SMF Research Symposium - April 1, 2016, Keynote: Dr. Susan Dion on Canada's Indigenous people and reconciliation)

[Toni Serafini]

The Department of Sexuality, Marriage, and Family Studies (SMF)

invites you to join us on

Friday, April 1st for the 6th Annual SMF Research Symposium



Since 2009, the SMF Department at St. Jerome’s University has hosted a one-day research conference that highlights student and faculty research dealing generally with issues of social justice, personal/professional ethics, and responsible citizenship. SMF faculty first launched a half-day Symposium in an effort to bring together an academic community of shared interests in scholarship and research about sexualities, relationships, and families. The small, grass-roots symposium has grown into a formal professional conference with leading Keynote speakers, scholarly presentations, and panel discussions. It is now offered annually, with contributors from universities and colleges across southwestern Ontario, as well as community practitioners. This research conference is an ideal venue for students (undergraduate and graduate) to share and discuss their work in a professional conference setting.



Past conference themes have explored ethical intersections among theory, research, and practice; families and relationships in a globalized world; and navigating intersecting identities, to name a few. With this year’s theme – Cultural Pluralities: Situating the Studies of Sexualities, Relationships, and Families – we seek to further enrich past dialogues by exploring how individual and community cultural pluralities impact and influence individuals’ sexualities, relationships, and experiences of family. This year’s theme considers culture quite broadly, and invites an exploration of intersecting cultural identities (or pluralities) in family, relationship, and sexuality research and the discourses this research produces.





2016 Keynote



Dr.  Susan Dion

“Not So Perfect Strangers:

Investigating a Shared History in Service of Reconciliation”

We welcome Dr. Susan Dion, a First Nations (Lenape-Potawatomi) researcher and educator at York University, as our Keynote speaker this year. The focus of her teaching and research is on the representation of Aboriginal people in various contexts, in particular, the relationship between First Nations and non-First Nations people in Ontario’s publicly funded schools.  A researcher and activist, Dr. Dion’s work calls attention to the teaching of Aboriginal content in Ontario schools and the importance of understanding our Canadian history.


Her research interests include the social and political contexts of education; disrupting memories of post-invasion First Nations-Canadian Relations; resistance strategies of Aboriginal adolescent girls; and urban Aboriginal experiences.  She is the author of two leading reports on Aboriginal Education in Ontario’s public schools, Decolonizing Our Schools<http://ycec.edu.yorku.ca/files/2012/11/Decolonizing-Our-Schools.pdf> (for the Toronto District School Board’s Aboriginal Education Centre) and Our Place in the Circle<http://www.metisnation.org/media/328915/our_place-report-usb.pdf>, that examine Metis and Aboriginal content in Ontario Faculties of Education.



Keynote Abstract:

What is remembered and what is forgotten in the study of Indigenous people and the study of Canada?  Do dominant stories of Canadian history encourage Canadians to distance themselves from and abdicate their responsibility for the inequities that exist in the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada?  In this talk, Dr. Dion explores the tensions that emerge in the intersection of speaking and hearing across difference and illuminates the challenges of crossing cultural boundaries in service of reconciliation.



SMF Research Symposium – April 1, 2016 – St. Jerome’s University

·           Registration: 8:00 am

·           Welcome:  8:45 am

·           Keynote - Dr. Susan Dion, 9:00 am

·           Concurrent Seminars throughout the day

·           Wine and Cheese Reception at 5:00pm



For more information and to register, please go to smfsymposium.ca<http://smfsymposium.ca/>






Best,

Toni

____________________________________
Toni Serafini, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Department Chair (sabbatical)
Sexuality, Marriage, and Family Studies (SMF)

St. Jerome's University in the University of Waterloo
290 Westmount Road, North
Waterloo, ON, Canada, N2L 3G3
519-884-8110 x28293
tserafini at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:tserafini at uwaterloo.ca>

Adjunct, School of Public Health and Health Systems (SPHHS), University of Waterloo
Special Graduate Faculty, Family Relations and Applied Nutrition (FRAN), University of Guelph

"No one is born fully formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are."
~Paolo Freire
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