Past Events

Description

Beijing and Taipei have long disputed ideas of “one China.” The nature of their contentions has also varied across time. What is certain now is that a majority of Taiwanese disagree with any “one China” concept that implies Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China. Most people in Taiwan want to remain a self-governing liberal democracy and reject Beijing’s “one country, two systems” policy. Our speaker, Yu-Jie Chen, an assistant research professor at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica and an affiliated scholar of U.S.-Asia Law Institute of NYU School of Law, talked about the diversified political positions on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese attitudes towards their own identity, and whether a peaceful solution can be found to this increasingly volatile and high-stakes dispute.  

Speaker’s Bio:  Yu-Jie Chen is an assistant research professor at the Law Institute of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. Her research focuses on human rights and international law and relations, particularly in the context of China, Taiwan, and China-Taiwan relations. Professor Chen received her J.S.D. and LL.M. degrees from New York University School of Law. She also holds an LL.M. and LL.B. from National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She was an inaugural Global Academic Fellow at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law (2019-2020). She has been a research scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute, a researcher and advocate for the non-governmental organization Human Rights in China, and an attorney at the Taipei-based international law firm Lee and Li.

Description

With close to half of Indigenous Peoples living in urban areas, ensuring strong, deep Indigenous-municipal relationships across Canada is vital. Yet, Canadian municipalities are often unsure what duties and obligations they owe First Nations and Indigenous Peoples living in their jurisdictions.

On November 4, Doug Anderson and Alexandra Flynn will discuss some of the key questions on the way forward to improved Indigenous-municipal relationships. Do municipalities, like federal and provincial governments, have a “duty to consult,” and is this duty the appropriate framework for Indigenous-municipal relationships? How have municipalities reformed their governance in the last decade to strengthen relationships with Indigenous Peoples? And what more can be done to respond to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action?

Working from their recently published paper for IMFG, Anderson and Flynn will look at how Indigenous-municipal relations can move forward in a reciprocal and respectful manner.

Description

With their shared and yet diverged colonial and postcolonial experiences, both China and India have embarked on their own modernizing and state-building projects after World War II. From a brief hope of solidarity in the 1955 Bandung Conference to repeated border conflicts, and from postwar developmentalism to neoliberal market reforms, the two self-assured Asian giants have entangled with one another in numerous ways. Today, as China and India seem to drift further apart from each other under the rhetoric of the “New Cold War,” what does it mean to talk about South-South relations in research, activism, and policy-making in the context of China and India? How do scholars and intellectuals from or working on India view China and the changing Asia-Pacific order? This panel brings together scholars and intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds to engage these urgent questions.

Description

Join us as we discuss the intersection of extractivism, populism, and accountability in Latin American politics with co-authors Donald Kingsbury and Teresa Kramarz.

Although populist politics are often portrayed as a driver of poor environmental governance, Populist Moments and Extractivist States identifies it as an intervening variable at best – one that emerges in response to the accountability deficits of extractive states. Case studies in Venezuela – for many, the prototypical petrostate – and Ecuador – which exchanged agribusiness dependency for oil decades later – illustrate how extractive states are oriented by a colonial logic of export and service. This logic regulates state-society-nature relationships and circumscribes avenues for local stakeholders to hold public officials and extractive industries to account for environmental and human harms. Populist moments of the early 21st century across Latin America responded to these conditions, promising more equitable and sustainable futures. However, rather than reversing the technocracy, verticalism, and exclusion of the recent past, populist moments often intensified and legitimated them in the drive to maximize and distribute resource rents. The result has been cyclical, as populist moments of hope and rupture fall prey to the extractivist states they tried, and failed, to replace.

Description

Asian Institute x Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

USA | 2021 | 84 min | English | Canadian Premiere | Documentary, Women Filmmakers

FREE Screening Dates: November 10-19, 2021

About four hours from Los Angeles, on the dusty valley floor beneath the snow-capped Sierra mountains, lies a single white obelisk gravestone, one of the iconic remains of the notorious Manzanar camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. But the valley wasn’t always so. Payahuunadü, or “the land of flowing water,” Owens Valley is the home of the Nüümü (Paiute) and Newe (Shoshone) people who, years earlier, were forced from their land after ranchers and farmers claimed it, while the Los Angeles water department later drained the valley dry, diverting its water to the thirsty city.

Ann Kaneko’s Manzanar, Diverted invokes this history to tell the story of generations of women: Native American, Japanese American WWII incarcerees, and environmentalists, fighting for the future of the valley. Through a mix of testimonials, archival, and aerial photography, Kaneko weaves intersectional histories with the urgency of the present. – Aram Siu Wai Collier

Recognitions:
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, 2021
DOXA Documentary Film Festival, 2021
CAAMFest, 2021

Director Bio:

Ann Kaneko is known for her personal films that weave her intimate aesthetic with the complex intricacies of political reality. Her work has screened internationally and been broadcast on PBS Independent Lens and NewsHour. Her wig-shop musical 100% Human Hair played Reel Asian in 2002.

Description

Asian Institute x Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

FREE Screening Dates: November 10-19, 2021

Myanmar | 66 min | Burmese with English subtitles | Drama, Experimental, Women Filmmakers

Guest-programmed by Thaiddhi in partnership with the Minikino S-Express Short Film Program Exchange, this collection of short films showcases young and new voices of independent filmmakers from Myanmar amid the sociopolitical changes of the country.

This collection includes ‘Late Summer Day’ by Nay Wunn Ni, ‘Burn Boys’ by Kaung Myat Thu Kyaw, ‘The Cockroach Thu’ by Sxar Kiss, and ‘Age of Youth’ by Myo Thar Khin.

Description

Asian Institute x Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

Screening Dates: November 10-19, 2021

USA | 2020 | 77 min | English, Hawaiian with English Subtitles | International Premiere | Drama

PART OF THE CENTREPIECE SPOTLIGHT ON HAWAI’I

Kea can’t make ends meet, even while working as a luau dancer, karaoke-bar hostess, and elementary school Hawaiian-language teacher. After a violent altercation with her boyfriend, Kea accidentally hits a homeless man with her car. Not wanting to involve the authorities, she decides to take care of the mysterious man herself. But while she continues to struggle with her own financial hardship and difficulty finding housing, Kea’s downward spiral begins to reveal a deeply rooted trauma from her past. As her life careens out of control, so too does her grasp on the world around her.

Christopher Kahunahana’s captivating storytelling ventures beyond the world-famous titular tourist destination and strikes an aesthetic that is perhaps unfamiliar to those with cursory knowledge of idyllic Hawaii. Kahunahana’s juxtaposition of the latter against the cold concrete of looming and perpetual urban development casts a critical look at the gentrified waste of ecological decay, systemic poverty, and the enduring legacy of U.S. colonization, which haunts the faces and spaces of Kahunahana’s film. Waikiki is a critical contribution to the growing body of Native Hawaiian cinema. – Kevin Lim

Director Bio:
Christopher Kahunahana is a Sundance Institute Native Lab and Feature Film Program Alumni. As the founder of 4th World Film, he’s written and directed LĀHAINĀ NOON and directed a short documentary for the Smithsonian Institute’s Asian Pacific American “A Day in the Life” project.

