Loyalist-Acadian collaborative study receives SSHRCC funding

Vocabularies of Cultural Identity - a research project directed by Dr. Chantal Richard from the French Department at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton (and a member of the LRN) - has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) to engage in a comparative analysis of Loyalist and Acadian discourses in the 1880s, using computer-aided text analysis software. Specifically, this project will examine digitized documents from the Loyalist Centennial celebrations in Saint John which occurred in 1883 and compare them to the speeches of the first three Conventions nationales acadiennes from 1881, 1884 and 1890. These texts are of the same time period, the same genre, and have essentially the same preoccupation: defining a specific group of people within a larger nation and ensuring the survival of their collective identity. Concepts of interest in these corpora are, to name just a few: collective identities based on past events, promotion of value systems, proposed role models for women, and differentiation from or identification with other social groups.

In order to engage in this analysis, Dr. Richard is facilitating inter-institutional collaboration between francophone and anglophone co-researchers, including Maurice Basque (Institut d’études acadiennes), Denis Bourque (U de Moncton), Anne Brown (UNB), Alan Burk (UNB), Margaret Conrad (UNB), Gwendolyn Davies (UNB), Bonnie Huskins (STU and the LRN), Sylvia Kasparian (U de Moncton), Greg Marquis (UNBSJ) and Erik Moore (Electronic Text Centre, UNB).