Past Events

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The 2020 PCJ Student Conference served as a platform for discussions on the modern challenges and opportunities for Indigenous communities in Canada.  The PCJ Student Conference is an annual student-organized event that brings together the PCJ community outside of the classroom for an opportunity to learn about and engage with an issue pertinent to discussions of peace, conflict and justice.  This year, the conference served as a platform for Indigenous academics, practitioners, community leaders, Elders and traditional knowledge keepers to guide discussions on the modern challenges and opportunities for Indigenous communities in Canada. This theme served to provide a domestic context to issues of peace, conflict and justice that are often overshadowed by international events.  The two-day conference took place at the Campbell Conference Facility at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy with the following schedule of events:  Friday, January 31  5:00 PM ─ Opening Remarks and Land Acknowledgement 5:30 PM ─ Keynote Address (Professor Brenda Wastasecoot) 6:30 PM ─ Networking Event  Saturday, February 1  9:30 AM ─ Opening Remarks and Land Acknowledgment  10:00 AM ─ Session 1: Land and Environmental (TBA)  11:00 AM ─ Session 2: Legal and Treaty (Delbert Wapass)   12:00 PM ─ Lunch   1:00 PM ─ Session 3: Language and Culture (Debby Danard)  2:00 PM ─ Session 4: MMIWG (Lee Maracle and Jennifer Brant)  3:00 PM ─ Session 5: Economic Empowerment (Tabatha Bull)   4:00 PM ─ Final Remarks and Closing.

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The Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, CERES, and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto would like to invite you for an exclusive event with Ukrainian filmmaker and writer Oleg Sentsov on Monday, February 3, 4 pm, Room 108N, North House, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place.

Film director Oleg Sentsov was active in Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity and was detained in Crimea in May 2014 and sentenced to 20 years in a Russian prison on charges of terrorism. On September 7, 2019, Senstov was freed from a Russian penal colony after more than five years of detention as part of a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine. He was one of 35 Ukrainian citizens that returned home. He continues to fight for freedom of expression and the freedom of other Ukrainian political prisoners. Oleg is visiting on Toronto on the invitation of the Ukrainian Embassy in Canada.

The event will be chaired by Professor Taras Koznarsky.

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For the past several years, Myanmar has found itself in the international spotlight. The state once thought of a pariah in the international community made headlines in 2010 when its military rulers dissolved the junta that had ruled the country since 1962 in favour of a democratically elected civilian government. However, the path to democracy has not been without significant challenges. The Rohingya crisis has shed light on the continued control of military officials over the new government, and once revered leader Aung San Suu Kyi faces increased scrutiny for her defense of their practices at the International Court of Justice. By all accounts, the fight for democracy is ongoing in Myanmar. What are the obstacles to its achivement of a quality democracy? What is the role of international actors in advancing or suppressing this? How will the governing National League for Democracy handle the Rohingya Crisis with increasing nativist sentiments?

Join the Contemporary Asian Studies Students’ Union and the Synergy Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies on February 6th from 2-4PM as we dissect the democratic progress of Myanmar. Refreshments and snacks will be provided!

Jacques Bertrand is Professor and Associate Chair (Graduate) of Political Science, as well as Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies and Director of the Collaborative Master’s Program in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies (Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs) at the University of Toronto. He is the author/co- editor of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia (Cambridge, 2004); Multination States in Asia: Accommodation or Resistance (Cambridge, 2010); Political Change in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2013); and Democratization and Ethnic Minorities: Conflict or Compromise? (Routledge, 2014). He is finalizing a book manuscript on Democracy and Secessionist Conflict in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP)and a book (w/ Ardeth Thawnghmung and Alexandre Pelletier) entitled Winning by Process: The State, Democratic Transition, and Ethnic Conflict in Myanmar.

Matthew Walton is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was the inaugural Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on religion and politics in Southeast Asia, with a special emphasis on Buddhism in Myanmar.

Joseph McQuade is the Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies. He is also Editor-in-Chief at the NATO Association of Canada, where he runs the newly-created Centre for Disinformation Studies program stream. Dr. McQuade is affiliated with the Queen’s University Global History Initiative and with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, and is a Managing Editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies.

