Conference Description:

Abstract Submission: https://humber.ca/tifa/call-proposals
Contact: [email protected]
Conference Fee: $250.00 plus taxes (includes registration, some meals, snacks and a reception)
Location: The Harbourfront Centre (235 Queen’s Key West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
Hosts: Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Humber College, and the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA)

Keynote Speaker: Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of four books: This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, A History of My Brief Body, and A Minor Chorus.

Call for Proposals:

“The formation of a diaspora could be articulated as the quintessential journey into becoming; a process marked by incessant regoupings, recreations, and reiteration. Together these stressed actions strive to open up new spaces of discursive and performative postcolonial consciousness.”
-Okwui Enwezor (Nigerian poet, art historian, and curator: 1963-2019)

At COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Tuvalu’s foreign minister Simon Kofe delivered a pre-recorded address to the delegates standing behind a podium knee-deep in water to highlight the rapid effects climate change is having on his country. The island nation of Tuvalu, located in the South Pacific, is just over four metres above sea level. It’s been predicted that as soon as 30 years from now, the country will be completely submerged, leaving its population of about 11,000 without a home. They would be part of a predicted 200 million environmental refugees that could exist within the next 30 years.

When we think of displacement and diaspora, we often think of refugees displaced by war and imperialism, but our conception of these terms is growing, particularly as we face increasingly bleak environmental outlooks, but the very idea of what it means to be displaced and to be part of a diaspora is changing as well.

According to UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency, at the beginning of 2022, of the 89 million people displaced worldwide, over 53 million people were internally displaced, meaning despite being separated from their homelands, they have not crossed a border to find refuge. In settler colonial states like Canada, there is also a growing understanding of the effects of Indigenous displacement (historic and ongoing) and an increasing understanding of urban Indigenous communities as forming a diaspora as well.

This conference seeks to explore displacement and the concept of diaspora through an interdisciplinary lens. Whether due to war, colonialism, or environmental deterioration, we are seeking analyses of the causes of displacement, and we want to hear stories from and about the diaspora. Whether it be studies of diasporic literature, analyses of environmentally-influenced migration, or glimpses into what it means to be part of a digital diaspora, we are seeking to have our understanding of the terms diaspora and displacement challenged and reshaped.

Themes/Topics:

Activism
Alienation and displacement
Art and film
Belonging and Belongingness
Citizenship
Climate change displacement
Communities of culture (and cultures of healing)
Concept of home
Crime displacement
Cultural identity and community
Cultural hybridity (Hybridized cultural practice)
Diasporic cinema
Diaspora communities
Diasporic culture
Diaspora curriculum
Diaspora geopolitics
Diaspora as social movements
Diasporic literature(s)/Canadian literature
Diaspora tourism
Digital diaspora
Food in the diaspora
Forced displacement
Gendered transnational selves
Human rights
Homeland politics
Hostlands and homelands
Imagined communities
Immigration and emigration
Imperialism
Indigenous diaspora within settler colonial states
Instability of national categories
Internal displacement
Internment
Invisibility
Language socialization
Memory-making, Nostalgia and In-Betweeness
Music and visual culture
Public policy
Post coloniality and the politics of location
Psychology of displacement
Queer diasporas
Refugees
Religious identity and diaspora
Spaces of visibility and resistance
Statelessness
Transnational literature
Trauma and terror
War crimes

Our conference committee welcomes individual presentation proposals of 300 words, and panel proposals (3 people max) of 900 words, based on any of the above themes. This will be the ninth annual Humber@TIFA interdisciplinary conference held by Humber College’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences in association with the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA), one of the most celebrated literary festivals in the world.