Past Events

Description

This talk will address the complex issue of memory of the Holocaust in Ukrainian society after the fall of communism. After a brief overview on the main tendencies in the politics of remembrance, the talk will primarily focus on wider societal attitudes and beliefs. Anna Chebotarova will consider the place that Jews occupy in collective memory in Ukraine, which was home to one of the largest pre-war Jewish communities in Europe and became one of the major Holocaust killing fields during the WWII. She will analyze the dynamics of the attitudes of Ukrainians toward Jews and memory of the Shoah in the context of recent debates on antisemitism in Ukraine and in East-Central Europe. As many researchers have repeatedly stressed, the subject of contemporary antisemitism is often not real Jews, but the images of them, including those transmitted through collective memory frameworks. The presentation will explore the multilevel and multidirectional relations between (trans)national and local Holocaust memory and the social distance towards Jews in Ukraine today. Anna Chebotarova will apply mixed method research – the perspective that combines both data from previously conducted research, nationwide representative surveys as well qualitative data. She will explore how the (trans)formation of historical memory influences the perception of the Holocaust and, more broadly, the attitudes towards Jews in post-Soviet Ukraine and the main factors influencing these phenomena.

Anna Chebotarova is a research fellow at the School for Humanities and Social Sciences, St. Gallen University (Switzerland), and the coordinator of “Ukrainian Regionalism: a Research Platform” initiative. She is affiliated with Polish Academy of Sciences, and with the Center for Urban History in East-Central Europe (Lviv, Ukraine). She obtained MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and MA in History and Sociology from Ivan Franko Lviv National University (Lviv, Ukraine). Her research interests include collective memory, Jewish heritage in East-Central Europe, Holocaust memory, heritage studies, qualitative methods of sociological research.

Description

Join us for a conversation with the 2021 Lionel Gelber Prize Winners.

While the U.S.-China trade war has been perceived mostly as projections of great power competition, trade disputes actually should be seen as part of a global pattern of economic imbalances. Contrary to conventional wisdom, spats over tariffs aren’t necessarily rooted in international rivalries but often are attempts at rebalancing massive trade surpluses and deficits. Those in turn are results of domestic policy choices, which reflect the income inequality at the heart of these tensions.

In their book “Trade Wars are Class Wars” — the 2021 Lionel Gelber Book Prize Winner — Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis trace the origins of today’s trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past thirty years. Challenging the mainstream understanding of trade wars, the authors argue that domestic policies that advantage the rich at the expense of workers produce not only strife at home but also rivalries abroad. They tell a gripping story of how economic policies have generated inequality both within and between states causing global tensions and political polarization.

Join the Lionel Gelber Prize, in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and Foreign Policy Magazine for an exciting virtual dialogue celebrating the 2021 Lionel Gelber Book Prize winners. Hear from the authors as we discuss insights from their seminal research on how the class wars of rising inequality threaten the global economy and international peace—and what we can do about it.

Description

Background

There is growing evidence about how corruption in the pharmaceutical system creates inequitable barriers to access to medicines through wastage, diversion, and exclusion. The pharmaceutical system is particularly prone to corruption given that it is a complex system with multiple decision points and stakeholders, and it is characterized by many market and government failures. As the global community seeks to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including achieving SDG #3 – Good Health and Well-being, addressing corruption in the pharmaceutical system is essential. The COVID-19 pandemic has also shown how corruption threatens equity of access to health services and products.

The Summer Institute: Advancing Anti-Corruption, Accountability and Transparency in the Global Pharmaceutical System provides a unique opportunity to learn from an array of multidisciplinary global experts in areas related to corruption risks in the pharmaceutical system. Attendees will also have the opportunity to apply their learning by working on case studies in small groups.

Who Should Attend?

Researchers, policy makers and any students interested in learning about how to identify and manage corruption risks related to the pharmaceutical system. No prior knowledge or experience on this topic is required.

Time Commitment

3 hours each day – May 10th, May 11th, and May 12th, 2021. Each session is from 9AM-12PM EST.

Schedule **Coming Soon**

We have an exciting list of instructors, topics, and activities lined up. Information is forthcoming.

Please note that Zoom information will be directly emailed 24 hours before the first session (May 10th).

Description

Property taxes account for about 3% of GDP in Canada and the United States, yet our understanding of who bears the burden of the tax is unclear. There are two economic theories of the incidence of the property tax – one that leads to the conclusion that it is a regressive tax (one that falls disproportionately on low-income households) and another that suggests that it is a progressive tax (falling more heavily on those with higher incomes).

This presentation by IMFG Graduate Fellow, Devin Bissky Dziadyk, will review the decades of research on the property tax, and provide new estimates of the incidence of the tax in Canada. Most estimates suggest that the property tax is regressive. If so, what does the regressivity of the property tax imply for cities, and do we need to reform the property tax to make it fairer?

