A national first organized by Dal students

What did you get up to on the weekend? Well, if you’re asking members of the Dalhousie Arts and Social Sciences Society (DASSS), the answer would be hosting Canada’s first national undergraduate arts and social science conference, organized and run entirely by students.

This time organizers took the DASSS Undergraduate Research Conference—now in its third year—to the next level by opening it up to national submissions (previously it had been open to Dalhousie and Kings students only).

Max Ma, a fourth-year classics and early modern studies student, is a member of the DASSS Conference Committee, which has been meeting since October to plan the weekend-long event. The committee used social media to spread the word nationally about the conference.

Overwhelmed with interest

“We found our long lost brothers and sisters [from other arts societies from universities across Canada] over Twitter,” explains Mr. Ma. “Then we sent them a warm greeting from the east coast with the conference call for submissions attached.”

The committee was happily overwhelmed with submissions, eventually narrowing them down to 19 selections, eight of which were out-of-province.

I sat in on one of the Saturday afternoon sessions and heard three different presentations. During the post-talk discussions, it was surprising to see how many connections were drawn between the three seemingly distinct topics.

The first presenter was Veromi Arsiradam, a fourth-year honours philosophy student, who is also the vice-president of the Dalhousie Undergraduate Philosophy Society. Her paper, “A Feminist Critique of Marriage”, discussed Kantian ethics as pertaining to gender equality in marriage, and her delivery showed an obvious passion for the subject.

Ms. Arsiradam was excited not only to present, but also to hear presentations from a range of disciplines. “We’re working on the same things, but we bring different perspectives,” she said.

Gaining perspective

Next was Kathleen Higgins, who also presented at last year’s conference. She centred her talk around the beloved fairy tale Cinderella, and how its moral lessons have been criticized and revised by an evolving society.

The title of Ms. Higgins’ paper—“An English Version of an Italian Adaptation of a Spanish Translation of a Latin Version of a Hebrew Translation of an Arabic Translation of an Indian Original: Cinderella, Feminism and Revision” (say that five times fast!)—was both intriguing and intimidating.

“You work really hard on a paper, you get your grade, and you never look at it again, but I really liked this paper and wanted to hang around with it a little longer,” Ms. Higgins said, of her interest in presenting.

Ms. Higgins felt the post-talk discussion gave her some new perspective on her topic. “With paper writing you get sucked into your own world,” she explained. “So it was interesting to me the types of questions people were asking.”

The session’s final presenter was Adam Dmytriw, whose paper “Images of Male Hysteria as Dysfunctional Masculinity” examined the historical diagnosis of hysteria in Victorian England. For Mr. Dmytriw’s modern audience, the attempts by medical practitioners to explain and treat hysteria in a sexually-repressed Victorian society were positively comic.

The DASSS event, which also included workshops, meals, and a keynote address by Shelly Whitman (deputy director, Centre for Foreign Policy Studies) benefitted greatly from the many FASS faculty members who volunteered their time to act as session moderators (giving critical feedback to student presenters), workshop leaders, speakers, and general supporters for this student-initiated learning opportunity.

Though the student conference ran as smoothly as one hosted by a national research council, Mr. Ma feels there is a critical distinction between the two. “The essence—in other words, the academic nature and the professional process—is the same,” he explains, “but the atmosphere is entirely different.”