Past Events

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F. Ross Johnson Distinguished Speaker Series
Center for the Study of the United States

America’s Carceral Landscapes

This symposium seeks to historicize, map, and challenge the proliferation of carceral landscapes in the contemporary United States. The Trump administration’s response to a refugee crisis at the nation’s southern border, one precipitated by U.S. military intervention, political corruption, neoliberal economic policies, and climate change, has illustrated once again America’s perverse fascination with caging children of color. Millions of African American, Latinx, and Native American people, meanwhile, remain trapped in evolving regimes of mass incarceration that have enshrined “civil death” in American society. The U.S. military continues to detain thousands of enemy combatants across a vast network of detention centers that stretch from the Middle East to West Africa, and Guantanamo Bay. Even those activists and advocates contesting the nation’s vast carceral archipelago are enmeshed with social media platforms at the vanguard of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” The “carceral,” as Michel Foucault conceptualized it, is truly hegemonic. This interdisciplinary symposium brings together scholars uniquely positioned to help us map and historicize the current conjuncture: concentration camps at the border, systematic deportation, decarceration / relocation of citizen-captives to municipal jails, surveillance capitalism, and transnational, gendered regimes of incarceration.

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Within the labor literature, with its predominant focus on wage workers, self-employed workers are too often ignored and under-examined as part of the modern proletariat. However, this neglect of self-employed workers creates major blind spots in our understanding of the multiplicity of agents of social change that are organizing as workers outside the Global North. As urban spaces are increasingly being captured as a speculative commodity, especially in rapidly urbanizing cities beyond the often-theorized and studied West, urban spaces are becoming a source of precarity for the many self-employed workforce who depend on them to make a living. However, the same spaces are also emerging as loci for building workers’ power. I focus on the South Korean tenant shopkeepers who are waging creative collective actions to defend their rights to their shops and attracting outside allies within the progressive networks to join them. Through ethnographic research, I analyze how and when the making of what I refer to as protest space—a symbolic space challenging the entrenched power structure—can effectively translate into workers’ power. The case of Seoul presents broader implications for understanding how the previously fragmented and isolated self-employed workers can form collective consciousness.

Yewon Andrea Lee is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Prior to coming to Toronto, she completed her doctoral degree in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
As a political and labor sociologist and urban ethnographer, Yewon is broadly interested in how speculative real estate interests increasingly dictate the shapes and characters of urban landscapes and how, in response, ordinary people organize to preserve their ways of living. Her dissertation, Precarious Workers in the Speculative City: The Untold Gentrification Story of Tenant Shopkeepers’ Displacement and Resistance in Seoul, examines tenant shopkeepers in Seoul, Korea—how the previously unorganized organize under their collective identity as workers. A manuscript that emerged from this dissertation is currently forthcoming at Critical Sociology and has received many awards including Honorable Mention in the 2019 American Sociological Association’s Mayer N. Zald Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship/ Graduate Student Paper Award competition.

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Dr. Wysocki will discuss the activity and archival heritage of the Ukrainian Bureau in London, which was established in 1931 with the aim of informing international opinion about the Ukrainians in Galicia, then part of Poland. Although the office was to exist for about two years, it continued to operate until the outbreak of World War Two. During its existence, the Ukrainian Bureau played a key role in the area of Ukrainian civic diplomacy and disseminating information on the situation in Ukraine, especially on the Holodomor.

Historian Roman Wysocki is a lecturer at the Institute of History at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on Polish-Ukrainian relations between the two world wars and on Ukrainians and Belarusians in Poland. His areas of interest include Ukrainian political thought, Polish-Ukrainian history in the twentieth century, Ukrainian emigrants in Poland, reactions to the Holodomor, and the Orthodox Church in Poland.

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On 31 October 2003 the UN General Assembly adopted the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC). Fifteen years on, 181 UN member states have already ratified it, reaching near global unanimity. Unlike its older and more famous antecessor, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and subsequent UN human rights covenants, UNCAC did not meet with claims that it imposed some form of Western institutional hegemony on the rest of the world. But how much difference has the covenant made? Professor Mungiu-Pippidi will trace the history of ethical universalism as a governance norm and benchmark, examine the Western record of promoting it, and consider the pitfalls and the challenges of current efforts to implement it.

