Description

Thursday September 13

2:00 Opening Remarks: Willi Goetschel and Dan Silver

2:15 Omar Lizardo, Simmel’s dialectic of content and form in recent work in cultural sociology

3:00 Thomas Kemple, Simmel’s Sense of Modernity: Adventures in Time and Space

3:45 Coffee Break

4:15 Natàlia Cantó Milà, Simmel’s Sociology of Relations

5:00 Elizabeth Goodstein, Simmel’s Phenomenology of Disciplinarity

Friday September 14

9:15 John McCole, Georg Simmel: Deconstructing the Self and Recovering Authentic Individuality

10:00 Oliver Simons, Georg Simmel’s Theory of Form

10:45 Coffee Break

11:00 Daniel Silver and Milos Brocic, Three Conceptions of Form in Simmel’s Sociology

11:45 Willi Goetschel, Form and Relation: Difference and Alterity in Simmel

12:30 Open Discussion

Description

A conference to celebrate the centenary of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, bringing together scholars and practitioners from various disciplines from the Baltic states and Canada. The focus of the first day of the conference is on demography and migration, integration of the Russian minorities, and contemporary security challenges in the Baltic Sea region. The second day of the conference (September 22), focusing on language, identity, and the preservation of national heritage, takes place at the Estonian Studies Centre, Tartu College (310 Bloor St. W).

12:45-13:00
Words of Welcome

Randall Hanson, Interim Director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
Toomas Lukk, Ambassador of Estonia
Andris Ķesteris, President, Baltic Federation in Canada
Tea Varrak, Secretary-General, Estonian Ministry of Education and Research
Andres Kasekamp, University of Toronto

13:00-14:00 Keynote

Chair: Mihkel Tombak, University of Toronto

Keynote: Mare Ainsaar, University of Tartu
Baltic Population Challenges and their Impact on Societies

14:00-15:15
Panel I: The Challenge of Integration of Russian minorities in the Baltic States

Chair: Merli Tamtik, University of Manitoba

Piret Hartman, Estonian Ministry of Culture
Integration of the Russian-speaking Minority and Return Migration
Irene Käosaar, Integration Foundation, Estonia
Successes and Failures of Integration in Estonia
Juris Dreifelds, Brock University
Latvianization of Minority Schools: Progress or Regress in Ethnic Relations?

15:15-16:00
Coffee, snacks and networking

16:00- 17:30
Panel II: Baltic Regional Security

Chair: Toivo Miljan, Wilfred Laurier University

Aušra Park, Siena College, New York
Leadership and the Foreign Policies of the Baltic States
Aurel Braun, University of Toronto
The Geopolitics of Northeastern Europe in the Era of Trump and Putin
Marcus Kolga, MacDonald-Laurier Institute
Canada, NATO’s Eastern Flank and Russian Information Warfare
Andres Kasekamp, University of Toronto
The Baltic States and the Future of the European Union

Description

Since the end of authoritarian regimes in the late 80s, migration and refugee law took a new and more liberal direction in all different countries of Latin America. The new Immigration Politics consolidated in the last two decades explain in part the growing number of migrants and refugees to the region. How different Latin America is from nationalistic and restrictive countries on display in other parts of the world? The Global South, contrary to mainstream migration studies, is the region that receives more migrants in the world and urges us to reorient our debate and understanding on how the south hemisphere in general can cope with the challenges of massive migration flows and how the Americas in particular can work together on sharing the burden of migration crisis in the region. To answer these questions the presentation will take two major receiving countries in the region, Brazil and Argentina, and will explain how these liberal policies were implemented under their leadership and how resilient they can be in face of new conservative governments in power in the last few years. Are supranational institutions and liberal refugee and migration regimes strong enough to face these challenges? How effective are national and supra national courts in balancing anti migrants social and political movements in the region? Is the freedom of residence and work agreements for nationals in the region under attack? How Venezuela can be a parameter to test the resilience of our region in preserving our liberal tradition in migration and refugee politics.

Charles P. Gomes is senior researcher at Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa and director of the CEPRI, a pro bono legal clinic for Refugees and Migrants in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has a PhD in Political Science (2001) from the former IUPERJ (University of Rio de Janeiro Research Institute) current IESP. During his doctorate, he was a visiting researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, France. He was a visiting professor at the Université Paris I in the years 2006 and 2007 and the Center for Forced Migration Studies at North Western University in Chicago in the year of 2012. His studies focus on constitutional and supranational courts, international law, immigration and refugee policies. He is now leading a comparative study in Immigration policies and politics in major countries of Latin America. He has several books, articles and reports on the topic of Refuge and International Migration.

Description

The mural poster that Abel Faivre created in late 1916 for the second national French war loan, showing a young soldier exhorting soldiers and civilians to join him under the caption “On les aura!” (We’ll Get Them!), is one of the most iconic images of the First World War, yet it has never been fully studied in its own right. Based on archival research that reconstructs the poster’s production, distribution, and reception, this paper suggests broader conclusions about the ideological function of illustrated wartime posters: namely, that they were a contested field of cultural production with multiple, contradictory, and evolving meanings that often diverged from those intended by the artists who created them and their commissioning agencies.

By reconstructing the geographic and numerical scope of the poster’s dissemination in its original form as well as through related media such as postcards, newspapers, and photography, the paper juxtaposes Faivre’s iconic design to very different early draft of the poster; identifies the contemporary and historical models that inspired the artist; and surveys the ways in which various groups (soldiers in the trenches, civilians on the home front, antagonistic political parties) appropriated the image and the caption to express their divergent points of view on the war.