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In 1940, at the height of her stardom, the star-actress Shanta Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the Bombay film industry. I interrogate this curious text – Should I Join the Movies? – by placing it at the intersection of female stardom, the corporeality of cinematic labor, and techno-scientific interest in industrial fatigue. The weariness of the actress, her capacity for “being spent,” is an experiential category that pushes us to think embodiment as production experience. This essay positions Apte’s text as theory from the South that helps us rethink the meanings of gender, embodiment, affective labor, inequality, and human-machine relations at a critical phase in the career of cinema in India. In dialogue with Apte, I think through the materiality of the off-screen world of film work and parse her insistence on embodiment as the grounds for refusal and resistance.

Debashree Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her first book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (forthcoming from Columbia University Press) brings together insights from film and media studies, feminist cultural studies, new materialisms, and technology studies to narrate the history of Bombay cinema as a history of material practice.

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Planning your first year at U of T and want to find out more about Munk One? Join us on February 12 for an opportunity to meet Munk One professors, students and staff who will tell you about this unique first year opportunity for students interested in global affairs.

To make the most of your time with us, we ask that you arrive promptly at 6:00pm. During the first hour, Professor Donald Kingsbury, Interim Director of Munk One, will present a brief overview of the program. Then, students and staff will talk about specific aspects of the program such as its seminar class format, labs, research opportunities, case competitions, international opportunities and more. You will also have plenty of time to ask questions.

Meet us in the Boardroom and Library of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at 315 Bloor Street West.

We look forward to seeing you there!

In the meantime, you can learn more about the Munk One program by visiting our website and following us on Instagram:

https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/one/ | @mymunkone

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Address: Alumni Hall, 121 St. Joseph Street, Room 400

Elena Krejčová is Associate Professor at the Department of Slavic studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno (Czechia). She studied Czech Studies, Bulgarian Studies, English and American Studies at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski (Bulgaria), and completed her doctoral studies at Masaryk university in Brno (1999). Her main areas of research include political linguistics, sociolinguistics, contrastive linguistics of Slavic languages, theory of translation. Elena Krejčová is the author of monographs Slavonic Babylon (2016), Quo Vadis, Philologia? (2017), The Power of Public Speech (2017) and author of dictionaries Czech- Bulgarian Law Dictionary (2015) and Czech-Bulgarian Specialized Dictionary of Legal, Economic and Socio-political Terminology (2016).

Political correctness as a way of forming the principles of communication and in particular the verbal behaviour is very strongly connected with the period of totalitarianism in the countries of the former socialist block (including Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, etc.). The idea of “right” and “wrong”, i.e. unacceptable speaking, thinking, behavior that is treated as a crime, the battle of ideas and ideologies is well presented in media as a tool of propaganda before 1989, this close relation between communication and political systems was a part of the state policy. What happened after 1989 – did we finally gain freedom of speech? Media after the “Velvet revolution” changed a lot – from the feeling of freedom with no restrictions that ended up to vulgarization of language to the new requirements in society to treat people without prejudice and discrimination.

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This paper addresses the causes of non-execution deaths during the Cambodian Genocide. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979) had one of the highest mortality rates of any communist revolution, with the deaths of approximately one quarter of the population: half from direct violence and the other half from indirect means, in particular starvation. What explains the variation in indirect deaths, those that resulted from means other than execution, during this period of mass violence? I argue that it was not just control over agricultural production that led to high rates of starvation deaths, but the policies of social control associated with the collectivization process that exacerbated the problems of famine. The set of policies surrounding the family, including forced marriages and the separation of family units, which I call social collectivization, undermined traditional buffers against famine and decreased the likelihood of survival. The decision to include social components was an ideological one, but those it targeted reflect a strategic logic shaped by economic and security interests. I find that collectivization of economic activities also affected the likelihood of survival; but the social elements tipped the balance toward disaster. High levels of social control targeted preexisting social network and communal ties, fracturing those networks that would ordinarily have acted as a buffer against poor policy or economic downturns in a community. As a result, individuals were more vulnerable to the effects of overwork and over-requisitioned rice, making deaths from indirect means—starvation and exhaustion in particular—more likely. Through this study, I demonstrate the consequences of governing a revolutionary state for the indirect victims of mass violence.

Rachel Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Dickinson College. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019. Her research centers on questions of survival during periods of mass violence. More broadly, she researches issues of political violence, gender and conflict, human rights, and the long-term consequences of conflict.

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In this lecture Professor Junya Nishino (Keio University, Japan) elucidated Japan’s ‘three-pillared’ approach to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Firstly, Japan has pursued engagement and dialogue, which can be seen in events such as the 2002 Pyongyang Declaration, 6-party talks aimed at finding solutions to security concerns in Northeast Asia, and the 2014 Stockholm Agreement. Secondly, Japan has supported the use of pressure by imposing unilateral sanctions and supporting UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea for its nuclear program. Thirdly, it has promoted defense and deterrence by working with the United States and South Korea as part of a ‘defense triangle’. In this context, Professor Nishino’s lecture emphasized the need for a strong Japan-ROK relationship in order to confront the threat emanating from the DPRK.  

