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This talk takes up the early-COVID figure of the bat to consider human continuities with nonhuman, near-human, and becoming-human capacities, in order to think through how Asian Canadian Studies as a discipline emerges in the present moment. I consider the wet market as site at which two medicines collide, then turn specifically to the bat’s capacity for self location through echolocation, and its attentiveness to many sounds including the echoes of its own voice in order to navigate a precise flight path from moment to moment. Extending my earlier work in Slanting I, Imagining We, I address both historical and contemporary emergences (and emergencies) of Asian Canadian formation, and then consider how echolocation might give us a measure of agency (or, as Roy Miki would have it, asiancy) in emergence. In relation to formations seemingly (though not necessarily practically) exterior to Asian Canadian, including Blackness and Indigeneity, as well as formations that obviously overlap with it (queernes and disability, for example), I propose a fluctuating and imaginative approach to disciplinarity that takes up a complex "poethics" of relation and production; one that listens for voices, echoes and other sounds that might help us make sense of where we are at any given moment on a long journey. Remaining critical of the "echo chamber" as a site of confirmation bias, I consider how else such a concept and the spaces it gestures towards might be rethought.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Larissa Lai is the author of nine books including Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, and most recently The Lost Century. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist’s Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book and twice finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award, she has also been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Sunburst Award , the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism and the Governor General’s Award. She has held a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, and a Maria Zambrano Fellowship at the University of Huelva. She is currently the Richard Charles Lee Chair of Chinese Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto.

The Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies was established in November 2012 with a generous endowment from an anonymous donor. The objective of the Chair is to support research and teaching on topics relating to Chinese Canadian and Asian Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto.

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Join this expert discussion on current events in Asian and the broader issue of transnational repression.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra, is a Sessional Instructor for the Department of History at the University of Fraser-Valley.She earned her MA degree in 2008 from UBC’s Asian Studies department which looked at the 18th century court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Her PhD, completed in April 2022, from UBC’s Department of History looks at museums as spaces of belonging through a critical race theory lens. Sharn is the first Sikh person to graduate from UBC History’s PhD program. She is the former coordinator of the South Asian Studies Institute at UFV, having worked there for more than 12 years, and through that, co-managed and co-curated award-winning exhibits at the National Historic Site, Gur Sikh Temple and Sikh Heritage Museum. She continues to teach sessional in the Department of History at UFV.

Noura Al-Jizawi, is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab at Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is also and activist and spokesperson. Her work takes an in-depth look at digital transnational repression, digital authoritarianism and human rights, and digital surveillance more broadly.

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This event is part of "The Newars and Their Neighbours" series

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Beginning with Sylvain Lévi, most scholars for the past century who have assessed the state of Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley have described the tradition as "decadent, "corrupted by Hinduism," and so in serious decline. What has emerged over the last decade, however, is a hitherto unimagined revival among traditional Newar Buddhists and their venerable tradition centered on Mahayana-Vajrayana teachings and practices. Led by younger Buddhist vajracaryas and scholars, leaders have introduced a welter of new spiritual initiatives, institutional innovations, along with gender and caste reforms. The talk will sketch this confluence of reconfigurations and revivals, with special focus on how these factors converged in the nearly-completed construction of a Newar Vajrayana monastery in Lumbini.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Todd Lewis is a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Religion at the College of the Holy Cross. His primary research since 1979 has been on Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley and the social history of Buddhism. Lewis has authored many articles on the Buddhist traditions of Nepal and a book titled Popular Buddhist Texts from Nepal: Narratives and Rituals of Newar Buddhism (SUNY Press, 2000). His translation, Sugata Saurabha: A Poem on the Life of the Buddha by Chittadhar Hridaya of Nepal (Oxford 2010), received awards from the Khyentse Foundation and the Numata Foundation as the best book on Buddhism in 2011. He is currently engaged in his next project, a edited volume, Buddhism through Objects.

