Conference Sessions

To be finalized

Words can shed light on an issue, build bridges in thought, challenge hate, and foster connection, but they can also fall short. Language has the potential to generate change, but it can also be used as a weapon. During a time when tensions persist, where people and groups continue to be oppressed, language matters, maybe more than ever. In the realm of Indigenous-settler relations and decolonization, how does our language contribute to building relationships and forging a pathway forward? Does it continue to perpetuate division? This session welcomes presentations and papers investigating the use of language and its meaning in Indigenous-settler relations. The goal is to encourage critical conversations exploring whether language contributes to building relationships or reinforces the status quo. Both academic and applied papers from Canadian and global contexts are welcome.

Grief is both emotion and construction, arriving in our bodyminds as a deeply felt shift in how we move through the world and as an affect mediated by contemporary understandings of loss. Much recent scholarship asserts that grief currently occupies a central role in western societies (Head, 2016; Poole & Galvan, 2021; Kumar, 2021; Frantzen, 2022). A constellation of emotions including, anger, anxiety, fear, confusion and despair, grief is often suppressed, individualized and medicalized in North America as evidenced through the recent inclusion of prolonged grief disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the neoliberal imperative of happiness and its equation with health (Davies, 2016; Hill et al., 2019). Entangled with systems and structures of power, such as white supremacy and settler colonialism, grief has become politicized (Granek, 2014) and medicalized (Lund, 2021) which curtails emotive responses to some forms of human and more-than-human loss. This session considers how the emotional and affective terrain of grief is intertwined with the educational, political and social structures which shape and sustain our present and collective futures. Taking up grief from four different vantage points; the theorizing ecological grief, critical grief pedagogy, grief, justice and policy, and activist-artist representations of disenfranchised grief during COVID-19, the session asks how might grief highlight alternative ways of being and knowing in the world together, how we might welcome and contend with grief in the classroom and how the arts can work to resist grief’s disenfranchisement. Following the presentations, space for audience and panel reflection via arts-based responses, such as drawing or writing, will be offered. In sum, this session will posit that grief is one way of highlighting the interconnectedness of human (and more-than-human) existence and is essential to addressing the intertwined crises of our times.

The experiences of death and grief are both socially-mediated experiences. They are shaped and influenced by social, cultural, economic, political, demographic, racial, ethnic, and gendered dynamics, among others. The general purpose of this session is to become a meeting point and venue for scholars interested in death studies from a social science and humanities point of view.

The experiences of death and grief are both socially-mediated experiences. They are shaped and influenced by social, cultural, economic, political, demographic, racial, ethnic, and gendered dynamics, among others. The general purpose of this session is to become a meeting point and venue for scholars interested in death studies from a social science and humanities point of view.