Greetings!

This is an announcement about the 41st Annual Meeting of the Canadian Ethnic Society for the Study of Names, to be held in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, May 26-27, 2007.

On Saturday, May 26th, one of the concurrent sessions will be on 'Doukhobor Place Names', with a presentation by Jonathan J. Kalmakoff. Room 100, Arts Building, 10:20 a.m. to 12:20 p.m.

The Doukhobor Place Names presentation will focus on the names of early Doukhobor settlements in Saskatchewan during the 1899 to 1907 period. It will consider the factors which influenced Doukhobor place naming, including beliefs, collective history and world view; geography, settlement patterns and land use; as well as Russian language and orthography. It will also examine the types of Doukhobor place names according to their meaning and mechanism of origin.

All interested persons are invited to attend. For a look at the wider picture of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, including registration information, see the following website:

http://www.fedcan.ca/congress2007/

Best wishes.

Jonathan J. Kalmakoff

The following is a link to the programme for the Canadian Society for the Study of Names - 41st Annual Meeting. All are invited to attend the presentation on Doukhobor Place Names: http://geonames.nrcan.gc.ca/info/cssn_pro07_e.php

As a follow up to this posting, on May 26 to June 2, I participated in the 76th Annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The Congress is the largest annual academic gathering in Canada, with over 8,000 delegates from all over North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. It is an important meeting place to present research and debate some of the most important social and cultural questions of the day, and its multidisciplinary focus marks it as unique in the world. The theme of this year’s Congress was “Bridging Communities: Making public knowledge – Making knowledge public.” Through a series of academic and cultural events, the Congress placed special emphasis on women, equity issues, Aboriginal Peoples and minority groups.

I am pleased to note that the Doukhobors were the subject of several sessions of the Congress. I had the occasion to participate in one of the sessions, “Toponymy” along with several top world scholars. I presented a paper on “Place Names of Early Doukhobor Settlements in Saskatchewan, 1899-1907”. (An Abstract of the paper will appear on the Doukhobor Genealogy Website in the near future). At another session, “The Immigrant Experience in Canada”, Ashleigh Androsoff of the University of Toronto presented a paper entitled “From the Private Sphere to the Public Eye: ‘Redressing’ the Image of Doukhobor-Canadian Women in the Twentieth Century”.

Through participation in this exceptional world-level event, we were fortunate to have the opportunity to share our Doukhobor heritage and experience with members of the broader Canadian and international academic community, and in doing so, facilitate dialogue and understanding.