Canadian Happenings

"Canadian Happenings" is a regular column, edited by Mona Gleason. Send informatin and announcements to her at mona.gleason@ubc.ca

Canadian Happenings
Mona Gleason

This inaugural column is devoted to bringing SHCY members up to date on developments in the field in the Canadian context. Interest and scholarship regarding the history of Canadian children and youth continues to grow – this brief accounting of recent “happenings” testifies to the area’s vitality.

Conference News

At the Association for Canadian Studies Conference entitled “Presence of the Past: A National Conference on Teaching, Learning and Communicating the History of Canada,” held in Halifax, Nova Scotia in October of 2003, Neil Sutherland and Veronica Strong-Boag delivered papers highlighting their new work in the field. Sutherland’s paper was entitled “ ‘My father was killed in action...’Youthful Perspectives on Canada’s National History,” while Strong-Boag offered “‘Plural Identities, Plural Loyalties’: Adoption and Citizenship in Canada.” Strong-Boag’s paper is part of a larger research project funded by a prestigious Senior Killam Award entitled “Making Room: Canadians and the History of Adoption from the Mid-19th Century to the Present.”

The Canadian Congress of Learned Societies meets in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the spring of 2004. Sharon Wall, a postdoctoral student at the University of British Columbia, has organized a panel entitled “Childhood – Real and Imagined – in Twentieth-Century Canada” for the Canadian Historical Association meeting. Along with co-presenters Karen Dubinsky, from Queen’s University and Mona Gleason, from the University of British Columbia, Sharon will present her work entitled “Laboratories in the Woods: Psychology and the Making of Healthy Children at Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-1955.” Sharon’s doctoral dissertation explored the social and cultural history of summer camps in Ontario between 1920 and 1955. One of her central findings is that the establishment of summer camps was a manifestation of competing cultural tensions: on the one hand, a widespread twentieth-century anti-modernist sentiment and, on the other, a fascination with all things modern.

A number of scholars from Canada and around the world will converge on Montreal in October of 2004 to take part a conference entitled “Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Child Health in the 20th century” at the McCord Museum. The programme for the conference is still tentative at this point but themes expected to be addressed include: historiography of child health, comparative perspectives, social representations of child health, the voice of the child, counting children, selling health to children, and representing the child’s body. Vincent Lavoie from the McCord Museum will conclude the conference with a visual presentation highlighting images of mortality and morbidity in early photographs. Scholars from Australia, China, France, Canada, and the United States are expected to attend.

Recent Publications
A number of books and articles recently published will be of interest to SHCY members. They represent work in a variety of areas.