I have to tell you, I had a really hard time figuring out what to write about this week. Between the current strike by college professors in Ontario, the attacks online against feminist and socially progressive scholars, and the latest insanity happening down south, there are so many current events emerging right now that it seemed impossible to figure out a place to start. But two not completely unrelated events stand out in my mind. The first is the passage of Bill 62 in my home province, and the other is the disciplinary action faced by Masuma Khan, a student at Dalhousie, for speaking out against Canada150 on Facebook. To my mind, these events have something important in common: they are both based around particular narratives of history and identity. So in today’s blog post, I’m going to talk about the events in question, imagined communities, the backfire effect, and why it is important that we teach history responsibly.
