Past Events

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ABOUT THE EVENT

What does it mean to be free? Is freedom just about breaking external barriers set by others, or does it also involve overcoming our own internal barriers like undue desires and self-centered attitudes? What is the real essence of autonomy? 

To address these questions, Bhatt explores the challenges that decisions and actions of religious practitioners pose to secular liberal understanding of autonomy. As a case study, he will examine how modern interpretations of premodern Hindu sacred texts, such as the Bhagavad Gītā and Vacanāmṛta, both shape and are shaped by the processes of self-formation within a transnational organization, BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha. Drawing from his extensive textual and ethnographic research, he will argue that genuine agency not only involves removing external barriers in the realms of society, politics, economics, and beyond but also entails addressing the internal barriers rooted in human nature, which often arise from egoistic and selfish motives. Bhatt will show that personal autonomy as self-governance encompasses three key facets: first, it synthesizes both external and internal autonomy; second, it entails the realization of inherent aspects of the self, such as peace and happiness; and third, it is deliberately directed towards refraining from causing harm to others and actively fostering their well-being. Enhancing personal autonomy by returning the gaze to within in order to negotiate freedom without marks the “internal turn.” 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kalpesh Bhatt is an assistant professor of Asian religions at the University of Mary Washington. Synthesizing the fields of anthropology of religion and textual studies, his works examine how modern interpretations of premodern Hindu sacred texts and practices shape and are shaped by secular conditions, everyday concerns, and the ethical subjectivation of those who practice them. His projects have interrogated dynamics of agency and autonomy, religious differences, communal tensions by studying diasporic Hindu communities and temples in North America as well as Hindu festivals like the Maha Kumbh Mela in India. Kalpesh’s research interests include lived Asian religions, religious and cultural pluralism, and Hindu-Christian studies. He is also committed to enhancing public understanding of religion by disseminating scholarly findings to common people through visual anthropology methods.

Before earning his PhD from the University of Toronto and obtaining a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University, Kalpesh pursued a Masters in Physics and a Bachelors in Computer Science at BITS Pilani, India. His diverse interests in religion, science, and art have led him to direct several films, including an IMAX film on India, and state-of-the-art multimedia shows such as a grand watershow based on an ancient story from the Upaniṣads, highlighting the interplay between religion and technology, tradition and modernity.

Description

Please joins us for a reception after the performances from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM

ABOUT THE EVENT

How are Asian, particularly queer and/or trans Asian, bodies consumed in Canada? Featuring three queer and trans Asian Canadian artists from Vancouver and Toronto, this event will include live performances and a Q&A panel. Each of their works are an embodied reflection of queer and trans experiences in the Asian diaspora, particularly by using food and associated sensations and metaphors. Janice Jo Lee is a folk artist that will open up the event with a performance and land acknowledgement which will be followed by a showcase of new works by three drag artists. In YOU AND I ≠ WE, an experimental performance co-created by Romi Kim and Kendell Yan, their drag personas SKIM and Maiden China explore the weight of representation, the complexities and intersections of gender, culture, sexuality, and what it means to be in their Asian (Korean and Chinese) bodies with queer and trans identities in public and private spheres. The performance shares insights into intimate experiences through nonlinear storytelling and gestures of refusal in being consumed by the audience’s gaze. In a Drag Horror Cooking Show, “Sarap” (tasty), drag artist Ms. Nookie Galore combines Filipino dishes and ingredients with Philippine history and folklore to create an immersive experience for the audience.

These four artists will perform their works while also creating a space of collective reflection and dialogue on drag, performance, and the body for queer and trans Asian Canadians.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

김새로미 / Romi Kim, or SKIM in drag, is an interdisciplinary artist currently living on the unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. Kim is a nonbinary, trans-masc, second-generation Korean lesbian. They identify themselves in using these words as verbs rather than nouns or adjectives—constantly in action, and in flux. Their artistic practice is explored through an interdisciplinary approach and intersectional feminist queer theory. Kim has shown works in South Korea, the United Kingdom, Edmonton,  and Vancouver in Canada. SKIM is the only Drag King in the House of Rice and he is the producer of his own drag show called King Sized. They have been a part of producing and performing in various theatre shows such as The Transform Festival’s Opening Bash, Cultch Theatre, The ReVolver Festival, and The Array.

甄念菻 / Kendell Yan (she/they), is a second-generation Chinese, trans-femme, non-binary artist living on the lands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Her practice includes performance, visual art, sculpture, digital media, makeup, writing, and costuming, and is primarily centred around her drag identity, Maiden China. Through this lens she explores themes of vulnerability, queer ritual, the concept of the “hyphen”, and liminal experience, by incorporating elements of classical Chinese opera, glamour, punk, and intimate contact performance art. Performing since 2016 in so-called “Vancouver, BC”, Maiden holds the pageant titles of Mr/Ms Cobalt All Star, and the Dogwood Monarchist Society’s Entertainer of the Year 2018. They perform regularly as a member of the House of Rice, Vancouver’s only all-Asian drag family, and is also a part of the non-binary drag performance collective, The Darlings. Their work has been featured by many film and art festivals, including the PuSH International Performing Arts Festival and the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival.

Patrick Salvani, having been raised to fear everything, Ms. Nookie Galore has an un/comfortable relationship with stories that haunt us. She/They/He have been spotlighted in CBC Arts, the documentary “No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians,” and showcased at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Royal Ontario Museum, Gardiner Museum and Varley Art Gallery of Markham. She has been published in the book “Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginiaries” and her work analyzed in the academic journal, “Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 4.” Nookie is the Co-Director of the Queer Asian Love Party, New Ho Queen, AKA she knows how to make a party feel like home. As the Creator of drag plays SARAP: A Drag Horror Cooking Show, The Abularya, and Scary Stories People of Colour Tell in the Dark, Ms. Galore’s DRAG reminds us that dreaming is part of our survival and that nightmares are dreams, too. Get more Nookie in the PBS Docuseries "Brave Spaces" out now!

Janice Jo Lee is a dynamic artist. She is a second generation Korean-Canadian settler based in Tkaronto (Toronto), Ontario. She is a folk-soul-jazz singer songwriter, composer-sound designer, spoken word poet, theatre maker, and arts and anti-oppression facilitator. 

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Camille Sung is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow for the Department of East Asian Studies, and a Research Associate for the Centre for the Study of Korea, Asian Institute. Sung received a Ph.D. in art history and theory with her dissertation on the object- and action-based art of Korea between 1960 and 1980. Currently, she works on expanding her doctoral project by including experimental film and focusing on the relationship between aesthetics and politics of the practice during the period. Her research interests also include modern and contemporary art of the world, curatorial of BIPOC, continental philosophy, and queer and feminist art practice/theory/activism.

Samuel Yoon is a PhD Candidate in Women & Gender Studies Insitute and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Yoon’s research interests include Asian American Critique, Queer Diaspora, and Queer Performance.

Description

You’re invited to join us in the Campbell Conference Facility Lounge, located at 1 Devonshire Pl., for the Unissued Diplomas exhibition from March 4th to March 11th. Be sure to attend the official opening remarks on March 4th at 11:00 AM. 

Join us as we honour the memory of 40 Ukrainian students whose lives were tragically cut short by the full-scale Russian invasion that commenced on February 24, 2022. "Unissued Diplomas" serves as both a tribute to these lost lives and a poignant reminder of the ongoing conflict and the sacrifices made by Ukrainians in their struggle for freedom. 

In 2023, the project organized 110 exhibitions across 24 countries, spreading awareness and amplifying the voices of those affected by the war. Despite our efforts, the relentless attacks persist, compelling us to continue the remaining students’ mission of ensuring that the stories of their fallen peers are not forgotten. 

While we mourn the 40 students represented in this exhibition, it’s essential to recognize that they are just a fraction of the casualties of this conflict. The exact number of student lives lost still unknown as the toll continues to rise. 

Originally conceived in Ukraine, the Unissued Diplomas exhibition has now expanded to over 45 universities worldwide, including the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and Hart House. Each diploma tells the story of a student’s life, their aspirations, and the dreams they were unable to fulfill.

Learn more about the project at www.unissueddiplomas.org

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This Graduate Student Workshop presentation by Yi Wang is based on doctoral research investigating socio-spatial divisions of labour and working class formation within the retail logistics operations of Walmart, the biggest private sector employer and retail company in the United States and in the world. The research explores key contradictions in Walmart’s retail logistics operations, in workers’ discourse, and in labor movement strategies with a focus on the Western US. The research examines different forms of worker power in the context of centrally coordinated supply chains, fragmented workforces, and geographically uneven development at the regional scale. The research highlights the significance of logistical chokepoints positioned in peripheral hinterland zones in terms of labour organizing prospects as well as national politics. The presentation shares findings from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at multiple sites within Walmart’s retail distribution network, including participant observation as an hourly Walmart Associate and interviews with workers and labour organizers.

Yi Wang is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the University of Toronto and currently resides in Northern California. His research interests include the political economy of retail and logistics, spatial and racial divisions of labour, social movements, and class struggle. He has contributed to various action-research projects in connection with food sovereignty and labour movement organizations.

Description

Chaired by the Local Government Revenue Initiative (LoGRI), the upcoming Thematic Working Group (TWG) Meeting on Subnational Finance, hosted by the Local Public Sector Alliance (LPSA) on March 6, 2024, aims to convene experts and stakeholders in fiscal decentralization, multilevel government finance, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and subnational financial management.

The session will feature presentations from LoGRI experts:

Designing “Good Enough” Approaches to Property Tax Reform – Dr. Wilson Prichard, Executive Director, International Centre for Tax Development (ICTD), and LoGRI Chair; Associate Professor, University of Toronto. 
Valuation Reform in Freetown – Evan Trowbridge, Technical Lead, LoGRI
“Tilting-Led” VS “Property-Tax Led” Approach to Property Registration – Dr. Colette Nyirakamana, Research Lead, LoGRI.

These presentations will pave the way for an engaging discussion on key issues in subnational finance.

Event Details:

Date: March 6, 2024
Time: 9:00 EST / 14:00 GMT / 15:00 CET
Registration: Attendance is complimentary but requires prior registration.
For the complete agenda and additional details, please visit the LPSA website.

About LPSA: LPSA was established in 2022 as a global alliance of advocates for inclusive and efficient decentralization and localization, with the mission to promote inclusive, equitable societies and sustainable global development by enhancing the understanding of decentralization and localization as complex, cross-cutting and multi-stakeholder reforms.

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ABOUT THE EVENT

In her most recent film Elegies (2023), Ann Hui documents Hong Kong’s poetry through several of its leading lights. Although the film focuses on living poets, its English-language title points to a poetic form defined by loss and retrospection. In exploring Hui’s mobilization of elegy as that which connects poetry and cinema, this talk develops a critical reassessment of the role of nostalgia in the cinema of Hong Kong – as a persistent thematic thread, an orientation to history, and a condition of reception both locally and abroad. At once evoking and breaking from a structure of feeling that links the colonial and post-handover periods, Hui’s cinematic elegy sets into clear contrast the double edges of nostalgia as both an obstruction to and source of historical insight.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jean Ma is the Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-ying Professor in the Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Her books include Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema; Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography; and Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema. She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her recent monograph At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (available in an open-source digital edition) was a finalist for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards and the 2023 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize.  

Jixin Jia is a PhD Student at the Cinema Studies Insitute, University of Toronto.

Jiaqi Wang is a PhD Student at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.

Elizabeth Wijaya (Chair) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and in the Cinema Studies Insititute, University of Toronto. She is the Director of the Southeas Asia Seminar Series and the Interim-Director of the Dr David Chu Speaker Series, Asian Institute. Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies.

