Call for papers

Call deadline: October 15, 2019

North America today looks like an increasingly contested part of the world, scarred with discord, disparate realities, and battling truths. In fact, Canada and the United States have long traditions of contestation, conquest, segregation, and exploitation played out in and marked by inclusion, exclusion, and exceptionalism. Yet at the same time, foundational ideas about democracy and justice shaping the two countries have proven regenerative of new visions for the future. The 2020 Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference seeks to address these complicated questions in their myriad of forms, multidirectional entanglements, widespread ramifications, and global implications. We seek submissions on the fluid boundaries and meanings of inclusion, exclusion, and exceptionalism in North American contexts. We encourage proposals focusing on historical as well as contemporary social and political movements, materialities, and ideas made visible in economic, cultural, political, social, and geographical arenas.

For decades, the Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference in North American Studies has presented a dynamic setting for examining and describing the phenomenon that is North America, involving the study of North America itself. We thrive on being interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, welcoming to academic specialties as varied as history, literature, politics, geography, media studies, ethnic studies, culture studies, law, and economics. Presentations are sought from a wide range of research traditions and from a variety of political and ideological backgrounds.

Papers can discuss, for instance:

• Political cultures, social phenomena, demographics, religion, and economics
• Media, representations, and memory
• Literary traditions and discourses
• Local, regional, national, comparative, transnational, and global North America
• Race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class
• Border studies
• The environment
• Materialities, immaterialities, and ephemerality
• Legal and economic aspects of nation and empire
• Modes of knowledge production, e.g. participatory methodologies
• Higher education institutions in a time of change

We welcome individual papers and panel proposals. We are also interested in poster proposals, especially from graduate students. Unfortunately, we cannot accept roundtable proposals. Your proposal should include a short abstract for a 20-minute individual presentation (max. 200 words) or a 90-minute panel (max. 400 words), as well as a short academic bio and contact information for all participants (max one page). Send your proposal as a single Word document to mapleleaf-eagle@helsinki.fi by October 15, 2019. If you have any further inquiries, please do not hesitate to contact: mapleleaf-eagle@helsinki.fi.

For more information about the conference, go to our website at https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/maple-leaf-eagle-conference-2020, follow us on Twitter @MLEconference or like our Facebook page at @mapleleafeagle.