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a policy scientist who chairs the European Research Center for Anticorruption and State-Building (ERCAS) at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, where she holds the chair in Democracy Studies. A Romanian by birth, she created and chaired for many years the Romanian Academic Society, the country’s leading think tank, and the Coalition for a Clean Romania, an anti-corruption alliance. She also served in 1996 as the first anticommunist news director of Romanian public broadcasting. Her books include “The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption” (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and “A Tale of Two Villages” (CEU Press, 2010). The latter was screened as a documentary by the BBC. She has published articles in Nature, Foreign Policy, the Journal of Democracy, and several public policy journals and has frequently been cited in The Economist and other prominent media. She consults for the World Bank and various European institutions, and also serves as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and the research council of the International Forum for Democratic Studies.

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Why do states that confront comparable immigration challenges oftentimes adopt remarkably different policy solutions? Why does immigration policy change radically at certain points in time, whilst showing striking resilience at others? This talk presents a theoretical framework for the comparative study of immigration policy making. I argue the capacity of policy makers to turn their immigration preferences into policy is contingent on three types of political insulation. Whereas popular insulation will shield policy makers from public pressure for policy restrictionism, interest group insulation and diplomatic insulation are necessary if policy makers are to enjoy reprieve from demands by domestic lobbies and foreign governments for policy liberalization. Because each type of insulation differs across institutional arenas, immigration policy choices will vary not only across countries but, in contexts where actors can manipulate the institutional locus of policy making, also over time.
 
Antje Ellermann is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute for European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She is also the founder and Co-lead of the UBC Migration Research Excellence Cluster. Professor Ellermann’s research focuses on the politics of migration and citizenship in liberal democracies. Her book States Against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States (2009) was published with Cambridge University Press. Her work has also appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Politics & Society, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and West European Politics. Professor Ellermann’s lecture draws from a book manuscript she is completing that theorizes the politics of immigration policy making in liberal democracies. The project is based on case studies of key episodes of immigration reform in Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and the United States from the 1950s to the present.

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Watch the live stream of this event HERE

The populist challenge to liberal democracy is being waged in the name of democracy: the people versus the elites, the majority versus minorities, the electorate versus the courts. Instead of seeing the populism as a threat, we should think of it as a challenge that liberal democracy is fully capable of meeting. Liberal constitutionalism is built for crisis, and the populist crisis could end up strengthening our democracy, provided liberal institutions—and elites—respond.

About our Speaker
Born in Canada, educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard, Michael Ignatieff is a university professor, writer and former politician.
His major publications are The Needs of Strangers (1984), Scar Tissue (1992), Isaiah Berlin (1998), The Rights Revolution (2000), Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (2001), The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004), Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (2013), and The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (2017).
Between 2006 and 2011, he served as an MP in the Parliament of Canada and then as Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition. He is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and holds thirteen honorary degrees. Between 2012 and 2015 he served as Centennial Chair at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. Between 2014 and 2016 he was Edward R. Murrow Professor of the Practice of the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.He is currently the Rector and President of Central European University in Budapest.

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Information is not yet available.

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Watch the live stream of this event HERE

You are invited to attend the next installment of the David Peterson Public Leadership Program Global Leaders in Public Policy Series featuring the honourable Kevin Rudd.

About Our Speaker

Kevin Rudd joined the Asia Society Policy Institute as its inaugural President in January 2015. He served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Foreign Minister from 2010 to 2012, before returning as Prime Minister in 2013. As Prime Minister, Rudd led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis. Australia’s fiscal response to the crisis was reviewed by the IMF as the most effective stimulus strategy of all member states. Australia was the only major advanced economy not to go into recession. Rudd is also internationally recognized as one of the founders of the G20, which drove the global response to the crisis and in 2009 helped prevent the crisis from spiraling into a second global depression. As Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Rudd was active in global and regional foreign policy leadership. He was a driving force in expanding the East Asia Summit (EAS) to include both the U.S. and Russia in 2010. He also initiated the concept of transforming the EAS into a wider Asia-Pacific community to help manage deep-rooted tensions in Asia by building over time the institutions and culture of common security in Asia. On climate change, Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and legislated in 2008 for a mandatory 20 percent renewable energy target for Australia. Rudd launched Australia’s challenge in the International Court of Justice with the objective of stopping Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. Rudd drove Australia’s successful bid for its current non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and oversaw the near-doubling of Australia’s foreign aid budget. Rudd is Chair of the Board of the International Peace Institute, and Chair of Sanitation and Water for All. He is a Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a Distinguished Fellow at Chatham House in London, a Distinguished Statesman with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Paulson Institute in Chicago. Mr. Rudd is a member of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s Group of Eminent Persons. He serves on the International Advisory Board of the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University, and is an Honorary Professor at Peking University. Rudd is proficient in Mandarin Chinese. He remains actively engaged in indigenous reconciliation.

