Description

A Master Class with Professor Bruno Bosteels
FACULTY AND STUDENT EVENT ONLY

Starting from the premise that finitude constitutes the new dogmatic presupposition of much work in philosophy or so-called “theory” after
Heidegger and Foucault, this seminar will proceed to tackle five key concepts that figure prominently in the new jargon of finitude: difference, retreat,
inoperativity, affect, and community or commonality.

October 4th and 18th, and November 1st, 15th, 29th, 2013
5:00 – 7:00pm

Bruno Bosteels is Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Alain Badiou, une trajectoire polémique
(La Fabrique, 2009); Badiou and Politics (Duke University Press, 2011); The Actuality of Communism (Verso, 2011), and Marx and Freud in Latin America (Verso, 2012). He is preparing two new books, After Borges: Literature and Antiphilosophy and Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (under contract with Verso). He has translated Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject (Continuum, 2009). Further translations include Badiou’s Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, Philosophy for Militants, The Adventure of French Philosophy and Rhapsody for the Theatre (all for Verso). He is the author of dozens of articles on modern Latin American literature and culture, and on contemporary European philosophy and political
theory. Between 2005 and 2011, he served as the general editor of Diacritics.

5-7pm, Sidney Smith Hall
Natalie Zemon Davis Conference Room, SS2098

NOTE: To participate in this Master Class, please email Kevin.Coleman@utoronto.ca to register.

Description

In Makihara Norio’s words, the “Osaka Incident was a revolutionary program of the left-wing of the LPR movement to overthrow by force the despotic Meiji government” (1982, 84). As one part of the Incident included a plan to assist Korean independence activists in a coup d’état against the conservatives in the Korean monarchy, scholars on the left such as Inoue Kiyoshi and right like Marius Jansen have located the origins of Japanese imperialist expansion in the Osaka Incident. As I will explain in this presentation, the political motivations of the actors in the Osaka Incident come directly from the left-wing of the LPR movement: liberation, egalitarianism, and mutual aid—in other words, the antithesis of (at least) white imperialist deportment. The leaders of the Osaka Incident, Kobayashi Kuzuo and Oi Kentarô, were consistently critical of all existing forms of state power, which included criticism of Japan’s imperialist posture towards Korea and China.
I will explain why the Incident had been overlooked in both Japanese and Anglophone scholarship, fill in the absences of previous scholarship with archival work I’ve done on the classified police interrogation reports and suggest ways a fuller understanding of the Incident it speaks to our political present.

Mark Driscoll is Associate Professor of Japanese and International Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After studying for five years at UC, Santa Cruz he received his PhD in East Asian Literature from Cornell in 2000. He has published a monograph on the Japanese imperial propagandist Yuasa Katsuei (Duke University Press, 2005) and a second book, also from Duke, called Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque. He has also published widely in cultural studies and postcolonial studies more broadly, including essays in Social Text, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, and Public Culture.

Description

This lecture examines the visual ethics of death and love expressed in a contemporary Cambodian Buddhist temple painting of the mahaparinibbana (or “death without remains”) of the Buddha at Wat Unnalom, an influential center of Buddhist education and religious renovation in Phnom Penh. Visual ethics,” as the term is used in this paper, refers to moral reflection on how to be with oneself and others in and through visual media. Drawing on recent work by anthropologist Kenneth George, this lecture explores how and why Buddhist paintings like this one do ethical work: how they communicate values, shape moral agents, delineate ideal relationships, and further, how they suggest and reveal modes of seeing the world as it really is, which might be described as moral vision.

Anne Hansen is Professor at the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia Center For Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include the history and development of Theravada Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia; Buddhist ethics; Pali and Khmer Buddhist literature; narrative and ethics; Buddhism and modernity; modern religious movements in Southeast Asia; and Theravadin visual culture in Southeast Asia.

Description

Yu-Ling Cheng is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and Director of the Centre for Global Engineering (CGEN) at the University of Toronto. She served as Chair of Engineering Science from 2000-2005. In addition, she co-developed the Biomedical Option, one of the first undergraduate biomedical engineering programs in the world. She served as Acting Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry in 2006 and was elected Speaker of Faculty Council in 2007. In 2008, she chaired the Dean’s Task Force on Globalization. This past year, she was recognized by the University of Toronto with a Distinguished Professor Award. Established in 2009, this award is designed to advance and recognize individuals with highly distinguished accomplishments. Yu-Ling will hold the title of Distinguished Professor in Global Engineering for a five-year term effective July 1, 2013.

Currently, she is leading a team of engineers in a project to reinvent the Western-style toilet to provide people in developing nations with affordable sanitation that doesn’t rely on running water, sewer systems or electricity. This effort is part of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Professor Cheng’s team was the only Canadian group selected for this project. They garnered third place for their innovative design during Phase 1 of the challenge and recently received funding to further develop their prototype.

Description

Opening remarks:
Dr. Vivienne Poy, Chair, Advisory Committee of the Hong Kong Canada Crosscurrents Project

Officiated by:
Dr. Eugene Kin Keung Chan, Convenor, Overseas Working Group, Basic Law Promotion Steering Committee
Miss Gloria Lo, Director, Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (Toronto)
Professor Ming K. Chan, Visiting Fellow, Stanford University
Mr. Larry Alford, Chief Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries
Dr. Jack Hang-tat Leong, Director, Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library

The Hong Kong Basic Law Portal, developed by the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library at the University of Toronto, serves as an online gateway to Basic Law research materials from major institutions around the world. The portal consultants include Prof Ming K Chan, Hong Kong expert at the Center for East Asian Studies of Stanford University and Prof Simon Young, former Director of the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong. The Canada-Hong Kong Library currently maintains the largest collection of both in-print and digital Basic Law-related documents in North America. The portal will provide free access to a most comprehensive collection of Basic Law materials, which will continue to be one of the primary focuses for the library’s collection development.