Recognitions
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Hawai’I International Film Festival, 2020
Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2020
Seattle International Film Festival, 2021

AWARDS
Best Hawai’I Feature Film, Hawai’I International Film Festival, 2020
Best Feature and Best Cinematography, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2020

Description

Asian Institute x Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

‘The Blind Rabbit’ by Pallavi Paul
FREE Screening Dates: November 10-19, 2021

India | 2020 | 43 min | Hindi, English with English subtitles | North American Premiere | Documentary, Experimental, Women Filmmakers

A mysterious tiger walks through the forest, barely revealing itself, save for a few rare and magical glimpses. This allegorical fiction begins Pallavi Paul’s description of systemic police violence in Delhi, India, based on events suppressed from official history. Using scattered but historically significant fragments of documentation, including video and audio eyewitness accounts, Paul explores the intersections of power, gender, and the narrativization of memory. The film moves across moments like the national emergency of 1975–77, and the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, all while remaining contemporary by alluding to recent police brutality across university campuses.

Creating a narrative from the memories and stories of collective power, resistance, and violence, Paul arrives at a coherent study of an abuse of power that is situated in Delhi, but that is easily recognizable almost anywhere in the world. – Mariam Zaidi

Recognitions:
OFFICIAL SELECTION
2021 International Film Festival Rotterdam
2021 Sheffield DocFest

Director Bio:

Video artist and film researcher Pallavi Paul works with video, installations, and performance. She started her scientific career with a study of literary science, and has now completed her PhD in film studies in New Delhi. Paul’s work has been shown at, among others, the Tate Modern in London, Contour Biennale in Mechelen, Belgium, and the Mumbai Film Festival.

Description

Over the past 30 years, Ontario’s municipalities have relied on development charges to recover growth-related capital costs. At the same time, critics have argued that development charges increase the price of housing, and therefore work against efforts to make housing in the province more affordable.

On November 10, Adam Found will review the findings from his forthcoming paper for IMFG, which examines the connection between municipal development charges and housing affordability. By considering the effects of development charges on not only housing prices but also on property tax rates and municipal services, Found will argue that properly designed development charges in fact improve housing affordability.

Description

Today the power of algorithms to shape our lives is undeniable. The contests are about how fair, just, equitable, and socially useful these information-based decision systems are. They raise issues of power, both in the economic sense of control of markets and in the more political sense of who gets to decide the code and what it is used for. But the issues, and the systems, are deeply embedded in the history of capitalism, and have been developing and proliferating for nearly two centuries.

Join us as Ken Lipartito looks at the earliest examples of such systems, for mediating credit and financial relationships, starting with their origins in the nineteenth century and tracing their development into modern credit assessment surveillance platforms. Over that time most of the same issues that today surround information and decision-making systems arose, were debated, and were decided, in ways that have continued to shape practice down to the present.

Description

* Tea Circle is a Burma/Myanmar blog founded in 2015 and housed at the Asian Institute since 2018.

The military coup in Myanmar prompted a quick shift by major ethnic Burman political actors—including the National Unity Government (NUG)—to adopt language of a “federal democracy” and commit to meaningful federal reform. While political uncertainty and repressive military rule persist, conversations continue about what political changes are necessary to enact meaningful decentralization, but also what complementary processes are needed within Myanmar society to counteract decades of entrenched discrimination and inequality.  

Panelists:

David Thang Moe (Asbury Theological Seminary)

Naw May Oo Mutraw (Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, University of San Diego)

Dr Sai Thet Naing Oo (Pyidaungsu Institute)  

Moderator: Htet Min Lwin (York University)   

This event is supported by a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada

Description

There is a plethora of research on university commercialization and technology transfer. However, there is less of a discussion on the skillset and technical capabilities that allow a scientist to become an entrepreneur. In this webinar we will focus on these skills and programs that induce entrepreneurship. Moving from the scientist’s lab, to entrepreneurship courses, to forming a startup, to growing the firm within an incubator or accelerator.

This event is co-sponsored by the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto and 4POINT0 Partnership for the Organisation of Innovation and New Technologies.

Description

Since the advent of cinema and the forced colonization of the islands, Hawai’i stories on film have too often been told by outsiders. Reel Asian is bringing a spotlight onto two acclaimed Hawai’i-made dramatic feature films. Christopher Kahunahana’s award winning WAIKIKI is the first dramatic feature film written and directed by a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). Christopher Makoto Yogi’s I WAS A SIMPLE MAN had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. Unique films and filmmakers, both Kahunahana and Yogi share a genuine reverence for their home and seek to provide images and sounds of the Hawaii they know.

In this moderated filmmaker to filmmaker conversation Kahunahana and Yogi will discuss each others films and the groundbreaking context that surrounds them.

Description

Description: Amid intensifying extreme weather events linked to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the publication of a bombshell UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in August 2021, there are growing calls from NGOs, activists for climate justice. Postponed for one year due to the pandemic, the stakes will be high at COP26 to achieve concrete and robust outcomes, including updated emission reduction commitments, implementation rules for the Paris Agreement, and development financing.

Join the Environmental Governance Lab for a conversation with Dr. Jennifer Allan, Amalie Wilkinson, Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya and Raul Salas Reyes to discuss what happened in Glasgow, what was missed in media coverage of the events, the significance of COP26 for Canada, and where global climate governance will go from here.

Speakers:
Dr. Jennifer Allan is a lecturer at Cardiff University and Strategic Adviser and Team Leader with Earth Negotiations Bulletin

Dr. Allan’s research explores environmental and social movements, and how global rules are made and remade. Her publications engage with a wide range of environmental issues, including climate change, biodiversity, forest protection, and chemical and wastes management. Through contributing to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin – the de facto record of global environmental negotiations— she has attended roughly 40 UN conferences where states negotiate the rules of global environmental rules and has published over 100 Bulletins with her ENB colleagues. She also edits a yearly round of up the State of Global Environmental Governance for ENB.

Amalie Wilkinson
Amalie Wilkinson is a dedicated climate justice advocate and a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, where she double-majors in International Relations and Peace, Conflict and Justice Studies. She leads the Toronto chapter of Stop Ecocide Canada, an organization dedicated to the criminalization of Ecocide at the International Criminal Court, as a deterrent and accountability mechanism for environmental destruction.

Amalie has long been a strong social justice advocate, leading U of T’s Hart House High Schools Women and Gender Minorities Debate Tournament in 2021, speaking on issues of climate and gender justice as her high school’s valedictorian, and more. During the summer of 2021, Amalie worked as a Research and Advocacy Intern at World Without Genocide, a human rights organization based out of St Paul, Minnesota. Her research focused on underrepresented genocides, climate change as a threat multiplier, and the proposal to criminalize ecocide. This year, she is a member of Professor Donald Kingsbury’s Research Opportunities Program team at U of T, focusing on the emerging Lithium extraction industry as a key component in the clean energy transition.

Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Environmental Policy and Culture program at Northwestern University. Trained as an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, Suiseeya’s research examines complex questions around how the politics of justice and representation in different approaches to addressing global environmental challenges are negotiated and experienced from global to local scales, with particular attention to Indigenous Peoples and environmental justice communities. She co-leads the Presence to Influence project that examines how Indigenous Peoples influence international climate change and biodiversity policies and the Disproportionate Impacts of Environmental Change working group that is co-developing transdisciplinary resilience research initiatives with tribal Nations and Indigenous communities in the US and Southeast Asia. Suiseeya is Faculty Affiliate with the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, the Institute for Policy Research, and the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering.

Raul Salas Reyes
Raul is a senior PhD candidate in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences at UTSC and is currently researching the evolution of the differential treatment norm in the climate regime, which is embedded within the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR). Raúl has been working in climate governance and transparency issues for more than a decade where he has assisted developing and developed countries in meeting their obligations under the UNFCCC.

