Religious Diversity in Canadian Public Schools: Rethinking the Role of Law

Canadian public schools have long been entrusted with socializing children. Yet this duty can rest uneasily alongside legal questions of religious diversity. In Religious Diversity in Canadian Public Schools: Rethinking the Role of Law, Dia Dabby offers a critical reassessment of the role of law in education. She contends that schools are in fact microsystems with the power to construct their own rules and relationships. Grounding its analysis in three seminal Supreme Court cases involving religion in schools, her work reveals a legal process that is unduly linear, compressing multidimensional conversations into an oppositional format and stripping away the voices of children themselves.

This talk seeks to connect many of the themes and interrogations that have animated the public imaginary since multiculturalism was officially enacted in Canada in the early 1980s and offers situated stories in nation, education and diversity. Employing a rich mixed methodological framework, drawing on background information, evidentiary files, and administrative frameworks, Dabby proposes a distinct landscape for inquiry beyond judicial decisions and outcomes.

This talk has been co-organized with the Peter A. Allard School of Law.

Dia Dabby is Associate Professor in the Département des sciences juridiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), where her teaching and scholarship has focused on law, religion and institutions from a Canadian and comparative constitutional context. She is an active member of the CRIDAQ, an interdisciplinary research centre focusing on democracy and diversity. She is the author of Religious Diversity in Canadian Public Schools: Rethinking the Role of Law (UBC Press, 2022) and co-editor of Modération ou extrémisme? Regards critiques sur la loi 21 (PUL, 2020). Her work has appeared in, amongst others, the Supreme Court Law Review, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Dalhousie Law Journal, Studies in Religion, Religion & Human Rights as well as in Nonreligious Imaginaries of World-Repairing (Palgrave, 2021), Constitutions and Religion (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), Research Handbook on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Law and Religion (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019).