DCMÉT Presentations at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Sociology

We had a wonderful experience at the CSA conference in Halifax in June (2026), and also enjoyed visiting the Africville Museum and the Museum of Immigration there. The 2027 conference will be held in Vancouver at UBC.

Link to the 2026 conference

Link to the CSA website

Ecological Voices in Media: Critical Perspectives on Education and Citizenship

This roundtable examines the intersections between social movements, media power, and eco-citizenship through a critical lens. It builds on recent research that applied critical frameworks such as Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model to analyse how newspapers include non-profit environmental organizations and civil society actors in their coverage of ecological issues. Combined with the Media Observatory’s thematic grid on ecology, this analysis highlights which topics grant these actors visibility, and which ones systematically exclude them. These findings open a broader sociological dialogue about the implications of such dynamics for democracy, ecology, education, and citizenship. The discussion will explore how a stronger media presence for environmental and civil society organizations could contribute to contextualizing extreme weather events, rebuilding trust in the media, and fostering eco-citizen engagement. It will also question how critical, ecological, and democratic media education can empower citizens to interpret and respond to environmental information in transformative ways. 

Session Organizers: Alexis Legault, Université du Québec en Outaouais; Paul R. Carr, Université du Québec en Outaouais; Gina Thésée, Université du Québec à Montréal; Eloy Rivas-Sanches, Athabasca University

Pygmalion Democracy and the Need for Transformative Education

This roundtable discussion emerges from the context of contemporary democratic issues. It draws on the collective work of 28 authors from eight countries in the recently published book entitled Pygmalion Democracy: If you build it, will they come? (Carr et al., 2025). Through the lens of the concept of "Pygmalion democracy" this book critically problematizes tensions and relations between (normative) democracy, citizenship, ecology, education, media, peace and notions of social injustice. It describes the challenges, limitations, impacts and paradoxes of normative democracies, and implores us to reflect on avenues aimed at more critically-engaged and robust democracy on a global scale. These avenues, serving as the centre-piece of the proposed roundtable, are simultaneously sociopolitical, cultural, economic and educational. We also argue that they must be radically turned towards decolonial and transformative approaches to allow for social and ecological justice to be the core of a solidarity-based democracy project. The roundtable will be animated by four members of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT), who were actively engaged in the edition of the book. This roundtable is, in itself, a democratic space to engage in a multi-/trans-/inter-disciplinary dialogue on the role and responsibility of educational institutions and civil society in the face of recent anti-democratic movements in the Americas and around the world.

Session Organizers: Paul R. Carr, Université du Québec en Outaouais; Eloy Rivas-Sanches, Athabasca University; Alexis Legault, Université du Québec en Outaouais; Gina Thésée, Université du Québec à Montréal