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Please note that the registration is now CLOSED.

Same-day rush tickets will be available from 7 PM on the night of the show.

Feature Presentation
The Dragon Painter

USA 1919
53:00
Silent with English intertitles
G

DIRECTOR
William Worthington

CAST
Sessue Hayakawa
Tsuru Aoki
Edward Peil
Toyo Fujita

An early Hollywood silent film, The Dragon Painter is a fantasy romance about love and creative inspiration. Tatsu (Hayakawa) is a reclusive artist who lives in the mountains of Japan painting images of the dragon princess he loved in another life. He comes to believe the daughter of a wealthy art collector is his lost princess, but as Tatsu finds happiness in love, his art begins to suffer.

In his prime, Hayakawa was as popular as Charlie Chaplin, as rich as Douglas Fairbanks, and to this day, the only Asian American to own his own Hollywood studio. Hayakawa founded Haworth Pictures Corporation after becoming fed up with the self-proclaimed Orientalist roles in which he was cast by the major studios, including his character in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat. Hayakawa’s studio subsequently released 19 films between the years of 1918 to 1922.

Although set in Japan, The Dragon Painter was shot on location in Yosemite National Park and stars a predominantly Japanese American cast, including Hayakawa’s wife, Tsuru Aoki. Produced by Hayakawa’s own studio, the film deliberately strived to provide an authentic perspective on Japanese culture that countered the dominant narrative of stereotypes, violence, and melodramatic conflict expected in so-called “Oriental” films of the period. For these reasons, it is considered it to be one of the first Asian American films in history. – Rob Buscher

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On the occasion of the film’s 100th Anniversary, The Dragon Painter will be presented with a live musical accompaniment and an original score by Los Angeles-based musician Goh Nakamura that was originally commissioned by the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival. A presentation on Hayakawa’s work and legacy will be given by Stephen Gong, film archivist and executive director of the Center for Asian American Media, who was responsible for locating and overseeing the restoration of the last existing print of The Dragon Painter.

The screening will be followed by a discussion moderated by Takashi Fujitani, Professor of History at the University of Toronto where he holds the Dr. David Chu Chair and is Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies.

Please arrive early as all tickets become void as of 15 minutes before showtime.

Description

Since the end of the Cold War, the damaging effects of state failure have plagued the international community. Solutions like state or “peace” building efforts and multi-national interventions are plentiful in the literature, though their success is difficult to measure. Also strikingly absent from the literature is the empirical likelihood that the West will indeed respond to state failure. Crucially, if the West does not respond predictably to state failure, then the effort devoted to finding solutions may be based on a biased sample of cases, producing serious methodological flaws. This project seeks to fill this gap by conducting one of the first mixed-methods studies of its kind.

Using a large-n dataset, I test the relative strength of state failure in determining where the United States will intervene (financially or militarily). I find that the degree of state failure is not a good indicator of where the US will intervene militarily or financially. Counterintuitively, the US tends to send extremely small contingents to the most critically failed states. Secondly, I conduct a case study of Liberia to illuminate the reasons why the US did not immediately intervene during the civil war and the subsequent state collapse. I also draw on counter-examples from Nigeria for contrast. I find that the important factors in determining intervention include pressure from the international community, the perceived threat of terrorism, and the target states’ geostrategic position. The illumination of these empirical realities may help to determine the actual success (or failure) of international responses to state failure, and can help inform efforts in the study for new solutions.