Description

Japan is notorious for its gender inequality. Most foreign media coverage on Japanese women tend to be about how women are badly treated in Japan.  Gender inequality is visible in politics too. Comparatively speaking, the share of women in Japan’s Diet is among the lowest in advanced democracies. However, in recent decades, the share of women in politics has been increasing particularly in urban areas. For instance, the city assemblies in Tokyo’s twenty-three special districts have seen a big increase in the share of women. Suginami city assembly composition has reached gender parity (50% of assembly members are women) and has a female mayor. Furthermore, female mayoral candidates are no longer uncommon in Tokyo.  When one looks at the demographic composition of Tokyo’s city assemblies, Japanese politics does not look too different from Western liberal democracies.  Why does politics in Tokyo look so different from the national level politics? The presentation is based on an analysis of micro-data of all candidates who ran in the last four cycles of local politics in Tokyo. Our findings show that women are more electable than men despite their relative lack of political capital. Successful female candidates are compensating for their lack of political capital with their high human capital attributes. We argue that the reason why high human capital women are successfully running for local office in Tokyo reflects persistent glass ceilings in both politics and labor market.

Margarita Estévez-Abe is McClure Professor of Teaching Excellence at Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.  She taught at Harvard University before joining Syracuse and served as the first chair of Public Policy at Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy. Her research explores the intersection of welfare states, gender and the models of capitalism.  She’s the author of the award-winning book on Welfare Capitalism in Postwar Japan (Cambridge University Press), the editor of Outsourcing of Domestic and Care Work (Special Issue, Social Politics) and Beyond Familialism (Special Issue, Journal of European Social Policy). She’s finishing a monograph on marriage migrants in East Asia entitled Globalizing the Family: Gender and Citizenship in Japan South Korea and Taiwan.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan and the Centre for Global Social Policy, University of Toronto.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

This talk presents the first book-length biography of Kim Soo-Gyong (1918-2000). A gifted linguist with extraordinary life trajectories, Kim is known in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for his central role in establishing the national orthography and standardizing the official Korean grammar.

Born in 1918 in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, Kim moved to North Korea in 1946 with hopes of revolution and joined the faculty of the newly founded Kim Il Sung University. He became a leading figure in Korean linguistics at a young age, studying the history of the Korean language through structuralist linguistics. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Kim was separated from his family. (Some of his family members later emigrated and have lived in Toronto.) Although Kim disappeared from the academic scene in 1968, his honor was restored twenty years later. Even a novel featuring Kim was published in the DPRK during his lifetime.

Historical anthropologist Itagaki Ryuta published Kim’s biography in Japanese (2021), which was then translated by his colleague and linguist Ko Young Chin and published in Korean (2024). Much more than a personal biography, the book cross-examines multiple contexts and issues – including colonialism and the Cold War, structural linguistics and Marxism, and family separation and reunification – to bring to light the tumultuous twentieth-century history of the Korean peninsula and beyond.

Description

Please note this event is only open to University of Toronto affiliates. Please register using your utoronto email address. 

ABOUT THE EVENT

Student workshop with Thai independent Film Director, Screenwriter, and Producer, Anocha Suwichakornpong.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her thesis film, GRACELAND became the first Thai short film to be officially screened at Cannes Film Festival. MUNDANE HISTORY, her first feature, won numerous awards including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK, Anocha’s second feature, which centers around a student massacre that took place in 1976 by Thai state forces in Bangkok has been screened in festivals such as Locarno, Toronto, and Rotterdam. The film won Best Picture and Best Director at Thailand National Film Awards and was chosen as Thailand’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Anocha founded the Bangkok-based production house, Electric Eel Films and co-founded the non-profit Purin Pictures. Through these organizations, she supports emerging voices in independent Southeast Asian Cinema.

Anocha is a Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency recipient. She was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University from 2018-2020. Her latest film, COME HERE, premiered at Berlinale 2021. In 2022, Anocha directed her first live performance, FREETIME, commissioned by the Walker Art Center. She received the Creative Capital Award in 2024 for her upcoming film, FICTION. Anocha currently teaches directing in the MFA Film Program at Columbia University.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

How does Beijing make and change policies? Do authoritarian governments truly make public policy and how is it the process distinctive? Join a panel of preeminent China experts to reflect on the opaque process of how decisions get made and overturned.  From economic policy to health to tech & science, the panel will decipher it all.

ABOUT THE PANEL

Anna Lisa Ahlers is the founder and head of the Lise Meitner Research Group at the MPIWG which explores the many facets of China’s rapid and extensive ascent in the global system of science. In her current research projects, she analyzes authoritarianism and democracy as environmental factors for science and academia, the evolution of science policy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and science-policy interactions in China’s (local) governance. She does so with a general interest in the global structures of science and their local varieties in the twenty-first century.

Jessica C. Teets is a Professor at Middlebury College, and Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chinese Political Science.  Her research focuses on governance in authoritarian regimes, especially the role of civic participation.  She is the author of Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: The China Model (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and editor (with William Hurst) of Local Governance Innovation in China: Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance (Routledge Contemporary China Series, 2014), in addition to articles published in The China Quarterly, World Politics, Governance, and the Journal of Contemporary China.  Dr. Teets is currently working on a new book manuscript (with Dr. Xiang Gao) on changing governance under Xi Jinping, and a forthcoming edited volume (with University of Michigan Press) developing a theory of how to lobby dictators (with Dr. Max Grömping).

Kenneth G. Lieberthal is a senior fellow emeritus in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, where until 2009 he was the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Political Science and William Davidson Professor of Business Administration. He was director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies from 1986 to 1989, and on May 15, 2014, the university’s board of regents renamed the center as the “Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.” Lieberthal was special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asia on the National Security Council for 1998 through 2000.

(Moderator) Diana Fu is an Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science at The University of Toronto, and Director of the East Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is a Non-Resident Fellow at Brookings Institution, a China fellow at the Wilson Center, and a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations. Her research examines civil society, popular contention, state control, and authoritarian citizenship in China.

Description

Please note: this event has limited space and requires registration to attend.

ABOUT THE EVENT

Screening of Come Here with director Anocha Suwichakornpong, and a post-screening discussion.

ABOUT THE FILM

Come Here

Four young travelers embark on a trip to Kanchanaburi to see the museum, but pass the time in other ways when they find out it’s closed for refurbishment.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her thesis film, GRACELAND became the first Thai short film to be officially screened at Cannes Film Festival. MUNDANE HISTORY, her first feature, won numerous awards including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK, Anocha’s second feature, which centers around a student massacre that took place in 1976 by Thai state forces in Bangkok has been screened in festivals such as Locarno, Toronto, and Rotterdam. The film won Best Picture and Best Director at Thailand National Film Awards and was chosen as Thailand’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Anocha founded the Bangkok-based production house, Electric Eel Films and co-founded the non-profit Purin Pictures. Through these organizations, she supports emerging voices in independent Southeast Asian Cinema.

Anocha is a Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency recipient. She was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University from 2018-2020. Her latest film, COME HERE, premiered at Berlinale 2021. In 2022, Anocha directed her first live performance, FREETIME, commissioned by the Walker Art Center. She received the Creative Capital Award in 2024 for her upcoming film, FICTION. Anocha currently teaches directing in the MFA Film Program at Columbia University.

Description

Please note: this event does not require registration but seats are limited and only available on a "first come, first serve" basis.

ABOUT THE EVENT

Join us for a screening of By the Time it Gets Dark with director Anocha Suwichakornpong, and a post-screening discussion.

ABOUT THE FILM

By the Time it Gets Dark

A film director and her muse who was a student activist in the 1970s, a waitress who keeps changing jobs, an actor and an actress, all live loosely connected to each other by almost invisible threads. The narrative sheds its skin several times to reveal layer upon layer of the complexities that make up the characters’ lives.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her thesis film, GRACELAND became the first Thai short film to be officially screened at Cannes Film Festival. MUNDANE HISTORY, her first feature, won numerous awards including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK, Anocha’s second feature, which centers around a student massacre that took place in 1976 by Thai state forces in Bangkok has been screened in festivals such as Locarno, Toronto, and Rotterdam. The film won Best Picture and Best Director at Thailand National Film Awards and was chosen as Thailand’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Anocha founded the Bangkok-based production house, Electric Eel Films and co-founded the non-profit Purin Pictures. Through these organizations, she supports emerging voices in independent Southeast Asian Cinema.

Anocha is a Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency recipient. She was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University from 2018-2020. Her latest film, COME HERE, premiered at Berlinale 2021. In 2022, Anocha directed her first live performance, FREETIME, commissioned by the Walker Art Center. She received the Creative Capital Award in 2024 for her upcoming film, FICTION. Anocha currently teaches directing in the MFA Film Program at Columbia University.

Description

Why did Vladimir Putin decide to invade Ukraine? This talk focuses on the mentality of Putin and his close associates that informed the decision for war. To understand decision-making in a personalist dictatorship, it is important to study the personality of the dictator.

Brian D. Taylor is professor of political science and director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Taylor is the author of three books on Russian politics: The Code of Putinism (Oxford University Press, 2018); State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), as well as multiple articles and book chapters. His fourth book, Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction, is forthcoming this year from Oxford University Press. He received his B.A. from the University of Iowa, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Description

Culinary Workshop & Seminar with Prof. Rafia Zafar

Please join us in welcoming Prof. Rafia Zafar to the Culinaria Kitchen Lab on Thursday, March 14 (12-2pm) for a session that weaves together histories, recipes, and delectable improvisation. Working with and between the stories and dishes crafted by Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor and Zafar’s Grandmother in her Harlem restaurant kitchen, Prof. Zafar explores the languages of food, resilience, and memory composed in the literary genre of Black and African American food writing and cookbooks. Guests will be invited to sample the dishes demonstrated by Prof. Zafar as a part of this kitchen session.

This event is followed by a seminar With Prof. Zafar on Friday, March 15th at 12:00pm, titled "Kitchenette Unbuilding: Two Black women writers on ‘the heart of the home’" at Room 108N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7.

About the Speaker:

Rafia Zafar is Professor of English and African & African American Studies and the Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds degrees from the City College of New York (BA, English), Columbia University (MA, English & Comparative Literature) and Harvard University (PhD, History of American Civilization). In April 2024 she will return to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, where she will lecture in its master’s program in Gastronomy: World Food Cultures and Mobility. At her home institution she teaches popular courses on Food & Literature and Black Foodways.

Zafar’s major publications include Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning; the two-volume Harlem Renaissance Novels: The Library of America Collection (editor); We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870; Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (co-editor); and God Made Man, Man Made the Slave (co-editor). In addition to her book publications, she co-edited a special issue of African American Review on the bibliophile and historian Arturo Schomburg. Her awards and fellowships include the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair at Utrecht University, a Ford Foundation Post-doctoral fellowship, election to the American Antiquarian Society and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library). She began her career in foodways during university, slinging cheese at a little gourmet store in New York City that morphed into Dean & DeLuca, now gone, but at its height a veritable temple for professional chefs, gourmets, and food tourists alike.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Munk School of Global Affairs and Pubic Policy and the Culinaria Research Centre, University of Toronto Scarborough.

Description

In 1908 the Tunguska explosion in Siberia knocked down an area of forest larger than London. Most scientists believe that an asteroid or a comet caused the blast, but neither a crater nor unmistakable remnants of a meteorite have ever been found. Over the last century, the mysterious nature of the event has prompted a wide array of speculation and investigation. This presentation will recount the intriguing story of the Tunguska event and the investigations into it, foregrounding the significance of mystery in environmental history.

Andy Bruno works as a Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Northern Illinois University. A specialist in the environmental history of the Soviet Union, he is the author of two books, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (2016) and Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and its Environmental Legacy (2022).

Description

How do institutions classify collaborators and resisters of fascistic regimes? How do they do so especially during unsettled and turbulent times? Drawing on more than 100 biographies collected in the American Occupied Zone after World War II as part of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS’) efforts to de-nazify the German communication sector, the study illustrates the considerations that were made in differentiating between Germans. The effort to create a classification system was led by an American psychiatrist at Columbia university, who, through a series of interviews, created the category of ‘Anti-Nazis’ – meaning non-Jewish Germans who could have affiliated with the Nazi regime and nevertheless stood against it – to stand in contrast with that of the Nazi. Ori shows the factors that had the most impact in the classification process included not only political affiliations and actions during the war, but Freudian personality assessments and upbringing. The findings shed light on the complexities of classifying responses to fascistic regimes in post-war contexts.

Ori Gilboa is a Ph.D. Student at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, with a collaborative specialization in Jewish Studies. She is interested in the social processes of political violence and atrocities, with a particular focus on their aftermath. Her current research concerns institutional categorizations of political threats during unsettled times.

