Postcolonial University
Dr.
Len Findlay - Project Researcher
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Postcolonial University Dr.
Len Findlay - Project Researcher |
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 Dr.
Findlay became seriously committed to the Indigenous Humanities through
co-operating with Marie Battiste and Sakej Henderson on the SSHRC Summer
Institute at the University of Saskatchewan on The Cultural Restoration
of Oppressed Indigenous Peoples. He has since come to realize that a renewed
Canadian humanities community has much to learn (in its ongoing Eurocentricity
and sense of victimhood) from Aboriginal scholars and elders whose allegiance
to language and the arts as the lynchpins of community is undiminished and
unapologetic, despite the damage caused by colonization. In his collaboration
as humanities scholar and administrator with the Canadian Centre for Native
Law, University of Saskatchewan International, and the international Consortium
of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and as senior policy analyst with
the Universities Branch of the Saskatchewan Department of Postsecondary
Education and Skills Training, Findlay has begun to theorize and exploit
new conjunctures, convergences, and possible partnerships. He sees this
project as a much needed regrounding in Canadian distinctiveness of the
humanities and visual arts, so that they can become engines of transformation
and sources of leadership rather than academic “poor cousins”
and sites of self-pity and complaint. Some of his recent work on Indigenizing
the Canadian humanities has stimulated a good deal of discussion. This year
he will pursue this theme and the postolonial Canadian university as Northrop
Frye Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Toronto.
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