Moderator:
Dr. Matthew Hoffmann, Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab

Matthew Hoffmann is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and co-director of the Environmental Governance Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is also co-editor of the flagship journal Global Environmental Politics, a lead faculty member in the Earth Systems Governance network, and an Honorary Professor at Australia National University. His research on climate change and environmental politics has been published in 4 books and over 50 journal articles and book chapters. Professor Hoffmann is also the chair of the board of directors for the environmental NGO, Green Economy Canada.

Description

Abstract:
In this talk, I present the core findings and arguments of my upcoming book, Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press 2022). This research traces how Korean citizens have become “participatory democrats” who experience greater political efficacy when they engage in direct action than in institutional politics. In comparing the coordinating capacity of three groups of democracy activists between 1987-2017 – i.e., activists in social movement organizations (SMOs), activists turned politicians in centrist parties, and activists-cum-politicians in progressive parties – I center my explanation on the concept of national solidarity infrastructure. I maintain that activists in Korean SMOs, compared to their counterparts in formal party politics, have developed a remarkable infrastructure to address a broad spectrum of national public policy areas, to organize nationwide popular demonstrations, and thus to nurture the political dynamics of participatory democrats. These findings not only suggest a rethinking of the interconnection between and mutual constitution of social movements and political parties, but further revise the definitional characteristics of social movement actors when the scholarship has conventionally approached SMOs as focused on a narrow scope of social issues or as provisional organizations compared to political parties and institutional politics.

Speaker’s Bio:
Yoonkyung Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the director of the Center for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto. She is a political sociologist specializing in labor politics, social movements, political representation, and the political economy of neoliberalism with a regional focus on East Asia. She is the author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press 2011), Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press 2022), and numerous journal articles that appeared in Politics and Society, Globalizations, Studies in Comparative International Development, Asian Survey, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Critical Asian Studies. She regularly teaches courses on Theories of Social Movements (graduate), Research Practicum (graduate), Comparative Political Sociology (undergraduate), Social Movements (undergraduate), and Transnational Asia (undergraduate).

Discussant’s Bio:
Joan Cho is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Government at Wesleyan University. Authoritarianism, democratization, social movements, and authoritarian legacies in Korea and East Asia are her primary research and teaching focus. She is also a non-resident adjunct fellow at CSIS Korea Chair and an associate-in-research of the Council of East Asian Studies at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2016.

Description

Beginning in July 2020, youth-led protests filled the streets of Bangkok and other cities in Thailand. Fed up with the remnants of dictatorship that lingered despite the elections in March 2019, the protestors made three demands: 1) The current prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, who first came to power in the May 2014 coup, must resign and a new election held; 2) The 2017 Constitution, drafted by a junta-appointed body, must be revised; and 3) The institution of the monarchy must be reformed. The third demand is both what has made the protests potentially socially and politically transformative – and has caused the state to respond with repression. Since November 2020, at least 155 people, including many secondary school and university students, have been accused of lèse majesté, or insulting, defaming or threating the king, queen, heir-apparent or regent, a crime that carries a sentence of up to 15 years imprisonment per count. This talk examines the courageous dissent of activists and the repression they now face.

Bio:
Tyrell Haberkorn is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin. Tyrell researches and writes about state violence and dissident cultural politics in Thailand from the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 until the present. She is the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence (2011) and In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (2018). She is currently writing a first draft of an indictment of the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), the military junta that took power in the 22 May 2014 coup, and translating Prontip Mankhong’s prison memoir, All They Could Do To Us [มันทำร้ายเราได้แค่นี้แหละ]. Tyrell also writes and translates frequently about Southeast Asia for a public audience, including Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Mekong Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, openDemocracy, and Prachatai.

Description

For the past 18 months, the coronavirus pandemic has been the top concern for people around the world. As pandemic concerns begin to lessen, the attention of global citizens is turning to issues of poverty and social inequality, unemployment, financial and political corruption, crime and justice, and climate change. In this second event in the Munk School / IPSOS / CEVIPOF-Sciences Po, Global Advisory Data Series, panellists will discuss the top global concerns for citizens around the world. IPSOS CEO, Public Affairs Darrell Bricker will provide new data from IPSOS’ Disruption Barometer and What Worries the World survey and discuss citizens’ views with Professors Peter Loewen and Martial Foucault, with an emphasis on perspectives in Canada and France.

Description

“Smile Broadly!” is the title of a dynamic performance by children in the Arirang Festival. The scene symbolically shows the culture that can command a smile to breathless children, and actually train them to do so. It is this cultural background that makes it possible to advance the slogan “March with a smile though the roads are rough!” to the people suffering from severe famine. To comprehend the present changes and anticipate future developments in North Korea, we should understand their past experiences and socialization processes of their values, norms, and lifestyles. During the period of famine, I visited North Korea, met North Korean refugees in China near the border, and taught refugee youths in the South. As an anthropologist, famine relief activist and educator, I would like to share my experience with North Koreans and their culture.

Bio:
Dr. Byung-ho Chung received his Ph.D. from Illinois in 1992 in Anthropology. He is professor emeritus at Hanyang University, South Korea, and special advisor to the president of Korean Red Cross. He was professor of the department of cultural anthropology and founded the Institute for Globalization and Multicultural Studies at Hanyang University ERICA Campus. He has been a teacher, scholar, social activist, and social reformer. While keeping one foot in the university and sustaining a career as a researcher and writer, he has extended his reach to social activism and reform. As a public intellectual and action anthropologist, he is the founder or co-founder of seven social justice organizations for equality and multiculturalism in Korea and East Asia, including Cooperative Childcare and Communitarian Education, Okedongmu Children (NGO for relief of North Korean famine), Hanadul School for North Korean Refugee Children, Rainbow Center for Migrant Youths, and Steppingstone for Peace (NGO for the Peace and Reconciliation in East Asia). He is the author or co-author of a number of works on inter-Korean affairs and multicultural issues including North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics, Welcome to Korea: North Koreans in South Korea, Multicultural Spaces in South Korea, and Suffering and Smile (published in Korean in 2020, translated in Japanese in 2021, and English translation in progress).

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This event is organized by Jesook Song (Anthropology, University of Toronto), Yoonkyung Lee (Sociology, University of Toronto) and Laam Hae (Politics, York University).

This virtual event is co-organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea (CSK) at University of Toronto and the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies.

Description

How a Prescription for Supportive Housing Can Reduce Hallway Medicine and Why Every Government and Community Should Care

It is often said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have created a new urgency for coordinated actions that address the root causes and systemic impacts of housing and homelessness. What we face as a city and society is clear. No single community, government or institution can tackle these challenges alone. Collaborative, sustained, effective and innovative interventions are needed – including regional coordination, application of best practices, engagement of civil society and intergovernmental investments.

For the tenth annual IMFG City Manager Address, Chris Murray will speak to the urgency of a whole-of-community and whole-of-government approach to tackle the precursors of homelessness before the downstream consequences and costs multiply for all orders of government. Never has the whole been more important to ensuring success in tackling this issue.

Description

Abstract:

Taking up treatments in social thought on work as an insult to status and an assertion of dignity, the recuperation of collective standing in the recognition of individualised death, and the imagination of sovereignty derived from common culpabilities, this presentation explores how caste as a particular contextualisation of questions of equality is framed through mediation of the body as an analytical instrument. How might we understand the polemical force of B.R Ambedkar’s formulation of a “division of labourers” as description of inequality? How does the category of atrocity anchor untouchability as the reconciliation between multitudes of the dead and death as individual event? How might a poetic figuration of force frame sovereignty as collective culpability for every body harmed? Through thumbnail sketches of polemical, conceptual, and aesthetic strategies through which Dalit and other thinkers frame and engage these questions, I hope to share the sense in which these particular operationalisations of caste may be inhabited as lessons in thinking with equality as an axiom and aspiration.

