Description

This presentation of a book project draws on the previous research on censorship in the Eastern bloc, but advances the discussion and the theory of state-socialist censorship by 1. re-focusing the inquiry from literature to social sciences and humanities; 2. attempting a more complex treatment of writing and publishing under the conditions of censorship, by bringing together multiple actors and levels at which censorship was deployed; 3. striving for a nuanced account of repression, resistance, negotiation, and complicity. It looks at all stages of the writing process from the inception of an idea to post-publication reception and at the institutional and policy context surrounding this process. The agency and negotiations of the creative actors, rather than their instrumentalization by censoring repressions of the state institutions stand in the centre of this inquiry.

Czechoslovakia and Hungary are the countries of investigation, but the project takes a broader perspective that includes the former Soviet Union and most other countries of East Central and Eastern Europe. Oral history interviews constitute the backbone of the project, complemented by contemporary science-policy documents and the archive of the Editorial Board of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

Libora Oates-Indruchová obtained her PhD from Lancaster University, UK and a „habilitation“ in Literary and Cultural Studies from Szeged University, Hungary. She is Professor of Sociology of Gender at the University of Graz (A). Her research interests include cultural representations of gender, gender and social change, censorship, and narrative research, with a focus on state-socialist and post state-socialist Czech Republic. She recently published “Self-Censorship and Aesopian Language of Scholarly Texts of Late State Socialism” (The Slavonic and East European Review 96 [2018], 4: 614-641). Her book Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Press, 1969-89: Snakes and Ladders was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2020.

Description

This is the second lecture in a two-part series, “The Political Life of Architecture.” The two parts can be viewed together or independently.

The first part of this series, on the IMEL/Biltmore Hotel in Tbilisi, is available on our YouTube channel (search: CERESMunk).

Just south of Skopje’s central square is one of the city’s most opulent neoclassical buildings, known locally as the “White Palace.” Contrary to first impressions, this building inspired by classical antiquity is not old, but was constructed in 2012 as the political headquarters of the VMRO-DPMNE party. In this second talk on the political life of architecture, Suzanne Harris-Brandts tells the story of how the White Palace came to take on its opulent form and the power and wealth that it has afforded the VMRO-DPMNE party along the way. She breaks down three interconnected scales at which power is expressed relative to the party headquarters: (1) the Architectural, foregrounding the White Palace’s design and construction; (2) the Urban, examining broader city building and real estate extortion practices in Skopje funding the party, and; (3) the Historical/Regional, looking at the irredentist, ethnonationalist narratives expressed through architectural symbolism, supporting the party ideologically. Built during VMRO-DPMNE’s time in office (2006-2016) and amidst its undertaking of the highly contentious ‘Skopje 2014’ urban renewal campaign, the White Palace exemplifies the interconnected nature of power and space in North Macedonia. The nuances of how different forms of authoritarian rule operate spatially through the city’s built landscape and how they result in distinct approaches to city building are thus epitomized in the project. This research is based on data collected through fieldwork in Skopje, including site observations, media analysis, personal interviews, and focus groups. It is part of a chapter in the forthcoming book ‘Spatializing Authoritarianism,’ edited by Natalie Koch and published by Syracuse University Press.

Dr. Suzanne Harris-Brandts is an Assistant Professor in the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, and a Faculty Associate with the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University. Her research brings together design and the social sciences to explore issues of power, equity, and collective identity in the built environment. Suzanne’s current book project, entitled ‘Constructing the Capital,’ draws from her dissertation uncovering the politics of urban development and image making in Eurasian capital cities. It examines city building campaigns in part-democratic/ part-authoritarian hybrid regimes, foregrounding the cases of Tbilisi, Georgia and Skopje, North Macedonia. The work demonstrates how architecture and urban design are manipulated for power retention in such regimes, while also highlighting bottom-up, community-based strategies to resist these actions. Suzanne received her PhD in Urban Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a licenced architect in Ontario and co-founder of Collective Domain, a design-research practice for spatial analysis, urban activism, architecture, and media in the public interest.

Videos of our public events are posted on our YouTube channel within approximately 10 days.