Speaker Biography: NISHINO Junya is Professor, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law and Politics, Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. He also serves as Director of the Center for Contemporary Korean Studies at Keio University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yonsei University. His research focuses on contemporary Korean politics, international relations of East Asia and Japan-Korea relations. His research focuses on contemporary Korean politics, international relations in East Asia and Japan-Korea relations. Dr. Nishino was a Japan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Visiting Scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University in 2012-2013. He was also an Exchange Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 2011-2012. Previously he served as a Special Analyst on Korean Affairs in the Intelligence and Analysis Service of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2006-2007), and was a Special Assistant on Korean Politics at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul (2002-2004). Dr. Nishino received his B.A. and M.A. from Keio University, and Ph.D. in Political Science from Yonsei University in South Korea.

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The MeToo movement in Korea that happened for the past two years shows some fundamental differences from past political movements against sexual discrimination. First, the former takes on the form of a voluntary mass movement. The MeToo movement began due to the female audience’s active acceptance of the major head slogan of anti-sexual violence movements, “It was not my fault.” The growing feminist awareness of sexual violence and problems that surged after 2015 allowed the women to accept the slogan with all their hearts and launch the movement. Secondly, as testimonies appeared subsequently, the violence was seen as a communal affliction, different from the past feminist movements. In the past, sexual violence victims faced suspicion and criticism as soon as they open up about their experiences and to prove their experiences, they went through individual trials in court. However, the MeToo movement was different. As the name “MeToo” itself signifies, the sexual assault victims’ cases were not perceived as discrete or separate, or cause to socially ostracize the victim. Instead, the Me Too movement allowed more opportunities for solidarity and collaboration.
Lastly, the MeToo movement does not involve victim identity politics that responds to the demand to prove the assault and adheres to victim centricism that claims that women are disadvantaged. Rather, the movement demands change in socially mandated male-hegemonic, heterosexual normative, authoritative communal culture and behavior status quo. In this presentation, we will look at the hints of possibilities of change demonstrated by the MeToo movement and whether these possibilities will be held back by the process of court and bureaucratic procedures. Sharing these concerns about possible challenges to these new changes, I plan to discuss how sexual assault could be politicized as a social phenomenon.

Kwonkim Hyeonyoung is a Guest Professor in the Korea National University of Arts, South Korea. She sees herself as a research activist. She is a guest professor at Korean National University of Arts. She is the co-author of Analyzing the Korean man , Feminism of perpetration and victimhood and author of Will never turn back again. She also co-wrote twenty books, including The Politics of the MeToo Movement . Her primary interest as a researcher lies on exploring ways how gender politics of violence and power plays in today’s Korean society. As an activist, she reads written judgments in court, attends hearings at trials, protests in streets, and writes.

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Open science has momentum.  It is much discussed, though most often by advocates or product suppliers. The idea entails shifts in research practice with substantial implications for resource use in support of research.  To understand these implications and to make informed choices about the future of the research enterprise, we must fully understand what is being proposed and consider any empirical evidence on the effects.  To this end, this talk explored the origin, meaning, implications and current status of open science.  Aligned with the most recent National Academies report on the topic, open science was defined as encompassing the following: open access publishing, open data, open software, reproducible research, open evaluation, public engagement and policy.

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Please join us as a group of interdisciplinary scholars shares their expertise on the political and economic implications of the novel Coronavirus outbreak.

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The Dr. David Chu Scholarships in Asia-Pacific Studies offer funding to undergraduate and graduate students in the University of Toronto who are pursuing study and research related to the Asia-Pacific region (East and Southeast Asia). These awards are administered by the Faculty of Arts and Science with an application deadline of March 9, 2020. Learn more about the awards and how to apply through the Faculty of Arts and Science Website.

The information session features Professor Takashi Fujitani, Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, who will provide an overview of the award selection criteria and eligibility and how to build a strong proposal. Representatives from the Faculty of Arts and Science and Asian Institute will also be available to help students in filling out the Financial Need Assessment form and answer questions about the application process.

