Organizers: Cheryl Lousley, Lakehead Unviersity; Zishad Lak, Lakehead University; Paul Barrett, Lakehead University
If Canada is a suburban nation, what are its suburban stories? What dreams and diasporas land immigrant communities in suburbs? How has the mid-twentieth century popular imaginary of the suburb as a white middle-class, automobiled enclave been written otherwise across varied experiences of racialization, diaspora, and generation — and in the era of fossil-fuelled climate change? What histories are disrupted, and which are forged in suburban lives and spaces? What other places and social lives are relationally entangled in the suburbs — in social connections, in memory, in colonial displacements, and in material economies of labour, production, consumption, waste, and emissions? How are suburban arrivals and departures — and pasts and futures — narrated? What poetic practices engage suburban form and its social relations?