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

Courtesy of the Duke University Press

In Indifference, Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Through ethnographic fieldwork with animal healers, animal activists, farmers, laborers, transporters, and animals themselves, and moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, Davé shows how human-animal relations often manifest through care and violence. More surprisingly, what Davé also finds animating interspecies relationality in India is an ethic of indifference—that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. For Davé, indifference is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference, then, becomes the basis for an interspecies ethics and a method of care and practice in everyday life.

With indifference, Davé describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political concepts with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism. Moments of indifference, Davé contends, offer the promise of otherwise worlds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Naisargi N. Davé is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Davé’s research concerns emergent form of intra- and interspecies ethics, politics, and rationality in contemporary India. Davé’s latest book Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (Duke 2023), examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, I show how human-animal relations manifest through care and violence, but also, crucially, an ethic of indifference— that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. Indifference, the book demonstrates, is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Davé is a 2023-2024 Martha LA McCain Faculty Fellow at the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre, embarking on a book project titled Murder: The Social Life of Violent Death in Queer India.

(Discussant) Kajri Jian is a Professor of Art History and a Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. Professor Jian is interested in how the efficacies, affects, and values associated with images arise not only from what goes on within the picture-frame but also from the production, circulation, and deployments of images as material objects. She therefore finds it useful to bring ethnographic sensibilities and methods to the study of images. Her work on popular images in modern and contemporary India encompasses the bazaar icons known as “calendar art;” monumental statues; theme parks; and representations of “nature” in temples, gardens, zoos, and popular cinema. It has largely focused on a vernacular business ethos where religion has been the primary site for adopting new media and expressive techniques.

Description

This presentation discusses social and political effects of the regulation of queer sexuality, paying particular attention to the case of Russia where the “gay propaganda” law (2013) is but one example of instrumentalization of homophobia. First, I set out intellectual tasks for what I call a “queerer criminology”. Since queer criminology simply puts LGBTQ+ subjects at the centre of its inquiry, it lacks ambition of other queer projects which claim to be transgressive and transformative. I argue for the next step to make this branch of criminology queerer. Second, I offer my analysis of more than 300 court rulings of anti-queer violence in Russia on which my book Violent Affections is based. In this analysis I reveal currents of affectionate power relations that manipulate people’s emotions for political gains and control. Hence, third, I aim to find frameworks which would enrich our understanding of crime, Russian politics, and the regulation of sexuality. My ultimate example deals with the amendment of the “gay propaganda” law in 2022 as a means of war effort in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Alexander Sasha Kondakov, PhD, is an assistant professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Ireland. His truly international experience includes holding positions in the University of Helsinki in Finland, European University at St. Petersburg Russia, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington DC, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. Kondakov’s work is primarily focused on law and queer sexualities. His latest research on anti-queer violence concluded with an open-access book ‘Violent Affections: Queer sexuality, techniques of power, and law in Russia’.

Description

Join us for a workshop with the world’s leading experts on the Czech Republic

Barbara J. Falk

Lessons and legacies of Charter 77 for Resistance and Dissent Today

This presentation will focus on three themes: the lesson (or “gift”) of democratic dissent within authoritarian regimes (of which Charter 77 is a prime example); how such dissent could neither be predictive of nor assume the Velvet Revolution in 1989; and finally, how the idea of a “velvet” or non-violent revolution resonates (or does not) elsewhere in the region or the globally since 1989. Specific examples of all three themes will be provided, building on my research and teaching in this area over the last three decades.

James Krapfl

The Solidarity of the Shaken as a Force in European History

In his Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History, the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka noted a phenomenon whereby persons whom violence has shaken out of their everydayness form empathetic bonds in rejection of violence.  He illustrated this “solidarity of the shaken” with testimony from French and German soldiers facing one another on the First World War’s Western Front, noting that it did not succeed then in becoming a force that might change the course of history, but asking whether it might.  It was in the hope of incarnating this possibility that Patočka collaborated in the creation of Charter 77, and “the solidarity of the shaken” proved to be one of Czechoslovak dissidents’ most successful ideas.  Most participants in the Czechoslovak revolution of 1989 understood their mobilization as a response of those shaken by violence in solidarity with its victims.  This presentation will address these and other appearances of the phenomenon as a force in European history, including steps toward European unification after the Second World War, Polish Solidarity, Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, and European responses to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.  Patočka was cautious about what the solidarity of the shaken might accomplish; now that the number of historical examples has multiplied, we can assess how well Patočka’s prognosis has held up – and what the solidarity of the shaken might yet achieve.  

Jiří Přibáň

Human Rights and Legalist Revolutions of 1989: A Case Study of Czech Dissent

This presentation focuses on the evolving strategy of human rights among dissidents and opposition groups in communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It discusses three aspects of human rights – ethical, political and legal in both national and international contexts. It opens by an analysis of the post-1945 rise of human rights as a common legal and political denominator and then moves to the Helsinki Accords as a decisive breaking point in international politics and support of political dissent. The second part of the presentation focuses on the process of drafting the Charter 77 and the contrast between its legalist format and civic aspirations which increasingly dominated dissident struggles of the 1980s. The perestroika and glasnost policies introduced in the second half of the 1980s are discussed against the background of gradual liberalisation and political transformations in some countries in the communist bloc and persisting repressions in Czechoslovakia leading to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The revolutionary ethos, again, quickly transformed into legislative efforts and constitutional reforms incorporating human rights, most notably the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms as the material core of a new constitutional democratic order.

Ludger Hagedorn

Solidarity. Remarks on a Buzzword of Eastern European Dissidence  

The concept of solidarity is widely used in intellectual debates and everyday discussions of political issues, but it appears to have manifold meanings, carrying a number of divergent claims and sedimented traditions. Historically, it hovers somewhere between its Roman origins, Christian adaptations, and its heyday in the leftist movements of political and social emancipation. Although the proclamation of solidarity throughout the 19th and 20th centuries became inseparably linked with the international workers’ movement and socialist ideals, it is significant that the very same word obtained an almost emblematic meaning as an anti-communist slogan in Czechoslovakia in the 1970’s and a bit later in the famous Polish movement named Solidarność. The talk will point out conceptual similarities and differences with the ideal of fraternity and highlight Jan Patocka’s “Solidarity of the Shaken” as a communal bond that is not built on the firm ground of any shared identity but rather on existential upheaval.

Roman Krakovsky

The crisis of Communism and the practice of political autonomy

The crisis of the social contract in Eastern European countries during the 1970s and 1980s can be understood, in the context of the Cold War, as the triggering factor for the eventual disintegration of the bloc. The writings and actions of democratic opposition and self-organizing workers since the late 1950s offer an alternative perspective: a contemplation of the practice of political autonomy and the emergence of political subjectivity. The exercise of individual rights by citizens indeed sets in motion a self-stabilizing cycle where the public and private use of political autonomy mutually reinforce each other. This process ultimately leads to a self-determined life, where citizens confer their rights upon themselves.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

Following Mao Zedong’s passing, Chinese policymakers and economists embarked on intense debates regarding the overhaul of the country’s centralized planned economy. Past experiments with decentralization and the rural household responsibility system were influential, yet Eastern Europe’s economic reforms served as significant reference points, too. Notably, Chinese delegations were dispatched to Yugoslavia to scrutinize enterprise reform and to Hungary to grasp the intricacies of price liberalization. These visits aimed to dissect both the successes and failures of economic policies. Moreover, Eastern European economists were welcomed to China, engaging in discussions with party officials and leading economists, their insights transcending academic boundaries. Their works were also translated and disseminated widely in the public arena. With a focus on the transnational intellectual history through historical documents and academic journals, this talk probe why Eastern Europe’s economic reforms failed to avert socialism’s collapse, while China’s "Reform and Opening" policies thrived.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Felix Wemheuer is Chair Professor for Modern China Studies at the University of Cologne. His publications include Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union (Yale UP 2014) and A Social History of Maoist China: Conflict and Change, 1949-1976 (Cambridge UP 2019).

(Moderator/Chair) Yiching Wu teaches East Asian Studies, modern Chinese history, and anthropology at the University of Toronto. An anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, his research focuses on the history, society, and politics of Mao’s China, in particular during the Cultural Revolution. His main scholarly interests include historical anthropology, critical social theory, populism and social protest, modern Chinese history, Chinese socialism and post-socialism, and politics of historical knowledge.

Description

Terrell will talk about what it is like to cover Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine as an independent reporter, how being Black correspondent informs his work and what Ukraine means for the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.

Terrell Jermaine Starr is an independent journalist widely known for his coverage of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. He’s the founder of the newly-formed Black Diplomats Media Group that includes Black Diplomats newsletter on Substack, Black Diplomats Official YouTube channel and Black Diplomats podcast that will resume broadcasting mid-February and is available on Apple iTunes and all major podcast platforms.

Terrell’s work centers the Black perspective in foreign policy news and doesn’t shy away from inserting his personal views into his reporting when he talks about Ukraine, Gaza or any other part of the world. He is also looking for financial supporters to back his media group, so if you want to back his vision, please reach out to him via the contact information on the screen.

A former Fulbright grantee, Terrell also is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, having served in Georgia in 2003 to 2005. He has masters degrees in Journalism and Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies from the University of Illinois and a bachelor’s degree from Philander Smith College, a historically Black College in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Terrell is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and divides his time between New York City and Ukraine.

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

Strangers in the Family is a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). Departing from male-centered narratives of Overseas Chinese communities, the book tells the history of community-formation from the perspective of women who were subordinate to, and alienated from, full Chinese selfhood. From native concubines and mothers, creole Chinese daughters, and wives and matriarchs, to the first generation of colonial-educated feminists, Strangers in the Family  showcases women’s moral agency as they negotiated, manipulated, and debated men in positions of authority over their rights in marriage formation and dissolution. In dialogue with critical studies of colonial Eurasian intimacies, this book explores Asian-centered inter-ethnic patterns of intimate encounters. It shows how contestations over women’s place in marriage and in society were formative of a Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Guo-Quan Seng is an Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He is a historian of Chinese societies in Southeast Asia, with a special interest in race, gender, and sexuality formations in the region, and how they have been shaped by empires, migration, and global capitalism. Published in November 2023 by Cornell University Press, Strangers in the Family is his first single-authored monograph. He is now working on a second book project tentatively titled, “A Diaspora of Shopkeepers: Empire, Race and Chinese Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia, 1870-1970".

ABOUT THE PANEL

(Discussant) Su Yen Chong  is a PhD student in The Department of Art History at the University of Toronto.

(Moderator) Elizabeth Wijaya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and in the Cinema Studies Insititute, University of Toronto. She is the Director of the Southeas Asia Seminar Series and the Interim-Director of the Dr David Chu Speaker Series, Asian Insitute. Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. She received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she was affiliated with the East and Southeast Asian  Programs.

Description

Russian war showed that there is no limit to violence when it comes to genocidal conquest. It also showed the Ukrainian resilience and the power of ordinary citizens in resisting the invaders. In her first book, Anna Romandash collected testimonies of this resilience from different parts of Ukraine. Her work is a set of 33 reportages of extraordinary women who had to face the war, deal with loss of loved ones, and showed courage before the toughest circumstances. The heroines are soldiers, volunteers, psychologists, educators, and many others – who had to experience the double burden of the war as Ukrainians and women.

This talk is about what it was like collecting these testimonies, and how women managed to share their stories despite having to relive traumas of the recent past. Romandash will talk about her work as a journalist in many dangerous areas across Ukraine, the specifics of working with vulnerable communities, and the need to give more space to the experiences of women whose individual struggles often go unnoticed amid the national tragedy.  

Anna Romandash is an award-winning journalist from Ukraine and an author of "Women of Ukraine: Reportages from the War and Beyond". She has extensive experience working across Eastern Europe and Central Asia where she researched democratization processes, freedom movements, and human rights violations. Her areas of interest include international security, Eastern Europe, sanctions, and energy transition. Romandash is the Fourth Freedom Forum’s first Howard S. Brembeck Fellow, a Research Affiliate at the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, and a digital scholar at Vassar College. She holds an MGA degree from the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is a 2023-2024 Petro Jacyk Non-Residential Scholar.

