Ninth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

The quinquennial World Acadian Congress, or Congrès mondial acadien (CMA), Acadia’s most celebrated organized festivity, is a large-scale 10-day event established over 25 years ago as a means of building bridges between Acadians from throughout its global diaspora. It provides an arena for Acadians to express their cultural vitality through a sense of mutual collectiveness. However, like all cultural festivities, the CMA not only provides an arena for collective membership building, but it also unveils the social and political concerns of many Acadians and promotes the French-first linguistic ideology of the Société nationale de l’Acadie (SNA). a non-profit that also acts as the CMA’s overseeing structure. This CMA-SNA relationship creates an ideological umbrella and a hierarchical power within the diaspora that results in various communities of the Acadian diaspora receiving little consideration in Acadian relations and politics. This presentation details the results of a grant-funded research study to be conducted at the 2024 CMA in which I explore the meaning of Acadian membership as well as the extent to which the CMA promotes the inclusion of the whole diaspora. I seek to understand the organizational power and (language) ideology that reside within the very structure of the CMA. As data, I use CMA published media, such as promotional materials and advertisements and videos, blogs, and op-eds. These media pieces are then compared and contrasted with the results of ethnographic interviews conducted with Congress attendees on the CMA’s impact on their collective Acadian membership status.