Diana Brydon PhD FRSC

Canada Research Chair
Globalization and Cultural Studies

Director

Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies
Room 230 Isbister Building
Phone (204) 474 6346
http://umanitoba.ca/centres/gcs/
gcs at cc.umanitoba.ca
@centregcs
http://www.facebook.com/GlobalizationCulturalStudies

North American Convenor Building Global Democracy @b_gd

Member of the interregional, intercultural, interdisciplinary steering group (of 8) for a four-year team project, “Building Global Democracy,” directed by Jan Aart Scholte at Warwick/LSE, which has core funding from the Ford Foundation to begin. Participation in the first coordinating meeting in April 2008; second meeting at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, in Jan/Feb 2009; “Conceptualizing Global Democracy,” December 2009 (Cairo). Details available at www.buildingglobaldemocracy.org

Deputy Director Globalization and Autonomy MCRI

A SSHRC-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiatives project, Globalization and Autonomy (2002-09) is now almost complete. A capstone volume for the project is now in process: Globalization and Autonomy: Conversing across Disciplines Diana Brydon, William D. Coleman, Louis W. Pauly, and John C. Weaver

Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts UBC Press Edited by Diana Brydon and William D. Coleman 2008

This volume is part of the Globalization and Autonomy Series: Dialectical Relationships Facing the Contemporary World.

Other volumes are:
Empires and Autonomy: Moments in the History of Globalization
Global Ordering: Institutions and Autonomy in a Changing World
Unsettled Legitimacy Political Community, Power, and Authority in a Global Era
Cultural Autonomy: Frictions and Connections
Property Rights: Struggles over Autonomy in a Global Age
Autonomy, Democracy, and Legitimacy in an Era of Globalization
Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for a Global Age
Deux Méditerranées: Les voies de la mondialisation et de l’autonomie

Eight volumes in our series have now been published. Work continues on the capstone volume (co-authored by Brydon, Coleman and Pauly) with an expected completion date at the end of 2011.

Brazil Canada Knowledge Exchange: Developing Transnational Literacies

Transnational literacies combine global consciousness with the development of competencies suitable for full participation in the knowledge society. They encompass the digital, multimodal, informational, and critical literacies associated with both traditional reading and writing skills and the range of new literacies required by evolving information technologies. We have selected transformational practices in the teaching of global English in universities and schools in Canada and Brazil as our key site of intervention. Both Brazil and Canada face challenges in their educational systems that we believe can be addressed through sharing best practices and research expertise. Global English, bilingualism, and multilingualism play different roles in each country, and the challenges they pose for the next generation are different. By working together, we hope to involve students, teachers and researchers in both countries in closer and more intensive trans-hemispheric exchange.

This project is being undertaken with Professors Walkyria Monte Mór and Lynn Mario Menezes T. de Sousa from the University of Sao Paulo. Current and previous associates of the Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies are also involved. Over the next three years, we will be, using the resources of the Centre to enhance research sharing and communication. Glendon University provided the services of a research assistant (an MA in Translation Studies with a specialization in Brazilian Portuguese/English translation) for the summer semester. Her work enabled us to translate and check chapters originally in English for our forthcoming book in Portuguese and to translate sections of one of the key policy documents of one of our major Brazilian partners into English.  The University of Winnipeg supplied the air ticket for one of our co-investigators to co-present with others in the team on our project at the Global Studies conference in Rio in July 2011. The team will be presenting two panels (comprising three co-investigators each) on aspects of our work within this project at the Brazilian Association of Canadian Studies meetings in Salvador in October 2011. Several publications that include descriptions of our project will be launched at ABECAN.  Team members will be experimenting with Adobe Connect this fall and winter as a means of maintaining regular contact between our scheduled workshops.

The research is made possible, in part, through support from the SSHRC partnership development grant program, the Canada Research Chair’s program and the University of Manitoba.

Students who are considering carrying out research working with Professor Brydon may wish to consult a list of her publications. A full cv is available in a separate pdf file. A statement about her research program is contained on the Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies site under Director's Research. Some of her current research documents are contained in a related document section on that site.

