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Shannon Lecturer Series: Rewriting Refuge – Fall 2023

October 30, 2023 — November 27, 2023

Location:Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre, 355 Cooper St., Ottawa and online
Cost:Free

Shannon Lectures, Fall 2023

Convenor: Professor Laura Madokoro, Department of History, Carleton University.

Shannon Lecture Promo PosterRewriting Refuge

There are in Canada, as in other countries, many stories about refuge. Some of this history has been used to create powerful nation-building myths, which in turn have facilitated the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others. This edition of the Shannon Lecture Series, “Rewriting Refuge” seeks to explore the history of sanctuary and protection in a new light; by considering the movements of Indigenous peoples, the activism of migrants themselves, the creation of borders, and transnational connections. Featuring scholars working in a range of geographic contexts and temporal periods, the Shannon Lecture Series, “Rewriting Refuge” promises to offer important critical insights into both the past and the present-day.

Refuge histories in Canada and elsewhere are included in nation-building myths – stories that are used to assert who does and does not belong. The 2023 Shannon Lecture Series, “Rewriting Refuge,” explores these histories of sanctuary via Indigenous migrations, migrant activism, creating borders, and transnational connections. Ranging across geography and time, the featured lectures will offer critical insights into the past and present.

The opening event on October 16 at 1:00pm will be held virtually. All other lectures will take place at Woodside Hall in the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre. The lectures are expected to run from 7:00-8:30pm, and will be streamed as well.


Lectures in this Series

Benjamin Hoy posterOctober 30, 2023: Taking Refuge in the Canada-US Borderlands?

7 PM Woodside Hall in the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre, 355 Cooper St., Ottawa and online. Register here.

Benjamin Hoy

Biography:

Benjamin Hoy is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the HGIS Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. Hoy’s first book, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines the creation of the Canada-US border and its uneven effects on the communities who lived in its shadow from 1775 to 1930. Hoy’s broader research focuses on digital mapping (HGIS), game-based learning, and the history of everyday power along border regions.

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Jean Francois Lozier posterNovember 7, 2023: Promised Lands? Indigenous Refuge in Early Canada and Beyond

7 PM Woodside Hall in the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre, 355 Cooper St., Ottawa and online. Register here.

Jean-François Lozier

Biography:

Jean-François Lozier is Curator of French North America at the Canadian Museum of History.  His research focuses on intercultural relations and circulations in Early Canada.  He is the author of the book Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century and is working on another on the Franco-Haudenosaunee “Great Peace” of 1667.

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Aimee Villareal posterNovember 14, 2023: Sanctuary’s Unruly Subjects: Dissidents, Fugitives, and Exiles in Post-Civil Rights America

7 PM Woodside Hall in the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre, 355 Cooper St., Ottawa and online. Register here.

Aimee Villarreal

Biography:

Aimee M. Villarreal is an assistant professor of anthropology at Texas State University. As a Chicana with roots in New Mexico and Texas, she descends from farmworkers, faith healers, educators, and community workers whose collective spirit she brings to her teaching, scholarship, and creative projects. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on sanctuary practices, movements, and other radical acts of rebeldía for social justice, equity, and sustainable futures in the US-Mexico borderlands. Villarreal was part of the creative team that made the award-winning documentary animation, Frontera! Revolt and Rebellion on the Río Grande (2014). Her forthcoming book Sanctuaryscapes in the New Mexico Borderlands: Movements and Revivals Across the Secular-Religious Divide (2024), tells time-traveling stories about how people form bonds of solidarity, protection, and care in moments of social and political crisis.

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Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey posterNovember 27, 2023: ‘Follow the North Star to Canada’: Draft Resisters and the Underground Railroad

7 PM Woodside Hall in the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre, 355 Cooper St., Ottawa and online. Register here.

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

Biography:

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrékor Oblahii kè Oblayéé Mantsè) is William Dawson Chair and Assistant Professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history at McGill University. Author of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press, 2023), Dr. Adjetey is the recipient of McGill’s H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching.