In 1929, the Aird Commission Report on Radio Broadcasting recommended the creation of what would become the CBC, predicting that broadcasting would “become a great force in fostering a national spirit and interpreting national citizenship.” Several Canadian legacy newspapers have also been founded with the idea to shape, one way or the other, the ‘national consciousness’ of its colonial subjects/citizens.

The role of media as producers of national mythologies and imagined communities (Anderson) has long been studied in social sciences. Yet, it is still largely untheorized by many journalists and media professionals, trained to present ‘the public’ with ‘objective facts’ about ‘the most important stories’ facing ‘the nation’. As the media landscape transforms, perspectives that had historically been excluded from legacy media spark more and more conversations on journalism and national myth-making — spurring tensed debates on what journalism, and even Canada, are actually about.

This talk will address the interaction between a transforming media landscape and evolving nationalist narratives. More specifically, we’ll look into the media coverage of recent social movements that have mobilized key issues around coloniality, language, and race, and discuss how they have shaken both journalistic practices and public understandings of Canadian ‘nationhood’.

Emilie Nicolas is a columnist with Le Devoir and The Montreal Gazette, as well as a consultant and public speaker on public policy, equity, human rights, international cooperation, race and gender issues. She is a regular contributor to CBC’s Power & Politics and Let’s Go, CTV’s PowerPlay and Canadaland, and has been published in several journals, magazines and newspapers, both in French and English. Most recently, she won the Quebec’s cultural magazine (SODEP) 2020 Excellence Award for Best Essay, for a piece in the Liberté magazine.

As a former Vanier Scholar and PhD candidate in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Emilie focused her research on the role of a shared language in the connections between Quebec and Haiti. Emilie holds a M.A. in Comparative Literature from the same university. She recently taught the course #BlackLivesMatter in the Media at the University of St. Michael’s College.