Description

Greece (and other southern European countries) have experienced in the early 2010s an unprecedented economic and financial crisis which has led many people to emigrate. Those leaving were generally highly educated and they mainly headed towards EU countries as they had the right to free movement as EU citizens. Our research results though suggested that while important, economic reasons were far from being the exclusive, or even the predominant driver of highly skilled emigration from Greece. The desire to improve one’s training and career perspective, to increase employability and derive individual satisfaction from occupation, was mentioned by more than half of our respondents in a survey conducted in 2013 in all southern European countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece). The strongest emigration potential was to be found among those who were dissatisfied with the quality of life and their job prospects at the home country, and who refuses to renounce what they thought they could/should achieve in terms of life style and overall satisfaction. These findings will be the starting point of a reflection on what shapes highly skilled emigration from Greece today. Perhaps the lessons learnt from the financial and Eurozone crisis of the early 2010s can serve as a compass for navigating the post-pandemic downturn and recovery.

Anna Triandafyllidou holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is an internationally recognized sociologist and migration policy expert whose interdisciplinary research focuses on the governance of migration and asylum; the management of cultural diversity, nationalism and identity issues; and overall, the contemporary challenges of migration and integration across different world regions. Prior to her CERC at Ryerson University, Triandafyllidou was based in Florence, Italy, where she held a Robert Schuman Chair at the European University Institute and directed the Cultural Pluralism Research Area as part of the European University Institute’s Global Governance Programme.

Description

In a democracy numbers matter. Demography may not be destiny but it shapes political power in the way that water shapes rock. Put simply, when populations change, power changes hands. This lecture is about how shrinking ethnic and racial majorities in Western democracies are trying to adjust to a future in which their declining numbers threaten their majority status. It’s not about how people elect their governments, but rather how different governments select their people. This occurs by re-designing citizenship criteria and electoral law, by crafting new immigration regimes, by employing practices like gerrymandering and voter suppression, and by changing national narratives. The central argument is that today’s clash between liberalism and illiberalism is at root a contest between two contrasting ideals of the “people”. Liberalism is a vote for an inclusive body politic, representing the diversity of modern society, in which the only majority that matters is the one born on election day. Illiberalism, by contrast, is a belief that the political and national community should be aligned. It’s an effort to try and preserve the indigenous character of national democracies at a time of dramatic change in ethnic, racial or generational composition.

Short bio: Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of The International Crisis Group and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is the author of “Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe” ( Penguin, 2020); The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Allen Lane, 2019), co-authored with Stephen Holmes – won the 30th Annual Lionel Gelber Prize; “After Europe” (UPenn Press, 2017); “Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest” (UPenn Press, 2014) and “In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders?” (TED Books, 2013). Ivan Krastev is the winner of the Jean Améry Prize for European Essay Writing 2020.

Description

How is digital entrepreneurship, led by start-up companies and backed by venture capital, transforming the Greek economy? How might this movement be expanded to better enable Greece to improve its economic prospects? What steps might be taken to limit the social costs of disruption and enhance its benefits?

Stergios Anastasiadis was born in Canada to Greek immigrant parents, finished his secondary school education (Lyceum) in Greece, and returned to Canada to complete degrees at the University of Toronto and McGill University. He has worked in the technology space for more than thirty years, building teams and creating and scaling products. Most recently he has focused his energies in the start-up space, drawing on experience at Google, Good Technology, and Shopify. Stergios has worked with product development, user experience, design and data teams throughout his career. As an engineer he has enjoyed building systems in consumer and enterprise spaces and, most recently, in the area of big data and machine learning. Anastasiadis has made a conscious effort to invest in Greek start-ups through local venture capital funds. He has reviewed more than 50 Greek start-up pitches and formed relationships with innovative and dynamic entrepreneurs. His focus in on deepTech, cleanTech, agriTech and shippingTech, four areas of significant relevancy to Greece. Stergios is committed to mentoring members of the Greek tech community and has developed two of his own start-up companies. He is bullish about the Greek technology and start-up ecosystem and committed to returning to Greece on a full-time basis.

