The 5th Annual
University of Toronto
Centre for Ethics
Graduate Student Conference
May 5, 2017

With the onset of Canada’s sesquicentennial year, Canadian institutions, collectives, and individuals are organizing a myriad of retrospectives and celebrations. The sesquicentennial year itself, and these diverse recognitions, present an invaluable opportunity for ethical reflection as well as critical assessment, both of the anniversary and of the idea of Canada itself. It prompts essential inquiries, like what are the ethical and political consequences of counting back 150 years to Canada’s “founding”? What kind of ethical exercise is the celebration of a national anniversary? In what ways does the category of national sovereignty reify identities and imaginaries that not all the territory’s inhabitants accept? And how do moments of national reflection elicit ethical questions about multiple categories of the Canadian imaginary?

On May 5, 2017 the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics, hosts a graduate conference to explore the multiplicity of ethical questions this celebration prompts. Mobilizing its unique positioning as an interdisciplinary space examining ethics at the University of Toronto, and building on the groundwork of previous graduate conferences, the Centre for Ethics invites graduate students from the University of Toronto and the wider Canadian academic community to present work related to our theme from across the humanities and social sciences. This two-day event features faculty discussants as well as a public keynote address by University of Victoria Professor Paul Bramadat. For students and faculty who attend this conference it will be an indispensable opportunity to meet across disciplines and to use the shared questions of ethics to think carefully through what Canadian poet Al Purdy called “the more easily kept illusions.”

Fri, May 5, 2017
09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place