The Arts Matters Conference, hosted by UNB’s Faculty of Arts, is back for a sixth installment. The undergraduate academic conference will be running virtually from March 25-27, 2021, and the theme for this edition is “Transitions 2021: Lessons, Challenges, and New Beginnings.”
The conference organizing team this year is made up of UNB students: Arti Prajapati, Emily Veysey, Fernando Aguilar Sanchez, and Ceilidh Allison Bernon, all supervised by Tabatha Armstrong.
The Arts Matters conference was created six years ago to offer undergraduate students from the Faculty of Arts an opportunity to share their research and creativity with their peers.
“The goal was to create an encouraging and welcoming environment for students to share knowledge and ideas and to provide Arts students with more opportunities to present their work, build community, and connect with each other across disciplines,” said the Arts Matters Organizing Team.
They explained that the conference started as a single-day event featuring a small number of students and has grown and expanded to become a multi-day event with keynote speakers, workshops, and student participants from UNB as well as universities across Eastern Canada.
This year, the conference has received a large number of submissions, not only from UNB but also from about five other universities.
“We’re pleased with the diversity of subjects as well as the different universities represented among applicants,” they said.
This year, the organizing committee has developed a virtual conference that they hope will be just as engaging and rewarding as previous editions of the conference.
“This year’s event will feature four speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds; namely: Dr. David Hofmann from Sociology, Dr. Sabine LeBel from Culture and Media Studies, Dr. Amy Scott from Anthropology, and Dr. Matthew Sears from Classics and Ancient History,” they said.
The conference programming will be over Airmeet, an easy to access conference platform that provides opportunities for networking and connection among participants.
Emily Veysey, one of the organizers, said, “I think the conference is very beneficial to the community; undergraduate students don’t have many opportunities to showcase the hard work that they do during their degree, with most conferences favouring graduate level and professional presenters. It’s great to have a space for students to show their work and gain invaluable experience presenting their ideas to a larger group of people.”
More information about the conference is available on their website. You can also follow their social media pages for regular updates about the conference:
Instagram: @artsmatters2021
Facebook: @ArtsUNBF
Twitter: @ArtsUNBF