Description

Immigration to Canada has always raised questions about how society achieves a greater degree of unity, or integration, in the context of religious diversity. Recent polling reports that religious communities play a key role in the process of integration within Canadian society, by serving as a cultural bridge and offering social and spiritual support to newcomers. However, religion is also a focus point of reactionary forces in society, as national debates around accommodation, education, and schooling become inflamed by local events. These debates are often framed around competing rights claims. What is the role of human rights law and language, including around religious freedom, and what are its limits? What is the role of religious groups and communities in helping to foster understanding, tolerance, and mutual respect? To what extent, if at all, should the government become involved in regulating religious diversity?
Panelists:
Dr. Andrew Parkin, Executive Director at Environics Institute for Survey Research
Dr. Shaheen Azmi, Director of Policy Education Monitoring and Outreach for the Ontario Human Rights Commission
Dr. Shari Golberg, Senior Policy Advisor, OPS Inclusive Diversity Office, Treasury Board Secretariat
This seminar series explores the role of religion in migration to Canada, with regard to settlement and integration, accommodation and reaction, and citizenship and participation. Each seminar brings together scholars and practitioners to discuss the ways in which religious belief and practice, religious community life, and religious institutions influence migrant pathways to participation in Canadian life and society. This seminar series is organized in partnership with the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the Baha’i Community of Canada and the University of Toronto Multi-Faith Centre.

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This event is only open to registered PCJ students.

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This lecture is based on a study that suggests that the “Putin Exodus” is composed of highly educated and socially aware individuals— lending support to the idea that outbound migration is in fact a “brain drain.” The study also indicates that this emigration is composed of people who identify with the values that have made the West prosper. The results indicate that so long as authoritarianism and politically connected economic privilege continue in Russia, talented people will continue to leave. The study also undermines the notion peddled by the Kremlin that Russia represents a distinct civilization with its own distinctive values, stressing communal advantage over individual liberty and well-being. In short, the study suggests that the emigration can be a bridge between the West and a Russia that is not destined to be authoritarian. The political views of this group are encouraging. So is their continued interest in Russia. Russians, not the West, will determine the future of Russia. But the values and activities of these émigrés provide reason to hope that future may be one that includes cooperation and comity between Russia and the West based upon the values that have produced extraordinary liberty, prosperity, and peace since the end of World War II.

Dr. Sergei Erofeev is currently a lecturer at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He has been involved in the internationalization of universities in Russia since the early 1990s. Previously, Dr. Erofeev served as a vice rector for international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, the dean of international programs at the European University at Saint Petersburg, and the director of the Center for Sociology of Culture at Kazan Federal University in Russia. He has also been a Hubert H. Humphrey fellow at the University of Washington. Prior to his career in academia, Dr. Erofeev was a concert pianist, and has worked in the area of the sociology of the arts.

This event is sponsored in part by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Description

Please note that the registration is now CLOSED.

Same-day rush tickets will be available from 7 PM on the night of the show.

Feature Presentation
WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED

Afghanistan/USA 2019
71:00
Dari with English subtitles
PG • Toronto Premiere

DIRECTOR
Mariam Ghani

CAST
Latif Ahmadi
Hossain Fakhri
Said Miran Farhad
Juwansher Haidary
Wali Latifi
Faqir Nabi
Yasamin Yarmal

OFFICIAL SELECTION
2019 Berlinale Forum
2019 SFFILM
2019 Sheffield Doc/Fest

From 1978 to 1991, the Afghan Films Institute had been producing propaganda features to fit with the times. This documentary follows the incredible story of five of these unfinished works from Afghanistan’s Communist era, when the constantly shifting political regimes resulted in films remaining unfinished, unedited, and thought to be destroyed.

In her debut feature, Mariam Ghani pieces fragments of this once-lost footage, from The April Revolution (1978), Downfall (1987), The Black Diamond (1989), Wrong Way (1990), and Agent (1991), unedited (and therefore, uncensored). Just as the original filmmakers did when they shot action scenes with real bullets, hired ex-agents to play spies, or restaged the Communist coup d’état with the army, air force, and an awful lot of tanks and missiles, What We Left Unfinished interweaves histories and fictions. Ultimately, we come to understand both the price paid by Afghan filmmakers for the benefits they gained under Communism and the reasons they persisted despite the risks they faced—and why they still believe that film could save Afghanistan from the divisions tearing it apart today.

DIRECTOR BIO
Mariam Ghani’s previous projects in Afghanistan have documented the spatial politics of the post-war constitutional assembly, real-estate speculations in reconstructed Kabul, afterlives of former secret prisons, diasporic translators in theatres of war, and forgotten histories of Afghan modernists, artists and intellectuals. What We Left Unfinished is her first feature.

This screening will be followed by a discussion moderated by Shahrzad Mojab, a scholar, teacher, and activist, internationally known for her work on the impact of war, displacement, dispossession, and violence on women’s learning and resistance. She is professor of Adult Education and Community Development and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, and currently, the Director of Equity Studies at New College.