This launch marks the development of this online portal facilitating access to materials that the Library has collected over the last two decades. A brief introduction of HKBL and a selection of related research materials will be on display during the event.

Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP by 6 November 2013.

Description

The Centre for South Asian Studies
and The South Asian Journalists’ Association, Toronto
Present

A South Asia in the Media Event

Female Labor and Canadian Brands in Bangladesh: Reporting the Rana Plaza Disaster
On April 24, 2013, the eight-story Rana Plaza collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,129 and injuring more than 2,500 garment workers. But it was sight of a Joe Fresh label among the devastation that transformed the story for Canadians from another tragedy in the developing world. As a media story, the Rana Plaza tragedy forced an introspective look at the role of retailers, brands and consumers on the working conditions of women who make our clothes.

With

Tarannum Kamlani, Associate Producer CBC TV
Rick Westhead, Foreign Affairs writer, Toronto Star
Moderated by Sujata Berry, CBC Radio

Tarannum Kamlani has had a varied career in her dozen years in the news business, starting in New York in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks as part of the team that put together the New York Times’ Portraits of Grief project. Since moving to Toronto she’s worked on every kind of show from Breakfast Televison on CityTV to Power and Politics on CBC News Network and Q on CBC Radio One. Right now she’s an Associate Producer at CBC Television’s the fifth estate.

Rick Westhead is an award-winning foreign correspondent with The Toronto Star. He was based in New Delhi as the newspaper’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011, has won Mary Deanne Shears Award as The Star’s reporter of the year, and has also been a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Globe and Mail and the CBC.

Sujata Berry is an award-winning producer with the CBC Radio program “The Current”. In her 20 years as a producer Ms. Berry has worked at CBC News’ “The National” producing curent affairs programs and documentaries; and the Investigative Unit. She has also produced special news series as part of CBC News Content Units.

Description

This paper will explore two key concepts, which seem to relate quite differently to the spatialization of religion: syncretism, the mixing and synthesizing of different religions to create a sense of unity in one place, and diaspora, the creation of a sense of unity across different places. Syncretism is often described as the “localization” or “indigenization” of world religions, while diaspora involves the sacralization of an idea of home through the experience of exile and dispersal. Caodaism, founded in 1926 in French Indochina, has been a religion of decolonization and is now becoming a religion of diaspora, moving its axis of meaning from one that stretched back to the French metropole to one that extends across the Pacific Ocean. Summoning spiritual advisors that include Victor Hugo, Lenin, Jeanne d’Arc and even (in the US) Joseph Smith, its eclectic pantheon builds on East Asian ideas but expands to include a cast of sages of all ages, who now advise a global religious movement of about four million people.

Janet Hoskins is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Play of Time (1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies), Biographical Objects and the contributing editor of Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia, A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject and Fragments from Forests and Libraries.

Description

In the spirit of damayan, or “mutual aid in time of need,” the Asian Institute and the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies invite you to join us in a drop-in breakfast fundraiser to aid victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. Donations in any amount are welcome, with tax receipts issued for contributions of $20 and over.

As the media has reported, sustained winds reached 250 kilometres per hour, and with wind gusts of more than 300 kph, Haiyan was the most powerful tropical cyclone in recorded history to make landfall. It is estimated that the typhoon and its aftermath have affected more than 11 million people and the death toll is mounting. Our hearts go out to those who have suffered directly and their loved ones, many of whom are our neighbours, colleagues, and friends. We are sure that all of you have been emotionally overwhelmed by reports and images of the suffering and are seeking ways to help out.

Proceeds raised at the breakfast fundraiser will go to the Canadian Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders Canada for Typhoon Haiyan relief. The Government of Canada has pledged to match privately raised funds, so your generosity will automatically be doubled.

Please help us mount a strong collective response to this tragedy.

Description

The Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts, the Cinema Studies Institute, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, & Social Justice Education (OISE), New College, and co-sponsors, are pleased to present:

Cinematic Translations: The Work of John Akomfrah

A University of Toronto tri-campus 3-day event, focusing on Artist in Residence John Akomfrah, and featuring:

Nov 27:
STUDENT SALON with John Akomfrah and Keynote Speaker Manthia Diawara (New York University)
Screening of The Last Angel of History, with discussion following keynote
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave., 6:00-8:00 PM
Student reception 5:30-6:00 Innis Café

Nov 28:
JOHN AKOMFRAH IN CONVERSATION with Cameron Bailey (Artistic Director of TIFF) and Manthia Diawara (NYU) following screening of Seven Songs For Malcolm X
UTSC, MW 160, Mar 6:00-8:00 PM

Nov 29, 1:00 – 6:30pm:
SYMPOSIUM: Cinematic Translations: The Work of John Akomfrah
1:00-3:30 Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place
TO REGISTER FOR SYMPOSIUM: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ai/event/15147/

1:00-2:10
Chair: Ritu Birla (University of Toronto)
Panellists: Rinaldo Walcott, (OISE, University of Toronto), Kass Banning (University of Toronto)
Respondent: Malini Guha (Carleton University)

2:10-2:20 Break

2:20-3:30
Chair: Marieme Lo (University of Toronto)
Panellists: Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University), Pablo Idahosa (York University)
Respondent: Ato Quayson (University of Toronto)

3:30-4:00 Break

KEYNOTE CONVERSATION with John Akomfrah and Kobena Mercer (Yale University) on The Stuart Hall Project
4:00-6:30 Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave.

