What's New > CATR 2024 Conference: Call for Papers and Sessions
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Staging Justice: People, Places, Planet, and Practice
June 5-6th, 2024 (Act One), Online and June 17-20th, 2024 (Act Two), In-Person
Proposals due by Friday, November 24, 2023
The Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) is delighted to issue a call for papers and sessions for its 2024 hybrid conference, which will be hosted in person at McGill University as part of the 93rd annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences and online by the Centre for Socially Engaged Theatre (C-SET) at the University of Regina through TheatreAgora.ca.
CATR invites paper and session proposals in English and French from scholars and artists at any career phase. Submissions are welcome on any subject relating to drama, theatre, dance, performance studies, and pedagogy, especially with a focus on the 2024 conference theme, Staging Justice: People, Places, Planet, and Practice.
Justice, an aspirational value for an equitable system and society, stands at the intersection of almost every discourse and discipline in recent times (Hankivsky & Jordan-Zachery, 2019). Legal, ethical, socio-economic, ecological, biological, cultural and political considerations have produced a range of justice frameworks. Nuancing these approaches are concepts of intersectionality, which expose how interlocking systems of power affect those who are most marginalized in society (Crenshaw 1989; Misral et al., 2021), prompting negotiation of connections across human and non-human relations (Gueta 2020). In this way, justice is a selling currency inside and outside the academy, shaping EDI spaces, community outreach, and various advocacy, activism, pedagogy, and leadership approaches.
Also, the 2024 conference theme acknowledges Canada’s ongoing reckoning with its colonial past and the role theatre plays in recentering justice as a critical pathway to sustaining the future. For instance, the locations of the conference are home to theatre companies such as Black Theatre Workshop and Teesri Duniya Theatre in Montreal, as well as Sum Theatre and Deaf Crows in Saskatoon; these theatre companies explore urgent questions on justice.