This is a thematic seminar course focusing on the history of Canadian multiculturalism as a political ideology. The course is organized around the different historiographical approaches with which historians have tackled the “problem” of multiculturalism in Canada. In fact, as Richard Day has argued, the problematization of multiculturalism has become a public issue in the country, and politicians, political scientists, ethnographers, and other academics have helped devise various public policies to foster and encourage, but also to conduct and to order cultural diversity.
In the twelve weeks of the seminar, we will work our way through a multitude of historical studies, focusing our discussions on the ways historians have peered into the dynamics of multiculturalism. During our weekly meetings, we will be discussing the topic thematically. Thus, the course does not follow any chronological progression. It is organized according to the selected historians’ field(s) of study. We will focus on a wide range of social dynamics and historiographical trends such as politics, gender, culture, immigration, etc., but also on different analytical frameworks such as settler-colonialism, transnational and international history, and representations, which are all determining factors in the ways that Canadians have understood and lived with multiculturalism. In that sense, each week is interconnected and will speak to one another. I encourage not to view each seminar as a closed case.
The seminar format very much emphasizes participation, and the grading is split in two main components: seminar contributions, individually and as a group, and a historiography paper. The seminar participants will be required to group up, and each group will lead one weekly discussion during the semester.