Description

Religious conflict in Indonesia has historically occurred largely along Muslim/Christian lines. Since the mid-2000s, however, non-Sunni Muslims—particularly Ahmadiyah and Shi’a groups—have increasingly been targets of violence and state repression.This new phenomenon is puzzling: until the 2000s, there was little—if any—violence against non-Sunni Muslim groups. For example, the Ahmadiyah population has co-existed peacefully with their Sunni counterparts since the arrival of the first Ahmadi missionaries in the 1920s. Drawing from a self-constructed database of events, this paper explores the sudden salience of non-Sunni Muslim groups in Indonesia’s social and political spheres. In particular, this paper focuses how formal institutional change have contributed to the shape of intergroup politics in Indonesia today.

Jessica Soedirgo is a PhD Student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on democracy, religion, and intergroup conflict in Indonesia.

NOTE: Please register by November 25th to receive (and have enough time to read) the outline of this talk. This way, every participant can make a difference by giving constructive suggestions to the speaker. Thank you for your cooperation.

Description

The Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts, the Cinema Studies Institute, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, & Social Justice Education (OISE), New College, and co-sponsors, are pleased to present:

Cinematic Translations: The Work of John Akomfrah
SYMPOSIUM
NOV 29
1:00 – 3:30pm
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place

1:00-2:10
Chair: Ritu Birla (University of Toronto)
Panellists: Rinaldo Walcott, (OISE, University of Toronto), Kass Banning (University of Toronto)
Respondent: Malini Guha (Carleton University)

2:10-2:20 Break

2:20-3:30
Chair: Marieme Lo (University of Toronto)
Panellists: Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University), Pablo Idahosa (York University)
Respondent: Ato Quayson (University of Toronto)

Description

Much has been written about the origins of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan during the early 1990s. Most scholars point to the important role that Pakistan played in the sponsorship of the Taliban during its early formative period. However, these analyses cannot explain why other comparable groups that received substantial external support from Pakistan and other regional powers failed to achieve the same degree of political power that the Taliban movement did. To address this puzzle, I propose a microeconomic explanation of the Afghan civil war during the 1990s, focusing particularly on the role of the local business community in financing sub-state armed groups. I argue that the Taliban’s initial momentum was a product of a business-Islamist alliance, rooted in the rational, strategic calculations of members of the Pakistan-Afghanistan transit trade industry. This analysis highlights the important and often overlooked role of local business interests in affecting civil war outcomes.

Aisha Ahmad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She specializes in international security and has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia. She holds a PhD from McGill University and was a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Description

Norm Tasevski is a co-founder and partner with Purpose Capital, and leads the firm’s business development efforts. Norm has spent his career working with and for impact-minded for-profit, non-profit and government organizations. Prior to Purpose Capital, Norm was a Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence with the Social Innovation Generation (SiG) program at MaRS, where he advised a portfolio of approximately 30 innovation-minded social organizations in topics ranging from business model refinement to investment readiness. As a management consultant with Aperio, Norm managed a portfolio of social enterprises, advising each from idea generation to initial market entry and capital acquisition. Norm’s career began as a policy advisor with the province of Ontario, leading multiple social policy portfolios involving social assistance, social housing, immigrant sponsorship, accessibility services and youth services. Norm left government as a senior policy advisor to join EVIDENCE, a social enterprise consulting firm of First Work. There, Norm helped build the consulting practice and managed over a dozen client projects. Norm then moved to become Managing Director with York Consulting Group where he led the business development effort and oversaw a team of up to 12 consultants.

Norm holds an MBA from the Schulich Business School, where he also teaches social entrepreneurship and impact investing at both the MBA and BBA levels. Norm also teaches social entrepreneurship to MEng students out of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, and frequently guest lectures in other schools such as the University of Waterloo, Ryerson University and Queen’s University. Norm teaches social entrepreneurship and impact investing at the University of Toronto and the Schulich Business School. Norm currently volunteers with two organizations. As Chairman of the Board of the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, Norm leverages his entrepreneurial background as the organization pursues the development of its own social enterprise. Norm is also a partner with Social Venture Partners Toronto, an organization that focuses on non-profit capacity building and growing the community of philanthropists in Toronto.

Description

The workshop will bring together authors who have submitted articles to the special issue of The Journal of Korean Studies on “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Korea” (publication scheduled for fall 2014).

Suzy Kim
Mothers and Maidens: Gendered Formation of Revolutionary Heroes in North Korea

Minjeong Kim
South Korean Rural Husbands, Subaltern Masculinity and International Marriage

Yoonjung Kang
Re-producing Gender and Kinship: Postpartum Care Practices in Contemporary South Korea

Jee Eun Song
The Soybean Paste Girl: The Cultural and Gender Politics of Coffee Consumption in Contemporary South Korea

Description

North Korea is often portrayed in mainstream media as a backward place without a history worth knowing. But during its founding years
(1945-1950), North Korea experienced a radical social revolution when everyday life became the single most important arena for experiencing the
revolution in progress. Historical accounts across the political spectrum characterize the five-year postliberation period as a period of competing
ideologies. But what distinguished these competing visions for Korea’s decolonization were not lofty political goals, since everyone advocated
independence and democracy, but the minute details of how everyday life should be organized. In that sense, everyday life became the primary site
of revolutionary struggle in North Korea, and serves as the most useful theoretical category for understanding the North Korean Revolution in
particular, and social revolutions in general, as expressions of a heroic modernist impulse.

Suzy Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in History from the
University of Chicago. Her research focuses on North Korea’s social and cultural history. Her book Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution,
1945-1950 was recently published by Cornell University Press. Her teaching and research interests focus on modern Korean history with particular
attention to gender studies, oral history, and social theory.