Please arrive early as all tickets become void as of 15 minutes before showtime.

Description

The first independent Burmese administration of U Nu embarked on a national Buddhist revivalist project that included laws regulating Buddhism, sponsorship of lay-centred meditation centres, and the so-called Sixth Buddhist Council. This paper focuses on Burmese monk Mingun Jetavana Sayadaw (1868-1954) and the controversy over his Pali commentary in the early 1950s, the Commentary on the Questions of [King] Milinda (Milindapañha-aṭṭhakathā). Published in 1948 by a pioneer of mass-lay meditation in the most classical commentarial genre, this text sparked protest in the streets and forced U Nu to send police to confiscate almost 400 copies from a monastery in Rangoon at night. Ostensibly the uproar was over reforms the Mingun Jetavana Sayadaw proposed to the monastic code (vinaya), possibly hurrying the enactment of the Monastic Courts Act of 1949 (Ṭhana Vinicchaya). By examining the controversy over this text through newspaper articles, epigraphic evidence and government documents, this paper will explore the intersection between Buddhist statecraft, emerging communities of insight (vipassanā) meditation, and control of the Pali canon in mid-twentieth-century Burma.

Tony Scott is a PhD Candidate in the Department for the Study of Religion in collaboration with the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie in South and Southeast Asian Pali discourse and its intersection with communities of practice, vernacular language, and twentieth-century statecraft. He currently focuses on the Milindapañha-aṭṭhakathā, a modern Pali commentary on the Questions of King Milinda (circa 1st century B.C.E.) written by a Burmese pioneer of insight (vipassanā) meditation, the Mūla Mingun Jetavan Sayadaw (1868-1954).

Description

This talk discusses the relationship between the gay press and gay liberation movements in North America throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The talk traces how international solidarity efforts and the need to “build community” in order to advance gay liberation politics fueled gay activists’ “desire to connect” in the post-Stonewall era. The discussion is centered around two (interconnected) networks that brought together people working with Toronto’s gay periodical The Body Politic (1971-1987), San Francisco’s Gay Sunshine (1971-1982), Boston’s Gay Community News (1973-1999), Mexico City’s Política Sexual and Nuestro Cuerpo (1979), as well as academics, activists, intellectuals, and other people based in the U.S. and Mexico throughout the period covered in the study.

Juan Carlos Mezo González is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History working on a collaborative program in Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. He holds an MA in History from the University of Toronto (2016) and an Honors BA in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2014), where he was the recipient of the Gabino Barreda Medal as the top student in his cohort. His doctoral dissertation examines the transnational gay networks that people working with gay periodicals established across North America throughout the 1971-1994 period. His past and forthcoming publications focus on Indigenous and Colonial history and the history of gay liberation in North America. Juan Carlos is a recipient of the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) Doctoral Scholarship and an Ontario Graduate scholar.

Description

Tens of thousands of French prisoners of war (POWs) and German women had to stand trial in Nazi Germany for having engaged in a love relation with each other. The prisoner and the woman both faced severe punishment, and the woman had to suffer public shaming. What do the trials reveal about Franco-German relations in World War II? How did French POWs and German women perceive each other? How did German village and factory communities react to these international love relations? Why did the relations never become part of memory in either country? The project examines Franco-German collaboration and international relations from a new perspective grounded in the everyday life experience in wartime Nazi Germany.

Raffael Scheck is Katz Distinguished Teaching Professor of Modern European History at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He has published five books and 40 articles on German right-wing politics and on French colonial prisoners of war. His book on the German army massacres of black French prisoners in 1940 was translated into French and German. He has completed a book manuscript on forbidden love relations between western prisoners of war and German women in World War II and is beginning to write a book on the German campaign in the West in 1940.

This event is funded in part by the DAAD through the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

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Rereading Proust in 2019? Whose reading? Who is reading the Recherche du temps perdu? I am celebrating fifty years of reading Proust, remembering my first reading of Proust’s novel more than half a century ago. That sounds like a very long time. Proust died in 1922.  When I read him in 1967-69, that was less than fifty years after his death. The interval, the span of time between Proust’s death and my first reading of the Recherche was shorter than the years I have lived with Proust, alongside the Recherche, reading and rereading it all over again, editing it, teaching it. And the cultural, epistemological context of each reading has been profoundly different. Can one recover the original emotion?
 