Steve Vranakis is an award winning creative who has worked on the launch of the iPhone and Amazon in the UK, with NASA (Space Lab), and the United Nations UNICEF). He led the Creative Lab at Google in EMEA for over 8 years. Vranakis was appointed as the first ever Chief Creative Officer for Greece in 2019, to develop a new country narrative as a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister. To help the Tourism Industry cope with the effects of the Covid-19 crisis, he launched #GreeceFromHome, an initiative developed and deployed in two weeks. Some of his past projects include: a machine learning musical instrument called the NSynth Super, the Assembly of Youth (an installation giving youth a voice at the United Nations), and Inside Abbey Road – a virtual tour of the iconic music studios. You can view some of those projects here: https://youtu.be/MeHdXaSNaRU. Steve also worked on the launch of project Bloks, a physical coding platform that teaches kids to code for which he was granted two Google patents. In 2015 Vranakis went to the island of Lesvos to build a mobile information site (refugee.info) to help Syrian refugees fleeing civil war. Steve’s work has earned many international awards and has been featured in WIRED, The New York Times, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, Creative Review, Huffington Post, FT, Design Week, and Adage. He’s written columns for Adweek, Marketing, and Campaign, and conducted interviews with the BBC, CNN, and CNBC. Steve serves as an advisor to one of the world’s hottest fashion technology start-ups, unmade.com, as well as SUPERPERSONAL, an AI company using advanced visual personalisation technology. In 2017 he was president of D&AD where he made it his mission to help young people from disadvantaged backgrounds get into the creative industries.

Description

Discourses are essential arenas where policy-making occurs. Analysis of parliamentary debates on material need assistance reveals how governing societies through security, biologisation, the normalisation of self-responsibility, and through moral claims, redefines relationships in the society, leads to restrictive control oriented measures, resulting in symbolic and social exclusion that deepens inequalities and solidifies the institutional racism against the Roma in Slovakia.

Lenka Kissová, PhD is a junior researcher at the Institute for Research in Inclusive Education at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. She received her doctoral degree in Sociology from Masaryk University, Her professional interests include migration, minorities, political discourses, securitisation, social justice, and human rights. She has been a member of many local, national or international research projects., she was a visiting student at the University of Bologna and at the University of Toronto.

Description

Following the Syrian refugee program, the Government of Canada led a major effort to internationalize private refugee sponsorship through the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative. Four years later, what have we learned about this effort to export and internationalize aspects of Canada’s program? Panelists will draw from their chapters in the recently-published volume, Strangers to Neighbours: Refugee Sponsorship in Context (MQUP 2020).

Moderator:
Geoffrey Cameron is research associate at the Global Migration Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He has a PhD from the University of Toronto, where he was a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, and an MPhil from the University of Oxford. His forthcoming book is Send Them Here: Religion and Refugee Resettlement in North America (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), and he is co-editor of Strangers to Neighbours: Refugee Sponsorship in Context (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020)

Panelists:
Megan Bradley is associate professor of political science and international development studies at McGill University. Her research and teaching focus on refugees, human rights, humanitarianism, transitional justice, natural disasters, and gender. She serves as Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of International Development, and Associate Director of the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies. She also coordinates the McGill Refugee Research Group. She is the author of Refugee Repatriation: Justice, Responsibility and Redress (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and The International Organization for Migration: Commitments, Challenges, Complexities (Routledge, 2020).

Craig Damian Smith is senior research associate at the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University. He was previously Associate Director of the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and he is a Research Affiliate at York’s Centre for Refugee Studies. He is also the founder of Pairity, a data-driven platform to facilitate community-based refugee integration.

Shauna Labman is an associate professor of human rights in the Global College at the University of Winnipeg. She co-founded the Migration Law Research Cluster at the University of Manitoba and was a consultant for the Law Commission of Canada, the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in New Delhi. She is the author of Crossing Law’s Border: Canada’s Refugee Resettlement Program (UBC Press, 2020), and co-editor of Strangers to Neighbours: Refugee Sponsorship in Context (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020)

