Call for papers for the 2005 ACSN conference
Building liberty: Canada and world peace, 1945-2005
Date: June 2-4, 2005
Place: Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg, the Netherlands
In 2005 the Netherlands will commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of its liberation from German occupation. Canadian forces played a crucial role in establishing peace in the Netherlands and helping to rebuild the country in the immediate aftermath of war. The Canadian government offered a secure habitat to the Dutch Royal family during the war years. War cemeteries across the Netherlands testify to the heavy price paid by Canadians in protecting people and promoting peace. Local and individual stories testify to the impact of Canadian liberators on Dutch life and cultural memory. On a personal and a diplomatic level the ties between Canada and the Netherlands have remained strong and virtually unshaken for the past sixty years.
In 2005 the Association for Canadian Studies (ACSN) organizes a two-day international conference to address and, where appropriate, reassess the role of Canada as a force for liberty and peace in the Netherlands and the world since 1945. The conference aims to examine its theme from a strongly interdisciplinary angle: military and diplomatic history, politics, sociology, media and communication studies, conflict analysis and human rights, law, literature, art, film, popular culture. Possible themes for inclusion would be:
- The legacy of liberation: Canada and the Netherlands after 1945 - sixty years of friendship?
- Gender and liberation: Canadian and Dutch women at war and peace
- Canada's role in rebuilding the Netherlands: revisionary perspectives
- Getting out: Dutch postwar emigration to Canada
- Canadian war memorials in the Netherlands
- Canada and the media: an invisible country?
- Stories of war and peace: Holland remembers
- Canadian veterans: the war in Canadian cultural memory
- Representations of war and peace in Canadian literature, art, film, popular culture
- Canada: Peacekeeper for the World?
- Human Intervention and Human Rights: the Case of Canada
- War and Peace at Home: Canada and Civil Rights
- Canadian Multiculturalism: A Blueprint for the World?
- Canada and the US on the World Stage: A Comparative Inquiry
Scholars wishing to participate are invited to send a one-page proposal for a paper, plus a brief curriculum vitae, to the ACSN secretariat by December 1, 2004.