2021 Conference & Keynote Announcements

2021 Conference Update

Congress has announced that this year’s events, including our association’s annual conference, will be held entirely online. The SSA Steering Committee will meet in the next few days to determine the best strategy for our annual conference, but we will be posting our call for papers soon and are happy to announce our keynote speaker.

Keynote Address: By the Light of the Fire: Black Queer Life, Here

Spanning the interdisciplinary fields of Black queer diasporic analytics, health and medical humanities, this keynote address draws on Dr. Dryden’s research that interrogates the narratives about life, health, illness, and belonging. This event will be of interest to scholarly audiences, as well as members of the public who are interested in the ways that anti-Black racism influences conditions of belonging to, and excluded from, the Canadian nation.

Dr. OmiSoore H. Dryden, a Black queer femme, is the James R Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies, Faculty of Medicine, and Associate Professor, Community Health & Epidemiology at Dalhousie University. Dr. Dryden engages in interdisciplinary scholarship and research that focuses on Black LGBTQI people and HIV vulnerability within Black diasporic communities in Canada, systemic/structural issues that affect health and well-being, including experiences with blood donation in Canada, medical education, and Black health curricular content development. Dr. Dryden is the Principal Investigator of #GotBlood2Give / #DuSangÀDonner a research project that seeks to identify the barriers Black gay, bisexual, and trans men encounter with donating blood and also analyzes how anti-black racism, colonialism, and sexual exceptionalism shapes the blood system in Canada. Dr. Dryden is a content expert and Associate Scientist with the Maritime Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) SUPPORT Unit (MSSU). In that capacity, Dr. Dryden provides guidance on Canadian Black Health metrics needed to inform the development of health policies and improve the health care system, this specifically focuses on survey data and demographic information, determinants of trust, sexual health and qualitative data collection and analysis. OmiSoore has published in peer-reviewed journals and book collections and has an edited collection (with Dr. Suzanne Lenon): Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging (UBC Press, 2015) which applies, extends and thinks through homonationalism in a Canadian context as it articulates through racialization, settler colonialism and neoliberalism in which contemporary articulations of sexual citizenship are not only complicit with a conservative, neo-liberal Canadian nation, they are also predicated on foundational Canadian national mythologies that inscribe whiteness as the embodiment of legitimate citizenship and belonging. Dryden is currently working on a new edited collection (with Dr. Nicole Charles) titled, Black Technoscience “Here” which aims to center transnational and diasporic Black technoscientific praxes and methodologies in an effort to broaden perspectives on what technoscientific thought and method entails, while unearthing the politics of doing so as part of a transnational dialogue. Dr. Dryden is the co-president of the Black Canadian Studies Association.