Speaker:

Devin Bissky Dziadyk is the recipient of the 2020-21 Graduate Fellowship in Municipal Finance and Governance. He is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Department of Economics. He previously worked with Finances of the Nation, a project to assemble Canadian public finance data and make it more accessible. Devin has also worked in the tech industry in Toronto, and in particle physics research. Prior to his PhD studies, Devin completed an MA in Economics at the University of Toronto, and a BSc in Physics and Economics at McGill University. His research focusses on the incidence of the property tax, and tax schemes designed to improve the equity of property taxes.

Description

„Papers! Half of Jew’s life is consumed by the futile battle with papers.”- wrote Joseph Roth in his masterful work The Wandering Jews published in 1927. Roth’s statement is the motto of my presentation which tells how national elites exploited citizenship laws to create masses of „alien” Jews.
An anti-Semitic wave swept across East-Central Europe at the end of the First World War. The “Jewish question” became one of the prioritized issues of the new countries. The new political elite in Hungary, in Romania and in Poland, referring to itself as national and Christian, in general did not consider Jewry as part of the “nation”. The solution national elites proposed to the “Jewish question” was, on the one hand, to oust Jews from economic and cultural life, and on the other, to expel the “aliens”. For this reason state authorities were busy creating legal basis for expatriation of the “alien Jews”.
On the other hand the victorious great powers forced the governments of the new East-Central European countries to sign peace treaties and minority treaties which granted citizenship for each citizen living in the territory of the given state.
In my talk, I wish to explore in detail how national governments violated their international commitments and made masses of Jews stateless and vulnerable. Since Hungary is the focus of my talk, I would like to present which members of the Hungarian Jewry were considered aliens by the main actors of public life, what sort of plans were formulated to ensure their elimination, and what specific steps were taken by the successive Hungarian governments to question their citizenship and to expel them. What makes this question especially important is that in both Hungary and Romania, the “alien” Jews became the first victims of the Holocaust. In summer of 1941 they were deported to the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and massacred there.

Tamás Stark received his PhD from the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities in 1993. From 1983 he was a researcher at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 2000 he was appointed a senior research fellow. His specialization is forced population movement in East-Central Europe in the period 1938-56, with special regard to the history of the Holocaust, the fate of prisoners of war and civilian internees, and the postwar migration. In 2014 he was Fulbright visiting professor at the Nazareth College, in Rochester USA. His main publications include Hungary’s Human Losses in World War II (Uppsala, 1995), Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust and after the Second World War, 1939-1949: A Statistical Review (Boulder, CO, 2000), Magyar foglyok a Szovjetunióban. [Hungarian prisoners in the Soviet Union] (Budapest, 2006) „...akkor aszt mondták kicsi robot” – A magyar polgári lakosság elhurcolása a Szovjetunióba korabeli dokumentumok tükrében. [The deportation of civilians to the Soviet Union in the light of contemporary documents] (Budapest, 2017)

Description

For much of the country’s history, foreign investment has been integral to Canada’s economic growth and to the prosperity of its people. As an open economy, Canada has clearly benefited from international capital investment. Recently, however, major events like Covid-19, and the changing nature of technology in the global economy have called into question the assumptions underlying foreign investment around the world.

In this seminar, leading Canadian and international experts will share their insights on evolving strategic competition for resources, IP, talent, and taxation, their impact on Canada’s prosperity and national security, and their changing nature in an economy driven by intangible assets and strategic competition between states, including proposed changes to Canadian rules on foreign investment.

Description

Activists, academics and artists respond to Asian Canadian realities and discourses made urgent by the recent rise of anti-Asian violence, against a backdrop of long standing systemic injustices. This two-day event tackles culture and politics, strategy and pedagogy, drawing connections across movements in abolition, sex work, labour, histories, art and culture and futures of community-building and organizing.

Live captioning will be available for the event.

Brought to you by the AARU Programming Collective: Richard Fung, Shellie Zhang, Monika Kin Gagnon, Robert Diaz and Min Sook Lee.

Presented by Scholar’s Strike Canada with support from the President’s Office of OCAD University, Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), EAHR|Media (Ethnocultural Art Histories Research) at Concordia University, the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, CUPE Ontario.

**No registration necessary. All panels will be livestreamed.**

View the full program and access the LIVESTREAM LINK here: https://www.scholarstrikecanada.ca/aaru-schedule

Description

Since Xi Jinping visited Kazakhstan in 2013 to unveil the “One Belt, One Road” strategy, China has spent nearly USD 1 trillion in development assistance and infrastructure financing in more than 60 countries. This massive and multi-faceted project—since renamed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—has set in motion social, economic, and political transformations with the potential to reshape the globe.