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Marriage Migration of Dalit and Muslim Women in India: Articulation of New Form of Gendered Violence

This talk focuses on marriage migration undertaken by rural bachelors in North India who seek brides from outside their customary marriage pools such as from development peripheries of India. Drawing on feminist political economy and Dalit feminism, Dr. Kukreja connects the macro-political violent process of neoliberalism to the micro-personal level of marriage and intimate gender relations to demonstrate that predatory capitalism dispossess many poor women from India’s marginalized Dalit and Muslim communities of marriage choices in their local communities. It argues that this gendered matrimonial dispossession exposes migrant brides to new forms of gendered and caste violence in conjugal communities that act as disciplining tools to efficiently extract labour from them.

The talk draws on Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India (Cornell University Press 2022).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Reena Kukreja, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies with cross appointment to Gender Studies Department and affiliation with the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research interests and filmmaking practice is focussed on migration and development, political economy, marriage migration, South Asian masculinities, and caste. Her current work examines the intersections of masculinity, sexuality, securitization of borders and political economy on the lives of undocumented South Asian men in Greece and other South European countries.

(Discussant) Sanjukta Mukherjee is an Associate Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University. Dr. Mukherjee’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of feminist political economy, critical development studies and urban geographies with a focus on neoliberal globalization, transnational service work and social transformations centered on the politics of gender, class, caste, race and age in South Asia and its diaspora. She is co-author of Low Wage in High Tech: An Ethnography of Service Workers in Global India (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her research has been published in journals like Gender, Place and Culture, The Professional Geographer, International Migration Review and several anthologies and edited volumes.

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"There is a nuclear ghost in Minamisōma." This is how one resident describes a mysterious experience following the 2011 nuclear fallout in coastal Fukushima. Investigating the nuclear ghost among the graying population, Morimoto encounters radiation’s shapeshifting effects. What happens if state authorities, scientific experts, and the public disagree about the extent and nature of the harm caused by the accident? In one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of coastal Fukushima written in English, Nuclear Ghost tells the stories of a diverse group of residents who aspire to live and die well in their now irradiated homes. Their determination to recover their land, cultures, and histories for future generations provides a compelling case study for reimagining relationality and accountability in the ever-atomizing world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ryo Morimoto is a first-generation college graduate and scholar from Japan and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His scholarly work addresses the planetary impacts of our past and present engagements with nuclear things. His second book project explores the U.S-Japan transnational history of disaster robots and an ethnography of decommissioning robots in coastal Fukushima. Ryo is a facilitator of the Native undergraduate students-led project Nuclear Princeton.

Discussant: Shiho Satsuka is interested in the politics of knowledge, environment, nature, science, and capitalism. She examines how divergent understandings of nature are produced, circulated, encountered, contested, and transformed in relation to the global expansion of capitalism. She is currently working on her second book project, tentatively entitled The Charisma of Mushrooms: Undoing the Long Twentieth Century.The project explores the possibilities of mushroom science to realize interspecies entanglements, dissolve the twentieth-century style state-science-industrial complex, and explore the possibility of co-habitation of various human and nonhuman beings on the earth. In particular, the project traces interspecies encounters in satoyama forest revitalization movements inspired by the charisma of matsutake, the politics of translation between various scientific and other forms of knowledge, as well as the emergence of “new commons.” This research is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant and is a part of the collaborative, multi-sited ethnographic project, “Matsutake Worlds.” Satsuka was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Germany in 2012.

Chair: Tong Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies and the Graduate Department of History and Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute. His current book-length study employs lenses of media studies, environmentalism, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine the politics and poetics of mobilization in China’s special zones in the socialist and postsocialist eras. As a visual artist, Lam has utilized his lens-based work to uncover hidden evidence of state- and capital-precipitated violence—both fast and slow—across various contexts. At present, his research-based visual projects particularly delve into the intersection between technology and military violence, as well as the landscapes of industrial and postindustrial ruination.  

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Stephen will present on the historical and anthropological perspectives of N. Vanamamalai from 1917 to 1980.