Professor Brydon’s research projects each include some opportunities for graduate students to work as research assistants, or to carry out independent research. Students whose research interests mesh closely with those set out in the research project descriptions are encouraged to contact Professor Brydon. She welcomes projects from students applying for SSHRC postdoctoral fellowships.

Teaching Fall 2011 English 4630 TO1. National and Global Imaginaries
This course will introduce students to some of the various ways in which a range of literary, critical, and theoretical texts have engaged and contributed to the development of national and global imaginaries. We will ask: what does it mean to be at home in the world? What does it mean to derive one’s identity from one’s nationality? How do cosmopolitanism and nationalism interact in literary theory and practice? What are the strengths and limitations of “methodological nationalism” (an approach to analysis that takes the nation as its framework for analysis)? We will read a variety of theoretical texts and fictive imaginings to consider the different ways in which they engage these questions and what they mean in postcolonial and imperial contexts as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century. The course is designed to bring various feminist, literary, postcolonial, and global analyses of the nation and the planet into dialogue around the changing status of the imagination in the present time. We will proceed through class discussion and close reading of the assigned texts. Students are encouraged to bring their questions to class, to share their interpretations of the assigned material, and to strengthen their skills in research and in the oral and written delivery of their ideas.

Crosstalk Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue
Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák, editors

Marta Dvořák is professor of Canadian and postcolonial literatures in English at the Sorbonne.
@WLUPress http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/
Cloth · $85.00 · 286 pages
6 x 9 · 978-1-55458-264-8

What are the fictions that shape Canadian engagements with the global? What frictions emerge from these encounters? In negotiating aesthetic and political approaches to Canadian cultural production within contexts of global circulation, this collection argues for the value of attending to narratorial, lyric, and theatrical conventions in dialogue with questions of epistemological and social justice. Using the twinned framing devices of crosstalk and cross-sighting, the contributing authors attend to how the interplay of the verbal and the visual maps public spheres of creative engagement today. Individual chapters present a range of methodological approaches to understanding national culture and creative labour in global contexts. Through their collective enactment of methodological crosstalk, they demonstrate the productivity of scholarly debate across differences of outlook, culture, and training. In highlighting convergences and disagreements, the book sharpens our understanding of how literary and critical conventions and theories operate within and across cultures.

This book is the result of a 3 day intensive workshop Voice & Vision: Situating Canadian Culture Globally / Voix et vision : culture canadienne et mondialisation du 22 au 24 mai 2008 We invited scholars, primarily from Europe, to interact with their counterparts from Canada in the hope of identifying convergences and divergences across cultures, with Canada as the animating focus.

Table of Contents
Introduction | Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák
Olive Senior. "Whirlwinds Coiled at my Heart': Voice and Vision in a Writer's Practice"
Part I: Collaboration, Crosstalk, Improvisation
Voicing the Unforeseeable | Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling
Epistemological Crosstalk: Between Melancholia and Spiritual Cosmology in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant
and Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever | Daniel Coleman
Native Performance Culture, Monique Mojica, and the Chocolate Woman Workshops | Ric Knowles
Collaboration and Convention in the Poetry of Pain Not Bread | Alison Calder
Part II: Dialogism, Polyphony, Voice
Voices Lost in Time: Getting from Nowhere to the Far Bank | Marta Dvořák
Not Just Representation: The Sound and Concrete Poetries of the Four Horsemen | Frank Davey
Portraits of the Artist in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty | Pilar Cuder
Dionne Brand’s Cosmopolitan Cities | Sandra Almeida
Questions of Voice, Race, and the Body in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a
Thousand | Charlotte Sturgess
Part III: Space, Place, and Circulation
The Artialization of Landscape in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool | Claire Omhovere
Orientalist Clichés and Transformation in Robert Lepage’s The Dragons’ Trilogy | Christine Lorre
Diasporic Appropriations: Exporting South Asian Culture from Canada | Chelva Kanaganayakam
Negotiating Belonging in Global Times: The Hérouxville Debates | Diana Brydon