Antoine Compagnon has been professor at Columbia University since 1985 and at the Collège de France since 2006, where he holds the Chair in French Modern and Contemporary Literature. His research interests span Sixteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century French literature and literary theory and history of criticism.  He is the author of two novels and over twenty volumes of seminal essays on major writers from Montaigne to Proust, a number of which were translated into English: Proust entre deux siècles (trans. 1992); Les Cinq Paradoxes de la Modernité (trans. 1994); Démon de la théorie (trans. 2004); La littérature, pour quoi faire? (trans. 2014); Un été avec Montaigne (trans. 2019).  He also co-authored The Death of French Culture with Donald Morrison (2010) and edited numerous works by Marcel Proust. Antoine Compagnon has been granted the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from King’s College London, HEC in Paris and the University of Liège He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Europaea and corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He has been awarded by France the decorations of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, Officier de l’ordre national du Mérite, Commandeur de l’ordre des Palmes académiques and Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
 

Description

Rabindranath Tagore’s 1924 tour in China has attracted numerous critical analyses throughout the years and continues to pique scholars’ curiosity. The literary luminary’s attempt to raise support for his vision of an Asia-wide investment in spirituality in a rapidly materializing world remains a particularly fraught topic. Scholarship on China’s response to the Eastern spirituality ideal has generally focused on Chinese Marxists’ scathing critiques of Tagore’s vision, epitomized in the cold reception his lectures received from their audience. Less attention has been paid to an array of enthusiastic responses that emerged from May 4th poets in the form of journal articles about Tagore and poetry which directly engaged with his ideas. This talk investigates the exchange with Tagore and his work as an event that deeply informed Chinese poetry. As such, I argue, Tagore’s visit enables a new understanding of the Eastern spirituality project not as a failure, but as a vehicle for the Chinese envisioning of Pan-Asian poetics.

Gal Gvili is an Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University. She studies and teaches modern, and contemporary Chinese literature, literary and cultural theory. Her first book investigates how interactions between Chinese writers and Indian religions and philosophy fashioned a conviction that literature is the ultimate means for transforming the national fate.

The lecture will be followed by reception, 7-8 PM.

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Come learn more about the graduate programs offered at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

Representatives from the following programs will be on hand:

Collaborative Master’s and Doctoral Specialization in South Asian Studies
Collaborative Master’s Specialization in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies
Master of Arts in European and Russian Affairs
Master of Global Affairs
Master of Public Policy

Description

Randall Hansen: “War, Work, and Want: The Political Economy and Human Trafficking in South Africa and Thailand”

This paper examines two countries with sharply different levels of trafficking: South Africa and Thailand. Both are middle-income countries; both are larger than their contiguous neighbours; both are much wealthier than their immediate neighbours; and both are regional hegemons. Their common migration experiences, geopolitical contexts, and relative wealth levels are precisely the factors that the existing literature cites as the drivers of human trafficking. Given these shared characteristics, the fact that there is more trafficking in Thailand than in South Africa is puzzling. The paper argues that contrasting growth models, developed in the 1980s, explain the difference: whereas Thailand adopted a growth model based on cheap exports and cheap labour, South Africa adopted one based on finance.

Darius Ornston: “Ideas as an Innovation Policy Instrument: How Collective Narratives Shape Economic Adjustment”

This paper argues that innovation studies should take ideas more seriously, because innovation is a complex, uncertain, and fundamentally collective activity. While scholars are sensitive to the ways in which ideas shape policy choice, this paper illustrates how collective narratives can function as a policy instrument in their own right, facilitating and channeling innovative activity. Closer attention to collective narratives, and the role of ideas more generally, sheds new light on old cases (high-technology competition in Finland) and resolves some empirical puzzles (the entrepreneurship in Kitchener-Waterloo and financial services in Iceland).

Description

Beginning with a series of blasts in 13 sites across Bombay (now Mumbai) that killed 257 people and injured 713 in 1993, the last two decades have seen an increasing frequency of acts of terrorism being perpetrated in the Indian hinterland. While several Pakistan-based militant organizations such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad have been implicated in these attacks, Indian Muslims have formed militant organizations of their own. The Tanzim Islahul Muslimeen (Organization for the Improvement of Muslims), formed in 1985 is among the earliest examples of Islamic militancy in the Indian jihadist movement. The gradual radicalization of a section of the Students Islamic Movement of India in the 1990s and the establishment of the Indian Mujahideen in 2002, form more recent additions to the homegrown movement.