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G. Stephen, PhD, is a scholar of Tamil studies and folklore, will discuss the contributions of N. Vanamamalai to the inter-disciplinary study of History and Anthropology. A renowned Marxist intellectual, activist and researcher, Vanamamalai’s scholarship in folk literature transformed Tamil studies through an interdisciplinary approach animated by cultural Marxism. He played a key role in Tamil literary progressive and radical movements; founded the Nellai Research Group; mentored generations of students and a research journal in Tamil, Aaraicci.

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Settler extractivist projects seek to unearth “resources” that can generate profit, while also hollowing land to create an “industrial sink” (Liboiron 2021) to bury waste. In Japan’s Indigenous Ainu land, two communities offered to host Japan’s most radioactive nuclear waste in a Deep Geological Repository (DGR) – the most poisonous “sink” – for perpetuity. These sites where vibrant Ainu communities thrived, were obliterated by 19th century smallpox epidemics. Today, they host fisheries, aquaculture, and windfarms – asserting new settler infrastructures and submerging ancestral Ainu care for the land. In this talk, Lewallen considers how distinct notions of time – from Indigenous futurity to settler time – intersect with what may be called ‘nuclear time-scales,’ the expanse of time required for the toxicity of nuclear waste to be halved.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ann-Elise Lewallen is an anthropologist who supports Indigenous empowerment through decolonial mapping, ecosystem health, and restoring Indigenous Land relations in East and South Asia. Her first monograph is The Fabric of Indigeneity: Contemporary Ainu Identity and Gender in Settler Colonial Japan (2016), and her book-in-progress is The Banyan Tree and the Fish with no Scales.

Discussant: Mary X. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of the Centre from Criminology & Sociolegal Studies. Mitchell’s work centers on the intersections of science and technology with law and environmental social movements in the nuclear era. Focusing on radiological risk, her research examines the production of environmental inequality in the United States and transnationally.

Chair: Tong Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies and the Graduate Department of History and Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute. His current book-length study employs lenses of media studies, environmentalism, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine the politics and poetics of mobilization in China’s special zones in the socialist and postsocialist eras. As a visual artist, Lam has utilized his lens-based work to uncover hidden evidence of state- and capital-precipitated violence—both fast and slow—across various contexts. At present, his research-based visual projects particularly delve into the intersection between technology and military violence, as well as the landscapes of industrial and postindustrial ruination.

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About the Book:

Biography courtesy of the University of Chicago Press

A history of global secularism and political feeling through colonial blasphemy law.

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private.

About the Author:

J. BARTON SCOTT works on the intellectual and cultural history of religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on South Asia and its global connections. He teaches courses on social and cultural theory, media and material religion, and religion in political thought.

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ABOUT THE SEMINAR

This seminar traces state asymmetry as an analytical framework for the study of forms of power in authoritarian systems. Through the lens of a long term study of Tibet’s governance in the People’s Republic of China, the study of the politics of space is posited as a means for illuminating ongoing processes of regionalization and the construction of new scales of policy interests, casting new light on the reterritorialization of Tibet and the partitioning of its governance within the Chinese state. This structural approach to asymmetry in authoritarian states offers insights into the operation and analytics of power that are obscured by prevailing discourses on political disputes and contested regions that focus on minoritization and assimilation of ethnonational groups. By taking into account the spatial differentiation of policy interests and governance structures within authoritarian systems, state asymmetry provides a research framework that challenges conventional notions of authoritarian state power while offering a model that can better predict political behavior and the emergence of political conflict.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tashi Rabgey is Research Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University where she focuses on territorial politics, autonomous governance and state asymmetry with a specialization on Tibet and China. She directs the Research Initiative on Multination States (RIMS) at the Elliott School of International Affairs as well as the Tibet Governance Project (Tibet GovLab) which advances research on governance and public policy in contemporary Tibet. Dr. Rabgey led the development of the Tibet Governance and Practice Forum (TGAP), a seven-year research initiative that engaged policy researchers from the Chinese State Council in Beijing, as well as global academic partners including the University of Oslo, UQÁM, the University of Deusto and Harvard. Her work on TGAP developed new field-based knowledge and analytical insights on the institutional structure and dynamics of China’s policymaking in Tibet and other regional autonomies. She is also completing a long term project on legal pluralism, nationality law and the effects of sovereignty in post-democratization Taiwan. She directs experimental programs on regional governance and autonomy in collaboration with the University of the Basque Country and was recently a visiting professor at the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr (Iraqi Kurdistan) where she supervises Ph.D. students and Kurdish graduate students of law.

