2 ONLINE EVENTS
1) ICCS/GKS ONLINE EVENT, THURSDAY 15 JANUARY
Claiming Back Their Heritage: Indigenous Empowerment and Community Development through World Heritage
Thursday, 15 January 2026
16:00 CET/ 07:00 PT/ 10:00 ET | Virtually via Zoom
With Geneviève Susemihl, Pierre Savard Award 2025 recipient
For this event -
Register using this link: https://uni-due.zoom.us/meeting/register/wG_9OUNATh6UmnzY4rQVng#/registration
World Heritage sites are designated as humanity’s most outstanding cultural and natural places, belonging to all the people of the world, regardless of national borders. For Indigenous communities, however, heritage is not a universal abstraction but a vital foundation for cultural continuity, identity, and sovereignty. In this talk, Geneviève Susemihl examines three Indigenous World Heritage sites in Canada, exploring how they are mobilized as instruments of empowerment and community development. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth narrative interviews and engaging critically with universalistic discourses of World Heritage, she demonstrates how First Nation communities leverage these designations to assert collective rights, strengthen the preservation of cultural heritage, and advance political, economic, cultural, and social self-determination.
Geneviève Susemihl is a senior researcher and lecturer of North American literature, culture and media at Kiel University, Germany. She has published extensively on Indigenous heritage, the construction of the American Indian in literature and culture, migration and storytelling.
Presented by the Society for Canadian Studies in the German-speaking Countries and the International Council for Canadian Studies.
All are welcome.
For more information:
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2) BACS/UCL ONLINE EVENT, WEDNESDAY 28 JANUARY 2026
"Canada-US Relations in the era of Trump's America First: Lessons from 2025 and prospects for 2026"
The BACS/UCL Canadian Studies programme, hosted by the UCL Institute of the Americas in London, will be continuing its 2025-26 series of monthly on-line seminars on Wednesday, 28th January via Zoom at 18.00 (UK time) until 19.30.
Canada-US relations have been under unprecedented strain since President Trump's re-election in November 2024. His proposal that Canada should become the 51st state, however absurd at first sight, was taken across Canada as a serious threat to Canadian sovereignty. It indirectly caused the resignation of the unpopular Justin Trudeau and led to the Liberal party under new leadership to turn around a 20-point deficit in the polls and win a fourth term in government. The new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has since steered a careful path in managing relations with the Trump administration. While talk of a 51st state has abated, Carney has held firm in difficult trade negotiations while warning that relations with the US will never be the same again. Recent events elsewhere in the Americas have underlined the potential threat from Trump's America First foreign policy.
To start the year, we are very pleased to reconvene our panel of distinguished experts on this topic to examine the course of Canada-US relations in 2025 and look at what 2026 might hold in prospect for both Canada and the US. The panel includes:
Professor Chris Kirkey, Director, Center for the Study of Canada & Institute on Québec Studies, SUNY Plattsburgh.
Professor Laura Macdonald, Dept of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa.
Dr Richard Nimijean, School of Canadian Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa.
Chair: Patrick Holdich, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, UCL IA.
The panel discussion will be followed by a Q&A with members of the on-line audience.
Attendance at the event is free and open to all.
To register please email Tony McCulloch by 12.00 noon (UK time) on Tuesday 27 January:
The Zoom link will be sent out to registered attendees on 27 January