Participants from around the world recently tuned in to learn about \u201cCanada at Play,\u201d the theme of the annual Two Days of Canada conference hosted by Brock\u2019s Centre for Canadian Studies.<\/p>\n
Held at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts on March 25 and 26, the in-person event also offered each of its sessions simultaneously online. The hybrid format drew participants from as far afield as Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia and India as well as New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Waterloo and Toronto.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a lot of enthusiasm for the hybrid format,\u201d said Dan Malleck, Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies and a Professor with the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences, who noted that half the participants chose to engage virtually.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt looked like a small event, but it had a lot of planning behind it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a huge effort by a lot of people, including IT support staff.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sport theme built on momentum around the upcoming Niagara 2022 Canada Summer Games while engaging with current scholarship on sport and fostering discussion of the role of sport in Canadian culture and identity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had great discussions about diversity in sport,\u201d Malleck said. \u201cThe point was to complicate the myth of Canadian sport and I think we were successful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conference panels explored issues of diversity in sports, power dynamics, and inclusion and exclusion. The theme brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines in Humanities, Social Sciences and Applied Health Sciences.<\/p>\n
The event featured a screening of Keepers of the Game, <\/em>a 2016 documentary on women\u2019s lacrosse, at the Film House in the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre. The screening was followed by a moderated panel discussion.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving three young Indigenous women lacrosse players talking about their experiences was a highlight,\u201d Malleck said.<\/p>\n Courtney Szto, Assistant Professor of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen\u2019s University, gave the conference\u2019s keynote address, speaking on \u201cPlaying Through Pain: Racism, Sport, and Canadian Mythologies of Multiculturalism.\u201d Her talk explored what it is like to be a racialized participant in Canada\u2019s hockey scene and how sport can create anti-racist and anti-colonial spaces.<\/p>\n \u201cWe did our best to make it a great event for participants because we knew it was going to be a lot of people\u2019s first conference in two years, and for some students, their first conference ever,\u201d Malleck said. \u201cIt was a great way to build on some of the momentum around the Canada Games and also on the important scholarship being done around sport.\u201d<\/p>\n The conference was organized by the Centre for Canadian Studies with support from the Faculty of Humanities, Faculty of Applied Health Sciences, Faculty of Graduate Studies, Humanities Research Institute, Social Justice Research Institute, Alumni Relations, Recruitment, Brock University Printing Services, and the Council for Research in the Social Sciences. The FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre and the Canadian Sport Film Festival assisted with the film screening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Participants from around the world recently tuned in to learn about \u201cCanada at Play,\u201d the theme of the annual Two Days of Canada conference hosted by Brock\u2019s Centre for Canadian Studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":77460,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,9794,7,55,37,1,4],"tags":[283,28,6789,192,431,3212,7488,607,384,10555,30,131,204,125,1083,9014],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77459"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77459"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77510,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77459\/revisions\/77510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}