(Chair) Jacques Bertrand is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, as well as Director of the Collaborative Master’s Specialization in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies (Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Affairs). He was the founding director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the Asian Institute. He is also the co-founder of the Postcor Lab at the University of Toronto, a research hub for the study of civil wars and war-to-peace transitions. His most recent books include  Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (w/ Ardeth Thawnghmung and Alexandre Pelletier, Cornell UP, July 2022) and Democracy and Nationalist Struggles in Southeast Asia: From secessionist mobilization to conflict resolution (Cambridge UP, 2021).

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Chinese hydropower first captured the world’s imagination not—as one would expect—by going big, but rather by being small. By the end of the 1970s, the Chinese claimed to have built just under 90,000 small hydropower stations across the country. Over the ensuing decade, this small hydropower expertise and technology attracted interest across the world, both in the Global South and in the Global North. China also came to play an increasingly central role in a host of ambitious international small hydropower conferences—in places like Kathmandu, Nairobi, and Hangzhou. In this talk, I trace and contextualize this story in light of histories of hydropower, energy, and global development.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Arunabh Ghosh (BA Haverford, PhD Columbia) is an associate professor in the History Department at Harvard University. He is the author of Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Princeton, 2020). Current projects include a history of small hydropower in the PRC and a history of China-India scientific networks.

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OCAD University’s Faculty of Art presents: Art Creates Change, The Kim Pruesse Speakers Series. Supported in part by the Centre for South Asian Studies, Asian Institute. 

ABOUT THE EVENT 

Governor General’s Award recipient and acclaimed documentary filmmaker, Ali Kazimi, will address issues of history and social justice from a diaspora lense; specifically, one rooted in India. Kazimi will show clips that speak to the centrality of relational filmmaking in his practice, and the ethical and moral dilemmas in addressing issues of race and representation. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ali Kazimi (pronounced Ka-Zim-E) is filmmaker, writer, and visual artist whose work deals with race, social justice, migration, history, memory and archive. In 2019 he received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, as well as a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa from the University of British Columbia. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. 

His critically acclaimed films have been shown at festivals around the world, winning national and international honours and awards. His awards include the Donald Brittain/Gemini Award for Best Social/Political Documentary; Golden Gate Award, San Fran. Intl. Film Fest; Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival; Best Director & Best Political Documentary, Hot Docs and Audience Awards for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and Los Angeles Indian Film Festival. His most recent feature documentary Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence premiered at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in May 2023. The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Planet In Focus Canadian International Environmental Film Festival, and was screened as part of the prestigious Front Light program at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam 

Ali Kazimi is also a Professor of Cinema & Media Arts, at the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, York University. He served as Department Chair from 2015 to 2016, and was promoted to in 2022. In 2021, Ali Kazimi was elected as a Senior Fellow at Massey College.

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Book launch of Jaivet Ealom’s Escape from Manus Prison: One Man’s Daring Quest for Freedom (Penguin Random House Canada, 2022). Moderated by Elizabeth Wijaya, the roundtable features Jaivet Ealom, Thy Phu, Maral Aguilar-Moradipour, Matthew Walton, and Palita Chunsaengchan.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Courtesy of Penguin Random House Canada

The awe-inspiring story of the only person to successfully escape Australia’s notorious offshore detention centre–and his long search for freedom.

In 2013 Jaivet Ealom fled Myanmar’s brutal regime, where Rohingya like him were being persecuted and killed, and boarded a boat of asylum seekers bound for Australia. Instead of finding refuge, he was transported to Australia’s infamous Manus Regional Processing Centre.