Description

This presentation argues that a transnational approach to explore what Professor Purdy call “pariah spaces” offers a fresh and exciting perspective to understand several key aspects of the shared histories of urban social inequality and territorial stigmatization in the Americas. Dealing specifically with two examples – North American public housing projects and Brazilian favelas – Purdy offer ample evidence that external representations of such spaces share wider cultural and social meanings in state, media and public discourse throughout the Americas: the “marginal” spaces of North and South American cities are not solely seen as areas of poverty; they are regarded as sites of socially and culturally disorganized populations characterized by dangerous social pathologies. Marginality is thus simultaneously a representation/identity and a structure/place. However, there are limits to the ability of transnational perspectives to adequately analyze all aspects of the history and experiences of favelas and public housing developments, especially concerning political economy and larger questions of state organization and practices. Purdy thus concludes that we still need more local, regional, national and comparative research on such phenomena as well as transnational approaches.  

About the Speakers:

Sean Purdy

Sean Purdy is professor of the History of the Americas at the University of São Paulo since 2006. His research focuses on workers’ and social movements in the United Status, Canada and Brazil in the post-Second World War era. He has published widely in English and Portuguese in historical and social science journals as well as in the popular press. He has translated four books from Portuguese to English as well as dozens of specialist journal articles.

Carolina Sa Carvalho Pereira

Carolina Sá Carvalho writes about modern Latin American arts, photography, film, and literature, with a focus on Brazil, coloniality, extractivism, and infrastructure. She is currently working on a book-length project on mosquitoes and the aesthetics and politics of contagion in 20th and 21st-century Brazil.

She is the author of Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America (Northwestern UP, 2023). The book examines the role of photography as visual evidence of the destructive processes of infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multi-media assemblages, Traces of the Unseen explores how photographs of violence were framed, captioned, cropped, and circulated to develop singular pedagogies of the gaze and teach increasingly interconnected urban publics how to interpret them within the larger context of capitalist modernization. Traces of the Unseen draws on works by Flavio de Barros, Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mario de Andrade to situate an unruly photographic body at the center of modernity, in all its disputed meanings. Carolina Sá Carvalho teaches courses on Luso-Afro-Brazilian arts, film, literature, and cultures. At the graduate level she teaches a variety of seminars such as the Politics and Aesthetics of Multispecies Contagion, Latin American Visual Culture, and Home and Dwelling in Latin America. Before joining the University of Toronto, she was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Zoe Wool

Zoë Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the university of toronto, where she is also an affiliate of Center for the Study of the United States and the Women and Gender Studies Institute and core faculty at the Center for Global Disability Studies. Her work spans anthropology, disability studies, queer theory, and feminist science and technology studies, with a focus on the materialities of post-9/11 war making and military harm, and the tyrannies of normativity in the contemporary United States. Wool is director of the TWIG Research Kitchen, a feminist space for tinkering with collaborative and convivial modes of scholarship about toxicity, waste, and infrastructure. She is the author of After War: The weight of life at Walter Reed (Duke UP, 2015), as well as many articles in journals such as Social Text, Catalyst, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, where she is currently associate editor.

Description

A work in progress and the first of its kind, this presentation gives a sneak peek of Dr. Robin Mitchell’s forthcoming book based on Suzanne Simon Baptiste, also known as Madame Toussaint Louverture. Dr. Mitchell’s goal in this research is to bring Suzanne to the center stage and not in the shadow of her husband, Toussaint Louverture, where she has been stuck for most of history.

Robin Mitchell is an Associate Professor of European History in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo. She is a 19th century French historian, specializing in discourses about race, gender, and sexuality. Her work focuses on the white colonial fantasies, scandals, and crime imposed upon Black women’s bodies and voices when they were in metropolitan French spaces. Mitchell has published numerous journal articles, and her first book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020), was named by the African American Intellectual History Society to its "The Best Black History books of 2020," and by The Guardian as one of "The Best Books About Sex" in 2021.

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

Courtesy of Columbia University Press

Co-winner, 2023 AIPS Book Prize, American Institute of Pakistan Studies

From news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners.

Isabel Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians’ efforts to usurp the medium for state purposes, radio largely escaped their grasp. She demonstrates that the medium enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the cultural, linguistic, and political agendas of the British colonial administration and the subsequent independent Indian and Pakistani governments. Rather than being merely a tool of nation building in South Asia, radio created affective links that defied state agendas, policies, and borders. It forged an enduring transnational soundscape, even after the 1947 Partition had made a united India a political impossibility.

Huacuja Alonso traces how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts, arguing for a more expansive definition of what it means to listen. She develops the concept of “radio resonance” to understand how radio relied on circuits of oral communication such as rumor and gossip and to account for the affective bonds this “talk” created. By analyzing Hindi film-song radio programs, she demonstrates how radio spurred new ways of listening to cinema. Drawing on a rich collection of sources, including newly recovered recordings, listeners’ letters to radio stations, original interviews with broadcasters, and archival documents from across three continents, Radio for the Millions rethinks assumptions about how the medium connects with audiences.  

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Isabel Huacuja Alonso is a historian of media and an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS). Her recent book, Radio for the Millions: Hindi Urdu Broadcasting Across  Borders ( Columbia University Press, 2023) won the 2023 American Institute of Pakistan Studies best book award. She recently co-edited a special journal Issues for Modern Asian Studies titled, "Rethinking the Second World War in South Asia: Between theaters and beyond battles" ( September, 2023).

(Chair) Rakesh Sengupta is an Assistant Professor for the Cinema Studies Insitute, University of Toronto, and an Assistant Professor of English at University of Toronto Scarborough. Sengupta’s research and teaching focuses on South Asian cinemas, film history, media archaeology, critical theory and global media cultures. His current book project, An Archaeology of Screenwriting: Archives, Practices and Epistemes of Indian Cinema, 1930-1960, plots the history of screenwriting in South Asia outside Western epistemological frameworks of cinema. His work interrogates universalist ideas of film archives, aesthetics and audiences to imagine an alternative history of the medium and offers a decolonial model of film historiography from the Global South. His research is based on historical materials in four languages across formal and informal archives in several countries, as well as interview-based fieldwork in Mumbai.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

Fashioning Monogamy: Constitutional Rights of Gender Equality and Marriage in Postcolonial South Korea

In postcolonial South Korea, one of the areas that the state prioritized in the nation-building process was to construct modern monogamous marriage (ilbuilch’ŏ) based on gender equality. Article 20 of the Founding Constitution stipulates, “Marriages shall be based on the equality of men and women. Purity in marriage and the family’s health shall be under the special protection of the state.” By constitutionalizing “purity in marriage,” the state banned the old customary practice of concubinage that existed for centuries in Korea. Article 20 of the Founding Constitution was later instrumental in passing the gender-neutral adultery law at the National Assembly in 1953. This new gender-neutral adultery law penalized men’s concubinage practices and their extramarital affairs for the first time in Korean history. By examining Article 20 of the Founding Constitution and the legislation of the adultery law during the Syngman Rhee period, this presentation demonstrates how the constitutional language of gender equality in marriage played a critical role in establishing modern monogamous marriage and criminalized the long customary practice of concubinage in postcolonial South Korea.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jisoo M. Kim is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017-Present) and Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-Present). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Criminalizing Intimacy: Marriage, Concubinage, and Adultery Law in Korea, 1469-2015. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

(Chair) Andre Schmid is an Associate Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Schmid’s research and teaching focus on 19th and 20th century Korea and East Asia, as seen in the broader context of global, comparative history. He is currently working on a book about the early formation of North Korea after the devastation of the late colonial and Korean wars. This book focuses on the turn to the heteronormative nuclear family by both the population and the Party-state as a primary site for postwar reconstruction and decolonization. In this gendered, socio-economic history of north Korean urban families, he examines how issues such as advice literature, apartment construction, divorce, and consumption established norms that while explicitly revolutionary often enabled, implicitly, a conservative politics that has always remained at the core of North Korean political culture.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Robert Austin joined us for a discussion of his new book that begins in 1961, when Albanian King Zog I died in a Paris hospital after 22 years in exile. Austin tells the colorful story of this Balkan country’s first and only homegrown monarch. The road to becoming Europe’s youngest president in 1925 and then king of Albania in 1928 was paved with feuds and assassinations. Austin combines Zog’s adventurous life story with a studious analysis of Albania’s political history from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the threshold of Euro-Atlantic integration.

Remarks by Professors Randall Hansen and Edward Schatz.

Description

This lunch seminar, exclusively for Munk School students, is an opportunity to meet in a small group with Munk School Senior Fellow, Scott Gilmore.

Scott Gilmore has built a diverse international career as a diplomat, with the United Nations, as the founder of a successful international social enterprise, as an investor and entrepreneur, and as a writer and journalist. His work has taken him to over 30 countries from Switzerland to Iraq, and in his various roles he has often counselled students on the best and worst ways to start their international careers. Scott will be sharing what he has learned from the “mercenaries, missionaries, and madmen” he has worked with over the years.

Bio

Scott Gilmore is a writer, investor, and entrepreneur. He is the President of Anchor Chain which sets up, turns around, or transforms complicated projects. Recent examples of that work include rescuing a stranded asset in Africa and organizing the first deployment of Starlink terminals into Ukraine for SpaceX.

Scott founded the New York-based organization Building Markets, a social enterprise that has created over 70,000 jobs by connecting local entrepreneurs to global markets. Prior to this he was a diplomat specializing in conflict zones and helped open Canada’s first embassy in Afghanistan. Scott worked for the UN peacekeeping mission in East Timor and established the new nation’s intelligence agency. He is an award-winning writer, the former Editor-at-Large for Macleans magazine, and has been a columnist for the Boston Globe, Foreign Affairs, and the National Post.

Scott was given the EY Social Entrepreneur of the Year award, was named one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40, and was given the Skoll prize. President Obama awarded him the G20 Prize for innovation in impact investing, and the Globe & Mail named him a “Transformational Canadian”. The World Economic Forum has honored him as a Young Global Leader, and he is a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and the Ashoka Foundation.

Description

All students considering enrolling in the Public Policy Program were encouraged to attend, ask questions, and meet with Program Director Professor Shari Eli! Hear from current students and UPPSA executives about their experiences in the program’s courses, academic and co-curricular opportunities.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

In this book talk Perry discussed the process of editing and translating his MLA volume Han’guk ŭi k’wiŏ munka: han segi and its accompanying volume of English translations, A Century of Queer Korean Fiction. He also read from some of the selections, which range from Yi Kwangsu’s 1918 short story "Yunkwangho" to Park Sang Young’s 2017 "Yundo is Back" and include both canonical works as well as pieces found in the archives.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Samuel E. Perry is associate professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His interests include literary translation, queer studies, and revolutionary fiction from the early and mid-20th century. He is now working on two book manuscripts: “From Across the Genkai Sea: Japanese Literature During the Korean War” and “Bad Gays in Japan”.

(Chair) Janet Poole is an Associate Professor, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities & Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies. Poole’s research and teaching interests lie in aesthetics in the broad context of colonialism and modernity, in history and theories of translation, and in the creative practice of literary translation.

Description

This talk presents the emerging themes from a larger book project on China’s relationship-building with African elites through training programs and immersive experiences sponsored by the Chinese government. Drawing on rich empirical data, including interviews and ethnographic observations in China and Ethiopia, this study challenges the popular depictions of China as exporting its model to developing countries. Instead, it demonstrates the dynamic and multi-directional co-optation, persuasion, and disciplining efforts aimed at African elites. The talk highlights how these efforts yield both, a public acknowledgment and even promotion of China by the participants, as well as somewhat ambivalent private reflections about China and its future in Africa. 

Maria Repnikova is an expert on Chinese political communication, an Associate Professor in Global Communication, and the inaugural William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. This year, she is also a non-residential Wilson China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She has written widely on China’s media politics, including propaganda, critical journalism, digital nationalism, and soft power. Dr. Repnikova is the author of the award-winning book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge 2017), as well as the recent, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge Global China Element Series). Her public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic, amongst other outlets. Other than working on China, Repnikova does comparative work on information politics in China and Russia. Most recently, she has been researching and completing a monograph on Chinese soft power in Africa, with a focus on Ethiopia. Dr. Repnikova holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. In the past, she was a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2020-2021), a visiting fellow at the African Studies Center at Beijing University (2019), and a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication (2014-2016).

