Blogue

Eugenics and its modern world implications

 

Zahura Ahmed, Congress 2016 student blogger

Imagine having no agency over your reproductive decisions. Imagine that those around you believe that you are not capable of making decisions for yourself and your future. Now, imagine a society in which your body is policed to the point where institutions have the right to legally sterilize you without your consent. From 1928 to 1972, this was a reality for persons with disabilities or mental illnesses in Western Canada, predominantly practiced in Alberta. The Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta disproportionally affected vulnerable populations, including women, indigenous persons and institutionalized persons.

Nicola Fairbrother presented insights on the history of eugenics in Western Canada in the session entitled Surviving Eugenics in Alberta at Congress 2016. Fairbrother’s research focused on the story of eugenic survivors, as this problematic part of history remains largely...

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At the intersections of queer and youth, there is no single story

 

Caleb Snider, Congress 2016 student blogger

The Congress 2016 roundtable hosted by the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) and the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP) on May 31st entitled At the Intersections of Queer and Youth featured some of the brightest up and coming minds from Canadian academia.

Recent graduates Jordan Fischer (University of Calgary) and Andrea Oakunsheyld (University of Calgary), and Doctoral Candidates Isabelle Groenhof (University of Calgary), Meredith Snyder (University of Alberta), and Joshua Whitehead (University of Calgary) each presented papers on queer spaces and methods of identity formation in popular culture. These topics ranged from literature (Groenhof, Snyder and Whitehead) to music (Fischer) to fan fiction (Oakunsheyld). Each brought a unique perspective and emerging voice to the roundtable.

As different as each...

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Beyond the Academy: The public side of Congress panels

 

Caleb Snider, Congress 2016 student blogger

The academic papers being presented here at the 2016 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences all represent research and study that pushes the boundaries of scholarship. Many of those same papers also have an immediate and direct relevance to public life, whether in the realm of public policy or in popular culture.

Take for example the May 28th Canadian Communication Association (CCA) Annual Meeting panel entitled Food: Classifications, Recommendations, Regulations, in which Doctoral Candidate Rebecca Carruthers Den Hoed, Dr. Emily Truman, and Professor Charlene Elliott (all from the University of Calgary) presented their research into how food and nutrition is marketed and presented by public institutions, private health initiatives and the modern commercial food industry. All three presenters called for a radical shift in public policy to promote a new kind of media literacy...

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Preserving knowledge in the face of war and oppression: Stories of academic refugees fleeing Hitler’s regime

 

Caleb Snider, Congress 2016 student blogger

When academics and researchers are displaced by war or persecution, it is more than their lives and those of their families that face destruction; we also risk losing their accumulated expertise and future contributions to human knowledge. In times of political turmoil, intellectuals make easy targets for scapegoating and targeting, as they represent an imminent threat to totalitarian systems. The rise of the Third Reich in the middle of the 20th century proved no exception, resulting in the deaths and displacement of many of the German-speaking world’s academics.

This is the subject that six eminent academics spoke on, as part of multipart panel entitled Personal stories and institutional narratives from German-speaking émigré physicians, scientists, and academics between the 1930s and the 1960s. Presented by the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) and the Canadian Society for...

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Ideas matter: Telling your research story

 

Zahura Ahmed, Congress 2016 student blogger

Do you find yourself attending academic lectures on topics in which you are extremely interested, only to leave feeling confused, angry at your time wasted, and wondering how such a gripping topic was presented so poorly? Why are some academic presentations so long, difficult to follow, and simply boring? The truth is, researching and presenting require two completely different skill sets. Collecting, analyzing and synthesizing scholarly research are skills that do not automatically translate into the ability to effectively and accessibly deliver findings in the form of a presentation.

Shari Graydon of Informed Opinions was at Congress 2016 this week to deliver a Career Corner workshop entitled Ideas matter: Telling your research story, providing specific strategies and concrete tools to help individuals more effectively tell...

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