Description

Why do some ethnic groups abroad receive high levels of Western-based solidarity while others do not? Prominent recipients of such solidarity include Chileans and Darfuris, while prominent non-recipients include Tamils and Kurds. Existing research on the ‘discriminatory’ patterns of Western activism has focused on where advocacy efforts of the powerful human rights NGOs, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have been directed (Bob 2005). However, the explanatory power of this hypothesis is limited as there have been campaigns run by these NGOs that have fallen on deaf ears, failing to spark solidarity movement formation. While the work of these NGOs matters, this paper suggests that part of the variations in the level of Western solidarity given to groups abroad can be explained by looking at the advocacy work of diasporas in the West. Contrary to what we might expect, groups abroad with small or relatively un-mobilized diasporas in the West are more likely to be recipients of Western solidarity than groups that have large mobilized Western diasporas. There are at least two reasons for this outcome. First, strong diaspora movements tend to generate ethnic advocacy frames rather than universal frames. Second, large mobilized diasporas create incentives for local movements in the homeland to focus their international advocacy on the diaspora and not on mobilizing non-diasporic support. This paper will show how this perspective can help to explain the formation of the Western solidarity movement for a free Tibet.

David Zarnett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His doctoral research looks at why some human rights abusing states provoke more widespread attention from transnational human rights activists than others. He is a recent recipient of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and his work has been published in Democratiya and the St. Antony’s International Review. He began his doctoral work at the University of Oxford before returning to Toronto and has degrees from Queen’s University and King’s College London.

NOTE: Please register by December 11 to receive (and have enough time to read) the outline of this talk. This way, every participant can make a difference by giving constructive suggestions to the speaker. Thank you for your understanding.

Description

Stan Zlotkin is the Chief of Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Senior Scientist with Child Health Evaluative Sciences, and a Professor of Nutritional Sciences and Paediatrics at the University of Toronto. In his program, the Sprinkles Global Health Initiative, Dr. Zlotkin has focused on research and advocacy to control micronutrient malnutrition in children. It is estimated that as many as 750 million children in developing countries suffer from micronutrient malnutrition. Challenged by UNICEF to come up with a viable and reproducible solution to the problem of micronutrient malnutrition, Dr. Zlotkin and his research team developed the concept of micronutrient powders for “home-fortification” of complementary foods.

Dr. Zlotkin is past Chair of the Canadian Paediatric Society Nutrition Committee and is a frequent consultant to governments and UN agencies on issues related to global child health nutrition. His advocacy work was recognized by CIHR in 2006 with award of the prestigious CIHR National Knowledge Translation Award for “outstanding contributions to the health of children worldwide.” He was awarded the HJ Heinz Humanitarian Award in 2001 for his international contribution to the health of children globally. In 2007, he was awarded the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honour in Canada, for his contributions to improving the lives of children globally. He is known internationally as a successful social entrepreneur for his work on home fortification and was awarded an International Ashoka Fellowship in 2007.

Today, Dr. Zlotkin continues to head the Sprinkles Global Health Initiative at The Hospital for Sick Children and is an active researcher with well over 100 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Zlotkin was appointed as Vice-President Medical and Academic Affairs at SickKids in 2010 and in September 2012 he was named as the inaugural Chief of the SickKids Centre for Global Child Health.

Description

In the course of diplomatic interactions, the leader of a state may make promises or threats to induce another state to act (or deter from acting) in certain ways, but if they are not carried out, the leader is likely to suffer some political costs domestically. These costs are called domestic “audience costs”. While the concept has been central to the literature of international relations theory for some time, there has been only scant attempt to show empirically whether such costs actually exist and to what degree the costs vary across different democracies. This study expands on Tomz’ work on audience cost in the UK and the US: Japan’s prime minister is usually described as one of the least influential political leaders within the family of advanced democracies. Furthermore, throughout the post World War II period, Japan has never engaged in military activities, and its foreign policy options have been limited to less aggressive means such as the imposition of economic sanctions and the dispatch of peacekeeping forces under the United Nations’ auspices. While Japan is thus a “least likely case” where it would be difficult to find the domestic audience, the evidence shows unequivocally that the leaders in Japan seem to suffer audience costs identical to those found in the United States and Great Britain.

Professor Kohno is currently the Director of the Research Institute of Contemporary Japanese systems at Waseda University. He also serves as Research Affiliate for Waseda Institute for Advanced Studies and as Advisor for the University’s International Affairs Division. Before joining Waseda, he taught at University of British Columbia (1994-98) and at Aoyama Gakuin University (1998-2003), and he was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution (1996-97). Professor Kohno received his Bachelor of Laws in 1985 from Sophia University, M.A. (International Relations) in 1987 from Yale, and Ph.D. (political science) in 1994 from Stanford.

Description

As 2014 opens, the hosting of the annual Group of Eight summit will pass from the United Kingdom to Russia and the hosting of the now annual Group of Twenty summit will have just passed from Russia to Australia. This moment also marks the end of the first five years of G20 summitry, the start of the fifteenth anniversary of the creation of the G20 at the finance ministers’ level and the end of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1988 G7 summit held in Toronto, in part at the University of Toronto itself. That last event inspired the creation of the G8 Research Group and its Robert H. Catherwood Scholarship Program, as well as the G20 Research Group and BRICS Research Group. It is thus an appropriate time to assess what has been accomplished by G8 and G20 summitry, where such summitry is headed in the years ahead, what we now know about how such summitry works and how it can be improved.

To address these key questions in contemporary global summit governance, the G8 Research Group and its co-sponsors are mounting a one-day conference at Trinity College at the University of Toronto on January 10, 2014. Assembling speakers from the greater Toronto area, across Canada, Russia and elsewhere, its specific purposes are to:

1. Educate our students in our relevant courses, programs, G8 and G20 Research Groups and their alumni about global summit governance through these central forums;

2. Present and evaluate the scholarship of the colleagues and students from the G8 and G20 Research Groups and their associates;

3. Have practitioners reflect on their experience in G8 and G20 governance;

4.Assess what we know and need to know about G8 and G20 summit governance;

5.Identify what can be improved and what initiatives can be developed for 2014; and

6. Commemorate our recent Catherwood Scholarship winners and the authors of books supported by the G8 and G20 Research Groups.