Description

The modern Greek monarchical state, initially in effect absolutist, was reshaped by two moments of revolt: 1843, when the king was forced to grant a constitution sanctioning a national parliament; and 1862, when he was forced to abdicate, opening the way for a new constitutional process, the election of a new king, and the promulgation of a new, remarkably liberal constitution. Although both these processes led to important political transformations and were instrumental for the formation of the early Greek state, they have received surprising little attention from historians. This lecture seeks to turn this state of affairs around by revisiting these moments, and by locating them in the political and intellectual context of their era – both domestic and international. In so doing, it aims to shed new light on how and why these transformations came about; assess the liberal language that informed them, and was informed by them; and evaluate the short-term and long-term effects of these liberal transformations, and their significance for our understanding of the history of modern Greece.

About the Speaker

Michalis Sotiropoulos, FRHistS, is a historian of modern Europe specializing in the intellectual history of the Mediterranean and the Greek world in the long nineteenth century. Michalis has earned a PhD from the University of London and is currently the 1821 Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the British School of Athens, while in October 2024, he will join the University of Edinburgh as a Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies. His publications include studies of the Greek Revolution of 1821, on law and the formation of states, and on the historiography on the Age of Revolutions, while his monograph Liberalism after the Revolution: The Intellectual Foundations of the Greek State, ca. 1830-1880 was recently published by Cambridge University Press.

Sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, the Hellenic Studies Initiative at University of Toronto, the HHF Chair in Modern Greek Studies at York University, the Graduate Diploma in European Studies at York University, and the Hellenic Canadian Academic Association of Ontario.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

Join us for a workshop with Emiko Stock.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Emiko Stock is a multimodal anthropologist working on questions of historical and diasporic erasures, silence and absence, feminist praxis, and counter-archival orientations. Using writing, images, and soundscapes to resist medium specificity, her compositions dwell between pixels and emulsions, stillness and movement, facts and fabulation. Her short films The Wedding (2021) and Commute (2015) advocate for a sensory ethnography anchored in the experimental and have been screened in international film festivals and universities. She is the co-curator of The Virtual Otherwise Film Festival & Conference and co-founder of CoMMPCT (Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators and Teachers). She is based between Cambodia and Egypt, where she teaches at The American University in Cairo. She previously taught at Hamilton College and Cornell University where she received her PhD. She is currently working on her book project For This Cannot Be Told, Written Or Seen: Cham Resonances Countering Regimes of Hypervisibility. Some of her most recent publications include a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Material Religions and a short piece in Otherwise Magazine.

Description

Join a workshop with top experts on Hungary and Central Europe to examine issues central to Hungary in the twentieth  and twenty – first centuries.

Attendees are cordially invited to join us for a book launch directly following the workshop (5:00PM-7:00PM), showcasing "Survival under Dictatorships Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes" with author László Borhi.

 Refreshments will be provided.  

László Borhi

Revolution and Regime Change in History – The case of Hungary, 1956 and 1989

Karl Marx posited that revolutions occur when the ruling classes cannot rule the old way and the people cannot be ruled the old way. In fact, revolutions are not governed by any law of history. Sometimes they happen when they are not supposed to and sometimes they don’t when they are supposed to. Why did the only violent revolution behind the iron curtain happen in Hungary and what was, if any, the relationship between 1956 and the so called “negotiated revolution”, a trailblazing event in the collapse of communism and the end of the cold war? Why did the 1989 transition happen and why did it remain peaceful? This contribution will attempt to identify unique features in Hungary and how they combined. Both 1956 and 1989 had a dual purpose: to remove foreign domination and to change the system of government. Talk will make the case that the key to success was whether the rulers had an incentive to surrender power. 

Constantin Iordachi

Condemning vs. Remembering Communism: Memorial Museums of Communism in Global Perspective

The lecture will explore dominant master narratives over the communist past and the way they are implemented and “institutionalized” in museums of the Second World War and of communism, as part of more general governmental campaigns on “politics of history” in post-communist Eastern Europe. It will survey a sum of the most representative museums of the Second World War and of communism in Eastern Europe, by inserting them into a larger comparison with global trends in museum, with a focus on communist regimes in Cuba, China, and North Korea, but also with memorial museums emerging around the world, from North and South America to Africa and Asia. Special attention will be given to patterns of historical representation, capitalizing on a set of antithetic emotions, such as universalism vs. parochialism, pro- vs. anti-European feelings, attitudes of collaboration and accommodation vs. heroic resistance, and the pedagogy of “shame” and stigma versus the pedagogy of national pride, charisma, and messianic nationalism. 

Roman Krakovsky

Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe as a “crisis zone of Europe”

The emergence of illiberal democracies in Central Europe, particularly in Hungary and Poland, is commonly attributed to the transition from communism to capitalism and liberal democracy. However, viewed through a long-term historical lens, Viktor Orban’s attempt to reshape the political community along illiberal lines represents a new phase in the enduring series of crises that this region has faced since the late 19th century. This ongoing historical context positions the area as a “crisis zone of Europe,” shedding light on the complexities of its political evolution and diverging from the conventional narrative of post-communist transitions. 

Susan Papp

The Politics of Exclusion in the Hungarian Film Industry, 1929-1956

This presentation is about how the interwar and postwar governments in Hungary politicized and shaped the film industry to do their bidding and how filmmakers, actors and actresses reacted to those political pressures. The archival files of the postwar certification committees provide significant historical insight into the leadership and political narrative of the entertainment industry. The political trials that unfolded in the late 1940s served the position and power of the new elites more than anything else. By the early 1950s, the Cold War took precedence over retribution following the Second World War. This work notably adds to the research and discussion of how to shape, and for what purpose, a nation’s memory of the war and postwar years.

Attila Pók

1968, a Flashpoint between 1956 and 1989?

Pók will give a short summary of the major events of 1968, from the  perspective of a member of the so called 1968-er generation, himself. He will argue that 1968 was a historical  turning point in the history of Hungarian statehood but as A.J. P. Taylor put it  in connection with 1848: history came to a turning point but failed to turn. This topic is part of a longer term research on The Fourth Reform Generation in Hungary, i.e. reform efforts of various segments of the Hungarian cultural, economic political elite from  the mid 1950s to the late 1980s.   

Description

Over the course of a decade, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has implemented extraordinary changes in China that have profound implications not only for the Chinese people but nations throughout the world. Given how swiftly and fundamentally China’s relations with the rest of the world are changing under Xi’s rule, it is imperative that we know what “Xi Jinping Thought” is, how it evolved, and why it is so important.

Join us on Tuesday, April 2, 2024 as Professor Steve Tsang, Director of SOAS China Institute at

SOAS University of London discusses his latest book The Political Thought of Xi Jinping with the Munk School’s Professor Lynette Ong.

About the book

In The Political Thought of Xi Jinping, Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung provide an authoritative overview of Xi Jinping Thought, explaining what it is, what it is not, and what it means for both China and the world. Xi, now effectively the leader of China for life, has worked to ensure that Xi Jinping Thought becomes cemented as the new state ideology.

Clearly inspired by the doctrine of Mao Zedong Thought, which shaped the parameters of acceptable thinking during Mao’s quarter-century reign, Xi wants his doctrine to define what he calls the “China Dream of national rejuvenation” and serve as the pathway to its fulfillment by 2050. As Xi conceives it, the China Dream is about making China great again—restoring China to the height of its power, influence, and international standing in the mythical era of grandeur—the long centuries before the “century of humiliation” that began in the mid-nineteenth century.

About the author

Steve Tsang is Director of the SOAS China Institute at SOAS University of London. He is also an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College at Oxford, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He previously served as the Head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies and as Director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham.

Before that he spent 29 years at Oxford University, where he earned his D.Phil. and worked as a Professorial Fellow, Dean, and Director of the Asian Studies Centre at St Antony’s College. He has a broad area of research interest and has published extensively, including five single authored and thirteen collaborative books.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

There is always that one image that comes out of any archival digging only to resist everything: it comes with the excitement and promises of clarification, documentation, and explanation. And yet it gives nothing. It cares very little for tracks, footnotes, and answers. It resists the mission that, in all honesty and full passion, the historian, the ethnographer, the memory writer, and the all-things-pictures-nerd set out to do. It resists what we could call “regimes of hypervisibility”: the trials of facts, proofs, and truth that academic writing requires. The picture demands us to pause and ponder: could we, as researchers and writers of traces, find ways to work not against or around the blanks but through them? Is there a way for the historian to take in the emptiness of the archive in its entire fullness? Could the anthropologist account for ethnographic refusals beyond the anxious quest for observations?

In this talk, Emiko Stock starts with a single photograph, one taken among Chams—members of the Muslim minority—during the Cambodian 1960s pre-war era: an annihilation regime marked, notably, by a complete visual erasure, and the systematic destruction of archives, photographs, and family memorabilia. As Stock tries to work with the picture and its call to respect opacity, Stock discusses the potential for SF / Speculative Feminism / Speculative Fabulation to open alternative ways of thinking, analyzing, and writing with reparative generosity. For in the end, what those one-too-many pictures might be asking of us is to wonder: could there be other approaches to bring us into an actual resonance with humanity? A resonance which could have little to do with extensive documentation and studies of humans at large and more with a close attunement toward each other.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Emiko Stock is a multimodal anthropologist working on questions of historical and diasporic erasures, silence and absence, feminist praxis, and counter-archival orientations. Using writing, images, and soundscapes to resist medium specificity, her compositions dwell between pixels and emulsions, stillness and movement, facts and fabulation. Her short films The Wedding (2021) and Commute (2015) advocate for a sensory ethnography anchored in the experimental and have been screened in international film festivals and universities. She is the co-curator of The Virtual Otherwise Film Festival & Conference and co-founder of CoMMPCT (Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators and Teachers). She is based between Cambodia and Egypt, where she teaches at The American University in Cairo. She previously taught at Hamilton College and Cornell University where she received her PhD. She is currently working on her book project For This Cannot Be Told, Written Or Seen: Cham Resonances Countering Regimes of Hypervisibility. Some of her most recent publications include a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Material Religions and a short piece in Otherwise Magazine.

Description

This evening dinner seminar, exclusively for Munk School students and invited guests, is an opportunity to meet in a small group with Munk School Senior Fellow, Jonathan Hausman.

Hausman will address the need to remain flexible as an investor in the face of a climate change landscape that is becoming both more pragmatic and uncertain at the same time.  Students will have an opportunity to ask Hausman broad questions on topics related to sustainable and global strategic investment.

Speaker bio

Jonathan Hausman is Executive Managing Director of Global Investment Strategy at the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP), where his team develops fund-wide strategic responses to key emerging global themes. He is a member of the Investments Executive Team and the Global Investment Committee. Hausman was previously Head of Alternative Investments and Global Tactical Asset Allocation, where he was responsible for the Fund’s global hedge fund portfolio, as well as its internal global macro and systematic trading strategies.

Prior to joining OTPP, Hausman was Executive Director at Goldman Sachs, where he managed sovereign risk strategy and advised governments in its New York, Hong Kong and London offices. He is the Chair of the Canadian Council for the Americas and is a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He also serves on the advisory board of Capitalize for Kids. Before entering investment banking, Hausman worked as Special Assistant to the Premier of Ontario.

Hausman holds a BA (Hons.) from McGill University, an MSc. (Econ.) from the London School of Economics and an MPA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He also has the ICD.D certification from the Institute of Corporate Directors.

Description

An opportunity, exclusively for Munk School students, to meet in a small group with two Senior Fellows to learn about the day-to-day challenges and rewards of careers in diplomacy, international development assistance and humanitarian affairs: the Canadian foreign service and humanitarian assistance for both Canada and for the United Nations.   

