Description

Heated discussion in the media, costly and laborious government commissions, and restrictive legal recommendations in France and Quebec, Canada have recently focused on the undesirability of face-covering veils (burqas and niqabs) in the public sphere. This talk charts how these sites have, at the same time, generated a contrasting idealized presentation of a desireable secular female body. This examination is grounded in recent secularism studies scholarship that argues that, like forms of religiosity, secularisms include a range of social and physical dispositions, or what Michael Warner calls “a framework of corporeal experience and struggle” (Warner 2008; see also, Calhoun et al. 2011; Mahmood 2009; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Asad 2003). Through consideration of two recent niqab-wearing women’s legal cases outside of Paris and in Montreal, and with reference to Michel Foucault theory of governmentality (1980, 1988) and Nilüfer Göle’s notion of sameness (2007), I examine the regulatory functions and normalizing delineations of female sexuality within restrictions against full-face hijabs.

Dr. Selby is assistant professor of Religious Studies and affiliate faculty of Gender Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is author of Questioning French Secularism: Islam and Gender Politics in a Parisian Suburb (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics and Family Law Arbitration (with Anna Korteweg, University of Toronto Press, 2012). Recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs and in Culture and Religion.

Description

Michael David Fox is a historian of modern Russia and Soviet history. He has published widely on the political, cultural and intellectual history of late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. He has strong interests in transnational and comparative history and in the history of Russia-German relations, broadly conceived. Davod-Fox is now working on the history of Nazi occupation of the USSR during World War ll. David-Fox is founding and executive editor of “Kritika: Exploraions in Russian and Eurasian History”.

Description

Michael David-Fox is a historian of modern Russian and Soviet history. He has published widely on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. He has strong interests in transnational and comparative history and in the history of Russian-German relations, broadly conceived. David-Fox is now working on the history of the Nazi occupation of the USSR during World War II. David-Fox is founding and executive editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

Description

Adeeb Khalid will discuss the complex interaction of local elites and the Soviet state in the age of the Russian revolution in Central Asia. The talk will explore ways in which a project of cultural reform articulated on the colonial periphery of the Russian empire was transformed by revolution in the metropole. The paper will explore what revolution meant to indigenous elites, and trace their fate through the tumultuous decade oft he 1920s.

Description

The Lisbon Treaty has included provisions trying to transform qualified majority decisions into unanimous ones. Indeed, it specifies: “If a member of the Council declares that, for vital and stated reasons of national policy, it intends to oppose the adoption of a decision to be taken by qualified majority, a vote shall not be taken. The High Representative will, in close consultation with the Member State involved, search for a solution acceptable to it.” (Art 31 (2) TEU).
I call this provision “q-unanimity”, trace its history and analyze its consequences on EU decisions. The history can be traced back to the Luxembourg compromise. The consequences are the preponderance of the institution that makes the “q-unanimity” proposal in the decisionmaking process, as well as the reduction of precision of decisions in order to enlarge their political support.

Description

Professor Schoer’s writings and research activities range from contributions on transnational social support, interculturality and migration, to writings about citizenship, civil society and social policy.

Professor Schweppe works on issues about transnationality and social work, international comparison of social work, migration, poverty, professionalization of social work, methodology of social work research, old age, and social work in Latin America.

Description

Bringing together some of the most distinguished students of contemporary Europe, the panel will examine the historical background, the more immediate causes, and the possible solutions to the current crisis in Europe. Were the critics of the Euro right, or were the current difficulties faced by the Euro unforeseen and unforeseeable? Is austerity really the solution to southern Europe’s structural economic problems? And will it, as George Soros has suggested, lead to a dark age of austere German hegemony?

Description

The paper explores three case studies of non-electoral protest groups by so-called ‘land-grabbers’ ( zemlyazakhvatchiki) in the ‘new settlements’ (novostroyka) of Bishkek in the environment of Kyrgyzstan’s 2011 Presidential Elections. It is based on pilot research conducted during the period from August to December 2011 including participant-observation and in-depth interviews with representatives of the movements before, during and after the elections. Following a critical interrogation of the literature, the research investigates four dimensions of these protest movements: the character of the grievances and justice claims advanced by the protestors; their organisation, including their internal structures and links to external patrons; the links between groups and whether there is the emergence of trans-local protests; the success of the protests in eliciting compromises from elite actors (including private landowners, politicians and state actors). The paper argues that these are a type of protest which has, thus far, been largely disregarded by the literature on protest in the post-Soviet space. They are grievance-based protests founded on a belief in the right to land and basic welfare that have been effectual in extracting concessions from elites. The environment of competitive, semi-democratic elections provides conditions conducive to the short-term success of these protests in extracting resources from the state. The frequency of elections and political contention in Kyrgyzstan has produced the emergence of a culture of protest which, in an environment with a weak rule of law, has become an institutionalised means of articulating popular grievances to the elite. However, the protests studied remain local struggles which are yet to come together in a wider movement. These findings, challenge recent research findings that mobilisations in electoral environments in Kyrgyzstan are exclusively ‘top-down’, i.e. orchestrated by external patrons. Moreover, the findings contribute to a growing literature on local protests and challenge prevailing assumptions that such direct action in weak states must be hierarchical in its organisational form.