Speaker’s Bio:

William F. Stafford, Jr. is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He completed his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on the autorickshaw meter in Delhi as an exemplary format of “public” transactions and anchor of a variable ethos of commercial sociality. His current project takes up the autorickshaw meter-mounted panic button to explore architectures of “sequester” as a spatialising genre of governance and sociality in India. Taking the Lakshman Rekha as a technological artefact and visual rhetoric of security, his project works through political theologies and aesthetics of the individuation, identification, and fungibility of city residents in the “democratisation” of a gendered moral economy of location through the platformisation of bodily security. He has co-edited a collection of essays on topology and method in anthropology, authored essays and book reviews on political theologies of demonitisation in India and imaginaries of belonging through and beyond labour in Sri Lanka, and undertaken academic, policy, and legal research on bonded labour, forced labour, and the minimum wage in South Asia.

Description

Serhy Yekelchyk is Professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria and the author of seven books on Ukrainian history and Russo- Ukrainian relations, including the award-winning Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War. Dr. Yekelchyk is president of the Canadian Association for Ukrainian Studies.

Description

Historian and organizer Garrett Felber, Visiting Faculty Fellow at Yale University, discussed abolitionist lessons from his biography-in-progress of Black Puerto Rican anarchist and former U.S. political prisoner Martin Sostre. First as a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, and later as a political prisoner who was framed during the 1967 Buffalo rebellion while running a radical bookstore, Sostre embodied the dialectical transformations between self and society which led him to lead a life of “continuous struggle.” Sostre creatively adapted law, solitary confinement, surveillance, and organized abandonment to disrupt state violence and create life-affirming communities. His ideas and deeds formed architectures of resistance within the scaffolding of an oppressive state that provide a variety of illustrations for movements organizing within, against, and beyond it today.

Speakers Bios:

Garrett Felber, Yale University

Garrett Felber received his B.A. in English from Kalamazoo College, a M.A. in African American Studies from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an interdisciplinary historian whose work focuses on 20th-century social movements, the Black radical tradition, and the carceral state. Felber’s Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (UNC Press, 2020) received the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians and was a finalist for the Museum of African American History’s Stone Book Award and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Pauli Murray Book Award. He is co-author of The Portable Malcolm X Reader (Penguin 2013) with Manning Marable and has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Souls, and South African Music Studies.

Brett Story, Ryerson University

Brett Story is a geographer and award-winning non-fiction filmmaker. Her films have screened at True/False, Oberhausen, Hot Docs, the Viennale, and Dok Leipzig, among other international festivals. Her second feature-length film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Her interests across the fields of documentary and critical theory are expansive, and include experimental cinema and essay films, politics and aesthetics, racial capitalism and Marxist political economy, and visual geography. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is the author of a forthcoming book titled Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America from the University of Minnesota Press. She was a 2016 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow and is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

Max Mishler, University of Toronto, History Department and the Center for the Study of the United States. Mishler specializes in the transnational history of the United States, with a focus on slavery and abolition, incarceration, and the history of capitalism.

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States.

Description

It is now five years since the Brexit referendum and nearly two years since the UK left the EU. Former Member of the European Parliament Sir Graham Watson discusses the causes of Brexit, current developments, and future implications for the UK.

Sir Graham Watson’s political career started with the Scottish Young Liberals, of which he was the International Officer and later Vice-Chairman. In 1997 he was elected to the Bureau of the International Federation of Liberal and Radical Youth; from 1999 to 2001 he served as its Secretary General. He was a founder member of the Liberal Youth Movement of the European Community (LYMEC) and of the European Youth Forum.

From 1983 to 1987, Graham Watson was Head of the Private Office to UK Liberal Leader the Rt Hon Sir (now Lord) David Steel. From 1983 to 1993 he was a Council Member of the European Liberal Democrat Party and an active participant in Liberal International meetings. Elected as the first UK Liberal ever to the European Parliament in 1994, he served as Chairman of the Parliament’s Committee on Citizens Rights and Freedoms, Justice and Home Affairs from 1999 to 2002 before being elected as Leader of the ELDR (later ALDE) Group. Under his leadership it became the largest third party ever in the European Parliament. He served as Leader from 2002-09.

In 2010 his tenth book, Building a Liberal Europe, was published by John Harper Publishing and in 2011 he was knighted in the Queen’s birthday honours list.

Elected to the ELDR (now ALDE) Party Bureau in 2011, Sir Graham became Party President in 2012 and served until 2016, stepping down to devote his energies to the EU referendum campaign in the UK.

During his twenty years in the European Parliament Sir Graham was particularly active in the foundation and development of the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats and in the accession of central and eastern European countries to the EU. He is also a co-founder and former Chairman of The Climate Parliament, a global network of legislators committed to accelerating the switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.

Sir Graham remained active in politics at international level until January 2020, serving as a Member of the European Economic and Social Committee and taking part in activities of the ALDE Party and the Liberal International. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Fellow 2020-22 at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and is researching to write a biography of Lord Russell-Johnston for Birlinn Books.

Description

The Inter-Asian Forum on Film Censorship was the first webinar roundtable discussion for the series, Theory/Praxis/Politics. This forum highlighted film practitioners and programmers’ thoughts and reflections on the practices of censorship across Asia. Our panelists, Zhu Rikun, Kek Huat Lau, and Park Sungho, articulated their first-hand experiences in the field and unfurl the complexities of censorship both in the production and circulation of cinema.  Theory/Praxis/Politics was a webinar series working to advocate for and bring together perspectives of academics, filmmakers, programmers, civil servants, and other stakeholders with an interest in the question of censorship across Asia and its diasporas. We considered Asia as a productive site in which theory, practice, and politics overlap. The intersection allows us to question not only our understanding of censorship and the ways in which we engage with cinema in the region but also to reconsider the relationship between theory, aesthetics, and politics.

PARK Sungho is a programmer for Cambodia International Film Festival and Busan International Film Festival, and is working to promote Southeast Asian cinema globally. Park was born in Seoul, Korea in 1977. He majored in Film Editing at the Cinematography Department at Chung-Ang University. In 2007, he joined the Busan International Film Festival and served as a program coordinator for Asian cinema and manager for the Asian Film Academy. In 2013, he moved his base to Phnom Penh. Since 2016, he has joined Cambodia-based film production company Anti-Archive as a producer.  

ZHU Rikun is an independent film director and producer, as well as a curator from China. He is the founder of Fanhall Films and chief editor of cinema website fanhall.com. Zhu founded Documentary Film Festival China in 2003, which is one of the earliest independent film festivals in China. As a director, Zhu’s has made the following film: The Questioning, The Dossier, Welcome, Dust, Anni, and No Desire to Hide(also named Siren in original title).  

LAU Kek-Huat is a Malaysia-born filmmaker based in Taiwan. His debut film Boluomi was in competition Busan International Film Festival, New Currents section, and Golden horse nominated for a Best new director. The project won him the Tokyo Talent Award 2015,  Best Script Award in 2013 Taiwan, and was selected for La Fabrique. Cinema du monde. His short film Nia door won Best Short Film Award, Sonje Award at the Busan International film festival, selected for the 38th Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. Both his documentary Absent without leave and The Tree Remembers still face censorship challenges today in Malaysia. He is an alumnus of Golden Horse Academy and Berlinale & Tokyo Talents. Lau had also a jury and mentor for regional filmmaking events such as Doc Doc, Asiadoc, FFD, New Asian Scenery.  