What are the intentions, motivations, and perhaps perceived grievances of those attracted to the contemporary indigenous terrorist movement in India? Is there a connection between the rise of homegrown terrorism and the societal order or domestic politics that can inform our understanding of the former? The Indian security discourse on terrorism has related the issue as external- Pakistan-sponsored or cross-border terrorism. It is fundamentally seen as asocial and inspired by outside factors and any causes or relations to the society it targets are considered secondary. With ample evidence of the establishment of homegrown terrorist groups within India, this view needs to be revaluated with a focus on domestic politics. A parallel trend in Indian politics- the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism or the Hindutva movement and its targeting of the Muslim minority, is of particular significance. Using key causal-process observations in a process tracing exercise, this link between Hindutva-sponsored communal riots and the rise of homegrown terrorist groups is established within the theoretical framework of Critical Terrorism Studies.

Description

LECTURE: 4:00 – 5:30 PM
RECEPTION: 5:30 – 6:30 PM

China’s innovation ambitions inspire worldwide commentary, much of it poorly informed. Focusing on several sectors central to China’s innovation drive, Loren Brandt (University of Toronto) and Thomas Rawski (University of Pittsburgh) offer a richly detailed account of China’s innovation efforts in their latest book, Policy, Regulation, and Innovation in China’s Electricity and Telecom Industries. The book’s granular studies look beyond specific technologies to incorporate the policy matrix, regulatory structures and global developments into an appraisal of China’s industrial policy and innovation achievements. The massive application of human and financial resources offers great promise, but institutional obstacles and legacies, conflicting objectives, and ill-advised policies inject inefficiencies, resulting in a complex mosaic of success and failure in both technical and commercial dimensions.

Loren Brandt is the Noranda Chair Professor of Economics and International Trade at the University of Toronto. With Thomas G. Rawski, he was co-editor and a major contributor to China’s Great Economic Transformation (Cambridge, 2008). His current research focuses on issues of industrial upgrading in China, inequality dynamics, and China’s long-run economic growth and structural change.

Thomas G. Rawski is emeritus Professor of Economics and History at the University of Pittsburgh. Recent publications include Tales from the Development Frontier (2013), which he co-authored. With Loren Brandt, he was co-editor and a major contributor to China’s Great Economic Transformation (Cambridge, 2008). His research focuses on the development and modern history of China’s economy, including studies of China’s reform mechanism and achievements.

Lecture: 4 – 5:30 PM
Reception: 5:30 – 6:30 PM

Description

This talk examined director John Waters’s film Pink Flamingos in relation to the midnight movie circuit in major American metropolises during the 1970s. The exhibition practice of screening cult films that tended to transgress social mores late at night fomented a social and participatory form of spectatorship, in which boisterous, effusive responses were encouraged. This talk positioned John Waters as a crucial figure in the theorization of spectatorship that extends beyond the space of the theatre through publicity campaigns, and that encourages viewing practices that are opposed to the mainstream etiquette of contemplative viewing. Waters’s work instrumentalizes transgressive imagery in a way that ruptures the separation between the screen and audience, galvanizing a sense of community amongst his cast, crew and their late night fanatics.

Description

Abstract:  Prime Minister Abe, in both his first and second administrations, has emphasized values: democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, in his diplomatic statements. Does the Abe administration’s rhetorical focus on values signify a substantial change in Japanese foreign policy, or is it just window dressing?   In this public talk, Professor Hikotani argued: (1) Japan’s foreign policy was never value-devoid; but the “value” that drove Japan in its foreign policy was different from other western countries in its emphasis; to be less explicit about the value being promoted, and that the value promoted, especially with regard to Asia, emphasized development assistance over democracy promotion. (2) External developments (the rise of China in the region), and internal developments (institutional empowerment of the Prime Minister) led more emphasis in the use of values as slogans in foreign policy. (3) While values are more often used as slogans, the substance of Japan’s foreign policy has not changed much. Democracy and rule of law is mentioned more frequently as the natural bond among Australia, India and Japan, Japan is also careful about not to force Asian countries to choose between China and Japan and to antagonize China along the way.    

