating the Symons report within shifting Canadian state forms”

  • Stephanie Latty (virtual), “Burying History While Digging It Up: Excavating the Ruins of Blackness in Toronto”

  • Vincent Wong, “Towards an Asian Canadian Legal Studies”

Chair: Kristine Alexander

11:00-12:00 PM: Workshop On Teaching Canadian Studies

12:00-1:00 PM: Lunch Break - Lunch Served in Great Hall

1:10-2:40 PM: Indigenous Sovereignty, Treaty Thinking, and State Formations 

  • Daniel Sherwin, “The Origins of the “Indian Band” as Canadian State Institution”

  • Corey Snelgrove, “Modes of Treaty Criticism” 

  • Danielle Gendron, “Canoeing as Methodology — Denaturalizing Canadian Land Tenure Systems”

  • Etienne Cardin-Trudeau, “Transforming Settler Nationalism in Québec: Recovering the Principles of the Historical Treaties”

Chair: Phil Henderson

2:40-2:50 PM: Afternoon Break

2:50-4:20 PM: Foundational Infrastructures- Law, Violence, and the Settler State 

  • Megan Aiken, “Insidious Ideas: Understanding Institutionalized Discourse through Canada’s Drug Problems, Past and Present”

  • Stacie Swain, “‘I believe in the Indian Way’: The Criminalization of WSÁNEĆ Law and the Protection of Provincial Authority”

  • Jérôme Melançon, (virtual), “Residential Schools and Indigenous Self-Determination”

  • Éléna Choquette (virtual), “Inter-nationalising Canada: rethinking Indigenous-settler relations beyond settler states”

Chair: Miranda Leibel

May 13th, 2025

9:00-10:30 AM: Is a “Critical Canadian Studies” possible? Re-Examining the project of self-knowledge in 2025

  • Blair Many Fingers, “Blackfoot Heritage Management Praxis: Aapaitsitapiiysinni/White Robe Weasel People Life Ways”

  • Sarah Stilwell, “Old Town, New Approaches? Reviewing and revising nation-building narratives at the Royal BC Museum”

  • Tom Peace, “Teaching Indigenous Pasts & Settler Futures at the University Museum”

  • Nassisse Solomon, “Let's Talk About Race: Teaching and Learning About Black Histories and Identities as Canadian Studies”

Chair: Jennifer Mustapha

10:30 AM -12:00 PM: Nationalisms and the Nation-State 

  • Tyler Shipley, “Foundational Myths: The Absence of Indigenous Nations in Canadian Foreign Policy Studies”

  • Janice Feng (virtual), “Reimagining ‘Canada?’ E. Pauline Johnson, Indigenous Nationhood, and Refusal”

  • Zakara Stampp, “Beyond Multiculturalism: Reimagining Black Youth Well-Being in Southwestern Ontario”

  • Niloofar Golkar, “The False Promises of Canadian Interest”

Chair: Kristine Alexander

12:00-1:30 PM: Lunch Break: Catered Lunch at The Wave on Western Main Campus!

1:30-3:00 PM: Reimagining Political Futures 

  • Brydon Kramer, “Enclosures of Possibility’: On student encampments and what they teach us about the University’s role on stolen Native land”

  • Stephen Gnanasihamany, “Imagining Futures Beyond Crisis: Expanding Political Imagination in Canada through Speculative Fiction”

  • Ritwik Bhattacharjee, “Sinking that Fucking Ship: On Settler Colonial Canada’s Pathological Present”

  • Michelle Sylvestre, “Investigating the Algorithmic Nation: Decolonial Feminist Performance as Anti-Canadian Praxis”

Chair: Will Kujala

3:00-3:15 PM: Afternoon Break

3:15-4:15 PM Workshopping Next Steps and Research Dissemination

4:15-5:00: Closing Roundtable

  • Miranda Leibel

  • Will Kujala

  • Phil Henderson