Students from across Canada came together at Dalhousie for the third annual Dal Arts & Social Sciences Undergraduate Conference and the sixth annual Information Without Borders conference.
Max Ma, president of the Dal Arts and Social Sciences Society (DASSS) and one of the organizers of the event, says the conference was “a milestone event, because we’ve made it a national project.”
In an email, the dean of Arts & Social Sciences, Robert Summerby-Murray, called the conference “highly successful,” believing this to be the first “truly national arts, humanities and social sciences conference showcasing undergraduate research.”
Ma has seen the conference grow; he helped organize the first one in 2010. But he was surprised to find there were no other national arts conferences.
“The arts society at the University of Toronto, UBC and McGill are much bigger than us— they are bigger than the KSU, and they are way better equipped to hold a national conference,” says Ma. “But no one did it.”
The conference included presenters from five provinces and as far away as British Columbia. Over 30 per cent of the papers presented were from outside Nova Scotia.
Ma says that Twitter and Facebook played a huge role in turning the conference from a Dal and King’s affair into a national event. Linda Chan, a presenter from the University of British Columbia, says she found out about the conference through a post on Facebook, and received a travel grant through the UBC arts society.
“DASSS or KSU grants are available for students traveling to conferences,” says Ma. He says it was both the realization that there are other arts societies across the country, and their participation which allowed DASSS to host a national conference.
Taking place over three days, the conference featured papers on a wide variety of subjects such as “Postcoloniality, Orientalism and the Question of Quebec,” by Matthew Chung from McGill University, and “Canadian Policy Choices on Ballistic Missile Defense 2004-2005,” by Andrew Chisholm from King’s.
There was no prescribed theme, says Ma, because the organizers wanted to ensure that the conference is equally accessible to students working in all disciplines. Papers that intersect on a particular theme were grouped together, and organizers accepted roughly one in four of the papers submitted
It is difficult to estimate the number of attendees, says Ma, because there is no registration process. The conference and all related events were accessible to the entire Dal community.
Although he is graduating this year, Ma is confident that his fellow organizing committee members will continue their excellent work.
“The fact that we are hosting this, and that we pioneered this student-run, student-focused conference in arts, does say something: that we are doing something right,” says Ma.
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