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    Canadian Political Science Association
    2020 Annual Conference Programme

    Confronting Political Divides
    Hosted at Western University
    Tuesday, June 2 to Thursday, June 4, 2020
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    Presidential Address:
    Barbara Arneil, CPSA President

    Origins:
    Colonies and Statistics

    Location:
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 05:00pm to 06:00pm
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    KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
    Ayelet Shachar
    The Shifting Border:
    Legal Cartographies of Migration
    and Mobility

    Location:
    June 04, 2020 | 01:30 to 03:00 pm
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    Keynote Speaker: Marc Hetherington
    Why Modern Elections
    Feel Like a Matter of
    Life and Death

    Location:
    Wednesday, June 3, 2020 | 03:45pm to 05:15pm
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    Plenary Panel
    Indigenous Politics and
    the Problem of Canadian
    Political Science

    Location: Arts & Humanities Building - AHB 1R40
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 10:30am to 12:00pm

Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics



L04 - Workshop on Indigenous Politics - Memory and Forgetting and Shape of (Colonial) Nations

Date: Jun 2 | Time: 12:00pm to 01:30pm | Location:

Joint Session / Séance conjointe : Canadian Politics

Chair/Président/Présidente : Matt James (University of Victoria)


Session Abstract: The panel explores how the colonial past and its abuses enter the conversation about national belonging in the present. The papers trace how the stories/narratives we weave in various public settings - truth commissions, policy pronouncements, electoral positions and programs - authorize certain notions of national belonging and de-authorize others. The panel seeks to understand how remembering and forgetting facilitates emergent notions of togetherness.


Memory Narratives and Re-Imagining Nations: Kate Korycki (Queen's University)
Abstract: In this paper I specify the relationship between the processes of collective remembering and re-imagining of nations. Empirically, I explore the shifting narratives of Canadian multiculturalism and analyze what visions of national ‘we’ the stories legitimate, and those which they obscure. Theoretically, I contest three claims of nationalism literature: the first sees nations as historic and static. Instead, I argue that nations need to be seen as ongoing contestable processes. Second, nations are seen as stably meaningful (thus Canadians may experience a shift from being a union of two founding nations to a nation of multicultural settlers on the one hand, and not see how either vision perpetuates colonial domination in Canada on the other, but political science has no apparatus to capture either the shift or the continuity). Instead, I propose that a) the boundary and b) the principle of common belonging change: not only who is the ‘them’ to our ‘us,’ but also the condition under which ‘they’ can become ‘us.’ Third the conventional account sees two ideal types of belonging condition: civic and ethnic. Instead I propose a belonging continuum that incorporates external boundary and internal equality of citizenship positions. Finally, I identity a new modality through which the nations are made and remade, that is collective memory narratives woven in public and political sphere. In so doing, I advance a constructivist notion of nation-making and explain the persistent colonial imaginary of Canadian belonging.


Forget Colonialism: Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa and Canada: Melissa Levin (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) have become central instruments in a vocabulary of international human rights that seek to address historical abuses within nation-states and draw lines beyond which of these abuses are no longer tolerated. As such, they are both nation- and history-making events. The reification of the nation-state and the foregrounding of bracketed events as the focus of TRCs, tend to reiterate institutional practices through which those atrocities were produced in the first instance. An analysis of Canada’s TRC that shone light on residential schools, and South Africa’s TRC that highlighted atrocities of the apartheid years suggest a limit beyond which TRCs as events and practices not only refuse to imagine, but actively foreclose. In other words, identifying a single institution for investigation of the residential school in Canada’s case, or a 30-year period of apartheid in South Africa - rather than a much longer and generalized period of colonization - helps misremember the colonial edifice through which these particular atrocities emerge. The paper argues that while these commissions do open up some avenues for mobilization, they ultimately reproduce and normalize persistent relations of domination and thus contribute to a forgetfulness of a colonial present.


Changing the Shape of (Colonial) Nations Using Thin Sympathy: Joanna Quinn (Western University)
Abstract: Distinguishing between colonial, post-colonial, and settler colonial states matters greatly for the process of redressing harm that follows periods of gross violations of human rights. The important distinction is that in settler colonial contexts, the colonizers came and then stayed—leaving in place the structures and systems that they constructed, and continuing to govern by the set of rules they established. As the conference theme suggests, “the way in which these challenges manifest and develop continues to change.” But always, one group is disenfranchised while another benefits. The paper considers two settler colonial cases: Canada and Northern Ireland. In deeply divided societies, large sections of the population are oblivious to what has happened to victims, and are often unable to mobilize even a small understanding about the pain and suffering of those who have been affected, and what implications it has for their survivorship. That indifference comes from a general lack of knowledge, information, and awareness. The thin sympathetic hypothesis argues that the population needs to be “primed” before people can begin to engage in that process, and that what is needed is the development of only a very rudimentary understanding—“thin sympathy”—among individuals from each of the different factions and groups about what has happened: they need to know the basic facts of the other’s suffering. The paper considers how the memory narrative between dominant and disenfranchised groups can be reset through a process of thin sympathetic engagement, what that could look like and how it could matter.




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