Description

Hearts of Pine focuses on the selves and social lives that these three women cultivated through song. During four decades of post-war public secrecy about the comfort women system, song served for these women as both a private and a public means of coping with their trauma-each used song in a different way to reckon with their experiences and to forge a new sense of self. In the 1990s a nationalist movement arose in South Korea to seek redress from the Japanese government and to tend to the previously-shunned comfort women survivors in their old age. Suddenly these women, and many others like them, found themselves pulled from the margins of society and thrust into the very center of the public cultural spotlight. Appearing on television and radio as well as at political events and protest rallies, the “comfort women grandmothers” collectively functioned as an emblem of the horrors Japan inflicted on long “enslaved” Korea-a Korea that had now overcome Japanese domination. But while the women were to stand forward as symbols of Korea’s triumph over metaphorical enslavement, they were largely swallowed up by an archetypal, faceless “comfort woman victim” in the public cultural imaginary. Yet in the face of the selective interests and forces of the public cultural imagination, and directly into the media spotlights of South Korean public culture itself, all three of these women continued to use song as a means of expressing the particularity of their experiences publicly.

Hearts of Pine paints intimate and tenderly crafted portraits of three off-beat old women in a South Korean old age home, who made routine appearances on national television and radio. In so doing, this lecture addresses basic questions about the power of music vis-à-vis other forms of social expression, illuminates the history of Korean music in the twentieth century, and tells a new history of the “comfort women” system and postwar South Korean public culture.

Joshua D. Pilzer is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of music in modern Korea and Japan, women’s musical worlds, and the relationships between music, survival, memory, traumatic experience, marginalization, public culture, mass media, social practice and identity. He is particularly interested in the analysis of everyday musical practice as a life resource. His introduces his 2012 book in this presentation. Since 2011, he has been doing fieldwork for his second book, an ethnography of song and speech among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan. He has published articles in Ethnomusicology, Dongyang Umak Yeonggu, and ,The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Description

Media both reflects the norms and values which undergird the social and political fabric of a community and, in turn, a community’s media representations can help shape perceptions that a particular society holds of itself and others. This is no different in the context of North Korea, and the media framing of the DPRK both in South Korea and internationally shape developments on the peninsula through its ability to shape public opinion towards a country characterized as a “hermit kingdom”. How have key incidents and crises relating to North Korea been portrayed in North America and South Korea? What purpose does this framing serve, and what interests are at play in the framing of North Korean developments within human rights discourses?

Please join the INDePth Conference, in collaboration with the Contemporary Asian Studies Student Union, as we host “Beyond the “Hermit Kingdom”: Media Perception and Depiction of North Korea” next Monday, January 13th from 4 to 6 PM in room 208N at the Munk School. The panel discussion will include Ann Shin, Gilad Cohen, and Jack Kim.

DISTINGUISHED GUESTS

ANN SHIN:
Ann has been a Producer and Director for CBC, Discovery, HGTV, History, W and Food Network. Her latest cross-platform documentary The Defector: Escape from North Korea was filmed undercover, following North Koreans on a 5,000 km escape journey. The film has screened at 20 international film festivals and has been nominated for 4 awards to date, winning the Canadian Digi Award and FITC Award.

GILAD COHEN:
Gilad Cohen is the Founder and Executive Director of Jayu, a Toronto-based organization using arts to raise awareness of human rights abuses. Founded in 2012, the organization has held two annual film festivals in Toronto with each festival focusing on North Korea. In 2012, Gilad spoke during the 19th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland. He has a post grad in International Development.

JACK KIM:
Jack is the founder and former executive director of HanVoice, the largest organization in Canada advocating on behalf of North Korean human rights and refugees. He is also on the board of Jayu: The North Korean Human Rights Film Festival, and is the Managing Editor at www.jangmadang.ca, the only blog in Canada devoted completely to North Korean issues. He frequently consults decision-makers in Canada with regards to North Korean issues, and has been part of private consultations with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, among others. During the day, Jack is an immigration lawyer at Fragomen (Canada), the largest immigration firm in the world.

Description

Globalization needs to be governed. Our current infrastructure of global governance institutions is in urgent need of repair, expansion, and adaptation. The key relationship for progress in global institution-building is the one between established powers of the OECD and emerging powers. Under what conditions are they able to set aside conflicts of interests and successfully cooperate in advancing global rules and institutions? What are areas of progress and areas of failure? Among emerging powers, China is the critical player

Yves Tiberghien evaluates and contrasts and evaluates China’s changing behaviour on several dimensions of global economic and environmental governance: global finance/G20, international monetary system, global trade, climate change, energy governance, and genetically-modified foods. He argues that China mostly plays the role of a systemic stabilizer, with elements of veto and elements of innovation. Yet, China’s approach to the global governance question is fluid and diverse, offering a range of approaches on different issue areas. The presentation emphasizes the interplay between socializing/learning at the global level and coalition-building at the domestic level.

This talk builds on years of field interviews in China and at the global level, as well as participant observations of recent G20 summits (Cannes, Los Cabos, St Petersburg) as a senior Fellow with the Global Summitry Project, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

Description

Canada needs an Air Force that is expeditionary and able to rapidly respond to different types of operations across the spectrum of conflict, at home and abroad. During the last five years, the RCAF has transformed itself into an effective, combat-capable, flexible, and responsive expeditionary force. It has reorganized its assets in such a way that it can activate, operate and support two deployed operating bases – in Canada or abroad, and in austere conditions – in order to carry out a multitude of mission types.