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Toronto-born and educated, with an MA in History from the University of Toronto, Roman Waschuk went on to work at the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in 1985-86. He joined the Department of External Affairs in 1987, serving abroad as a political officer in Moscow, Kyiv and Berlin. In Ottawa, he led teams at Policy Planning and the Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force. His first ambassadorial posting was in 2011 to Belgrade (covering Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia), followed by a five-year assignment as Ambassador of Canada to Ukraine in 2014-19. He retired from Global Affairs Canada in December 2019.

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The Environmental Governance lab is excited to welcome Sonja Klinsky from Arizona State University for a talk on February 24, 2020. Sonja Klinsky is an alum of the IDS program at UTSC and is both a Senior Sustainability Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainabili and Associate Professor, at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She’s an expert on climate justice and climate policy.

Abstract : Geopolitical changes combined with the increasing urgency of climate action have the potential to intensify debates about justice within international climate policy. Tensions about historical responsibility have been particularly difficult and could deepen with increased climate impacts and as developing countries face mounting pressure to take mitigation action. Climate change is not the only time humans have faced historically rooted, collective action challenges involving justice disputes. Practices and tools from transitional justice have been used across a range of conflicts at the interface of historical responsibility and imperatives for collective futures. Central to this body of theory and experience is the need to reflect both backwards and forwards-oriented elements in efforts to build social solidarity. This talk integrates arguments emerging from the literature and from a series of international multi-stakeholder workshops that were held to examine the global climate context through the lens of transitional justice. In addition to assessing the potential applicability of a transitional lens to the climate context, including the limitations of this, it then lays out several strategies and practices that could be modified for potential use within the climate regime. This work has recently been released as a book, Klinsky and Brankovic (2018) “The Global Climate Regime and Transitional Justice” Routledge.

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Abstract: Countries have a moral obligation to liberalize their immigration policies. Immigration restrictions violate people’s freedom of movement and deprive them of opportunities to become dramatically richer. Moreover, none of the standard objections to open borders–the potential economic costs, special obligations to fellow citizens, states’ rights of self-determination, and so on–are successful. The talk concludes with a discussion of the relevance of immigration policy to issues like climate change and poverty relief.

Christopher Freiman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA. His first book, Unequivocal Justice, was published in 2017 and his second book, Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics, is forthcoming with Routledge Press. Chris is the author of over two dozen articles and chapters on topics including democratic theory, distributive justice, and immigration.
His work has appeared in venues such as the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Utilitas, The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, and The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy. His writing has also been featured in a variety of popular outlets, including Reason Magazine, Aeon, and Inside Higher Education. Chris received a William & Mary Alumni Fellowship Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. His website is www.cfreiman.com and he blogs at www.BleedingHeartLibertarians.com.

Commentary to be offered by Joe Carens (Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto), whose book The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford UP, 2013) was recipient of the David Easton Award of the American Political Science Association. Randall Hansen (Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto) will chair the event.

This event is co-sponsored by The Institute for Liberal Studies, a non-partisan public affairs venue based in Ottawa.

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This talk is based on a recently defended doctoral ethnography investigating end-of-life care issues in contemporary India from the perspectives of Indian and Tibetan religious adherents, through the lenses of religious studies, bioethics and the law. The need came in part from a paucity in bioethics studies related to the ancient Indic religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, from some studies ignoring the non-theistic Indic traditions altogether and legal challenges in India against Jain fasting at the end of life. Three core themes include attempts to block disclosure of bad news in sharing of sensitive medical information; ritual fasting and immobilization at the end of life; and exposure to and attitudes towards end-of-life care models including pain management, hospice palliative care and assistance in dying. This study is an advocacy anthropology project with hopes that it proves helpful in India and other jurisdictions where South Asian religious adherents receive end-of-life care so that culturally safe care can be better provided.

Dr. Sean Hillman is a clinical bioethicist with the Centre for Clinical Ethics (CCE), a consultant organization based at Unity Health Toronto and contracted to seven institutions in Ontario. Over the last several years Sean has been the ethics lead for the five-hospital Lakeridge Health system in Durham region. He also is a Buddhist Corrections Chaplain for two facilities in the Kingston region. Sean was a bedside caregiver in hospital for almost two decades and did a year-long fellowship in Clinical and Organizational Bioethics also at the CCE. A medical anthropologist and textualist, Sean recently completed his doctorate in religion and the collaborative programs of bioethics and south Asian studies at U of T.