Blistering hot days spent in shipping containers on the island melted into weeks, then years . . . until, finally, facing either jail in Papua New Guinea or being returned to almost certain death in Myanmar, he took matters into his own hands.

Drawing inspiration from the hit show Prison Break, Jaivet meticulously planned his escape. He made it out alive but was stateless, with no ID or passport. While the nightmare of Manus was behind him, his true escape to freedom had only just begun.

How Jaivet made it to sanctuary in Canada in a six-month-long odyssey by foot, boat, car, and plane, with nothing but his instinct for survival, is miraculous. His story will astonish, anger and inspire you. It will make you reassess what it means to give refuge and redefine what can be achieved by one man determined to beat the odds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jaivet Ealom was born in Myanmar and now resides in Toronto, where he has become a prominent spokesperson for the Rohingya community. He is a member of the Refugee Advisory Network of Canada and is on the leadership team of the Canadian Rohingya Development Initiative. In his roles as co-founder of the Rohingya Centre of Canada as well as Northern Lights Canada he aims to help some of the world’s most vulnerable refugees. Jaivet recently completed his study at the University of Toronto and is currently serving as the CEO of Rohingya Center of Canada.

ABOUT THE PANEL

Maral Aguilar-Moradipour  is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough, in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include critical refugee studies; cultural studies; digital humanities; diasporic literature and theory; Indigenous literature and thought; and critical race and gender studies. She has published in literary and academic journals such as English Studies in Canada and Postcolonial Text.

Palita Chunsaengchan is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian cinema at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Her book manuscript, A History of Chimeric Cinema: Thai Film Culture (1880-1942), traces cinema’s complex intertwinement with questions of sovereignty, modernity, and democracy in Siam/Thailand. Her past publications appeared in Asian Cinema and SOJOURN. Her upcoming article on cine-poetry in one of the earliest Thai film magazines is currently in production at the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. She is also one of the contributors of The Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which will be out in print in February 2024.

Thy Phu is a Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora and Visual Justice at the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Toronto. She is author of two books on photography, war, and citizenship, and co-editor of the book volume, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada. She is also a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee and Migration Studies Network of Canada.

Matthew Walton is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was the inaugural Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on religion and politics in Southeast Asia, with a special emphasis on Buddhism in Myanmar. Matt’s first book, Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar, was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a comparative study of Buddhist political thought across the Theravada world. Matt was P-I for an ESRC-funded 2-year research project entitled “Understanding ‘Buddhist nationalism’ in Myanmar” and was a co-founder of the Myanmar Media and Society project and of the Burma/Myanmar blog Tea Circle.

(Moderator) Elizabeth Wijaya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and in the Cinema Studies Insititute, University of Toronto. She is the Director of the Southeas Asia Seminar Series and the Interim-Director of the Dr David Chu Speaker Series, Asian Insitute. Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. She received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she was affiliated with the East and Southeast Asian Programs.

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The problem of environmental pollution in South Korea became prominent in the 1960s and escalated into a “disaster” situation in the 1970s. This talk focuses on complaints and litigation activities centered on residents of high-pollution areas in the 1970s, when environmental pollution became a serious problem in South Korea. These residents fought for the right to live as victims, who had been hidden behind economic development, exports, and growth at the time and until now. Ko will examine their struggle for the right to live, and highlight the problems of the pollution control system and government administration at the time. In addition, by examining the historical significance and limitations of the pollution problem in the 1970s, we would like to consider the relationship between the Global North and the Global South today. This study can be said to be a kind of “people’s history of pollution”. It is also part of Ko’s long-term plan to publish a book called “A History of Environmental Pollution in Korea in the 20th Century”.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Taewoo Ko (고태우) is an assistant professor in the Department of Korean History at Seoul National University in South Korea, and is studying modern Korean history and environmental history of the 20th century. In his doctoral dissertation, he revealed how Japanese-centered civil engineering contractors formed relationships with the Japanese Government-General of Korea in colonial Joseon and pursued profits, and the limitations of colonial development in the process. In 2019 after receiving his Ph.D., he became a research professor at Chosun University, Gwangju City, and was appointed the Department of Korean History at Seoul National University in 2020. Along with research on colonial Korea, he is currently researching the environmental history of East Asia, focusing on Korea in the 20th century. He historically examines environmental pollution, human responses to disasters, and the destruction and restoration of ecosystems in Korea under a critical perspective on capitalism. He is also interested in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene and post-humanism.

