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This paper grew from a bundle of anecdotes and observations I took with me to the Association for Canadian Studies forum "Canadian Culture and Digital Technology" on October 26-27,2007, in Gatineau. That raw material was distributed across three broad topics for discussion, which I posed as three questions. These questions, and some of that raw material, are provided here, in the hope that these discussion may go on.
Where are interesting ideas about culture to be found?
In early October, 2007, two weeks before the ACS forum, I participated in the third "How Canadians Communicate" conference at the Banff Centre in Alberta. This event, co-sponsored by the University of Calgary and Athabaska University, brought together Canadian scholars working on a range of topics, from contemporary Canadian art through the success, in the United States, of Canadian television programs like Da Vinci's City Hall. The papers delivered at this conference were, without exception, compelling and well-researched, but there came a point where we realized that few of us were talking about the dilemmas of national cultural identity in the grand synthesizing terms of a few years ago. There are readily available reasons for this: a welcome hesitancy to speak, anymore, of a national culture in unitary, essentializing terms, and the ever sharper realization that Canadian cultural artefacts circulate elsewhere in the world as part of what is sometimes called a global cultural system. What seemed clear, in any case, was that the virtue of current research on Canadian culture is in the details, and in the solidity of its findings and analysis. There is little passion for the development of larger models within which all these case studies might find their place.
In fact, however, there is a lot of excitement in cultural scholarship these days, and much of it concerns developments unfolding in Canada. However, the level at which this work operates is less and less that of the nation. For at least a decade now, we have seen cities take over from nations as the object and incubator of compelling new ideas about culture. Over a decade ago, the proceedings of a conference on the "24-Hour City", held in Manchester, England (Lovett et al, 1994) seemed like one of the most truly innovative...