Congress 2013

Researcher says they can do ‘religious work’ when associated with ideals

ST CATHARINES, Ontario — May 24, 2021 — A University of Waterloo PhD candidate says dead celebrities – in particular dead musicians – are in some ways the ‘saints’ of today’s consumer culture.

Just as people in the Middle Ages identified with the saints of the Church, so do many people today identify with dead celebrities, whose image and ideals are mass-marketed in a neat (and lucrative) consumable package.

Kathleen Riddell, whose area of specialty is religious studies, is presenting on dead celebrity fandom at the 2014 Congress of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dead celebrities, she says, are big business. In fact, dead celebrities often earn more money than when they were alive. According to Forbes magazine, in three of the last five years, the world’s top-earning celebrity has been dead. The magazine pointed out that Michael Jackson,...

Jessica Clark, Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

On December 12^th, everyone here at the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences was very excited to learn that Dany Laferrière had been named to the Académie française. He is the first Canadian to join this illustrious group, whose members are known as the "Immortals."

I was especially thrilled to hear this news. It was my good fortune to have worked with Mr. Laferrière in the lead up to Congress 2013 at the University of Victoria, where he gave a lecture as part of the Federation's Big Thinking series. His lecture was titled Je vis comme j'écris (I write as I live, in English). It was the only Big Thinking...

Christine McKenna Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

In 1956, William S. Burroughs sent a letter to the British Journal of Addiction with an article enclosed, which described his experiences using a broad collection of drugs and the symptoms of withdrawal from each. Of the common tendency to use the word addiction “to indicate anything one is used to or wants,” he suggests that “so misapplied, the term loses any useful precision of meaning.” Burroughs, a seminal figure of the 1950s Beat movement, appears in this letter to call for an understanding of “real addiction” as experienced by a “real addict”.

Team Media passing those long, long hours. I assure you it was a lot more work than it looks.

Its been a month since Congress ended and I don't know where to begin this long overdue post. Initially, I confess, I was at a loss for words when it came to this particular blog entry, but now, as the energy has died down and I've had some time to think, I can better summarize my experience. At a glance, Congress 2013 was Canada's largest gathering of academics, scholars, and researchers in the humanities and social sciences with 68 academic associations and some seven-thousand odd delegates. Over eight days the University of Victoria hosted, in most cases simultaneously, keynote lectures, panel presentations, meetings with policymakers, SSHRC funding workshops, and...