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Description courtesy of the Stanford University Press

Over the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of waste materials and the lives of those who toil with them? In Lahore, like in many parts of Pakistan and South Asia, waste workers—whether municipal employees or informal laborers—are drawn from low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups and dispose the collective refuse of the city’s 11 million inhabitants. Bringing workers into contact with potentially polluting materials reinforces their stigmatization and marginalization, and yet, their work allows life to go on across Lahore and beyond. This historical and ethnographic account examines how waste work has been central to organizing and transforming the city of Lahore—its landscape, infrastructures, and life—across historical moments, from the colonial period to the present.

Building upon conversations about changing configurations of work and labor under capitalism, and utilizing a theoretical framework of reproduction, Waqas H. Butt traces how forms of life in Punjab, organized around caste-based relations, have become embedded in infrastructures across Pakistan, making them crucial to numerous processes unfolding at distinct scales. Life Beyond Waste maintains that processes reproducing life in a city like Lahore must be critically assessed along the lines of caste, class, and religion, which have been constitutive features of urbanization across South Asia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Waqas H. Butt is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Butt’s research takes a stigmatized form of labor—waste work—as a point of entry to explore two interrelated questions: how have historical events, both past and ongoing, continually reshaped Pakistan’s fraught urban landscape, and, in what ways have the connections among caste, waste, labor, and infrastructures both endured and transformed across South Asia? Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore and the Punjab, his current book project examines the ways in which waste workers, who are drawn predominantly from low or non-caste groups, have become essential components of urban life through the everyday and intimate workings of waste infrastructures. This work brings together a variety of concerns—materiality of waste and value, histories of caste, stigmatized labor, and urbanization, and global circuits of development and capital—to unpack the unexpected socio-political processes by which urban life is currently unfolding across South Asia and globally

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Kazimi will show two films, Shooting Indians (1997) and Beyond Extinction (2022), that deal with the perspective of Indigeneity through an immigrant lens. Moving beyond the White Settler/Indigenous paradigm, the films open up discussions about the relationship between racialized immigrant communites and Indigenous communities, while also addressing the legacies of colonialism. Respondentsinclude: Ryan Rice, Kajri Jain, Stephen Foster, and Indu Vashist. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER Ali Kazimi (pronounced Ka-Zim-E) is filmmaker, writer, and visual artist whose work deals with race, social justice, migration, history, memory and archive. In 2019 he received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, as well as a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa from the University of British Columbia. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

 His critically acclaimed films have been shown at festivals around the world, winning national and international honours and awards. His awards include the Donald Brittain/Gemini Award for Best Social/Political Documentary; Golden Gate Award, San Fran. Intl. Film Fest; Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival; Best Director & Best Political Documentary, Hot Docs and Audience Awards for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and Los Angeles Indian Film Festival. His most recent feature documentary Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence premiered at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in May 2023. The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Planet In Focus Canadian International Environmental Film Festival, and was screened as part of the prestigious Front Light program at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam 

Ali Kazimi is also a Professor of Cinema & Media Arts, at the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, York University. He served as Department Chair from 2015 to 2016, and was promoted to in 2022. In 2021, Ali Kazimi was elected as a Senior Fellow at Massey College

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ABOUT THE EVENT

From election interference to overseas police stations to assassinations, foreign governments have found numerous ways to engage in repression on democratic soil.  It is not simply Beijing trying to influence democratic politics. The assassination of Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar last summer has pointed to potential complicity by India’s Modi’s government, for example. As tensions escalate between Canada and two Asian powerhouses, and elsewhere around the globe, what are the problems and solutions?  Join a panel of experts on transnational repression to probe into this urgent issue.

