Living Knowledge with Newcomers
Action Dignity Society and the University of Calgary Newcomer Research Network
Date: November 14, 2025
Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Venue: Best Western Premier Calgary Plaza
Deadline: September 30, 2025
Registration is Open
You are invited to a day of community-centred dialogue, research, and collaboration!
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Since 2019, the Newcomer Research Symposium has created space for newcomer voices, service providers, researchers, policymakers, and grassroots leaders to come together and reimagine newcomer integration in Canada.
This year’s theme, Living Knowledge with Newcomers, broadens how community-centred research is conducted, shared, and validated. We seek to centre community, amplify newcomer voices, and engage all attendees as leaders in the pursuit of equity and systems change. Guided by the Water of Systems Change Model, we aim to make research accessible and participatory. The Symposium focuses on lived experiences, diverse ways of knowing, and validating research rooted in relationships and community impact.
Themes
We encourage contributions that reimagine newcomer settlement and explore equity and systems change in the following areas:
- Settlement & Integration
- Public Safety
- Social Inclusion & Health Care
- Education
- Employment
- Grassroots Community Collaboration
Ways of Sharing
We invite proposals from newcomer community members, grassroots leaders, researchers, artists, practitioners, youth, and policymakers. Your contribution may take many forms, reflecting diverse and equally valid ways of sharing knowledge, such as:
- Workshops & Interactive Sessions
- Dialogues & Panel Discussions
- Paper Presentation
- Posters and Creative Exhibits
- Storytelling, Narrative, Spoken word
- Artistic Expressions (visual or performative arts)
Criteria for Selection
Proposals will be reviewed based on the following criteria:
- Centring newcomer lived experience
- Focus on Equity – considerations of what a goal of equity requires, offers, what it can look like, and how it will impact the lived experiences of newcomers.
- Focus on systems change that impacts the lives of newcomers to Canada, i.e. practices, policies, resource flows, connections and relationships, power dynamics, and mental models.
- Diverse ways of knowing and sharing knowledge
- Time – A range of presentation time from 5 minutes to 20-minute presentations.
- Rigor – thoughtful complexity, clear positionality, focus on lived experience, challenges dominant frameworks and the status quo, offers a counter-narrative.
- Anti-Racist – considerations of the role that racialization, racial hierarchy, and intersectionality impacts newcomer experience.
Join Us
Be part of the Newcomer Research Symposium 2025, a space where we centre community, amplify newcomer voices and lead collective action to catalyze systems change, together!