While there has been no shortage of analysis about the project’s origins and initial trajectories, our project is different. We view the BRI as a potential engine of transformations that are varied and difficult to predict; we set our sights on what occurs downstream, i.e. not in the minds of policymakers and project planners but on the ground in specific contexts. But what is the BRI? We welcomed scholars eager to leverage their respective disciplinary and empirical expertise to ask how we might best conceptualize the BRI and its emergent effects on Asian and Eurasian contexts. What historical antecedents, what conceptual frameworks, and what comparative points of reference should frame how we “think into” the BRI and its impact?

While the BRI’s effects will reveal themselves over the course of years and decades to come, we have identified three particularly promising conceptual themes: effects on migration, effects on labour relations, and effects on social mobilization.

Discussions took place as a small conference held via video link with the University of Toronto.

Description

Following the recent grounding of an Irish airline carrying a Belarusian dissident, President Alexander Lukashenko’s fight for power has suddenly taken on international implications. A panel of experts will discuss Belarusian developments since the opposition protests last year and the role of Russia and the West in shaping the fate of Lukashenko and the prospects for Belarusian democracy.

Panelists:

Mark MacKinnon is currently based in London, where he is The Globe and Mail’s Senior International Correspondent. In that posting he has reported on the refugee crisis, the rise of Islamic State, the war in eastern Ukraine, and the Brexit referendum. He was internationally recognized for his 2016 story “The Graffiti Kids,” which followed the lives of the teenagers who inadvertently started the Syrian war.
Mark spent five years as the newspaper’s Beijing correspondent. There he won accolades for his investigations into the garment industry in Asia and for his reporting from the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan.
Mark has also been posted to the Middle East and Moscow for The Globe and Mail. He has covered the arrival of Canada’s troops in Afghanistan, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Russia’s war in Chechnya, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
A seven-time National Newspaper Award winner, Mark is also the author of The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics – which was published in 2007 by Random House, and The China Diaries, an e-book of his train travels through the Middle Kingdom along with photographer John Lehmann.
He has interviewed many world leaders, including Shimon Peres, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

Amelie Tolvin is a current MA candidate at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, where her focus and interests lie in authoritarianism, contentious politics and the post-Soviet space. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree, with a major in Political Science and a minor in Russian, at the University of British Columbia in April 2020. She has previously held internship positions at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and with the European Values Thinktank’s Kremlin Watch Program. She is currently working on her graduate major research project with Professor Lucan Way, examining the authoritarian responses to the current protest movement in Belarus.

Professor Lucan Way’s research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union and the developing world. His most recent book (with Steven Levitsky), Social Revolution and Authoritarian Durability in the Modern World (forthcoming Princeton University Press) provides a comparative historical explanation of the extraordinary durability of autocracies born of violent social revolution. Professor Way’s solo authored book, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Johns Hopkins, 2015), examines the sources of political competition in the former Soviet Union. His book, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Steven Levitsky), was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. Way’s work on competitive authoritarianism has been cited thousands of times and helped stimulate new and wide-ranging research into the dynamics of hybrid democratic-authoritarian rule.

Moderator:

Professor Edward Schatz is the Acting Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He recently published Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia with Stanford University Press. His previous books include Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (2017) and Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (2009). Professor Schatz is currently working with Professor Rachel Silvey on a SSHRC-funded project about the downstream effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Description

Limited public sector funding has meant that municipalities have increasingly relied upon the private sector to help build affordable housing. In Toronto, the City has historically secured such affordable housing contributions largely through the development approvals process using individual negotiations with developers. This process has been facilitated through Section 37 of Ontario’s Planning Act, which permits the City to approve increases in height and/or density above what current zoning allows in exchange for community benefits.

On July 13, IMFG Post-Doctoral Fellow Julie Mah will present preliminary findings from her research on Section 37 agreements from 1988 to 2018 that contain affordable housing benefits to understand the housing outcomes achieved through Toronto’s negotiated and incentive-based approach.

Toronto is currently developing a new, formal “inclusionary zoning” policy that requires developers to set aside a percentage of their new housing units as affordable housing. Section 37 practices are also being reformed in response to recent provincial amendments to the Planning Act. In this context, Mah’s research seeks to establish baseline data against which the effectiveness of future approaches could be evaluated.

Speaker
Julie Mah is the 2020-2021 IMFG Post-Doctoral Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in Planning from the University of Toronto and her research focuses on affordable housing issues, evictions, gentrification and displacement, and equitable development approaches. Julie has also worked as a planning consultant on several community improvement plans, cultural plans and economic development strategies.

The IMFG Post-Doctoral Fellowship is funded by the School of Cities.