Last Best West Conference
From the 19th century immigration poster from which this conference adapts its title to the travel brochures of today, Canada's Western provinces have long been embedded in (and at times embedded themselves in) many and often disparate, even contradictory, identities. From the four provinces also emerged widely divergent political parties, prairie realism, BC bud, western alienation, Greenpeace, national medicare, the TISH school of poetry, the Emma Lake painters, the country-wide Fringe Festival circuit, stampedes, and the regional theatre system. This conference aims to examine some of the cultural, social, and political ways in which the provinces - individually or collectively - have informed the wider imagination.