ABOUT THE PANEL

Sanjay Ruparelia is an Associate Professor of Politics, and the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair, at Toronto Metropolitan University. His major publications include Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India; The Indian Ideology; and Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation. Ruparelia serves as co-chair of the Participedia network and associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Politics, and hosts On the Frontlines of Democracy, a monthly podcast/lecture series. He is currently a visiting fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, USA, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa.

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra, PhD, is a Historian, exhibit curator, storyteller, and founder of Belonging Matters Consulting. She is a passionate activist, building bridges between community and academia through museum work and has been featured in the Knowledge Network series “B.C: An Untold History,” as well as been featured on local, and international podcasts and media.

Suzanne Scoggins, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Asian Studies at Clark University. Her research focuses on policing and security in reform era China and explores themes of local governance, state legitimacy, and authoritarian control. Her first book, Policing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest, is out with Cornell University Press, and her academic articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, the Journal of Chinese Political Science, and the China Quarterly, among others.

Noura Aljizawi is a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. Her work takes an in-depth look at human rights issues connected to disinformation, digital authoritarianism, and digital transnational repression. She also serves on the board of the Center for Victims of Torture and is a member of Humanitarian Dialogue’s expert group as well as Just Tech and Migration Community’s steering committee. Her work on Security Planner, a platform that provides peer-reviewed recommendations for staying safe online, was recognized with an Excellence in Innovation Award by the University of Toronto.

(Introductory Remarks and Co-Chair) Joanna Chiu is a senior reporter covering national and foreign stories for the Toronto Star and the author of China Unbound: A New World Disorder. As a globally-recognized authority on China, Chiu is a regular commentator for international broadcast media. She was previously based in Beijing as a foreign correspondent, including for Agence France Presse (AFP) and Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) specializing in coverage of Chinese politics, economy and legal affairs. In Hong Kong, she reported for the South China Morning Post, The Economist magazine and The Associated Press.

(Moderator and Co-Chair) Diana Fu, PhD, is an Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science at The University of Toronto, and Director of the East Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is a Non-Resident Fellow at Brookings Institution, a China fellow at the Wilson Center, and a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations. Her research examines civil society, popular contention, state control, and authoritarian citizenship in China.

(Concluding Remarks and Co-Chair) Solarina Ho is the Toronto chair of NüVoices and a co-host of the NüVoices podcast. She is a freelance journalist and writer, covering a broad range of general, health, and business news for a variety of publications and organizations. She spent nearly 15 years as a correspondent for Reuters and has also written for publications and outlets including CTVNews.ca, The Globe and Mail, WebMD/Medscape, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

This event will showcase the aesthetics of Korean pansori, a vocal tradition of story-singing, and explore the Korean conceptualization and practice of voicing. Sangah Lee will present excerpts from traditional repertoires and new vocal pieces created in collaboration with Korean-Canadian artists. This project aims to integrate traditional Korean music into the local musical landscape by hosting the first full pansori-focused concert in Toronto.

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

Sangah Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include voice on the margins, music and social activism, gender, disability, and the aesthetics of Korean vocality. As a pansori performer and instructor, Lee has collaborated with various Canadian institutions and arts organizations, including the Korean Education Centre Canada, Royal Ontario Museum, and Aga Khan Museum, to organize educational and artistic programs that facilitate cross-cultural interactions. She currently serves as the artistic director for Canada Pansori Center, which aims to promote Korean cultural traditions and foster meaningful connections among diverse communities in Canada.

This event also features Eunji Kim on Korean percussions, Roa Lee on Gayageum (a Korean 12- or 25- stringed zither), Yerin Lee on Daegeum (a Korean transverse flute), Jihyun Back on dance, and Jay Yoo on guitar.