Canada: Time for the Olympics
February 9th 2010, 7.30-9.30pm
The Heymanszaal in the Academy building
Free entry, refreshments will be served afterwards in the Spiegelzaal
The Centre for Canadian Studies’ new student board is proud to present the first in a series of lectures exploring the multi-faceted character of the world’s second largest country. What better topic to kick things off than the upcoming Vancouver Olympics?
•Mr. D. McNamara, Counsellor Canadian Embassy, The Hague
•Prof. dr. Gerard Sierksma, Faculty of Economics & Business, RUG
•Dr. K.I.M. van Dam, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, RUG
For more information about the Centre for Canadian Studies, please visit this page.
Report Expert Meeting THE CANADIAN ARCTIC IN MOTION
Self Governance in Canada’s North: Nunavik and Nunavut
By Cunera Buijs, Leiden
On the 26th of October an expert meeting on Nunavik and Nunavut was held at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. The meeting was organized by the Canadian Embassy, the National Museum of Ethnology and the Research Group Circumpolar Cultures.
The meeting was organized in connection to the visit of two esteemed guests from the north, Pita Aatami, President, Makivik Corporation, Quebec, and Jean-François Arteau, Legal Counsel and Executive Assistant to the President of Makivik Corporation. This provided an excellent opportunity to discuss developments in Nunavik and Nunavut in the past, the present and the future. 
"Canada Talks" Lecture Series
On October 19th, the Roosevelt Academy (an international honors college of Utrecht University in Middelburg) in partnership with the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands, kicked off its “Canada Talks” lecture series. This new series of academic guest lectures aims to raise the profile of Canadian Studies in the Netherlands by bringing experts in relevant topics to the Roosevelt Academy to share their research with faculty, staff, students and the local community. The series welcomed as its first speaker Dr. Inge Genee, Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Lethbridge. Dr. Genee spoke on her current research on the structure of the Indigenous English dialects spoken by First Nations people in Canada.
Dr. Ernestine Lahey, Lecturer in Linguistics and Stylistics at the Roosevelt Academy (an international honors college of Utrecht University in Middelburg) was this year the recipient of an ACSN travel grant. The grant was used to fund travel to the University of Saskatchewan, where Dr. Lahey spent a week carrying out research in the university library’s special collections department. The special collections department at the University of Saskatchewan houses an important collection of papers on the life and work of Canadian poet Al Purdy, from his earliest days as a published writer to the late 1960s. Dr. Lahey’s previous research in the field of stylistics and Canadian literature has focused on the poetry of Purdy, as well as that of Milton Acorn and Alden Nowlan. Her current research focuses on Purdy’s poetics of landscape, his role as a nationalist literary icon for English-Canada, and his alternative reading of “the North” as a symbol for Canadianness. Preliminary findings of the research will be presented at the forthcoming New Grounds conference on ecocriticm, globalization and cultural memory at Radboud University Nijmegen (January 2101).
John Ralston Saul becomes first Canadian to head mighty PEN
Toronto author John Ralston Saul, who visitited the Netherlands last September, is vowing to shine a spotlight on disappearing languages in his new role as the president of International PEN, one of the world's oldest human rights organizations and a global champion of freedom of expression. Saul, elected Wednesday at the annual International PEN conference in Linz, Austria, is the first Canadian to hold the office, which carries a three-year term. The husband of former governor general Adrienne Clarkson succeeds former Czech dissident author Jiri Grusa. Past presidents of the organization, founded in 1921, include such literary heavyweights as John Galsworthy, Arthur Miller, Heinrich Böll and Mario Vargas Llosa. "It's exciting. It's a real commitment," said Saul, 62, on the line from Austria. "And it's very moving to stand up in a room full of writers and intellectuals from around the world, knowing that you're in an astonishing line of people. That carries with it a real responsibility. "One of the things I laid out was the importance of minority languages. There are hundreds of languages that are disappearing, mainly aboriginal indigenous languages, a lot of them in Canada. The ultimate removal of freedom of expression is to have your language disappear and, in a sense, to have your culture disappear." International PEN, based in London, has 144 chapters globally, representing 18,000 writers around the world. Its responsibilities include lobbying for the release of writers who have been imprisoned or exiled for their views. "This means that Canada will play a bigger role in International PEN," said Toronto Star columnist and past PEN Canada president Haroon Siddiqui, who had a hand in nominating Saul for the position. "PEN Canada is one of the most successful PEN centres in the world. This is partially a recognition of that and also a recognition that John would make a very good president." Over the years, PEN Canada has lobbied on behalf of several celebrated dissidents, including former Czech president Vaclav Havel and Turkish Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk. In 2002, the organization helped secure the release of Jose Francisco Gallardo, a Mexican brigadier-general sentenced to 28 years for writing an article urging his country to appoint a military ombudsman. Saul is the author of several fiction and non-fiction titles, including The Collapse of Globalism and A Fair Country. He is a past president of PEN Canada, which he joined in the 1980s.
To find out more please visit this page
Prepare for Studying in Canada
The Education in Canada website provides information to international students about education opportunities in Canada. Individuals interested can search for study programs, get cost estimates, learn about study permit requirements and work opportunities. For more information, visit this page.
5th Congress of Polish Canadianists
Towards Critical Multiculturalism: Dialogues Between/Among Canadian Diasporas.
October 7th - 9th 2010, CRACOW, POLAND
Organized by the University of Silesia and Jagiellonian University
First Announcement and Call for Papers
The Canadian policy of official multiculturalism has been recognized as unique in the world of multiethnic states. Many international comparisons of national performance show that the Canadian solution has yielded very good results in such areas as quality of life, human development, public education, economic freedom, and the protection of civil liberties and political rights. No wonder there is much interest in the multicultural politics all over the world, yet in Canada, it has become a sharply contested issue. Many critics claim that the federal model of multiculturalism has failed to control racism against ethno-racial minorities and hence a ,br more "radical" or "critical" multiculturalism is needed which would restructure power relations and envision a reciprocal process among all groups. Recent studies on diaspora in Canada have focused predominantly on the examination of relations between the dominant culture and a variety of minority groups and Indigenous peoples. While the results of such research are essential for critical examinations of Canadian multiculturalism, the predominance of the approach in effect both underlines and supports unequal power relations between the majority and minority groups. The problem becomes particularly clear in view of the fact that no sufficient work has been done on the exploration of encounters between/among various Canadian diasporic groups and First Nations people. New comparative frameworks are urgently needed to examine various transdiasporic practices which aim at reconceptualization of current Canadian national discourses and at forging and developing a successful transcultural communication.
Canadian short story writer Alice Munro wins Man Booker International Prize for fiction
Ms. Munro, who lives in Clinton, Ont., and Comox, B.C., was chosen from a field of 14 writers, including Peter Carey, E.L. Doctorow, Mario Vargas Llosa, V.S. Naipaul and Joyce Carol Oates.
The International Prize is open to writers from around the world and is awarded for an entire body of work. The inaugural International Prize was awarded to Albanian writer Ismail Kadare in 2005. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe won it in 2007.
The Man Booker International Prize's three-person judging panel, chaired by author Jane Smiley, saw no reason for modesty, praising the winner in a statement: “Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.”
For more information please visit this page of the Globe and Mail.
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