Past Event

Community/Solitude: The Poetics and Praxis of Life in Transition

The English Graduate Students Society (EGSS) is pleased to announce this year’s interdisciplinary graduate conference titled “Community/Solitude: The Poetics and Praxis of Life in Transition”. This two-day conference will take place on May 5^th, 2023, from 9:00 am to 7:00 pm and May 6^th, 2023, from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm in Dunton Tower Room 2017 (20th floor) and live via Zoom.

Please remember to register below to receive the Zoom link and to ensure that your accessibility and dietary needs are met. The deadline to register is April 28, 2023.

Click here to view the poster.

This conference will explore how research in all disciplines understands community/solitude as potential sites for transmutation, adaptation, and creative possibility. We also seek to understand how community/solitude might provide the impetus for insulation, stagnation, and social control.

This year’s conference will feature a keynote presentation by Critical Disability Studies Professor Dr. Fady Shanouda, speaking again on the topic of Mad Pedagogies, this time at Carleton. In this talk, adapted from a previous event, Dr. Shanouda describes a mad-informed pedagogy’s role in responding to the violence of dark academia. He considers pedagogy’s role in activating students to respond collectively to current university conditions that seek to reduce the experiences of distress and suicidality to simplistic medicalized and psychiatric explanatory models that perpetuate individualistic and self-responsibilizing solutions as interventions. A mad-informed pedagogy is an alternative intervention – not to eliminate madness but to harness the embodied and embedded human neurodiversity towards creative potentials yet unimagined.

The program schedule for the 2023 EGSS Graduate Conference is available here.

Participants and attendees can join this conference either in-person or online via Zoom. The event will offer live AI captioning.

To facilitate accessibility, participants and attendees are encouraged to wear masks and to abide by COVID-19 safety protocols. For more information, please visit Carleton University’s COVID-19 information website.

Lunch and refreshments will include vegan and gluten-free options. If you require other food accommodations, please let us know on the registration form (below).

Dunton Tower and the conference room (DT 2017) are physically accessible, and there are accessible washrooms on the same floor of the conference room. Carleton has accessible parking available in lot P1 (behind the MacOdrum Library) and in front of the University Centre (UC). Dunton Tower (DT) is accessible through both buildings via elevators and the underground tunnels. There is also a para transpo spot (#11) at the back of Dunton Tower with access leading from this lot directly to the tunnels.

There are all-gender bathrooms on the 18th and 14th floors of Dunton Tower, and an all-gender accessible washroom on the 4th floor of the University Centre that is accessible via the tunnels. For more information, please visit this page.

This year’s conference is made possible thanks to generous contributions from the following departments at Carleton: Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Department of History, and Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture.

Event details:
May 5, 2023, 9:00 am to 7:00 pm
May 6^th, 2023, 9:00 am to 4:30 pm
Location: Dunton Tower Room 2017 and live via Zoom