Description

Dr. James Harrington will talk about the political trial of Fethullah Gülen, a moderate Turkish religious leader, helped to greatly expand civil liberties and strengthen democracy in Turkey. The trial began in 2000 in an Ankara state security court and ended in 2008 in an appeals court in Gülen’s favor. He will also talk about the Hizmet (Gulen) Movement, which originated in 1970s’ Turkey as a faith-inspired initiative to improve educational opportunities for a local community; and which since then, has grown into a transnational educational, inter-cultural and interfaith movement...

http://www.toronto.interculturaldialog.com/recent-upcoming-events/public-lecture-by-james-harrington-political-trials-of-fethullah-gulen-oct-16th-2012/

Description

Throughout the 20th century, Ukraine survived many catastrophic crises, some of them accompanied by enormous numbers of deaths and human suffering of outstaying proportions. The Holodomor of 1932-1933 is one of such events. Their immediate psychological impact and their later representations influenced social life in Ukraine for several generations to come. Can we speak about Post-Genocide Ukraine in this respect and what does it mean? This question will be at the core of Vitalii Ogienko’s presentation.

Description

A notable aspect of Ukraine’s democratization efforts after 1991 was the effort to come to grips with its experience as part of the Soviet Union. Mr. Zabily argues that the present Ukrainian regime has seemingly divested itself of any critical thinking regarding the Soviet past at the same time that it has been backsliding on the development of an open society. Mr. Zabily will speak on access to archival materials of the Soviet era, the prospects for historical research on the USSR and Ukrainian independence efforts (as well as the politics of national memory) and attempts toharass the academic community in Ukraine.

Description

The DAAD Information Centre Toronto is dedicated to serving the needs of students and faculty in Canada. It promotes study and research in Germany, advises local students on funding opportunities, and builds ties between German and Canadian universities. This information session will focus on DAAD scholarship opportunities for Undergraduates and Graduates. Specific questions can be addressed with DAAD staff members following the presentation.

Description

The talk seeks to explain the oft, although unsurprisingly ambiguous record of Soviet surveillance on the ground, which was torn between totalitarian aspirations and institutions and the corresponding quota system, collateral damage, and constant pressure for immediate results on the one hand, and the aspiration to professional pride and ethos of its police officers on the other. What did the Soviets initially know about populations on which they imposed their rule? What did they want to know? How did they obtain their information and recruit informants? How did the surveillance system cope with the political and socio-economic turbulence and changes of the post-Stalin era, and, in particular, the challenges of the spillover of unrest from the restless satellites and the loss of monopoly over information? How did the organs in charge of gathering information react and adjust to the simultaneous decline in the party-state authority and the rise of dissent, restless youth and secessionist national movements? How successful was the surveillance enterprise according to the Soviets’ own goals and evaluation? And finally, what do the surveillance methods tell us about the nature, goals and distinct features of the regime when compared with other systems?

Description

Why did Tajikistan’s security institutions fragment into state failure and civil war in the 1990s, while Uzbekistan’s law enforcement and security services centralized their personnel systems, modernized their facilities, and expanded into one of the largest and most cohesive security apparatuses in post-Soviet Eurasia? My research proposes expanding the “resource curse” argument to investigate how cash crop economies insert very different mechanisms by which resources promote state failure. In countries whose economies are structured around cotton, cocoa, or coffee production, for example, subtle changes in the underlying patterns of rent-seeking determine whether states keep or lose a monopoly of force within their borders. The examples of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan not only highlight the critical interplay of resources and rents at the local level in Central Asia. They also challenge the consensus in the literature linking resource endowments and conflict, which holds that only non-renewable commodities such as oil or alluvial diamonds — and not renewable resources (cash crops) — can be the primary engines of civil war.

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In this roundtable, several Central Asia experts with ground-level knowledge of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan explore the reasons for the weakness of the region’s states.

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Elshan Alekberov currently advises corporate clients on political, economic and energy developments in Russia, Eurasia and the Middle East. Until mid-2009, he was Director of Moscow office of the Stonebridge International LLC, a leading international business consulting firm with headquarters in Washington, DC. Based in Moscow for five years, Mr. Alekberov led Stonebridge’s efforts to help global multinationals and institutional investors to seize strategic opportunities in Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Before joining Stonebridge International LLC, Mr. Alekberov was a full-time business development manager for Russia for Key Energy Services, Inc., world’s largest land based well servicing and workover company. Prior to that, Mr. Alekberov worked as Vice President at LPI Consulting, Inc., a Washington, DC based energy consulting firm.