Ecologies, knowledge, and power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence region, c.1500-present
2025 Call for Papers
“Ecologies, knowledge, and power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence region, c.1500-present” is a SSHRCfunded collaborative project that is being co-led by Dr. Joshua MacFadyen, University of Prince Edward Island, and Dr. Erin Spinney, University of New Brunswick, Saint John. The project involves over thirty collaborating scholars and focuses on the Gulf region in its own right rather than a periphery of, or a throughfare to, other places. The project seeks to bring together a variety of scholars to ask questions about the region that are based on the premise that the Gulf of St. Lawrence constitutes a distinct spatial system which has been shaped by the marine environment. Some of the central research questions are:
- What can we learn with a geospatial approach to studying the Gulf of St. Lawrence?
- How did the long-term projection of outside power into the Gulf region shape the diverse
- human communities around it?
- How did the pronounced seasonality of that external power projection, both economic and jurisdictional and absent over the winter, aƯect the permanent communities in the Gulf?
- How did those diverse cultural communities utilize the environment for life’s necessities?
- Can we apply geospatial analysis to the acquisition and distribution of food and energy in the region?
- How did communities interact with other long-term residents of the Gulf?
In asking these questions and leveraging recently created digital databases, the project seeks to develop and explore through collaboration a new conceptual model to help explain this region over the long run, and also apply it to other multi-jurisdiction marine and coastal environments. This model emphasizes the Gulf’s cultural complexity, its seasonal centrality to outside extractive interests, particularly the fishery, and its commonly understood peripheral status in the governmental power arrangements of European empires and settler societies, expect for the cases where those outside powers negotiated safe transit and access to resources on, in, and around the Gulf.
If you believe that your work fits into this emerging field of ‘Gulf of St. Lawrence Studies’, the organizers warmly welcome the submission of an abstract and look forward to hearing from both individuals and organizations interested in our July 2025 meeting in Sackville, New Brunswick.
The 2025 Meeting: Knowledge Beyond the Text
The organizers of the Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region project are pleased to invite abstracts and other expressions of interest for the 2025 meeting, “Knowledge Beyond the Text,” which will be held in person at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB, 22-24, July, 2025. Limited travel funds will be available for participants, with a priority given to students and precariously employed scholars. Shared accommodations at one of the Mount Allison residences will be covered by the project. We also plan to conduct field trips in the Cape Jourimain and Tantramar marsh areas. The schedule-at-a-glance will be posted on the meeting website shortly, but most likely we will begin with dinner on the 22nd, followed by talks on the 23rd, and a mix of sessions and field trips on the 24th.
The Gulf meeting will be followed on 25 July by the Northeast and Atlantic Region Environmental History (NEAR-EH) Forum. Any participants who anticipate having a fully developed paper are welcome to submit to the NEAR-EH Forum as well. Please contact Drs. Mark McLaughlin or Hannah Lane for more information and see their CFP on NiCHE.
Our host and local organizer for the 2025 Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power meeting will be Dr. Lauren Beck, Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter at Mount Allison. The central theme this year will be: Non-textual Sources for Understanding Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region, or “Knowledge Beyond the Text.” We will prioritize papers and roundtable sessions that put oral, pictorial, photographic, object-based, and other non-textual sources at the centre of their analysis.
The CFP portal will remain open for abstracts on the meeting website until Friday 30 May, and we will follow-up within a week of that to let you know if we are accepting a full paper or a research update. Similar to our previous meeting, we will schedule time for full 20-minute papers that address the meeting’s theme, as well as shorter research updates (max. 10 minutes) on any topic related to the larger Gulf project. We are also open to roundtable and collaborative sessions, particularly those involving partners outside of academia, so feel free to submit an abstract for such a session with information about how each participant would contribute.
We welcome all proposals related to the larger Gulf project’s objectives. Please submit a title and an abstract of between 250-350 words. We hope you will also indicate if the paper you are giving is already being considered for publication elsewhere, or if you are interested in contributing it to publications coming out of the Gulf Project. We intend to finalize these plans shortly after the 2025 meeting.
Sincerely the 2025 organizing committee,
Dr. Joshua MacFadyen, University of Prince Edward Island
Dr. Erin Spinney, University of New Brunswick, Saint John
Dr. Lauren Beck, Mount Allison University
Natasha Simon, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton
Zachary Tingley, University of New Brunswick, Saint John
Dr. John Matchim, University of Prince Edward Island
Barbara Rousseau, University of Prince Edward Island