With its new expeditionary capability, the RCAF has the versatility, flexibility and responsiveness needed to better meet the security challenges of the 21st century. The value of having an air expeditionary capability was ably demonstrated by several recent deployments, including the NATO operation to help the people of Libya and the recent humanitarian operation to help the people of the Philippines recover from Typhoon Haiyan.

Description

Since the time when humans began living in sedentary communities more than 12,000 years ago, the majority of permanent settlements have had small populations where relationships based on kinship have provided the basis for social order and political influence. With the emergence of urban centers containing large and diverse populations, new types of relationships and identities that supplemented kinship were needed to provide order and legitimacy. During the mid-first millennium CE, members of the Dvaravati culture of central Thailand faced these challenges as they developed the region’s first cities and towns. In this talk, I examine how the residents of Dvaravati centers created new identities and relationships by infusing their own indigenous traditions with religious and political ideologies from South Asia. Public monuments played a key role in this process by reinforcing group membership during their construction and use, as well as by allowing emerging elites to materialize ideologies that supported their authority. Finally, through a comparison of Dvaravati urbanism with urban traditions elsewhere in Southeast Asia and beyond, I highlight the common features of low density urban centers in Asia that challenge some long-standing ideas about life in early cities.

Description

In The Gift of Freedom, Mimi Thi Nguyen develops a new understanding of contemporary United States empire and its self-interested claims to provide for others the advantage of human freedom. Bringing together critiques of liberalism with postcolonial approaches to the modern cartography of progress, Nguyen proposes “the gift of freedom” as the name for those forces that avow to reverence aliveness and beauty, and to govern an enlightened humanity, while producing new subjects and actions—such as a grateful refugee, or enduring war—in an age of liberal empire. From the Cold War to the global war on terror, the United States simultaneously promises the gift of freedom through war and violence and administers the debt that follows. Focusing here on the figure of Pham Thi Kim Phuc, Nguyen looks at the Vietnam War-era photograph of “accidental napalm” so often remembered as the failure of the gift of freedom to unfold how, through an appeal to forgiveness and the promise of beauty, liberalism’s empire redeems its violence.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war and its afterlife (Duke University Press, 2012). She is also co-editor with Fiona I.B. Ngo and Mariam Lam of a special issue of positions on Southeast Asians in diasporas (Winter 2012).

Description

Ellie Avishai is the Founder and Director of I-Think, a unique initiative at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. I-Think adapts Rotman’s pioneering integrative thinking curriculum, which aims to engender self-reflective thinking and creative problem-solving in MBA students, to the world of elementary and secondary education.

In the span of four years, I-Think has grown from a single pilot program to a key initiative at over a dozen schools in Toronto and a partner of the Toronto District School Board. I-Think has drawn considerable media attention from newspapers such as the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the Financial Times of London. It was recently listed as one of the 50 Reasons to Love Toronto in Toronto Life Magazine.

Prior to her work at Rotman, Ellie taught in both public schools and education- focused NGOs. Working for three years within the Toronto District School Board, she developed new curricula for Special Education, as well as coordinated and taught within two Special Education departments. Her decade of experience in the not-for-profit sector included directing the volunteer program for Peace by PEACE Toronto and serving on its Board of Directors as Secretary and Strategic Planning Chair. Ellie also worked in project management, public relations, and recruitment for the national youth service learning program Katimavik. She also worked as a strategy consultant with the NeXus consulting group, which aims to further the sustainability of non-profits through the application of social enterprise business models. Ellie teaches in the Rotman School of Management’s Executive Education and Commerce programs. She was a 2005 recipient of the Bealight Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurs.

Description

This talk presents a discussion of the political economy of two different Southeast Asian polities. I begin with a discussion of an early state located in the Mekong Delta region of Cambodia and Vietnam. Chinese visitors in the first few centuries AD called this area the kingdom of Funan, which many scholars believe laid the foundations for the later Angkorian Empire. Interaction with and influence from India and South Asia is believed to have been a major factor for the emergence of this early state. However, the role that inter- and intraregional trade played has long been poorly understood. In this presentation I discuss the results of my dissertation research examining early exchange networks through a study of important trade goods from South Asia: stone and glass beads. These prestige objects were exchanged across mainland Southeast Asia and are primarily found in burial contexts. Through compositional and stylistic analyses of beads from Iron Age (500 BC – AD 500) sites in Cambodia and Thailand, several distinct regional trading networks were identified. I argue that evidence for changing trade networks is related to an increase in trade with India and an expansion of power by elites in the Mekong Delta, contributing to the emergence of the early state of Funan. In the second portion of my talk I present a new research project which focuses on the excavation of a house mound within the Angkor Wat enclosure. This research provides an opportunity to explore the role that households played in the political and ritual economy of the Angkorian Empire.

Description

This discussion examines the largest evacuation movement of the Korean War, the January 4th Retreat of 1951. Far larger than the civilian displacement following the surprise start of the war on June 25, 1950, the retreat was characterized by evacuations from both sides of the 38th parallel. Three different groups of people were targeted for relief: refugees from the north, the internally displaced from the south, and war sufferers. This talk will examine how each group was treated by official relief organizations and the general conditions for refugees in the winter of 1951.

Janice Kim is an Associate Professor of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled, “Between Mountains: Refugee Life during the Korean War,” which explores the social and economic history of refugees and civilian livelihood during and after the Korean War.