A scholar of various Asian philosophies and languages for almost thirty years, with a major focus on the Indic religious traditions, Sean has spent five years living, studying and researching in India. Sean’s current research projects are on maximizing decisional participation by those who might have mental capacity interferences, and on how to better understand why families may request aggressive medical management for their loved-ones despite a poor prognosis (including religious logic such as vitalism, non-harm and filial piety). Sean is a member of Durham Family Resources community advisory committee for their “recognizing capacity” pilot project which advocates for increased inclusion of those with intellectual, cognitive or communication challenges and for including supported decision making in Ontario healthcare law.

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Opium was once integral to colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The drug was a major source of revenue for European colonizers, who also derived moral authority from imposing a tax on a peculiar vice of their non-European subjects. Yet between the 1890s and the 1940s, colonial states began to ban opium, upsetting the very foundations of overseas rule—how? Empires of Vice traces the history of this dramatic reversal, revealing the colonial legacies that set the stage for the region’s drug problems today. Diana Kim challenges the conventional wisdom about opium prohibition—that it came about because doctors awoke to the dangers of drug addiction, or that it was a response to moral crusaders—uncovering a more complex story deep within the colonial bureaucracy. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence across Southeast Asia and Europe, she shows how prohibition was made possible by the pivotal contributions of seemingly weak bureaucratic officials who delegitimized the taxing of opium, which in turn made major anti-opium reforms possible.

Diana Kim is Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago (2013) and held a Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University.

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Lecture Abstract: When the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan regained power led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in December 2012, Japan’s government embarked on a set of economic policies dubbed "Abenomics." Abenomics aimed to bring Japan back from stagnation and restore its growth potential. Prime Minister Abe is now the longest serving Japanese Prime Minister in history. Abenomics looks seemingly successful as well. Japan’s economy has been in the longest expansion phase in the post war era. The unemployment rate is so low that many employers claim they cannot find workers. Yet, the major goals of Abenomics set at the beginning, such as 2% inflation rate and 2% real economic growth, have not been achieved. Has Abenomics really succeeded? What challenges remain?  

Speaker Bio: Takeo Hoshi is Professor in the Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo. He is the former Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Professor of Finance (by courtesy) at the Graduate School of Business, and Director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), all at Stanford University. He served in these roles until August 2019  Prior to 2012, Professor Hoshi was Pacific Economic Cooperation Professor in International Economic Relations at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).  His book titled Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan: The Road to the Future (MIT Press, 2001), co-authored with Anil Kashyap (Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago), received the Nikkei Award for the Best Economics Books of 2002. His other publications include, “Japanese Government Debt and Sustainability of Fiscal Policy” (with Takero Doi and Tatsuyoshi Okimoto), Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 2011; “Corporate Restructuring in Japan during the Lost Decade” (with Satoshi Koibuchi and Ulrike Schaede), “Japan’s Bubble, Deflation, and Long-term Stagnation,” MIT Press, 2011 (Koichi Hamada, Anil K Kashyap, and David E. Weinstein, eds.); “Will the U.S. Bank Recapitalization Succeed? Eight Lessons from Japan” (with Anil Kashyap), Journal of Financial Economics, 2010; and “Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan” (joint with Ricardo Caballero and Anil Kashyap), American Economic Review, December 2008.  Hoshi received his BA in social sciences from the University of Tokyo in 1983, and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988.

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Technologies of Risk Response in Germany and the United States: 1850-1900.

This talk investigated the history of fire services and the technologies they employed to contribute to the scholarship on infrastructure and power, urban liberalism, and risk management. Specifically, Jan illustrated the fire alarm telegraph’s impact on fire preparedness in Germany and the United States. He argued that this technology materialized the values that guided society’s response to risk. This novel technology led to the rapid decline of the profession of tower watchmen and appeared to democratize fire signaling. By providing evidence about the privileged location and use of the telegraph, Jan put the notion of democratized fire signaling into perspective. Examining documents from city councils and fire departments in Boston, Philadelphia, Berlin, and Frankfurt, he provided evidence that it privileged use by local officials and police forces. In the formerly free city of Frankfurt, for instance, the fire telegraph allowed Prussia to control potential political threats. His study elucidates a larger insight about risk management during the nineteenth century. Entities worth protecting by fire services were usually not the individual but property. Infrastructures like the fire telegraph mainly benefitted the overlapping groups of property owners, industrials, liberals, and the bourgeoisie.  

Jan Henning is a PhD student in the history of technology and medicine at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at U of T. His research focuses on the history of emergency services in Europe and North America. Emergency services, as they developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century, contributed to the idea that risks are an inevitable but controllable part of urban life. The histories of these services illuminate which forms of life and property were deemed worthy of protection. Jan argues that the technologies employed by emergency services materialized the values that guide society’s response to risk. Prior to coming to U of T, Jan received a BA (history and philosophy) and MA (history) from the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany), where he won the Aretin Prize for his Master’s thesis Tuberculosis and Race in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century American Culture and Media.