Palita Chunsaengchan is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian cinema in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is working on her book manuscript entitled, Sovereign Screen: Early Thai Cinema and Politics of Media Modernity. This project focuses on early Thai cinema — particularly on its intermedial relationships to prose, poetry, and traditional theatre — from the period of the absolute monarchy to the Siamese Revolution. She also published in Asian Cinema (2021) and Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (2018).   

Elizabeth Wijaya is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies and Cinema Studies Institute of the University of Toronto. She is Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies and an Associate Producer of Taste (Dir. Le Bao, Special Jury Award, Berlin Film Festival).

Description

On December 1, 2021, Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, delivered the 18th annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture: https://www.ned.org/events/eighteenth-annual-seymour-martin-lipset-lecture-ronald-deibert-on-digital-subversion-the-threat-to-democracy/

Join us on December 6th at 5pm ET for an online Q&A session with Professor Deibert on “Digital Subversion: A Threat to Democracy.”

Ronald Deibert is professor of political science and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy and the Dark Side of Cyberspace; Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communications in World Order Transformation; and Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society, as well as several edited volumes.

Previously, Deibert was a principal investigator and co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (2003-2014) and Information Warfare Monitor (2003-2012) projects. Deibert was one of the founders and (former) vice president of global policy and outreach for Psiphon. He serves on the editorial boards of Explorations in Media Ecology, Astropolitics, Journal of Global Security Studies, Review of Policy Research, and International Political Sociology.

He has received several awards, including the University of Toronto’s President’s Impact Award (2017), the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity (2014), and the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom in Canada Award from the Canadian Library Association (2014). In 2013, Deibert was appointed to the Order of Ontario and awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal for recognizing and mitigating the “growing threats to communications rights, openness and security worldwide.”

The Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World was inaugurated in 2004 by the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the Munk School for Global Affairs at the University of Toronto as an important new forum for discourse on democracy and its progress worldwide.

The Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World was inaugurated in 2004 by the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the Munk School for Global Affairs at the University of Toronto as an important new forum for discourse on democracy and its progress worldwide.

Description

Join us for the book launch and discussion of Voices from the Periphery, a new collection of thought-provoking essays written by young people whose families have lived as minorities in various countries in east-central Europe for four generations. They became minorities not because their families migrated to different parts of Europe, but because the borders were changed overnight by the Treaty of Trianon after the end of the First World War.

Much has been written about the outcomes of Trianon, but this book is very different. These essays are the result of a competition for students and young professionals who live in minority status in four different countries surrounding Hungary: Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Serbia. The writings of several Canadian students on this topic are included as well.

Voices from the Periphery examines how the current generation of young people perceive the impact of the treaty that has had such a long-term effect on their lives. During this book launch, we will hear from the contributors. Their essays not only examine the legacy of the past but also recommend pathways to a more positive future.

Dr. Emőke J.E. Szathmáry is a biological anthropologist whose career combined research, teaching, administration, and community service. She served 12 years as President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Manitoba. Earlier she was Provost and Vice-President (Academic) at McMaster University, and before that, Dean of Social Science at Western University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Member of the Order of Canada, and the Order of Manitoba. Dr. Szathmáry’s focus on the genetics of the indigenous peoples of North America included research on the causes of type-2 diabetes, the genetic relationships within and between North American and Siberian peoples, and the microevolution of subarctic populations. Her field research involved Ottawa, Ojibwa and Tlicho peoples in Ontario and the Northwest Territories. She has published over 90 scientific articles and reviews, and co-edited four books. As well, she served terms as Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology (1987-91), and the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1995-2001).

Susan M. Papp has had a distinguished career as an award-winning broadcaster and filmmaker. One of her documentaries received the prestigious Michener Award for Public Service. Dr. Papp is the author of several books and many scholarly articles, including a history of the Munk-Munkácsi family in the volume How it Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry. One of her books, Outcasts: A Love Story, is based on a true story that took place during the Holocaust. Originally written in English, Outcasts has been translated into three languages and made into a documentary film. Susan Papp earned her Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, The Politics of Exclusion and Retribution in the Hungarian Film Industry, 1929–1947, is presently being prepared for publication.

Description

Gustavus Stadler’s Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life is a new biography of the storied folk singer and icon of the Popular Front Left, one that does the work of disentangling him from myth and setting him down amid the messy, contradictory, human struggles of his day: “an expansive and strikingly unique portrait,” as the Los Angeles Review of Books recently put it, “of a man, not of an immortal legend.” The book also functions as a kind of intimate history of the Left, tracking the definitive importance for Guthrie of a series of dilemmas — about illness and shame, pain and joy as they are experienced through the body, intimacy as a crucible for solidarity — that suggest a greater continuity between Old and New Lefts than we are used to acknowledging.

Join us for a conversation about the book, these issues, and more, between Stadler and eminent historian of U. S. music David Suisman.

—Speaker Bios—
Gustavus Stadler is William R. Kenan Professor and Chair of English at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he directs the John B. Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities. In addition to Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life (Beacon Press, 2020), he is the author of Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the U. S. 1840-1890 (U of Minnesota Press, 2006). He has published essays on U. S. literature, music, and politics in such venues as Al Jazeera, Public Books, Avidly.com, and Social Text.

David Suisman is associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, where he specializes in cultural history, the history of music, sound studies, war and society, and the history of capitalism. His books include Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009), recipient of numerous awards and honors, and Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), co-edited with Susan Strasser. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of American History, Social Text, Radical History Review, The Believer, American Historical Review, Journal of Social History, and other publications. From 2010 to 2021, he was associate editor and book review editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. A sometime disc jockey at freeform radio station WFMU, he lives in Philadelphia.

Description

Taiwan is among the top 20 largest economies in the world and plays a key role in global supply chain. Yet, the industrial activities also come with a heavy environmental cost. Taiwan is the fifth largest coal importer in the world; at the per capita level, Taiwan’s carbon emission is higher than most developed countries. This talk will review the politics of climate change in Taiwan at different levels. At the global level, the talk will discuss how being a non-member to UNFCCC constrains Taiwan’s internal discussions on climate change; at the national level, the talk will focus on how Taiwan’s legacy of developmentalism shapes the policy trajectories on energy sources; at the local level, the talk will showcase how the potentials and challenges for Taiwan’s vibrant civil society to contribute to climate actions.
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John Chung-En Liu is an associate professor of sociology at National Taiwan University, and a faculty affiliate in the International Program on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and previously was an assistant professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.

Description

Please join us for a panel discussion of Kajri Jain’s new book, Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke University Press, 2021)

In 2018 India’s prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the world’s tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India’s economic reforms of the 1990s. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora, Gods in the Time of Democracy examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, it mobilizes the concept of emergence towards a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Its richly layered narrative describes how these public icons have proliferated at the intersections between new image technologies, neo-spiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence.

Learn more about the book at: https://www.dukeupress.edu/gods-in-the-time-of-democracy

Description

Are you interested in applying to the Master of Global Affairs &/or Master of Public Policy Programs? Are you planning on applying by the January 20, 2022 application deadline?

Then come get all of your admissions questions answered in this Admissions Q & A. There will be no presentation. You will just come in and ask questions about how to apply. If you are in the process of the application and you have questions, this session is the one for you! Don’t miss it!

Description

BOOK TALK

What can China’s railway initiative teach us about global dominance? Join us for a panel discussion with the authors of the book ‘Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power In Southeast Asia’ (University of California Press, October 2020).