Description

Panel I: Imaginaries and Practices of Political and Economic Justice
Presenters: Noaman Ali, Jaby Mathew

Presentation 1: Noaman Ali
Department: Political Science

Title: Class struggle in between political society and civil society: peasants, land and democracy in northwestern Pakistan

Abstract:

Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of “political society” sees the extra-legal political engagement of subaltern communities as a form of democratic empowerment. Chatterjee’s formulation has justifiably been criticized for ignoring how class striates “communities” and results in unequal distribution of the benefits claimed through political society. A related line of criticism has focused on how elites solidify their privileges by acting extra-legally, while subaltern groups empower themselves through engagement with the rule of law and the institutions of the liberal state (i.e., through civil society). Examining peasant struggles over land in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, my paper challenges the dichotomy between political society and civil society. While richer peasants are often able to make use of the political and legal system (i.e., both political and civil society) to assert their occupation or even titles to land (among other benefits), poorer peasants are more systematically vulnerable to the depredations of landlords. Moreover, it is precisely the depredations of capital at the provincial and national levels, advanced through civil society, that make political society so perverse for all peasants and landless workers. The crucial factor here is not the rule of law and adherence to liberal proceduralism, but class power and class struggle. The conceptual and normative parameters of liberal democratic theory (whether “political” or “civil”), which rely on obscuring class struggle, need to be transcended in order to assess and advance the interests of subaltern groups.

Respondent: Katherine Rankin

Presenter 2: Jaby Mathew
Department: Political Science

Title: From History-Memory to Minority Rights: Conceptions of representing a “Distinctive Community” among Leaguers (1906-1936)

Abstract:

This paper is part of my dissertation work examining the available and possible normative justifications to redress the persistent under-representation of Muslims in post-independent Indian legislatures. Reading through the Muslim League documents between 1906 -1936, this paper argues that there are two different justificatory accounts offered by Leaguers for separate representation of/for “Indian Muslims,” both resting on the idea of a “distinctive community” with interests unique and un-representable by non-Muslims. The earlier positions articulated around Morley-Minto reforms drew from the political ideas of Sir Syed, and present also in the Address made by Simla Deputation to Viceroy Minto, resists the label of “minority” accorded to the community through colonial enumerative practices and notions of rights that may come along with it. Rather, the demand is framed in the language of recognition invoking a specific “history” – of ruler-ship, dominance and glory – and a “collective memory” of that history among “Indian Muslims.” This claim is supplemented by additional arguments; central among them is the argument of “socio-political weight” of the community for the empire based on numerical strength. By the time of the next set of reforms in 1919 the demands are couched in the liberal framework of right to minorities. But as opposed to western liberal idea of rights for minorities as protecting individuals, the League’s conceptualization of minority rights was for safeguarding a community and the shared interests and ethos of its members. This “cultural turn” opens avenues for an alternative version of liberalism emerging in the South Asian context. This paper attempts to examine these two justificatory frameworks as possibilities to think through contemporary claims to redress the issue of legislative under-representation of Muslims in contemporary India.

Respondent: Frank Cody

Panel II: Capital, Media and Globality
Presenters: Askhaya Tankha; Prasanta Dhar

Presenter 1: Akshaya Tankha
Department: Art History

Title: The image of culture and the cultures of images that prevail in Nagaland

Abstract:

2013 marked the 13th year that the Hornbill Festival was celebrated in Nagaland, a state in northeast India with a population that is 89% indigenous and predominantly Christian besides a postcolonial history of armed movements against the Indian state that have waged fractured battles for political autonomy since India gained independence in 1947. The image of ‘tribal culture’ has been central to India’s promotion of the region as a ‘land of festivals’ through events such as the annual Hornbill Festival, media campaigns, renovations to the state museum and the promotion of ‘tourist villages’ since the mid 1990s, when the country removed restrictions for a greater flow of global capital into an otherwise protected economy and signed a landmark ceasefire agreement with separatist factions. But an overt agreement to cease armed opposition has not ended the movements for political autonomy. Far from it, online forums and the local market place reveals a host of practices where the ‘image’ of culture remains central to alternative political imaginaries of Nagaland. Furthermore, the local consumption of popular culture reveals pre- and post globalization market enabled ways of ‘being Naga’ that depart from the normative image of the region as exclusively ‘tribal’. Based on a preliminary survey of the region, my paper will address some of the material, imagistic and performative ways in which local identitarian constructs operate alongside an increasingly dominant image of Nagaland as part of India’s cultural diversity, illustrating, expanding and challenging the encompassment associated with visual and cultural production under conditions of globalized capital.

Respondent: Meghan Sutherland

Presenter 2: Prasanta Dhar
Department: History

Title: Intimate Immateriality: Reading Marx’s Writings in India in the 1940s

Abstract:
Most of Marx’s own writings — including The German Ideology and Notes on Indian History — were not published till the 1930s. Over the next few decades, these ‘new’ books were read for and against classical Marxism, thereby generating debates across global sites. Thus, in the 1940s, Indian historians engaged in a debate on Marx’s writings on India. Some of them claimed that Marx did argue that British rule was bringing social revolution in India while others refuted that claim based on a reading of Marx’s Notes on Indian History. These critical Marxists also dismantled classical Marxist theories such as ‘historical materialism’. Their interventions fundamentally changed the mode of writing history of colonial India and planted the earliest seed of Subaltern Studies. Interestingly, however, these ‘new’ works of Marx, especially Notes on Indian History and The German Ideology, could not have been materially present in contemporary India, although they were being read politically fruitfully. Why was it necessary for the Marxists to ‘read’ these books that were not there? My paper historicizes this Marx-reading culture in India in the 1940s, showing how current methods in bibliography and textual criticism can effectively historicize the uneven political economy of global circulation of Marxism. However, the current theories in that field do not help us much to theorize such effective, yet unconventional, reading practices.