Julia Bentley is a former career diplomat whose work has focused chiefly on Asia. She has served twice as a diplomat in China (cross-accredited to Mongolia), Taiwan and India, where she was cross-accredited to Nepal and Bhutan. She was appointed as High Commissioner of Canada in Malaysia from 2017 to 2020. Combined with other roles including as a teacher, development consultant and head of an international organization, she has spent 22 years in Asia.  At Global Affairs Canada’s headquarters in Ottawa, Bentley served as Director for Northeast Asia, Executive Director for South Asia and Director General for South Asia, encompassing foreign policy, development, trade and investment.  She previously worked as Winrock International’s Chief Representative in China and director of its NGO Capacity Building Program in China, funded by the Ford Foundation.  She was on secondment from Global Affairs Canada to the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at University of Toronto from January through December 2022 and held a policy practitioner fellowship at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs for a semester in spring 2023. She holds degrees in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and University of Toronto, as well as a post-graduate diploma from Nanjing University in modern Chinese history.

Catherine Bragg is a former Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator in the United Nations (2008-2013). As the ASG, she was the deputy head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). Prior to her secondment to the UN, she has spent 24 years in the federal public service of Canada, in multiple departments, including Justice, Defence, and the Privy Council Office. In 2004-2008, she headed the International Humanitarian Assistance, Peace and Security Program of the Canadian International Development Agency. As Canada’s senior official, she represented Canada on the Executive Committee and Executive Board of the UN High Commission for Refugees and the World Food Program.  Bragg continues to contribute to humanitarian affairs and academic advancement through her participation globally in major national and multi-national humanitarian initiatives, governance and advisory bodies. For the past 10 years, she was Adjunct Full Professor in the Centre for Humanitarian Action, University College Dublin, Ireland, and is a frequently invited speaker in universities in Europe and Asia. In 2016-2020, she was appointed member of the Governing Council of University of Toronto. In total, she has visited over 100 countries and been involved in response to close to 30 humanitarian crises and situations. Bragg received her degrees from University of Toronto (B.Sc. Psychology), University of Cambridge (M.Phil. Criminology) and the State University of New York at Albany (Ph.D. Criminal Justice).

Description

Money has built society. As a technology for holding and exchanging value, money has evolved over millennia and is therefore fit-for-purpose. Money is the universal incentive-mechanism that holds society together like glue. But money is changing rapidly as the 21st century takes shape. This change introduces opportunities to reinvent currency and commerce at a foundational level. It offers new capabilities for the evolving role of banking in the consumer value-chain. It presents the promise of greater economic inclusion across the world. But this change also presents peril. It risks undermining centuries of great sacrifice to build the society we have today, imperfect as it is and always a work-in-progress. As such the importance of this topic begs a broad discussion across the public arena. This event seeks to host that conversation. The Future of Money is... now. 

Our 2024 event will courageously challenge existing global policy standards to better safeguard our financial system from collapse and our civilization from conflict with rogue superintelligence. We will cover three broad topic areas: (1) The future of money, open banking, digital currencies and payment modernization to preserve stability while rethinking the purpose of money in society. (2) The future of the international monetary system with central banks, global banks, fiscal policymakers as well as the high-stakes geopolitical contest of currencies. (3) Stewardship of beneficial and responsible artificial general intelligence as we respond to new and emerging forms of sentience that threaten to end the human dynasty.

Your ticket to this event includes access to the keynote panel & networking cocktail reception both at Koerner Hall. Use PROMO CODE FOM040424 to cover the full ticket price; a $15 processing fee still applies.

Description

The Political Economy of Innovation Annual Lecture

Rapid Indoor Air Quality Monitoring at Large Scale Events:

How the 2021 environmental study of the UK government’s Events Research Programme helped UK society reopen following a year of lockdowns

In early 2020, in the face of the unprecedented public health challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK Government convened the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), to provide evidence-based advice on the emergency response. As several “super-spreading” events that occurred around the world in indoor settings revealed the role of airborne transmission of the disease, public health advice focused on recommending severe limitations on social or professional gatherings indoors, in buildings and on public transport. In this context, mass gathering events, such as live music, sports, theatre performances business networking events and weddings were prohibited in the UK for over a year. A number of research consortia were quickly established to carry out basic and applied research on indoor transmission, to understand how indoor environments could be occupied safely. The Events Research Programme (ERP) was the largest multi-disciplinary research program of this nature, involving public health, behavioural and environmental studies. It was established by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) to assess risk factors for COVID-19 transmission at mass gathering events and the feasibility of public health risk reduction measures.

This talk will describe the “Environmental Study” of the ERP, a rapid evaluation of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and airborne transmission risk conducted at ten large venues around the UK during live events between April and July 2021. The study, which developed a significant evidence base on environmental risk factors at events, was designed to respond to the policy related questions, and to develop high level guidance for event operators and venue managers on environmental standards and safety at events. Following the programme, the UK government allowed the return of live events in July 2021. The talk will describe the approach taken to collect evidence at scale, and how the cycle of rapid reporting and evaluation was carried out. The talk will also describe the legal, logistical and reputational challenges to the research teams of working in this space and discuss the need for further work on indoor environments, in the context of climate change, the energy crisis and an aging population.

About the speaker

Liora Malki-Epshtein is an Associate Professor in Urban Fluid Mechanics and Air Quality, in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London, and director of the Controlled Active Ventilation Environment Laboratory (CAVE). During the Covid-19 pandemic since April 2020, she worked with Transport for London (TfL) and Veolia on protection measures for bus drivers and waste collection crews, and on reducing risks to passengers on the London transport network. She was the Field studies lead on project AIRBODS, which was set up as a rapid response Covid project to understand disease transmission mechanisms in buildings. In April-July 2021, Liora led the largest Environmental Study of its kind worldwide for the UK Government’s Covid-19 Events Research Programme, a study of air quality and transmission risks that enabled the UK to finally re-open events in culture, music and sports industries following a year-long closure, while improving safety for staff and spectators. These studies have provided quantitative evidence of the state of indoor air quality in the UK in a wide range of real-world settings, to enable evidence-based decision by policy makers and to develop appropriate ventilation and operations guidelines for different sectors. This work is now being explored further in CAVE, a world-first large scale experimental facility dedicated to research air quality and other challenges of indoor environments and building design with particular emphasis on safety, health and wellbeing for building occupants.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

This mini conference is organized as a way of imagining and practicing resistance and alternatives to “conventional” Korean Studies, which have often disengaged with decolonial, transnational, feminist, and queer perspectives. We would like to bring together scholars who have expanded the epistemological horizons of the ways of studying “Korea” beyond its geographical designation by making the silenced voices audible, the unexplored insights visible, and discrete locations of resistance connected. We would like to generate radical, yet constructive, conversations about scholarly practice of undoing hegemonic knowledge and towards methodological alternatives for critical knowledge praxis here and now.

There will be three presentations from Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Nadia Y. Kim, and Suzy Kim

ABOUT THE PRESENTATIONS

Writing Sallim: Social Reproduction and Korean Women’s Diasporic World-Making

By Laura Hyun Yi Kang

Abstract: This presentation considers the change of researching, reading, and writing about women’s social reproductive labor in and across very different nodes of the Korean diaspora. The first part outlines the promises and limitations of several possible methods and approaches. The second part will focus on the challenges of reading and translating posed by Herstories, 다시 만난 코리안 디아스포라 여성들의 삶 이야기, a collection of twelve “life stories” of women in the Korean diaspora, which was published in 2021.

Laura Hyun Yi Kang is Professor and former Chair of Gender & Sexuality Studies and a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Traffic in Asian Women (2020) and Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (2002). Kang has edited two anthologies, writing away here: a korean/american anthology (1994) and Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings (2002), which was co-edited by Elaine H. Kim.

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Beyond the Sheen: There’s No South Korea without Empire and its Discontents

by Nadia Y. Kim

Abstract: Its quick rise to one of the highest positions atop the global order, glimmering high rises boosted by the best broadband in the world, its hot Kpop idols, movie stars, and global trendsetting in beauty and shopping cannot hide a crucial fact: it took empire by vicious outside powers and literal flows of blood, sweat, and tears to get an Asian country like South Korea to this high point. These flows persist today but in more hidden and indirect ways, even in the cool idol factory. But this is not merely a story of Koreans suffering Han, rising up in resistance, and being categorical victims at the hands of Japanese-US militarized and capitalized empire and war, but of how the Korean state and civil society across borders also remap this violent, unjust system of stratification and hierarchy. It is a system rooted in extreme neoliberal capitalism, ethnonationalist racism, dogged heteropatriarchy/misogyny, Confucian honor/shame, and conservative Christianity, all with ties to Japanese colonization and US imperialism and their ongoing tentacles. Hence, decolonization and recolonization happen at once; this talk will explore the nature of this and that as true, and the implications for the future of this soft power capital of the world.

Nadia Kim is a Claudius M. Easley Faculty Fellow Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on US race and citizenship hierarchies concerning Korean/Asian Americans and South Koreans, race and nativist racism in Los Angeles (e.g., 1992 LA Unrest), environmental (in)justice, immigrant women, and comparative racialization of Latinxs, Asian Americans, and Black Americans, and race theory. Throughout her work, Kim’s approach centers (neo)imperialism, transnationality, and the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and citizenship. In addition to numerous articles, Dr. Kim has written two multi-award-winning books. Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford University Press 2021) examines Asian and Latina immigrant women’s movements for clean air, and Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA (Stanford University Press 2008) is an exploration of how immigrants navigate American imperial racism. Her book co-edited with Dr. Pawan Dhingra, Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies, addresses how sociology (and other social sciences) benefit from engaging with critical ethnic studies. Kim has long intersected her scholarship with her social justice work, organizing on such issues as affirmative action, immigration, feminism, and environmental justice.

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Among Women across Worlds for Peace in Korea and Beyond

by Suzy Kim

Abstract: While both feminism and pacifism may appear to have stagnated in the 1950s with the rise of Cold War domesticity and McCarthyism, the Korean War galvanized women to promote women’s rights in the context of the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Recuperating the erasure of North Korean women from this movement, this talk excavates buried histories of Cold War sutures to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternalist strategies. Socialist feminism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive understanding of “difference” toward a transversal politics of solidarity. The talk weaves together the women’s press with photographs and archival film footage to contemplate their use in transnational movements of resistance and solidarity, both then and now.

Suzy Kim is a historian and author of the prize-winning book Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her newest book Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell 2023) was completed with the support of the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is senior editor of positions: asia critique and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Korean Studies and Yŏsŏng kwa yŏksa [Women and History], the journal of the Korean Association of Women’s History.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Jesook Song is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology with a certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Mediating Gender, her co-edited volume with Michelle Cho, is scheduled to come out in the University of Michigan Press in early 2024.

Yoonkyung Lee

Description

This event is part of the B.N. Pandey Memorial Lecture Series

ABOUT THE EVENT

The interlocking technologies of caste, gender, sexuality, and humanity continue to shape identity, agency, and citizenship in South Asia and beyond. This talk focuses on the construction and consolidation of caste and examines its everdayness in both touchable and Dalit lives. It demonstrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and the violence of caste. It centers new approaches to understand the transformative potential of the interlocking politics and the global history of gender, sexuality, and the human.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Shailaja Paik is Charles Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Associate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her first book Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit ("Untouchable") women in urban India. Her second book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity (Stanford University Press, 2022) focuses on the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra. Her book won the 2023 John F. Richards Prize for most distinguished work on South Asia.

Description

The presentation will summarize the arguments of The Shifting Ground of Globalization: Labor and Mineral Extraction at Vale S.A. (Haymarket, 2024). It describes the transformation of the Brazilian mining company Vale, global leader in iron ore and nickel production and formerly state-owned, into a Transnational Corporation (TNC). It analyzes the effects of this process on the company’s workers and unions, in Brazil and abroad, through ethnographic research in two of the countries where Vale has mining operations (Brazil and Canada), in places as different as Carajás, in the heart of the Amazon forest, and Sudbury, in northern Ontario.

The book also describes the company’s union and labor relations strategy, which seeks the weakening and isolation of its unions in Brazil, and especially the restructuring of Vale’s operations in Canada after the acquisition of Inco in 2006, which led to the longest strike in the North American country’s private sector in 30 years (between 2009 and 2010) against the powerful and multinational union United Steelworkers (USW). Former USW international president Leo Gerard engaged personally in the strike against Vale, since he has deep roots in Sudbury and in Inco mines, where he got his first job and his father was a union leader in the past.

