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In April 2019, scholars, students, writers, and community partners will gather in Dublin, Ireland for a three-day conference on the theme of TEXT/SOUND/PERFORMANCE: Making in Canadian Space. There will be a keynote address and masterclass workshop on each of the three pillars of the conference, alongside academic and creative panels,s roundtables, and performances. We will also offer a fifth masterclass on digitization and archival practices, in collaboration with the Irish Poetry Reading Archive (UCD) and the SpokenWeb Project (Concordia). Other forms of nontraditional engagement, including performances, thematic unconference-style discussions, and exhibitions, will supplement the panels, classes, and plenary talks. The conference will feature papers and presentations that expand, trouble, decentralize, destabilize, or interrogate literary practices and performance. Canadian and Indigenous authors and scholars will dialogue with Irish authors and scholars about the legacies of experimentation and decolonization.

Foundational questions that inspired this conference include: If literature, and by extension language, are entwined with complex socio-cultural and ecological issues, then how have Canadian and Indigenous cultures shifted in the contemporary moment? What types of new pedagogies must emerge to make sense of both the complex transformation of Canadian and Indigenous societies and the range of emerging cultural practices? What are the effects of our experiences, our language in a collapsing environment? Do they “change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible” (Ranciére)? The answers are not simple; the conversation and creation of new practices is imperative. TEXT/SOUND/PERFORMANCE offers a crucial opportunity to learn, engage with, and mobilize cutting-edge work.