Description

-DESCRIPTION : Le pasteur Pierre du Moulin (1568-1658) est l’une des grandes figures de la communauté protestante française de la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Premier pasteur du temple de Charenton à quelques lieues de Paris, il est bien connu pour ses écrits théologiques et ses controverses avec le clergé catholique. Mais du Moulin a également rédigé ses Mémoires dans lesquels sont consignés les évènements plus personnels de sa longue existence marquée par les guerres de Religion (1562-1598) et les relations très tendues entre les réformés et le pouvoir royal durant le règne de Louis XIII (1610-1643). En s’appuyant sur une version restée manuscrite des Mémoires de du Moulin, cette présentation analysera la thématique du voyage et s’interrogera sur ses significations. La vie de Pierre du Moulin se caractérise par de nombreux déplacements, voulus et contraints, tant en France qu’à l’étranger (Sedan, Angleterre, Provinces-Unies), et ce pasteur incarne à la fois la France huguenote et le Refuge huguenot. Cette présentation montrera en outre que les imaginaires liés au voyage doivent être pris en compte, dans la mesure où ces Mémoires visent à délivrer un message religieux à ses lecteurs.

-BIOGRAPHIE : Marie-Clarté Lagrée est agrégée d’histoire et docteur en histoire moderne de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, et elle a publié sa thèse sous le titre : « C’est moy que je peins ». Figures de soi à l’automne de la Renaissance (PUPS, 2012). Elle est spécialisée en histoire culturelle de la France des XVIe-XVIIe siècles, et privilégie une approche enrichie par l’apport des autres sciences sociales. Ses recherches actuelles et ses dernières publications portent sur les thématiques du corps et du voyage, et elle travaille en ce moment sur le pasteur Pierre du Moulin (1568-1658).

Description

The Belt and Road in Global Perspective project is delighted to welcome Laleh Khalili (Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary U of London), who will discuss her book “Sinews of War and Trade Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula” with Joseph McQuade (Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy)

On the map of global trade, China is now the factory of the world. A parade of ships full of raw commodities—iron ore, coal, oil—arrive in its ports, and fleets of container ships leave with manufactured goods in all directions. The oil that fuels China’s manufacturing comes primarily from the Arabian peninsula. Much of the material shipped from China are transported through the ports of Arabian peninsula, Dubai’s Jabal Ali port foremost among them. China’s “maritime silk road” flanks the peninsula on all sides.

Sinews of War and Trade is the story of what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructure has meant not only for the Arabian peninsula itself, but for the region and the world beyond. The book is an account of how maritime transportation is not simply an enabling companion of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism. The ports that serve maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport create racialised hierarchies of labour, engineer the lived environment, aid the accumulation of capital regionally and globally, and carry forward colonial regimes of profit, law and administration.

Laleh Khalili is a professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London and the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The politics of national commemoration (Cambridge 2007), Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 2013) and Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020).

Joseph McQuade is the Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies. He is also Editor-in-Chief at the NATO Association of Canada and Digital Content Manager for the Munk School’s Belt and Road in Global Perspective research initiative.

Description

The lecture will provide an overview of Hungarian policies directed at leaving the Axis camp during the Second World War. After an introductory part on the general political and military situation of the country, the lecture will concentrate on the main goals of the Hungarian government in 1943 and the efficiency of various peace-feelers in the neutral capitals of Europe, primarily Bern Stockholm and Turkey, showing events from the perspective of the Hungarian side. The lecture will place Hungary into the general context of allies’ aims and war efforts, with a special focus on the geopolitical significance of Southeast Europe in the war. The lecture will draw the attention of the audience to the significance of secret peace-talks with the allied side while giving an insight into the related intelligence maneuvers and their impact on Hungary shortly before the German occupation.

András Joó (VERITAS Institute, Budapest) obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Economics and Public Administration (now known as Corvinus University, Budapest) in 2001. His main area of research is the 20th century diplomatic history with a special focus on World War II. Dr. Joo is the author of a monograph on Hungarian foreign policy during World War II (Kállay Miklós külpolitikája: Magyarország és a háborús diplomácia 1942-1944. The Foreign Policy of Miklós Kállay: Hungary and Wartime Diplomacy 1942-1944. Napvilág Kiadó, Budapest, 2008). Dr. Joo joined the VERITAS Research Institute in 2015, where he has continued his research on the history of Hungary during World War II collecting and editing sources that have survived in the private hands yet not been discovered by the general public. He regularly publishes the results of his research in Hungarian.