ABOUT THE BOOK:

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled what would come to be known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—a global development strategy involving infrastructure projects and associated financing throughout the world, including Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. While the Chinese government has framed the plan as one promoting transnational connectivity, critics and security experts see it as part of a larger strategy to achieve global dominance. Rivers of Iron examines one aspect of President Xi Jinping’s “New Era”: China’s effort to create an intercountry railway system connecting China and its seven Southeast Asian neighbors (Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam). This book illuminates the political strengths and weaknesses of the plan, as well as the capacity of the impacted countries to resist, shape, and even take advantage of China’s wide-reaching actions. Using frameworks from the fields of international relations and comparative politics, the authors of Rivers of Iron seek to explain how domestic politics in these eight Asian nations shaped their varying external responses and behaviors. How does China wield power using infrastructure? Do smaller states have agency? How should we understand the role of infrastructure in broader development? Does industrial policy work? And crucially, how should competing global powers respond?

The book is available for purchase at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520372993/rivers-of-iron

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Selina Ho is Assistant Professor and Chair (Master in International Affairs Program) at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. She is also nonresident Senior Fellow at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. She is the author of Thirsty Cities: Social Contracts and Public Goods Provision in China and India.

David M. Lampton is Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and Research Scholar and Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center. He has served as president of the National Committee on United States–China Relations and was the inaugural winner of the Scalapino Prize in 2010. He is the author of Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping.

Cheng-Chwee Kuik is Associate Professor and Head of the Centre for Asian Studies, the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies at the National University of Malaysia, and a nonresident Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, SAIS Johns Hopkins. He received the 2009 Michael Leifer Memorial Prize, presented by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, for his essay “The Essence of Hedging.”

Description

Excerpted from my forthcoming book, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism 1870-1930, “Blood” traces my great-grandfather, the Populist Congressman from Nebraska, Omer Madison Kem, in his avid adoption of eugenics as he expressed it throughout the extensive archive he left behind. Focusing on blood as a symbolic marker of value (class, race, and strength) and of bodily vulnerability at once, I explore the concept of blood contamination running through segregationist policies, eugenics, and the anti-immigration crusades of the 1910s and ‘20s. As my own family participated in and benefited from these ideologies, I explore this history from a sense of deep implication, tracing the inexhaustible threads of invitation and rejection, belonging and barrier, weaving through my family’s history and all of our lives now.

—Speaker Bio—
Julie Carr is the author of 10 books of poetry and prose, including Real Life: An Installation, Objects from a Borrowed Confession, and a book of essays, Someone Shot my Book. Earlier books include 100 Notes on Violence, soon to be reissued, RAG, and Think Tank. With Jeffrey Robinson she is the co-editor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015). Her co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory was published by Commune Editions in 2018. Climate, a book of epistolary essays written with the poet Lisa Olstein, is forthcoming from Essay Press.

Carr was a 2011-12 NEA fellow and is a Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in English, Creative Writing, and the Intermedia Art Writing and Performance PhD. She is currently the Chair of the Women and Gender Studies Department. She has collaborated with dance artists K.J. Holmes and Gesel Mason. With Tim Roberts she is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden in Denver. Www.reallifeaninstallation.com; www.juliecarrpoet.com;www.counterpathpress.org

— Respondent Bio—
Dr. Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of six novels, three collections of short stories, five collections of poetry and three non-fiction books. Originally written in Spanish, these works have been translated into multiple languages, including English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean. The recipient of the Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature (Paris, 2013); as well as the Anna Seghers (Berlin, 2005), she is the only author who has won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize twice, in 2001 for her novel Nadie me verá llorar (translated into English by Andrew Hurley as No One Will See Me Cry ) and again in 2009 for her novel La muerte me da. In 2020, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.
The Restless Dead, her most recent book of criticism, comparatively explores the contemporary discussions surrounding conceptualist writing in the United States, post-exoticism in France, as well as communally-based writing throughout the Americas.
She was born in Mexico (Matamoros, Tamaulipas, 1964), and has lived in the United States since 1989.

Description

Dartmouth College’s Initiative for Global Security and the Centre for the Study of Global Japan at the University of Toronto were pleased to co-host an expert discussion of how the US-Japan alliance should adapt to the rise of Chinese power and a changing Indo-Pacific. Speakersl discussed emerging challenges to the US-Japan alliance, and to what extent the alliance responded (technologically, politically, and militarily) to these challenges.

 —–SPEAKER BIOS—– Moderator: Prof. Jennifer Lind (Dartmouth College, Government Department and Dickey Center)  Jennifer Lind is Associate Professor in the Government department at Dartmouth College, a Faculty Associate at the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and a Research Associate at Chatham House, London.  Professor Lind’s research focuses on the security relations of East Asia, and U.S. foreign policy toward the region. Her book, Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Cornell, 2008), explores how memory and apologies affect international reconciliation. Lind’s current research and book manuscript examines the future global balance of power, arguing that China’s rise has led to a bipolar system: that through “smart authoritarianism” China has emerged as a peer competitor to the United States. Professor Lind has published her research in numerous academic journals, and writes for wider audiences in Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

Panelists: Professor HIKOTANI Takako, Gakushuin University, Japan  Takako Hikotani is Professor at Gakushuin University International Centre. From 2016 to 2021, she was the Gerald L. Curtis Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy at Columbia University, and continues her affiliation with Columbia as Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. She also serves as the Asia Society Policy Institute Fellow at Asia Society Japan Center. Professor Hikotani previously taught at the National Defense Academy of Japan, where she was Associate Professor, and lectured at the Ground Self Defense Force and Air Self Defense Force Staff Colleges, and the National Institute for Defense Studies. Her research focuses on civil-military relations and Japanese domestic politics, Japanese foreign policy, and comparative civil-military relations. Her publications (in English) include, "The Japanese Diet and defense policy-making," International Affairs, 94:1, July, 2018; "Trump’s Gift to Japan: Time for Tokyo to Invest in the Liberal Order," Foreign Affairs, September/October 2017; and "Civilian Control and Civil-Military Gaps in the United States, Japan, and China" (with Peter Feaver and Shaun Narine), Asian Perspective 29:1, March 2006. Professor Hikotani received her BA from Keio University, MAs from Keio University and Stanford University, and PhD in Political Science from Columbia University, where she was a President’s Fellow.

 Professor MORI Satoru, Hosei University, Japan  Satoru Mori is the professor of international politics and U.S. foreign policy at the Department of Global Politics, Faculty of Law, Hosei University. Dr. Mori is currently undertaking research on U.S. strategy in Asia, U.S. defense innovation and its implications for U.S. allies, and the history of U.S. defense strategy. Dr. Mori is a former Japanese Foreign Ministry official and holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Tokyo, LL.M. degrees from Columbia University Law School and Kyoto University, and a LL.B. degree from Kyoto University. During his sabbatical leave, he was a visiting researcher at Princeton University (2014-2015) and George Washington University (2013-2015). He currently chairs a security policy project at the Japan Institute for International Affairs as well as two government commissioned projects. His book on U.S. diplomatic history The Vietnam War and Alliance Diplomacy (in Japanese) published from the University of Tokyo Press in 2009 was awarded the 15th Hiroshi Shimizu Prize for Distinguished Academic Work from the Japanese Association of American Studies. English publications include “The Case for Japan Acquiring Counterstrike Capabilities: Limited Offensive Operations for a Defensive Strategy,” (co-authored with Shinichi Kitaoka) in Scott Harold et al., Japan’s Possible Acquisition of Long-Range Land Attack Missiles and the Implications for the U.S.-Japan Alliance, (RAND Corporation, forthcoming) 7-25, “U.S. Technological Competition with China,” Asia Pacific Review 26:1 (2019) 77-120, and "The Promotion of Rules-based Order and the Japan-U.S. Alliance" in Michael J. Green ed., Ironclad: Forging a New Future for America’s Alliances (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) 97-112. He is also a recipient of the Nakasone Yasuhiro Incentive Award and is also a senior fellow at the Nakasone Peace Institute.