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Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culture-featured place selling mediates two separate domains: political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture. The local election system introduced in the mid 90s has stimulated strong desires among city mayors and county and district governors to develop and promote their areas. Riding on the Korean Wave—the overseas popularity of Korean entertainment, also called Hallyu—Korean cities have actively used K-dramas and K-pop idols in advertisements designed to attract foreign tourists to their regions. Hallyu, meanwhile, has turned the Korean entertainment industry into a speculative field into which numerous players venture by attracting cities as sponsors.
By analyzing the process of culture-featured place marketing, Pop City shows that urban spaces are produced and sold just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities. Popular culture-associated urban promotion also uses the emotional engagement of its users in advertising urban space, just as pop culture draws on fans’ and audiences’ affective commitments to sell its products. Oh demonstrates how the speculative, image-based, and consumer-exploitive nature of popular culture shapes the commodification of urban space and ultimately argues that pop culture–mediated place promotion entails the domination of urban space by capital in more sophisticated and fetishized ways.

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Few events in the French twentieth century have been as richly commemorated as May ’68. May’s fiftieth anniversary in 2018 provoked a veritable commemorative frenzy, with five major exhibitions in the Paris region alone. These shows were accompanied by new books by leading French scholars, re-editions of classic texts, commemorative magazines, an online exhibit at the Nanterre campus of the Université de Paris, and two outdoor poster displays in central Paris. This illustrated talk examines the capital’s fiftieth anniversary exhibitions on May ‘68 in the context of recent scholarship on the event and its commemorative history, as well as on 1960s youth. It pays particular attention to the shows mounted by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Archives nationales, and the municipality of Paris, the last of which aestheticized the events and ended by funneling visitors into a shop selling May-themed souvenirs, including commemorative paving stones priced at 280 or 380 euros.
Susan Whitney is Associate Professor of History at Carleton University, where she also served as Associate Dean (Undergraduate Affairs) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences from 2008 to 2011 and 2015 to 2017.  An historian of youth, she is the author of Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Duke, 2009).  She is preparing a chapter on 1960s youth culture for the Routledge Handbook of French History and has a chapter in A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). In 2018, Professor Whitney received Carleton’s Graduate Mentoring Award for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

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East Asian Seminar Series

The late 1970s and early ‘80s saw a Chinese craze for Indian films. Members of the generation that came of age in this time have such fond memories of the foreign and exotic Hindi films that many Indian visitors to China are still serenaded with songs from the handful of films that were screened in that period. This talk examines India’s symbolic role in China’s post Cultural Revolution healing, looking especially at the discourse around popular Hindi films such as Caravan, Noorie, and Awara. The contemporary rethinking of the 1980s in China serves as the larger framework of the talk, emphasizing how the India craze of the early 1980s challenges how 21st century scholars see 1985 as marking China’s entry to “world culture.” Looking at Hindi film in the 1980s interrogates the ways in which “the west” can come to symbolize “the world” in contemporary Chinese cultural studies.

Krista Van Fleit is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of Asian Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her first book, Literature the People Love, examines culture from the Early Maoist Period, providing a new interpretive framework with which to approach texts from this time. She is currently writing a book titled Bollywood to Beijing: Film Exchange and Cultural Production in China and India.

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On Monday Marchh 2, from 2-3 PM, Chris Snyder is presenting a seminar on How Volunteering Can Kick-Start & Enhance Your Career.

Chris Snyder is a member of the Trudeau Centre Advisory Board. He is a pioneer in the personal finance business and co-founder and chair of the ECC Group. He has authored many articles and five books on personal finance. His most recent book, Be Smart with Your Money, focuses on human behaviour and money. He is the former Chair of The Canadian Landmine Foundation, current Chair of HIP (Honouring Indigenous Peoples) and runs hands-on school building trips for Rotary to the developing world. Chris is the recipient of The Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee Awards.

This is a great opportunity to learn important insights on growing your personal and professional networks as you think about embarking on careers in the peace, conflict and justice realm.

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The Walter Gordon Symposium is an annual conference on public policy held at the University of Toronto.

This year’s Symposium is entitled “Policymaking for a Well Society”. It will focus in on three major themes at the core of how our societies thrive or struggle – environment, health and housing. By dissecting each of these policy topics in detail this year’s symposium hopes to make us reflect on where we have done well and where we can do better.

