Canada Program Special Event

A Visual Narrative of Labour Migration and the Environment

In Conversation with Kate Beaton, Cartoonist, Writer, Illustrator, and Author of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

and

Katie Mazer, Assistant Professor, Women and Gender Studies and Environmental and Sustainability Studies, Acadia University

Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania

Cosponsored by the Department of English, Harvard University

Free and open to the public. Please register here to attend. A light lunch will be available.

Kate Beaton is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator. She has made graphic novels, comic strips, children’s books, and was a producer on an animated tv series on Apple TV+. She has lived in quite a few places – Halifax, Sackville, Fort McMurray, Victoria, Toronto, New York and St John's, but now lives back on her home island in Cape Breton. Kate is best known as a cartoonist, and for her graphic novel Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.

Katie Mazer is an Assistant Professor of Environmental and Sustainability Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Acadia University. A human geographer by training, Katie’s research examines the ways rural and declining regions come to see their economic futures as dependent on unsustainable resource development. Her forthcoming book Roads to Resources (UBC Press) historicizes the movement of people out of the Canadian Maritimes to work in the Alberta petroleum industry.

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is originally from Québec and obtained his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches 20th and 21st Century North American and African American literature, comics and graphic novels, and archival research methods.