Notes on the speakers:

Benoît Pelletier is a politician and lawyer in Quebec. He was a Liberal Party Member of the National Assembly from 1998 to 2008, and served as Minister for Canadian Intergovernmental Affairs, Aboriginal affairs, Francophones within Canada, the Reform of Democratic Institutions and Access to Information in the Jean Charest government, as well as the minister responsible for the Outaouais region, for the region of Nord-du-Québec and the deputy leader of the government in the National Assembly of Québec. He studied law at the Université Laval in 1981 and obtained a licence and was admitted to the Barreau du Quebec soon after. He worked for the federal Ministry of Justice as a legal adviser.

Francisco Colom González is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He Obtained his Ph.D in Philosophy (1991) at the Universidad Complutense, in Madrid (Spain) and his Diploma in Political Science and Constitutional Law (1991) at the Centre for Political and Constitutional Studies, Madrid. He undertook post-graduate studies at the Free University of Berlin (Germany; 1985-86) and postdoctoral research at McGill University (Montreal, Canada; 1992). From 1992 until 1994 he was Associate Professor of Sociology at the Public University of Navarre (Pamplona, Spain). He has also been visiting professor and research visitor in several Latin-American, Canadian and European universities. From 2000-2005 he was the president of the Ibero-American Association of Political Philosophy and is currently the president of the Spanish Association for Canadian Studies/Association Espagnole d'Etudes Canadiens and Vicedirector of the Institute of Philosophy of the CSIC. His early work dealt with the political theory of the Frankfurt School and recently he has developed several research lines on the symbolic construction of collective identities, the political management of ethnicity and religion and the cultural meaning of modernity in the Ibero-American sphere. He is currently coordinating a research project on political secularisation.

Formerly the Special Envoy to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Stephen Lewis is the chair of the board of the Stephen Lewis Foundation in Canada (www.stephenlewisfoundation.org). He is Professor in Global Health, Faculty of Social Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, a new international AIDS advocacy organization, based in the United States.

Stephen Lewis’ work with the United Nations spanned more than two decades. He was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa from June 2001 until the end of 2006. From 1995 to 1999, Mr. Lewis was Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF at the organization’s global headquarters in New York. From 1984 through 1988, Stephen Lewis was Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations. An elected member of the Ontario Legislative Assembly from 1963 to1978, in 1970, he became leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, during which time he was leader of the Official Opposition. Mr. Lewis is co-chair of the Leadership Programme Committee for the XVII International AIDS Conference, which will be held in Mexico City in August 2008. He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

Danielle Fuller holds degrees from the Universities of Durham and Leeds and studied at Dalhousie University, (Halifax, NS, Canada) on a Commonwealth Scholarship. She has been Lecturer in Canadian Studies and Director, Regional Centre for Canadian Studies at Birmingham since 1997. Her chief research areas are: contemporary Canadian writing, particularly Atlantic Canadian literary culture; the politics of cultural production in Canada, and reading communities in present-day North America and the UK. She is also committed to interdisciplinary research methods that combine empirical and textual strategies. Her book, Writing the Everyday: Women’s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004) was the Winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize (English-language) 2005. Danielle has served on BACS Council and as a Convenor of the BACS Literature Group.