Respondent: Bhavani Raman

Description

Studying how technology and society were co-constructed in prehistory can help us think more clearly about the potential implications of contemporary technological choices. I use an intensive study of earth-working implements from the Hemudu culture (7,000-5,000 BP) in the Lower Yangzi Basin of China to examine the relationship between technology and Neolithic land-use strategies for plant production and sedentary construction. My investigations I involved soil science, replication and analysis of bone and stone artifacts, use-wear analysis, zooarchaeology, and a large number of controlled experiments. Multiple sources of evidence suggest that Hemudu artisans and tool users made technological choices of spades based on easy-to-perceive benefits. Frequency-dependent bias (i.e., the tendency to copy the solutions
employed by the majority) within a household production system helped ensure the persistence of traditional implements even when raw materials became scarce and other artefacts would have provided marginal advantages. The resultant technological tradition imposed significant technical and conceptual constraints on long-term land-use strategies and caused a prolonged process toward intensification of agriculture and sedentary settlement.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

How can we understand long-term regional cooperation among illiberal states? Despite having a number of conflict-generating conditions, such as regime change and instability, territorial disputes, a lack of democratic development, and variation in hegemonic engagement, the regions of Southeast Asia and South America have experienced long-term regional security cooperation. It is the contention of this paper, and the larger dissertation project of which it is part, that regional stability cannot be understood alone by reference to domestic interests, power politics, or successful institutional creation in a functionalist sense. Rather, the development of habituated dispositions have profound constitutive effect and assist in explaining long-term cooperation.

Sociological and psychological literature suggest that social interaction is shaped by self-evident knowledge and routine action, yet the logics of habit and practicality have only recently been introduced to IR (Hopf 2002; Pouliot 2010). Building on nascent work in IR and insights from sociology, this paper has two aims. First, it articulates the puzzle of long-term regional stability in Southeast Asia (1960s-1990s) and South America (1880s-1990s). In neither case do traditional theories focused on materialist nor liberal variables provide substantive insights. Second, it seeks to provide the foundations for a novel explanation that centres of the norms and habits of regional interactions, and the cognitive and institutional mechanisms through which they have effect.

Aarie Glas is a Ph.D. candidate and research assistant in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His doctoral research explores the normative and habitual foundations of regional diplomacy in Southeast Asia and South America. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and McMaster University.

Important Note to Registration* : You should register by Wednesday Jan. 29th to receive (and have enough time to read) the outline of this talk. This way, every participant can make a difference by giving constructive suggestions to the speaker. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

Description

Drawing on two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia, Land’s End offers an intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders who privatized their common land to plant a global market crop, cacao. Some prospered; others lost their land. It is a story with potent messages for social movement activists, who expect indigenous people to be guardians of community and tradition, committed to sustaining food production. It also interrupts transition narratives that expect people who lose their land to march off to the city to find a job. For these newly landless highlanders, as for many other post-peasants across Asia, jobs are scarce. When land’s end is a dead end, a different politics must emerge.

Tania Murray Li is Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy and Culture of Asia in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and author of Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press 2014), Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (with Derek Hall and Philip Hirsch, NUS Press, 2011), and The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Duke, 2007).

Join us for a presentation and discussion session with Tania Li, Derek Hall, and Christopher Krupa.

Description

This roundtable takes up infrastructure as a key site of methodological and theoretical innovation for critical development studies. The panelists will comment on approaches to interrogating infrastructures from different disciplinary perspectives, and based on long-term engagements with different South (and Southeast) Asian worlds. Their perspectives depart from conventional ‘impact studies’ that connote the teleologies of modernization.

Road building and automobility in particular express a powerful modernist aspiration for democracy and improvement through enhanced accessibility, mobility and aesthetics, and constitute a special focus of the panel. The panel will take up the kinds of questions that could help forge an approach to studying infrastructure-in-the-making. What competing governance projects assemble to build the road? What labor processes are enrolled? What cultures of entrepreneurship, market relations, and sociality are facilitated or diminished? What economic, political, and cultural subjectivities predominate? How does road building articulate cultural ideologies of caste, gender, ethnicity and class? What sensory and affective modes do roads and automobility enable? And what methodologies are best suited to interrogating infrastructure, as both complicit in prevailing hegemonies, while also harboring possibilities for critical insight?

Description

In the 1990s, China opened up the country’s vast mineral resources to international investment. Over the past decade, the Chinese government has reformulated its mining legislation to attract foreign companies into the mining sector with the hope of speeding up its ‘modernization’. Between 2001 and 2004, the number of foreign mining projects quickly increased from 150 to 279. Only a few years later, many of these projects have been halted; and some of them never fully realized. Only 92 foreign mining projects were registered by the end of 2010. Currently, notwithstanding the abundance of unexplored mineral deposits, many foreign companies have departed the Chinese market and moved their interests to Mongolia or elsewhere, and most of the remaining ones are only involved in selling equipment and marketing efforts. However, foreign investors’ hopes of being successful in the Chinese land of opportunity have not faded entirely. Through the analysis of Canadian experiences in the Chinese mining sector, this research aims to identify and assess the theories and practices that have contributed to a decrease of Canadian direct investment in China. While comparing their experiences, I argue that international firms continue, on the one hand, to feel stymied by an inconsistent and convoluted mining policy and their inability to create relationships of trust with local mining stakeholders, and on the other hand, to feel threatened by the Chinese government due to their support for the expansion of Chinese domestic companies. The aim of this research is to not only clarify the issues at stake, but also to encourage constructive dialogue and promote fair trade between China and Canada.

Dr. Elena Caprioni is a research affiliate of the the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. She received her PhD in Chinese Modern and Contemporary from the University of Cagliari (Italy) in 2009, focusing her dissertation research on Uyghur-Han ethnic relations. Elena then undertook post-doctoral studies at the Institute of Asian Research (UBC, Vancouver) for two years on Uyghur sexist proverbs, and the Western Development Program in peripheral China, with an emphasis on Canadian mining companies. Over the past year Elena has been the Program Director of the Asian Business and Management Program at York University.