Call for Participants and Proposals: Canadian History and Environment Summer Symposium (University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, May 30-June 2, 2018)

 

The Network in Canadian History and Environment is excited to announce its Call for Participants for the 2018 Canadian History and Environment Summer Symposium. CHESS is an annual gathering of emerging scholars, graduate students, junior and senior faculty, public historians, and independent scholars, interested in environmental history and historical geography. For the first time, in 2018 CHESS will consist of two parts, a summer school and a workshop. The summer school will resemble previous CHESS events. The workshop is a new element to CHESS intended to provide a workshop for authors of pre-circulated papers to be published as part of NiCHE’s new peer-reviewed online journal Papers in Canadian History and Environment. Participants are invited, but not obligated, to participate in both the summer school and workshop.

 

To the uninitiated, the prairie landscape and environment, like the intellectual journey to know its history, might seem pretty straightforward. But the plains of western Canada are the product of thousands of years of human occupation, management, and reciprocity with the natural world. In some cases, change took place in subtle and slow ways that allowed for adaptation and accommodation. In others, dramatic and rapid change transformed the prairie landscape and its peoples. The history of the prairies during the twentieth century reveals the overlapping pace and scale of First Nations, Métis, settler colonial, immigrant, scientific, and technological experiences of change in a landscape that seems timeless and flat.

The summer school will start in Regina after the meeting of the Canadian Historical Association on May 30 and end after lunch in Saskatoon on June 1. Participants will learn about the variety of interconnected ways that people living in Saskatchewan adjusted to and altered the prairie landscape during the twentieth century. Traveling between a number of historic sites north of Saskatoon, participants will consider how communalism shaped the settler experience at the Blaine Lake Doukhobor community, networks of agricultural science informed the development of Marquis wheat and other crops at Seager Wheeler’s farm in Rosthern, kinship networks maintained sites of Métis resistance and resiliency at Gabriel’s Crossing near Batoche, concerns over wind erosion inspired experiments with introduced species of trees at Saskatoon’s Forestry Farm, and industrial agriculture created both the necessity and opportunity for a Federal seed bank on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan.

Those interested in attending CHESS 2018, but are not submitting an abstract for the workshop should provide a statement of interest (250-300 words) and a one-page CV using the CHESS 2018 application portal.

 

We invite abstracts for journal-length manuscripts in Canadian environmental history to be published as part of an open access, online, and double-blind peer-reviewed series, Papers in Canadian History and Environment, which will be published on the NiCHE website. Invited authors will pre-circulate papers amongst workshop attendees in early May and receive feedback prior to final submission for peer review. Final articles will not appear as part of a particular issue, but will be published online as they have completed the peer-review and editing process. The workshop will take place over the afternoon of June 1 and a full day on June 2. Those interested should submit a short abstract (400-500 words) along with a one-page CV using the CHESS 2018 application portal. Anyone submitting an abstract for the workshop need not also submit a statement of interest for the summer school.

 

 

Organizing Committee: Ashleigh Androsoff, Jim Clifford, Laura Larsen, Cheryl Troupe and Andrew Watson.