Brett Bowles is Associate Professor of French Studies and Director of the Institute for European Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a media historian, he has published widely on visual propaganda in France during the World Wars. This paper is taken from a developing book project on comparative history of wartime posters in France, German, Great Britain, and the United States.

Description

In the last three decades we have seen important changes in the area of ethnic relations in Poland. In general, ethnic minorities are becoming more and more active and better organized actors in the public scene. Additionally, the state policy has been stabilised, as the official frames of minority protection have been created.

The lecture will concentrate on two general perspectives: agency and structural one. The main aim is to present these both faces of ethnic relations. The former, an agency perspective, concerns the activities undertaken by minority groups which are focused on their identity and culture. The main argument developed in this part is that a gradual process of moving from culture to politics could be observed in Poland nowadays. The activities undertaken by minorities take a different shape and expression both on institutional and public, as well as more spontaneous and personal levels. The latter, structural perspective, underlines the aspect of power inscribed in minority-majority relations. To develop this issue, the concept of ethnic field will be introduced to show prospects and barriers imposed on these groups, especially by current legal regulations, as well as by the dominating national discourse. The presentation will touch on the problems concerning the so-called old minorities living in Poland, among them Ukrainians and Lemkos.

Katarzyna Warmińska-Zygmunt, PhD hab., is a socioligist, an associated professor at the Department of Sociology, Cracow University of Economics. Her main interest concentrates on ethnic relations in Poland, identity and politics in the context of minority groups, and anthropological practice. She has conducted fieldwork among Polish Tartars and Kashubs. The author of over fifty articles, and one book (“Polish Tartars. Religious and ethnic identity”) and the coeditor of three other books.

Description

In the wake of the 2014 Maidan revolution – the “revolution of dignity” – as Ukraine has begun its movement towards greater democratic rule and closer relationships with its European neighbours, it has struggled with conflicts over the Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. Part of this revolution of dignity has been a movement within the Ukrainian Orthodox churches toward the establishment of an autocephalous (self-governed) Church in Ukraine. At the same time, the Russian government has tried to maintain the Moscow Patriarch’s position in Ukraine, in part to advance its concept of the Russian World, a Russian sphere of influence. With the decision of the Constantinople Patriarchate to reassert its role as the Mother Church of the Orthodox of Ukraine that has the right to grant autocephaly, a confrontation has emerged affecting Orthodox Churches throughout the world. This roundtable brings together scholars who will address various aspects of the history leading to the process of granting of autocephaly to a new Ukrainian Orthodox Church; international inter-Orthodox relations and divisions; the conflicts with the Russian Orthodox Church’s control over a segment of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Ukraine; and what a newly established autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church might look like.

Description

The lecture will explore some of the conceptual problems that are involved in writing a world history of genocide. The question posed is really a rhetorical one: genocide has occured in every period of human history and in a wide variety of geographical and cultural circumstances. This seems to be increasingly accepted by genocide scholars, if not necessarily by scholars who are focused on temporal and spatial boundaries of their discipline. The second part of the lecture examines some of the recurring themes that occur in the history of genocide: genocide and war; dehumanization; “cumulative radicalization;” issues of gender, among others.

Norman M. Naimark received his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D (1972) from Stanford University. He spent fifteen years as Professor at Boston University and Research Fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard before returning to Stanford in 1988. He is presently Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies in the History Department at Stanford University, and is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute. He also served as Sakurako and William Fisher Director of Stanford’s Global Studies Division. Earlier he was Chair of the Department of History and Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program. He also directed the International Relations and International Policy Studies Programs. A selection of his books include Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (Harvard 1981); The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Germany (Harvard 1995); Fires of Hatred; Ethnic Cleansing in 20 th Century Europe (Harvard 2001); Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton 2010); and Genocide: A World History (Oxford 2017).

He is presently finishing a book project, “Stalin and Europe: The Struggle for Sovereignty, 1944-1949.” Naimark has been awarded the Officer’s Cross First Class of the German Federal Republic. He twice received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching at Stanford. He won the Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies from ASEEES (the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). He was recently elected as a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Description

Liudmyla Hrynevych is the Director of the Holodomor Research and Education Centre in Kyiv (HREC in Ukraine), and Senior Scholar at the Institute of the History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture began in 1998 at the initiative of the Famine-Genocide Commemorative Committee of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto Branch. Past lecturers have included James Mace, Norman Naimark (Stanford University), Anne Applebaum (Washington Post), Timothy Snyder (Yale University), Serhii Plokhy (Harvard University), and Jars Balan (University of Alberta).

Description

 
Like the Baltic states, Icelanders are now celebrating their 100th anniversary of restored independence. Initially, they were among the poorest of the poor in Europe. By the twenty-first century, they were among the top ten globally. A decade ago, Iceland was on the verge of national bankruptcy as a consequence of the international financial crisis. Having to rebuild its society from financial ruin, Icelanders faced a fateful choice: should they adopt the small government, low-tax model – the American way? Or should they try to reconstruct their original Nordic state? That is the question the speaker will discuss.

Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson was the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Iceland (1984-96) and served as foreign minister from 1988 to 1995. During his tenure, Iceland joined the European Economic Area and became the first country to recognize the independence of the Baltic states. Subsequently, he served as ambassador to the USA, Canada, Finland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine. Before entering politics, Mr. Hannibalson obtained an MA in Economics from the University of Edinburgh and worked as a teacher and journalist. He has lectured extensively on the role of small states in international relations. He is the author of The Baltic Road to Freedom – Iceland’s Role (2017) and the subject of the documentary film Those Who Dare (2015).

Description

N.B.: This event will be presented in French.