It also delves into recent changes in the ownership structure and "corporate governance" of Vale. After years of international expansion of the mining company, financed by state and parastatal funds in the governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (Workers’ Party, 2003-2016), these recent changes led to the increased presence of large transnational investment funds in its shares. In dialogue with the theories of global capitalism, the book takes the case of Vale, the largest Latin American company in market value, as a telling example of the integration of Brazilian economy into capitalist globalization and its consequences for workers, communities, and the environment in the first decades of the twenty-first century – when many celebrated the BRICS and its companies as an alternative to neoliberal globalization.

Thiago Aguiar holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of São Paulo (USP-Brazil), and was visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley (2016-2017). He is currently a visiting research fellow at the King’s College London, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Campinas (Brazil) and an associate researcher at the Centre for the Study of Citizenship Rights (USP).

Judith Marshall holds a PhD in Education from the University of Toronto with a thesis – and later book –  on workplace literacy based on her 7 years in the Ministry of Education in post-independence Mozambique.  After Mozambique, she worked for more than two decades in the Steelworkers Humanity Fund, developing labour education programmes on global issues for USW members.   These programmes included a week-long course called "Thinking North South" and many north-south worker exchanges in the mining sector.  The exchanges created working links between Canadian mine workers and their counterparts in countries like Chile, Peru and Mozambique. Often they shared a common transnational employer like Teck, Placer Dome or Vale.  Since her retirement in 2014, Dr. Marshall has been a research associate at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University.  Her most  recent publication is entitled  Vale in Mozambique: Creator and destroyer of jobs, livelihoods and communities, available in a special issue of EXIS (The Extractive Industries and Society).

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States and the Undergraduate Society of American Studies.

Description

Information is not yet available.

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ABOUT THE EVENT

A variety of mutations of neoliberal, capitalist politics have been investigated across different parts of the globe, including many Asian countries. Particularly in South Korea, the market-state nexus has developed a distinctive form of legal violence for the past two decades to protect the capital, (re)establish sovereignty, and outlaw “the disobedient.” Marked by a punitive turn of neoliberal governance in 2007, the recent trend of lawsuits targeting labor unions and protestors reveals a new punitive technique of dispossession and death, which has been effectively enabled and deployed through the Korean juridical systems. Drawing on the analyses of 249 lawsuit cases and 3,138 pages of court judgments, this talk proposes a notion of punitive precarity to elucidate (a) exceptional legal mechanisms to punish the “social ills” employed by legal, government, and for-profit institutions; (b) a contemporary form of the subjugation of life to the power of death enforced by the imposition of liabilities and confiscation; and (c) legal violence as the performative and communicative technology that produces material and symbolic effects that spill over into the entire society. In doing so, this talk extends a poignant critique about the ways in which the state and state-sanctioned violence has proactively created a new underclass, legitimized by the law and legal systems.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Dr. Heewon Kim, a scholar-activist who works across borders, is an associate professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. She is a critical organizational scholar who focuses primarily on the areas of justice, participation and voice, power/knowledge, violence, as well as burnout and resilience.

(Chair) Michelle Cho is an Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies and Affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Korea, Asian Institute. Her research and teaching focus on questions of collectivity and popular aesthetics in Korean film, media, and popular culture. 

Description

Join us on Monday April 15 as Dr. Gunisha Kaur delivers the Cadario Visiting Lecture in Public Policy entitled Reimagining Migrant Health. Dr. Kaur’s talk will cover a novel approach to global health work, rooted in medical anthropology. It will include programs that are local and international with a primary focus on refugee health research.

The Cadario Visiting Lecture in Public Policy is possible because of the generous support of Paul Cadario, Distinguished Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.  

About the speaker

Dr. Gunisha Kaur, MD, MA is a practicing physician, medical anthropologist, and refugee health researcher at Cornell University Medical College. Dr. Kaur has used her extensive background in neuroscience research as an analytical framework to pioneer the study of human rights through rigorous scientific methodology. This has involved clinical research with refugees on issues such as cardiovascular disease related to deportation stress, treatment of chronic somatic pain after torture, and the use of cutting-edge digital tools and artificial intelligence for early diagnosis of hypertension in pregnant refugee women. Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Academy of Medicine, and Cornell University. She is a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations and an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine at the National Academy of Medicine and holds degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. Herself a migrant to the United States, Dr. Kaur has dedicated her career to advancing the health of other forcibly displaced men, women, and children. She is the Founding Director of the Human Rights Impact Lab and is a Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights.

Description

Since the 1970s, a large amount of scholarship has analyzed the prediction of risks in early and modern European societies. Building on the concepts of “risk societies” and cultural theories of risk perception, this workshop explores how risk, originally an economic prediction appearing with the birth of capitalism and global industrialization, permeated every aspect of society, from individual decision-making to artistic and scientific practices and state policies. This workshop aims develop the existing scholarship, bringing scholars from different disciplines whose work focuses on France and the Francophone world.

Further event details and program available here: https://crrs.ca/crrsevents/conceptualizing-uncertainty/

Speakers

Hayden Bytheway, University of Toronto

Ursula Carmichael, Independent Scholar

Constance de Font-Réaulx, University of Toronto

Marianne Guernet, University of Toronto

Magdalene Klassen, Johns Hopkins University

Nicole Liao, University of Toronto

Pierre Marty, University of Toronto

Jason Nguyen, University of Toronto

Margaret Schotte, York University

Samantha Wesner, University of Toronto

Description

This seminar is open to students and faculty at the University of Toronto.

Event Description:

The Cadario Visiting Lecture in Public Policy is possible because of the generous support of Paul Cadario, Distinguished Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.  

About the speaker

Dr. Gunisha Kaur, MD, MA is a practicing physician, medical anthropologist, and refugee health researcher at Cornell University Medical College. Dr. Kaur has used her extensive background in neuroscience research as an analytical framework to pioneer the study of human rights through rigorous scientific methodology. This has involved clinical research with refugees on issues such as cardiovascular disease related to deportation stress, treatment of chronic somatic pain after torture, and the use of cutting-edge digital tools and artificial intelligence for early diagnosis of hypertension in pregnant refugee women. Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Academy of Medicine, and Cornell University. She is a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations and an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine at the National Academy of Medicine and holds degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. Herself a migrant to the United States, Dr. Kaur has dedicated her career to advancing the health of other forcibly displaced men, women, and children. She is the Founding Director of the Human Rights Impact Lab and is a Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

In this presentation, based on my book "The Gilded Cage," I will discuss how the Chinese developmental state orchestrated the transition to becoming the world’s second-largest digital economy. This shift occurred against the backdrop of moving away from a labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing model. I will explore the rise and nature of China’s techno-developmental regime, its implications for state-capital-labor relations, and its varied impacts on different social groups.

About the Speaker

Ya-Wen Lei is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. She is also affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Trained in both law and sociology, she holds a LL.M. and a J.S.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. After graduating from Michigan in 2013, she was a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University from 2013 to 2016.

She is the author of The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China (Princeton University Press, 2018) and The Gilded Cage: Techno-State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023). She has published in various journals, including Annual Review of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Sociology, Law and Society Review, Work, Employment and Society, Political Communication, and The China Quarterly. Her publications have received various awards from the American Sociological Association, the Law and Society Association, and The China Quarterly.

Description

Interested in a career that spans national and global security? Learn how an advanced degree in international Affairs could take you there! 

Join APSIA’s virtual open house now!

Description

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto are pleased to invite you to the launch of the GI-TOC-Munk School Strategic Partnership for North America. Join us as we introduce the partnership and discuss its goals and objectives to combat transnational organized crime in North America. The event will feature insightful discussions, keynote speeches, and networking opportunities with experts, policymakers, and stakeholders.

Speakers include:

Peter Loewen, Director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy: Why this partnership now?
John Collins, Director of Academic Engagement: Building bridges: Introducing the GI-TOC-Munk School Strategic Partnership for North America
Walter Kemp, Director of Global Strategy Against Transnational Organized Crime: Intersections: Working towards a global strategy against organized crime
Siria Felix, Director of Resilience: The Resilience Fund: Supporting community responses to organized crime
Jason Eligh, Senior Expert and Thematic Lead on Drugs: Changing illicit markets in Canada

The GI-TOC is an independent civil-society organization dedicated to improving the evidence basis and seeking new and innovative strategies and responses to organized crime. The GI-TOC-Munk School Strategic Partnership for North America, established by the GI-TOC in collaboration with the Munk School, aims to build a platform to collaboratively address the evolving challenges of transnational organized crime (TOC) in North America. Through the development of a network and rigorous research and analysis, this strategic partnership will contribute to a deeper understanding of TOC dynamics in the region and inform policy responses to combat illicit activities.

Description

Session begins at noon, Eastern Standard Time

Part of the series “Scholars in dialogue: six conversations on the modern Middle East", co-presented by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy,  IE University Madrid, and Sciences Po – Paris School of International Affairs.

About the Session

Gaza has been since Antiquity a prosperous oasis and a commercial hub that served as a springboard for any Middle Eastern empire to conquer Egypt and for any Nile Valley-based power to attack the Levant. This imperial pendulum went back and forth for centuries until Allenby-led British army entered Gaza in 1917, on the very day that the Balfour declaration was made public in London. But the worst was to come in 1948, with Gaza turning into the enclave of a geographical “strip”, and one quarter of the Arab population of Palestine now cornered on only 1% of their historical homeland. Since then, Israel has waged no less than fifteen wars on Gaza, all won militarily, but lost politically, except the first intifada that paved the way for the first Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Any attempt to revive such a process should start from Gaza that remains the key to war and peace in the Middle East.   

Speaker

Jean-Pierre Filiu is professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po, Paris. A historian and an Arabist, he has also held visiting professorships at the universities of Columbia and Georgetown. Hurst and Oxford University Press published his “Arab Revolution” in 2011, “Gaza, a History” in 2014 (MEMO Book Award) and “From Deep State to Islamic State” in 2015, after University of California Press had published in 2011 his award-winning “Apocalypse in Islam.” His “Middle East, a political history, from 395 to the present” has just been out with Polity. His books have been translated in more than fifteen languages, including Arabic and Turkish.

Moderator

Cristina Gallach, international official and journalist, served as United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information (2015-17), and as a member of the Spanish government for six years (2018-2024) in multiple roles, including State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Iberoamérica and the Caribbean. As UN Under-Secretary-General, she directed global, regional, and local communications of the UN system on major current affairs and strategic agendas, with special emphasis on the 2030 sustainable development agenda, climate action, and peace and security issues.  As a senior EU Official and communication director for the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy (1999-2009), she participated in all EU plans, activities and joint international initiatives related to the Middle East, including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Prior to that, she worked for NATO as communications advisor to the Secretary General.   Her long career in journalism includes international reporting in Central and Eastern Europe, Brussels, and as a correspondent in the former Soviet Union, based in Moscow. She graduated from the Journalism and Communications faculty in the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, holds an MIA from Columbia University (New York), and an Honorary Doctorate degree from Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Description

This project explores the most recent famine in Soviet and European History, which killed at least one million people in 1946-47, mostly in Ukraine and Moldova, but about which we know very little. The Soviet state repressed news of the 1946/47 famine at the time, and it remains largely absent in English-language scholarship and relatively neglected in Russian and Ukrainian scholarship compared to the Holodomor of 1932/33.  Our project operates from archival sources across the former Soviet space to explore the interaction of numerous factors in understanding famine causation, duration, mortality, and its broader consequences, which endured for decades afterward.

Speakers:

Filip Slaveski, Senior Lecturer in Russian/Soviet and East European History, Australian National University.

An historian of Soviet Empire, primarily of Ukraine and Russia, his work focuses on the collisions of mass conflict, famine and political repression, their aftermath and contemporary echoes across the former Soviet space.

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Emeritus Professor in History, Indiana University, Bloomington

Japanese-American historian, Emeritus professor in the Department of History, University of Indiana, studies modern and contemporary Ukraine in a wider context of Eurasian history. He has written on the Donbas, historical and contemporary, the Holodomor, the Great Terror, and other subjects mainly during the Stalin era. His publications include books Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, and The Eurasian Triangle: Russia, the Caucasus, and Japan, 1904-1945 (with Georges Mamoulia), as well as numerous articles.

