The upcoming ACFAS annual conference will be held in May in Quebec city. LABRRI will be presenting a conference on the theme «Intercultural Chronicles of Quebec». We invite all who are interested to join us on 8 May 2013 at the Université Laval. In addition, we welcome your contributions to the Chronicle by submitting a proposal on the subject from any angle of analysis, though we would especially value proposals about the evolution of intercultural thought in Quebec from a critical point of view. Please send your proposal suggestion to Bob White (bob.white@umontreal.ca) or Lomomba Emongo (lomomba@sympatico.ca) by 12 February.
Here is the detailed version of the call:
In recent years, the word “interculturalism” has become more and more popular in Quebec. For some, it is a watchword that could reorganize the intellectual coherence and social cohesion in Quebec today. Is it a new Québécois political ideology or a terminological change of a certain ideology that opposes, probably unduly, Quebec and the rest of Canada, and, to a different extent, immigrants to Quebecers of “pure descent”?
It is important to note that, as a society built with immigration, Quebec has always had to work with intercultural dynamics. Therefore, diversity and interculturalism are not additions to the society, but an intrinsic part of it. Hence the epistemological concern surrounding the recycling of the word, and the reality of the intercultural as a new founding myth for Quebec. The risk of instrumentalization of the word is real. We believe this alone is a good reason to propose an alternative reading of the genealogy of the term and its assertion in Quebec today.
The problematic and novel nature of this risk should be emphasized. In a recent text about “interculturalism,” the historian Gerard Bouchard gives the impression that “interculturalism” is subject to a consensus despite the looseness and vagueness of its meaning, and not only in academic circles (2010: 2). But what “interculturalism” are we talking about? In Quebec, the word is used in three main contexts: to describe a sociological reality (cultural diversity), a state policy and finally a philosophical orientation. Identifying which of these three meanings is used is even more important when we consider the series of conferences that have aimed to define the concept of “interculturalism,” obviously with the aim of articulating a cultural diversity model for Quebec following the final report of the Bouchard-Taylor commission (http://www.symposium-interculturalisme.com/1/accueil/fr). Unfortunately, this conception of interculturalism as an agreed upon and clear-cut concept has a tendency of evacuating too easily theoretical findings as well as sociohistorically significant elements of Quebec’s intercultural reality (see www.labrri.wordpress.com).
The idea of the Intercultural Chronicles of Quebec arose from the need to read back the history of Quebec society beyond the ideological roles that we would want this word to play at one moment or another. It is to reconstruct as much as possible some of the high points in Quebec’s intercultural development. We would like to question in a new light the historic encounter that punctuates this chronicle between thinkers (immigrant or not), academic researchers from here or elsewhere, social actors within Quebec’s cultural mosaic, decision makers, etc.
Download a PDF version of this call for papers here (french only)