Professor Andrew Oros, Washington College, USA  Andrew L. Oros is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. His latest research project, initiated as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC in the past year, examines how demographic change – such as shrinking populations, aging societies, and gender imbalances – have and will affect the security environment in the Indo-Pacific region and, in particular, the network of US alliances and partnerships in the region. He conducted research for his last book, Japan’s Security Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2017), as an invited research fellow at Japan’s National Institute of Defense Studies and as a Japan Foundation Abe fellow at Keio University in Tokyo and Peking University in Beijing. He also is the author of two other books and numerous articles and book chapters on issues related to East Asian security and Japanese politics. He serves as an executive editor of the scholarly journal Asian Security, is a member of the US-Japan Network for the Future (Japan/Mansfield Foundations), and is part of the Mansfield-Luce Asia Scholars Network. He earned his Ph.D in political science at Columbia University, an M.Sc from the London School of Economics as a British government Marshall scholar, and a B.A. from the University of Southern California.

Discussant: Prof. Phillip Lipscy (University of Toronto, Department of Political Science and Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy)  Phillip Y. Lipscy is associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He is also Chair in Japanese Politics and Global Affairs and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. His research addresses substantive topics such as international cooperation, international organizations, the politics of energy and climate change, international relations of East Asia, and the politics of financial crises. He has also published extensively on Japanese politics and foreign policy. Lipscy’s book from Cambridge University Press, Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations, examines how countries seek greater international influence by reforming or creating international organizations.

Description

Matt Robertshaw is researching the impacts of Haiti on French colonialism in Africa. In this talk he looks at the experiences of Haitians who travelled to Africa between 1896 and 1986. He describes how these travellers—citizens of an independent Black republic that had won its independence from France—engaged with colonialism in French Africa and contributed to the transition to independence in several African states.

Matt Robertshaw is a PhD candidate in History at York University. He focuses on Haiti, the Caribbean and French colonialism in Africa. He is also a video essayist via Sleeper Hit History on YouTube.

Description

The 16th annual Peace, Conflict and Justice Student Conference will explore the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, examining how they influence power asymmetries between state actors within the current context of COVID-19. Through four forums featuring scholars, professionals, and student speakers from the University of Toronto and beyond, the conference will analyze the ways in which these legacies persist through practices and structures such as the exercise of soft power, financial interventions, the military-industrial complex, and international legal systems.

The conference will kick off with a keynote address from Dr. Amitav Acharya, UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University.

11:00-11:05 – Opening Remarks
11:05-11:20 – Keynote Address
Dr. Amitav Acharya, UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University

11:20-12:20 – Forum #1: Financial Interventions
Dr. Sanjay Ruparelia, Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University
Sachini Perera, RESURJ
Wafaa Abdurahman – Coordinator of Fight Inequality Alliance, South Africa
Dr. Carmen Logie, UofT Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work
David Okojie, Second-Year PCJ Student

12:20-1:20 – Forum #2: Soft Power
Dr. Rinaldo Walcott, UofT OISE & Women and Gender Studies Institute
Laila Omar, UofT Department of Sociology
Geetha Philipupillai, Goldblatt Partners LLP
Neha Dhaliwal, Fourth-Year PCJ Student
Madhurie Dhanrajh, Third-Year PCJ Student

1:50-2:45 – Forum #3: Military Industrial Complex
Dr. Terri E. Givens, McGill University Department of Political Science
Dr. Walter Dorn, Royal Military College of Canada & Canadian Forces College
Ray Acheson, Reaching Critical Will (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom)
Maryam and Nivaal Rehman, Third-Year PCJ Students

2:45-3:50 – Forum #4: International Legal Systems
Roojin Habibi, Global Strategy Lab & Canadian International Council
Bryce Edwards, Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP
David Walders, Indigenous Innovation Initiative
Dr. Uchechukwu Ngwaba, Ryerson University Lincoln Alexander School of Law
Lina Lashin, Fourth-Year PCJ Student
Roya Aboosaidi, Second-Year PCJ Student
Hailey Marleau, Fourth-Year PCJ Student

3:50-4:00 – Closing Remarks

Forum Descriptions:

Financial Interventions:
The Financial Interventions Forum will highlight how COVID-19 pathways to recovery differ between the Global South and Global North. The forum will contextualize these differences by looking at the histories of colonialism and imperialism in conjunction with their current economic impacts. It will identify the disproportionate effect of these impacts on Global South nations through topics such as vaccine apartheid and vaccine hoarding.

Soft Power:
The Soft Power Forum seeks to examine the use of immigration policies to attract migrants whose labour, cultural, and political attributes contribute to the advancement of a country’s imperialist interests. The forum will explore topics including precarious labour migration, geopolitics, just immigration, and political considerations when determining an individual’s status as a “refugee.”

Military Industrial Complex:
This Forum will analyze the ways in which the military-industrial complex has sustained conflict and contextualize it within the social movements mobilized by the pandemic. The discussion will broadly cover topics including the Canadian Armed Forces aid during COVID-19, arms trade, and defense contracts while examining the relationship between Canada, the United States, and neo-imperialism.

International Legal Systems:
The International Legal Systems Forum will explore the power asymmetries between the “developing” and “developed” worlds in international institutions. It will serve as a platform for analyzing peace-keeping, peace-building and humanitarian intervention through different international legal institutions, and how they have been influenced by legacies of imperialism. This forum will also discuss the implication of the response from the international legal system on Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people.

Speaker Bios:

Keynote: Amitav Acharya
Dr. Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and a distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University. He is the first non-Western scholar to be elected (for 2014-15) as the President of the International Studies Association (ISA), a renowned interdisciplinary association committed to understanding international, transnational and global affairs. Dr. Acharya’s academic interests include Southeast Asia, multilateralism and global governance, human security, and international relations theory. His current affairs commentaries cover subjects such as Asian regionalism, Asian security, the war on terror, and the rise of China and India.
Dr. Acharya has received two Distinguished Scholar Awards from the ISA. The first was rewarded to him by ISA’s Global South Caucus in 2015, while he was honoured with the second award in 2018 by ISA’s International Organization Section. In 2020, he received American University’s highest honour: Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award.

Financial Interventions

1. Sanjay Ruparelia
Dr. Sanjay Ruparelia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. He is also the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Ryerson’s Faculty of Arts. Dr. Ruparelia has written on vaccine hoarding for Global Policy Journal and was a panellist at Ryerson’s conference on vaccine apartheid. His research interests include the politics of democracy, equality and development in the postcolonial world, and the role of parties, movements, and institutions in politics.

2. Sachini Perera
Sachini Perera is the executive director for RESURJ, a Global South-led and grounded transnational feminist alliance. She researches the intersections of technology, pop culture, sexual and reproductive justice, and pleasure. She has written on vaccine justice within the context of COVID-19 and holds expertise in sexual and reproductive health, as it pertains to socioeconomic divides.

