Canadian Studies at the Crossroads, Again!

Canadian Studies and the project of knowing ourselves have a long history. The initiative took a leap forward in the 1970s with the release of the Symons Report and the development of Canadian Studies programs and departments in a number of Canadian and international universities. By the 1990s, however, interest in Canadian Studies was flagging. The situation has not improved of late. This essay touches on the many reasons behind the current waning of interest in and support for Canadian Studies: economic, political, socio-cultural, and intellectual. It addresses interdisciplinarity, a foundation of the Canadian Studies project, showing how this refusal to contain knowledge within traditional academic disciplines was at first embraced by area studies but is now generalized throughout scholarly research. This has made the appeal of Canadian Studies less novel than it once was. Yet there are also corresponding developments, such as Indigenization, that reveal the extent to which new knowledge of Canadian experience can be gained through interdisciplinary research. For this research to flourish, and for the potential of Canadian Studies to be realized, scholars and others must defend old achievements in order to keep alive the possibilities of new advances in learning and of knowing ourselves more thoroughly.