Past Events at the Centre for the Study of the United States
September 2022
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Friday, September 30th Conversation with Grace M. Cho, the Author of 'Tastes Like War'
Date Time Location Friday, September 30, 2022 2:00PM - 4:00PM Boardroom and Library, This hybrid event took place at the Munk School, 315 Bloor Street West, Toronto with the virtual component on Zoom. + Register for this Event Print this Event Bookmark this Event
Description
ABOUT THE BOOK: Tastes Like War
A Korean American daughter’s exploration of food and family history, in order to understand her mother’s schizophrenia. Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her mother’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.
Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in journals such as Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute, the Department of Sociology, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, the Department of English, and the Centre for the Study of the United States at the Munk School, University of Toronto
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.
October 2022
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Wednesday, October 26th A World Without Roe: The Constitutional Future of Unwanted Pregnancy
Date Time Location Wednesday, October 26, 2022 5:00PM - 6:30PM Seminar Room 208N, This event is taking place at Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar Room 208, North House, Toronto, Ontario. + Register for this Event Print this Event Bookmark this Event
Description
With the demise of Roe v. Wade, the survival of abortion access in America will depend on new legal paths. In the same moment that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has constrained access to abortion in the United States, other constitutional democracies have moved in the opposite direction, expanding access to safe, legal, and free abortions. They have done so without reasoning from Roe’s vision of the private zone of unwanted pregnancy. The development of abortion law outside the United States provides critical insights that can inform future efforts to vindicate the constitutional rights of women facing unwanted pregnancies.
This lecture maps out the constitutional paths of reproductive justice in a world without Roe. Constitutional democracies around the world that have progressed from banning most abortions to legalizing many of them have embraced the public dimensions of childbearing and childrearing. Laws protecting abortion access have recently emerged from strong pro-life constitutional baselines in several jurisdictions, including the notable example of Ireland. Rather than constitutionalizing the individual’s privacy interest in unwanted pregnancy, many constitutional orders recognize the social and public value of reproducing the community, and the disproportionate role played by people who stay pregnant and raise children in the production of these public goods. Banning abortion effectively coerces people to contribute disproportionate sacrifices to the state, without properly valuing these contributions. This insight from global abortion law norms can be pursued in U.S. constitutional law. The formulation of takings- and 13th Amendment-based challenges to abortion bans could focus on just compensation for the risks, burdens, and sacrifices of compelled motherhood, beyond the enjoining of abortion restrictions. Global experience also points to the importance of incrementally establishing reasonable, expanded definitions of medical necessity exceptions to abortion bans. Such avenues for reestablishing abortion access, as well as public support for pregnancy and parenting, imagine a broader world of reproductive justice than the one defined by Roe. —
Speaker Bio:
Julie Chi-hye Suk is a Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law in New York City. She is the author of We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, the first book to chronicle and assess the twenty-first-century revival of the Equal Rights Amendment, culminating in Virginia’s ratification in 2020. She has published dozens of scholarly articles on equality and antidiscirmination law, women and gender, and comparative constitutional law. Her next book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It, will be published in April 2023. Her commentary has appeared in many media outlets including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Review, and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Professor Suk joined the Fordham faculty after three years at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she served as dean for Master’s Programs and professor of sociology, political science, and liberal studies. Before that, Suk was a Professor of Law for 13 years at Cardozo Law School in New York. She has also taught as a visiting professor at the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, University of Chicago, and UCLA. She has also been a fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and LUISS-Guido Carli in Rome. Suk received her doctorate in politics from Oxford University (where she held a Marshall Scholarship) and her J.D. from Yale Law School (where she studied on a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans). Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.