Keynote Lecture – John Ibbitson of The Globe & Mail

We are pleased to welcome John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail as the keynote for the 2020 Walter Gordon Symposium. He will be speaking on his recent book, co-authored with Darrell Bricker, “Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline” followed by a question and answer session.

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On Super Tuesday, delegates for the national conventions are selected. We watched live from 7:30pm onwards, then were joined Wednesday morning by experts from both countries on what it means for the presidential primaries, election cycle and Canadian-American relations.

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In 1997, Japan hosted the international meeting that produced the Kyoto Protocol, a major agreement to confront climate change. However, the country’s climate change policies have come under intense scrutiny in recent years. Japan regularly ranks toward the bottom of international climate change rankings, and critics have condemned its promotion of coal-fired power plants. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has sought to reclaim Japanese climate change leadership, for example highlighting the issue as host of the G20 Osaka Summit. What will it take for Japan to reemerge as a climate change leader? In this panel, Professor Phillip Lipscy provided an overview of climate change politics in Japan, explaining why Japan has struggled to reduce emissions in recent years. Mari Yoshitaka, a leading expert in environment business and environment finance who has served on numerous Japanese government policy committees, discussed Japan’s climate resilience and energy security challenges.

Moderator: Matthew Hoffman, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto

Panelists: Phillip Y. Lipscy, Associate Professor of Political Science, Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan, University of Toronto   Mari Yoshitaka, Chief Environmental & Social Strategist for Environmental Strategy Advisory Division at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co., Ltd.; Lecturer in the Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University

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The Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Council are the main forums for official Nordic co-operation, which involves Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland. The goal of Nordic co-operation is to make the region the most sustainable and integrated region in the world. How successful have the Nordic countries been in achieving this goal? How has Nordic co-operation helped with the branding of the region as egalitarian, efficient, business-friendly and environmental-friendly? Tómas Orri Ragnarsson, Senior Adviser to the Secretary General, Nordic Council of Ministers, will present the strategic lines of Nordic co-operation and will discuss the solutions the Nordics propose to our common, global challenges.

Description

Jesse Driscoll is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California at San Diego. His first book, Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (2015), was published by Cambridge University Press in the Series on Comparative Politics, and was honored with the Best Book Award by the Central Eurasian Studies Society and the Furniss Award. He has conducted fieldwork in Tajikistan, Georgia, and Ukraine. He has a book forthcoming from Columbia University Press tentatively titled Doing Global Fieldwork: A Social Scientist’s Guide To Mixed-Methods Research in Difficult Places and a book under review (co-authored with Dominique Arel) on the causes and consequences of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

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The Global Migration Lab – Student Research Initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy is glad to host a panel discussion with Juno Award-winning Toronto-based saxophonist, composer and arranger Allison Au on Migration, Art, and Identity.

Allison recently premiered in January 2020 her piece “Migrations Suite”, which was commissioned by the Toronto Royal Conservatory of Music. By exploring her family history through music, Allison addresses the larger issues of displacement, relocation, lament for the loss of home, the feeling of “foreign-ness” and legacy.

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Fatwas from Islamic organizations are prominent elements of public debates in democratic Indonesia, as well as the broader Muslim world. Yet scholars lack a clear theoretical explanation for the power of fatwas in politics. This paper draws on original archival material to explicate the legal authority of the fatwas from the Indonesian Council of Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI), which over the past twenty years has become one of the country’s most influential actors. The paper distinguishes three periods in the growth and transformation of MUI’s authority; starting with charismatic authority and state corporatism, MUI later gained formal regulatory authority, and now uses agenda setting, lobbying, mass mobilization, and the threat of violence. By examining how the power of MUI’s fatwas increased as the organization accrued more forms of authority, this periodization demonstrates that explaining the political power of the fatwa requires understanding the modern organizational authority of Islamic actors. In the modern age, Islamic legal authority reflects the dominant logic of political authority in society.

Jeremy Menchik is Assistant Professor in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and faculty affiliate in Political Science. His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) was the co-winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations.

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Focusing on the geopolitical and economic circumstances that have prompted migration from Hong Kong and mainland China to Canada, The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities examines the Chinese Canadian community as a simultaneously transcultural, transnational, and domestic social and cultural formation. Taking an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the ways in which Chinese Canadian adapt to and co-construct the Canadian cultural mosaic, the book explores various patterns of Chinese cultural exchanges in Canada and how they intertwine with the community’s sense of belonging and disengagement.