3. Wafaa Abdurahman – Coordinator of Fight Inequality Alliance, South Africa

4. Carmen Logie
Dr. Carmen Logie is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. She is the Canada Research Chair in Global Health Equity and Social Justice with Marginalized Populations. Her research aims to advance an understanding of, and develop interventions to address, stigma and other social ecological factors related to health disparities.

5. David Okojie
David Okojie is a 2nd-year Political Science and PCJ major with a minor in French. Due to his Nigerian heritage, he has a deep interest in West African colonial history, and the modern forms of imperialism employed globally ever since traditional colonialism fell out of style. He has no pets but plans on getting one, preferably a dog but he hasn’t decided what breed, any suggestions are welcome. His favorite color is blue and love basketball and anime with YuYu Hakusho and Onepiece being his favorite.

Soft Power

1. Rinaldo Walcott
Dr. Rinaldo Walcott is the Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute and an Associate Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, both at the University of Toronto. From 2002 to 2007, he was the Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies. His research is in areas of Black Diaspora Cultural studies, gender and sexuality. He is the author of the essay, “The End of Diversity” (2019).

2. Laila Omar
Laila Omar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She co-authored an article entitled “Listening in Arabic: Feminist Research with Syrian Refugee Mothers” (2019). Her main research interests include Education Policy, Immigrant and Refugee Integration, International Development and Middle East Studies.

3. Geetha Philipupillai
Geetha Philipupillai is a practising attorney with Goldblatt Partners LLP, specializing in employment law, civil litigation and class actions. She regularly represents labour unions and their members in a range of civil proceedings. Her Master’s thesis explores the branding of Tamil youth in Canada as terrorists and radicals, and how such targeting contributes to a national project of white settler colonialism.

4. Neha Dhaliwal
Neha Dhaliwal (she/her) is a fourth-year undergraduate student. Aside from her major in peace, conflict, and justice, Neha is also pursuing a major in human geography and a minor in diaspora and transnational studies. On campus, Neha is an executive member of the Peace, Conflict, & Justice Society and the Feminist Equal Rights Alliance. She is also currently an International Presidential Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress in Washington, DC. Neha will be presenting on the role of migrants and diasporic groups in decolonization & Indigenous resurgence movements.

5. Madhurie Dhanrajh
Madhurie Dhanrajh is in her third year at UofT, pursuing a double major in Peace, Conflict and Justice and Ethics, Society and Law, with a minor in Political Science. She is also passionate about postcolonial and gender studies. Madhurie is also pursuing a degree in classical music and education, and in her free time, plays a few instruments like the violin and sitar. She spends her time between Canada and Guyana, studying and volunteering in both countries.

Military Industrial Complex

1. Terri E. Givens
Dr. Terri E. Givens is a Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She was the founding director of the Center for European Studies at the University of Texas and is the author/editor of books and articles on immigration policy, European politics, and the politics of race. Her most recent book is Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides (2021).

2. Walter Dorn
Dr. Walter Dorn is a Professor of Defence Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada and the Canadian Forces College (CFC). At the CFC, he teaches officers of rank from Canada and other countries Canadian foreign and defence policy, the ethics of war, peace operations and international security. His interests cover both international and human security – focusing on UN field operations for peacekeeping and peace enforcement. At the University of Toronto, he was a Research Fellow with the International Relations and Peace, Conflict, Justice Studies Program. Professor Dorn also served as the UN Representative of Science for Peace since 1983 and addressed the UN General Assembly at its Third UN Special Session on Disarmament in 1988.

3. Ray Acheson
Ray Acheson is the director of Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They represent WILPF on the steering committees of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, and the International Network on Explosive Weapons. They aim to bring an intersectional feminist approach to disarmament and antiwar activism.

4. Maryam and Nivaal Rehman
Maryam and Nivaal are twin activists, journalists and filmmakers and the Co-Executive Directors of their non-profit The World With MNR. They’re currently pursuing a Double Major in International Relations and Peace, Conflict and Justice Studies with a Minor in Women and Gender Studies. They’re passionate about taking action for climate justice, gender equality and human rights through storytelling and advocacy projects. While they work to address issues on a global scale, they’re currently focusing on research and advocacy to end human rights abuses in Indian-Occupied Kashmir.

International Legal Systems

1. Roojin Habibi
Roojin Habibi is a lawyer specializing in human rights and global health. She is a PhD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School (York University) and a research fellow at the Canadian International Council and the Global Strategy Lab. She has advocated for the right to health through organizations including the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, the Canadian Medical Association, the Namibian Legal Assistance Centre and UNAIDS.

2. Bryce Edwards
Bryce Edwards is a partner at Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP. He provides legal and strategic advice on lands and resource matters, intergovernmental negotiations, mining, energy, land use planning, oil & gas projects, and treaty and rights claims. He teaches at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where he was awarded the Truth & Reconciliation Teaching Award.

3. David Walders
David Walders is a securities lawyer and the Deputy Director of the Indigenous Innovation Initiative, a platform to provide funding and support for Indigenous Innovators and entrepreneurs. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and teaches in the area of Aboriginal Law and Policy.

4. Uchechukwu Ngwaba
Dr. Uchechukwu Ngwaba is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University’s Lincoln Alexander School of Law. His research engages multidisciplinary, comparative and socio-legal methods in investigating complex questions affecting health governance frameworks in the Global North and South. Dr. Ngwaba’s areas of expertise include public health and human rights, health systems, and transitional justice.

5. Lina Lashin
Lina Lashin is a senior student at Trudeau’s Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice Studies, also earning a minor in Sociology and two regional minors in African Studies and Near Middle Eastern Studies. Her academic interests include colonial legacies in the Arab world, migration studies, sociology of law, comparative legal systems, and modern Arab thought. Lina derives her worldviews from personal experiences within the institutions, processes, and communities she is interested in studying. These experiences continue to enhance her academic skills by providing unique, nuanced understanding of realities otherwise inaccessible to many. Lina is interested in producing theoretically sound perspectives for structural issues facing her community.

6. Roya Aboosaidi
I am Roya Aboosaidi, a second-year student at Trinity College. I am currently pursuing my majors which combine my vast interests in medicine, economics, international relations, and political science. I have presented at 3 U of T conferences and look forward to speaking on British colonialism in India.

7. Hailey Marleau
Hailey Marleau is in her final year of her undergraduate studies with a double major in Peace, Conflict and Justice and Ethics, Society and Law and a minor in Political Science. She is passionate about the intersection between climate justice, indigenous justice, and peacebuilding, and the role that law can play in remedying social injustice. She hopes to pursue a career in environmental policy or journalism to promote policy solutions that support climate resilience for vulnerable communities.

Description

Speakers’s bios:

Maria Avdeeva, Research Director at the European Expert Association, focuses on international security, cooperation of Ukraine with the EU and NATO in combating hybrid threats and emerging security challenges. She analyses information operations, efforts to counter disinformation, and threats to democracy. Author and instructor of a course on Information Security, conducted as part of a National Security Course. iSANS expert, OSCE Project Coordinator in Ukraine national Cybersecurity Expert.

Oxana Shevel holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge in England, and a BA in English and French from Kyiv State University in Ukraine. She is the author of Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region, leading countries to be more or less receptive to refugees. The book won the American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) 2012 book prize. Professor Shevel’s current research projects examine the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states; church-state relations in Ukraine; the origins of separatist conflict in Donbas; and memory politics in post-Soviet Ukraine. Her research has appeared in a variety of journals, including Comparative Politics, Current History, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, Geopolitics, Nationality Papers, Post-Soviet Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, Slavic Review and in edited volumes.

Brian Taylor is Professor of Political Science in the Maxwell School at 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).