Call for Papers – Migrations & Gatherings in the West

Western Canadian History Conference 2024

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan – 12-15 September 2024

Proposal Deadline: 15 April 2024

Post-pandemic, it is once again time for historians to migrate to the Western Canadian History conference, last held in 2019. The 2024 meeting of Western Canadian History will be held in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on Treaty six territory and traditional lands of the Cree, Saulteaux, Dene, Dakota, Lakota, Nakota and Metis nations, hosted by the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan.

This conference will be a chance to gather, share research, re-connect, and renew making it fitting we migrate and gather in Saskatchewan, the flyover province and the migratory bird flight path capital of Canada. Together with local partners, we hope you will join us for a memorable fall weekend.

The theme of migrations and gatherings is suggestive rather than constraining and aims to provoke a wide range of expansive, open-ended questions about how humans, non-humans and ideas change, move and coalesce. It prompts questions of individual movement, waves of migration, forced migration, displacement, and diaspora of peoples for social, economic, religious, and cultural reasons over diverse geographies. Questions about the exchange of ideas, of how, why, and where we gather, and the ideas we gather around.  Changes to the social, political, cultural and physical landscape as a result of migrations. How we interpret or bring meaning to these migrations and how they change our relationship to the landscapes or geographies through which we move.  Additionally, it raises timely questions about how we define the scale and scope of prairie Canadian history, and of the ways that these histories challenge national narratives that tend to ignore the prairies in their quest to historicize Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia.

Our definition of Western Canada is flexible and includes the large part of northern North America that lies between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean. We welcome work that examines these places in wider comparative frames, whether they are national, continental, comparative, imperial, Oceanic, or transnational. We welcome submissions from scholars working on Western Canada and its many histories from a range of methodologies.

Please submit proposals electronically to 2024 Western Canadian History Conference at wcs2024@usask.ca by April 15, 2024. Individual paper submissions should be no more than 150 words and be accompanied by a 100-150 word biography. We encourage proposals of complete panels or roundtables. Panels should be made up of three papers and a facilitator and roundtables of four papers/commentators and a facilitator. Panel or roundtable submissions should include abstracts and a curriculum vitae for each participant. We hope to be able to provide travel and accommodation assistance to graduate students.

Stay tuned for information about our conference website.

Conference co-chairs: C. Troupe, E. Dyck & V.J. Korinek

Email for more information: wcs2024@usask.ca

Feature Image: Immigration Hall, Edmonton, Alberta. c.a. 1909. Credit: Canada. Immigration Branch / Library and Archives Canada / C-042728