Please RSVP by emailing events.rclchkl@utoronto.ca
or by calling 416-946-8978

Description

Kristin Bloomer’s Possessed by the Virgin: Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Marian Possession in South India introduces readers to three women who become possessed by the Virgin Mary: Rosalind, Nancy, and Dhanam. In this rich ethnographic account of Marian possession, healing, and exorcism in Tamil Nadu, Bloomer pays particular attention to the experience of possession as articulated by these women and the various community members that surround them, from the skeptical Catholic priest to the devotees, and everyone in between. This beautifully written ethnography raises questions about possessed subjectivities and agencies, gender, Tamil language, Hinduism and Catholicism in South India, and, more generally, how to write about possession.

In this panel, a group of graduate students from the University of Toronto, with diverse research interests ranging from Tamil Studies to Possession Studies, will critically engage with the author and her book from various perspectives. The event aims to raise questions, deeply reflect, and start a critical conversation about the book and its contents.

PANELISTS:

Kainat Bashir, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Janani Mandayam Comar, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Stephanie Duclos-King, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Jesse Pruitt, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Kristina Rogahn, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Austin Simoes-Gomes, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT

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Kristin C. Bloomer is an Associate Professor of Religion at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. She is currently working on a book about Tamil family gods and lineage deities, with support from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Carleton College.

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NOTE: This event is proceeding as planned on March 12. For those unable to attend in person, you may join us via the live webcast: https://hosting2.desire2learncapture.com/MUNK/1/Live/490.aspx

Cultural and linguistic diversity is one of Canada’s main characteristics and strengths. Beyond the two official languages, English and French, millions of Canadians are speakers of indigenous and immigrant languages, which are taught, learned and promoted mainly by community and educational institutions. New ICT technologies, offer today the opportunity to facilitate the inter-generational transmission of these languages by connecting their speakers and learners with teachers, programs and resources, nationally and globally.

GREEKLANGUAGE.CA is an online portal designed by Dr.Themistoklis Aravossitas at the University of Toronto’s Hellenic Studies Program, to support Greek language education in Canada. It is aimed at students, educators, parents and community members who wish to locate schools, associations and groups that teach and promote the Greek language and culture in order to access their services and share resources which enhance learning. The portal is based on a doctoral study at the Curriculum, Teaching and Learning department in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto, entitled “The Hidden Schools: Mapping Greek Heritage Language Education in Canada”. The platform’s content is based on dozens of researchers, volunteers, educators and other stakeholders, who shared their insights on where, how and by whom Modern Greek is used, taught and learned across Canada.

This year’s Hellenic Heritage Foundation Annual Munk Lecture is the official launch is GREEKLANGUAGE.CA. Prof. Aravossitas will guide users through what the platform has to offer and discuss the key components of second-language learning in Canada. A discussion of the role community groups, cultural institutions and associations play in language learning will be examined, along with how connecting communities, educational institutions, language programs and recourses is vital for the survival of community languages in Canada.

Themistoklis Aravossitas teaches Modern Greek language and culture at the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He holds a Bachelor of Education from the University of Athens, Greece, an MA and a PhD from the Department of Curriculum Teaching and Learning of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He is a SSHRC-Canada post doctoral fellow investigating the status of heritage/community languages in Canada. His recent publications include the books Rethinking Heritage Language Education (Cambridge University Press), Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education (Springer), Interdisciplinary Research Approaches to Multilingual Education (Routledge Research) and Language Diversity and Education Matters (Gutenberg, In Greek).

Description

Please join us for our annual Munk School Graduate Student Conference where we explore the theme of Technology in the Global Sphere: Challenges and Opportunities. Through a series of professional and student panels, the conference aims to interact with and educate attendees on the impact of technology on the fields of security and development, while also giving Munk students an opportunity to share their own research at the intersection of technology and global affairs. We invite you to stay for our closing reception, offering a closing speaker and an opportunity to network with our specialists and your fellow attendees.

$15 admission provides you access to the day’s events, with lunch and light refreshments offered.

Student tickets purchased with any valid student card will be FREE with registration.

9:30 – 10:00 Breakfast and Registration

10:00 – 11:30 Security Panel

11:30 – 12:30 Lunch

12:30 – 2:00 Development Panel

2:00 – 2:15 Coffee Break

2:15 – 3:45 Student Research Panel

3:45 – 4:30 Closing Speaker

4:30 – 6:00 Closing Reception/Networking