Moderator: Bohdan Klid, Director of Research, Holodomor Research and Education Consosrtium, CIUS, University of Alberta

Description

Join us on Thursday, April 18 at 12:00pm ET for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture with prize winning author Timothy Garton Ash for his book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. The Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture will take place in-person at the Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto ON and online via Zoom.

The Lionel Gelber Prize is awarded annually to the world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues. The Prize is presented by the Lionel Gelber Prize Board in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

About the Book

In his new book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash gives a unique account of the history of Europe since 1945. This is history illustrated by memoir and reportage. Garton Ash draws on his extensive personal notes from 50 years of events witnessed, places visited and history makers encountered (from Margaret Thatcher to Vladimir Putin) to chart the rise and then faltering of the quest for a ‘Europe whole and free’.

About the author

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of eleven books of contemporary history and political writing which have explored many facets of the history of Europe over the last half-century. They include The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name and Free Speech: Ten Principles For a Connected World. He also writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, amongst other journals.

From 2001 to 2006, he was Director of the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he now directs the Dahrendorf Programme. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague was reissued in 2019 with a new chapter exploring  the 30 years since 1989 in post-communist Europe. His latest book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, has been translated into 18 other European languages. He is the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Prix Européen de l’Essai and the George Orwell Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen, for services to European unity.

Description

Join us on Thursday, April 18 at 12:00pm ET for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture with prize winning author Timothy Garton Ash for his book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. The Gelber Prize Ceremony and Lecture will take place online via Zoom.

The Lionel Gelber Prize is awarded annually to the world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues. The Prize is presented by the Lionel Gelber Prize Board in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

About the Book

In his new book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash gives a unique account of the history of Europe since 1945. This is history illustrated by memoir and reportage. Garton Ash draws on his extensive personal notes from 50 years of events witnessed, places visited and history makers encountered (from Margaret Thatcher to Vladimir Putin) to chart the rise and then faltering of the quest for a ‘Europe whole and free’.

About the author

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of eleven books of contemporary history and political writing which have explored many facets of the history of Europe over the last half-century. They include The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name and Free Speech: Ten Principles For a Connected World. He also writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, amongst other journals.

From 2001 to 2006, he was Director of the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he now directs the Dahrendorf Programme. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague was reissued in 2019 with a new chapter exploring  the 30 years since 1989 in post-communist Europe. His latest book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, has been translated into 18 other European languages. He is the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Prix Européen de l’Essai and the George Orwell Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen, for services to European unity.

Description

The transformation of the Ottoman janissary corps from a slave army to a major social group in civilian urban spaces has been well recognized by historians. From the late sixteenth century onwards, they entered guilds, opened coffeehouses, and turned to civilian channels of justice for their disputes, especially the qadi courts. Nevertheless, the impact of this transformation on their traditional status as “slaves of the sultan” remains obscure. Were they slave, free, or experiencing another form of unfreedom entirely? What can sharia court records of the period tell us about their status in relation to their civilian activities? This presentation will examine how janissaries appear in the Istanbul records and what these appearances reveal about their stature in the wider community.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

This talk will explore gender, transformation, and patriarchy in the 19th-century Urdu Qissah-i Agar o Gul (Tale of Agar and Gul), a story of the deeds of Prince Agar, who begins his life as the daughter of the vizier of Poppyseed City. Agar’s tale is queer in many senses, involving real or apparent same-sex desire, bursting with innuendoes and oddities, and driven by the question of Prince Agar’s gender. The talk will question the romantic strategy of celebrating Agar’s tale as an anti-patriarchal transgender narrative, and will begin an examination of the story’s instances of transformation more broadly, in relation to desire. Prince Agar’s maleness makes his tale revelatory of the oppressive force of norms of masculinity and the workings of homopatriarchy through representations of manly virtues, sexual pursuit, traffic in women, rape, and the possibility of a reproductive future.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Pasha M. Khan is the Chair in Urdu Language and Culture and an Associate Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. He is interested in the narrative qissah genre and storytelling in languages such as Urdu-Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian, as well as South Asian literature more broadly. He is the author of The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu, among other writings.

Description

Please join us for a celebration of the Harney Program’s Director from 1999 to 2021, Professor Jeffrey Reitz! The morning will include an all-star panel featuring three of Jeff’s former doctoral students, Professors Rupa Banerjee, Emily Laxer, and Wendell Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey; a keynote address by Professor Richard Alba, and a short address by Professor Reitz. A lunch reception will follow.

Schedule

08:00 AM – 08:45 AM: Breakfast

08:45 AM – 09:00 AM: Welcoming remarks from Prof. Phil Triadafilopoulos

09:00 AM – 10:30 AM: Panel featuring Professors Rupa Banerjee, Emily Laxer, and Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

10:30 AM – 11:00 AM  Coffee Break

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM  Keynote address by Professor Richard Alba

12:30 AM – 12:45 PM  Remarks by Jeffrey Reitz

12:45 AM – 02:00 PM  Lunch Reception

About the Speakers

The seeds of Richard Alba’s interest in ethnicity were sown during his childhood in the Bronx of the 1940s and 1950s and nurtured intellectually at Columbia University, where he received his undergraduate and graduate education, completing his Ph.D. in 1974. He was distinguished professor of sociology at the University at Albany, CUNY, until coming to the Graduate Center in September 2008. He is also on the staff of the GC’s Center for Urban Research and was its acting director during the 2011–12 school year. Increasingly, his teaching and research have taken on a comparative focus, encompassing the immigration societies of North America and Western Europe. He has carried out research in France and in Germany, with the support of Fulbright grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the Russell Sage Foundation. In 2003–04, he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. His research has also received grant support from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His latest books are The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective (2011), coedited with Mary Waters, and Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America (2009). His books include Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (1990); Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (1985); and, most recently, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (2003), cowritten with Victor Nee. He has been elected president of the Eastern Sociological Society and vice president of the American Sociological Association

Jeffrey G. Reitz (Ph.D., FRSC) is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, and R.F. Harney Professor Emeritus of Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies.  He has published extensively on immigration and inter-group relations in Canada from comparative perspectives and has frequently contributed to discussions of policies on immigration, multiculturalism, and minority group employment in Canada.  He is the co-author of Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion: Potentials and Challenges of Diversity (2009); recent articles have appeared in the International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Social Science Research.  Professor Reitz served as Chair in the University of Toronto’s Department of Sociology from 1980-1985, and he contributed for many years at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management.  From 1999-2020, he was R.F. Harney Professor and Director of the Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies Program, and in 2002 brought the program to the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.  In 2000-2001 he was the Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University, and he has been visiting professor or visiting scholar at other universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, and Mexico.  During 2012-2014 he was Marie Curie International Fellow at l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, and 2017-2018 he was Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the City University of New York Graduate Centre.  He is a Research Fellow with the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal.

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrékor Wé Oblahii kè Oblayéé Mantsè) is William Dawson Chair, Assistant Professor, and specialist in post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history at McGill University. He is the author of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press). He is working on two new book projects. The first examines nineteenth-century African-led abolitionism and warfare along the Gulf of Guinea Coast. The second interrogates the roots of counterinsurgency in the United States and the Americas broadly from the 1870s to the 1970s. Adjetey is the back-to-back recipient of McGill’s two teaching commendations: 2023 Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and 2022 H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching. He earned his Honours B.A. from the University of Toronto (St. Michael’s College), and an M.A. in Ethnic, Immigration, and Pluralism Studies and Political Science, also at U of T. He earned his Ph.D., M.A., and M.Phil. from Yale University. Before pursuing an academic career, Adjetey worked in youth gang prevention and intervention in north Toronto.

Rupa Banerjee is Associate Professor of Human Resource Management at Toronto Metropolitan University, and Canadian Research Chair of Economic Inclusion, Employment and Entrepreneurship of Canada’s Immigrants. Her research examines employment outcomes of newcomers, a topic on which she has published extensively. Her research interests also include diversity and ethno-racial discrimination in the workplace. Dr. Banerjee’s current program of research focuses on the role of post-secondary institutions and employers on the migration and labour market integration of temporary residents and immigrants in Canada. Dr. Banerjee’s research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and has appeared in leading journals in the fields of immigration and labour.  Her work has contributed to the awareness of implicit bias in hiring practices and the development of a digital app that facilitates newcomer access to information and resources for settlement in Canada.

Emily Laxer is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University’s Glendon Campus, where she holds a York Research Chair in Populism, Rights, and Legality. Dr. Laxer’s research has addressed both the political underpinnings and community-based effects of state policies concerning minorities’ citizenship, rights, and belonging. This research has had particular implications for understanding debates over restricting Islamic religious signs in comparative societies. International in scope, it has been published in English and French in peer-reviewed journals in the fields of immigration, nationalism, and politics. This research also forms the basis of a sole-authored monograph, Unveiling the Nation: The Politics of Secularism in France and Québec, which received the John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award from the Canadian Sociological Association in 2020. Dr. Laxer’s current research program explores the relationship between contemporary populist political movements and articulations of rights and legality in Canada.

Description

Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar (1864-1944) was a prominent Turkish author in the late Ottoman and early republican Turkey, and now, for the first time, one of his most popular novels, Gulyabani (Ghoulyabânî), originally published in 1913, is available in English translation. A group of University of Toronto alumni have turned what was once a student club of literature enthusiasts in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations into a publishing house, and have just released their second book.

Come join the founders of Translation Attached publishing house, UofT alumni Nefise Kahraman, Karolina Dejnicka, and Yasemin Mangal, as they discuss the life and times of Gürpınar, the enduring appeal of Ghoulyabânî, and the journey of publishing the novel in English translation.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Session begins at noon, Eastern Standard Time

Part of the series “Scholars in dialogue: six conversations on the modern Middle East", co-presented by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy,  IE University Madrid, and Sciences Po – Paris School of International Affairs.

About the Session

What are the conflicts and peace-making efforts over time?  What are the consequences of these events for Palestinian and Israeli society today?  What are the controversies in understanding and interpreting these histories?

Speakers

Bernard Avishai is Visiting Professor at Dartmouth during the summer and fall quarters. He is former Adjunct Professor of Business at the Hebrew University and taught also at MIT and Duke. He splits his time between Jerusalem and New Hampshire. He is a past strategy editor of Harvard Business Review and former International Director of Intellectual Capital at KPMG. For the past ten years, he has contributed regularly to The New Yorker about Israeli affairs and global business; and has written for Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and many other publications. A Guggenheim fellow, he is the author of four books, including The Tragedy of Zionism: Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel, The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last, and Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness. His doctorate, in political economy, is from the University of Toronto.  

Ezzedine Fishere is a Senior Lecturer at Dartmouth College, a novelist, and a diplomat. He taught at the American University in Cairo (2008-2016), worked for International Crisis Group (2007 – 2008); advised the Egyptian foreign minister (2005 – 2007); was a senior political adviser to multiple UN missions in the Middle East (2001- 2004). He also worked at the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv (1999 -2001), served as rapporteur for the "Independent Commission on Reforming the Arab League" and was a speech writer for the League’s Secretary-General (2011-2013). Fishere published nine novels, depicting social and political conditions in Egypt as well as the questions of identity construction and transformation. Many of these were translated to English, French and Italian.  Fishere was part of Egypt’s attempted democratic transition. He advised pro-democracy groupings and presidential candidates. He briefly served as an independent on a government committee monitoring democratic transition in the Fall of 2013, then denounced the return of authoritarianism at the hand of its military.  Fishere studied political science at Cairo University (B.Sc.1987), the University of Ottawa, (M.A, 1995) and l’Université de Montréal (Ph.D., 1998). He also studied public administration at the École nationale d’administration (ENA, Paris 1992).  

Moderator

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at th New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, and a co-host of Slate’s Political Gabfest, a popular weekly podcast. She is the author of two national bestsellers published by Penguin Random House: Charged, about the power of prosecutors, and Sticks and Stones, about how to prevent bullying. Charged won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Emily was also a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2023. Before joining th Times Magazine in 2014, Emily was a writer and editor for nine years a Slate. She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.