Speaker Bio:  Takako Hikotani is Gerald L. Curtis Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy at Columbia University. She 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 focus 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 “Japan’s New Executive Leadership: How Electoral Rules Make Japanese Security Policy" (with Margarita Estevez-Abe and Toshio Nagahisa), in Frances Rosenbluth and Masaru Kohno eds, Japan in the World (Yale University Press, 2009). She was a Visiting Professional Specialist at Princeton University as Social Science Research Council/Abe Fellow (2010-2011) and Fellow of the US-Japan Leadership Program, US-Japan Foundation (2000- ).  Professor Hikotani received her BA from Keio University, MA from Keio University and Stanford University, and PhD in Political Science from Columbia University, where she was a President’s Fellow.

Description

Presentation Abstract:  According to a comparative research of multiculturalism policies among democratic countries, Japan is known to be one of the least multiculturalist countries. Its national government does not affirm its ethnic diversity, has very few supports for immigrant groups, and still keeps its self-image of a “country of non-immigration.”  However, Japan has also a (not so) long history of widening minority’s rights and creating its own version of multiculturalism. During the 1990s and the early 2000s, social scientists and bureaucrats researched the cases of countries in Europe and North America and coined a new term of “multicultural co-existence (tabunka kyosei)” as a response to increasing number of foreign residents. This presentation introduced the special characteristics of multiculturalism policies in Japan from comparative research findings. Then it examined how Japan learned from the experience of multiculturalism in the United States and Canada and how it failed to adopt the vision of “multicultural co-existence” as a platform of integration policy.   

Biography:  Fuminori Minamikawa is a Professor at the College of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan and a Visiting Professor at the R. F. Harney Program in Ethnic, Immigration, and Pluralism Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He received PhD in Sociology from the Graduate School of Social Sciences at Hitotsubashi University, Japan. His field of research is a sociology of ethnicity, race, and multiculturalism in historical and comparative perspectives. He is now engaging in a research projects on the historical making of American multiculturalism and a comparative study of multicultural policies in the United States, Canada and Japan. He published academic books and journal articles both in Japanese and English, including E Pluribus Unum: A Historical Sociology of Multicultural America (Kyoto: Horitsubunka-sha, 2016, in Japanese) and Trans-pacific Japanese American Studies: Conversations on Race and Racializations (Edited by Yasuko Takezawa and Gary Y. Okihiro, Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2016).

Description

No registration is required for this event.

Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies presented

Sakis Gekas, Associate Professor and Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair of Modern Greek History, York University

"The Ottoman and Other Imperial Turns in the Historiography of the 1821 Greek Revolution"

December 5, 2022, NMC Conference Room (BF200B), 4 Bancroft Ave, 2nd floor

Abstract:

The bicentennial of the 1821 Greek revolution signalled a turn in the historiography of the great event towards Ottoman and other imperial (British, French, Russian) histories. The paper discussed the contextualization of the Revolution within trans-imperial and trans-national networks, and focused on the much more advanced understanding of the Ottoman context of the revolution. Works published by historians of the Ottoman Empire, including the publication of primary sources, and a focus on the empires that lined up in support of the Greek cause and against the Ottomans, allow for a richer and more nuanced understanding of the Greek revolution than before.

Description

Without artists and humanists, science is frequently lost in translation, while artistic work that disregards science risks irrelevancy.

About this Event  

Climate change is often framed as an exclusively scientific issue: a matter of rising carbon dioxide levels, decreasing arctic ice and species extinction. But humanists and artists also grapple with this environmental crisis, and today deeply engaged, thought-provoking and artistically savvy responses to climate change are showing up in galleries, concert halls and theaters as well as in universities across the globe. Indeed, much recent art deftly incorporates scientific research and methodologies, such as Philippe Squarzoni’s graphic novel Climate Changed, Mel Chin’s fine art app ‘Unmoored,’ and Daniel Crawford’s string quartet piece "Planetary Bands, Warming World". Too often climate science and environmental humanities travel two parallel tracks, functioning as concurrent but not collaborative projects. Conjoining the two is a force amplifier.   

This one-day symposium brought together climate scientists, humanists and artists to bridge this disciplinary gap. In partnership with co-sponsors the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) and the Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS), the event welcomed guest scholars and artists who are committed to – and practiced in – the current paradigm shift to less siloed climate change thinking. The symposium featured artists and humanities scholars in dialogue with scientists.

Speakers include:

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech, is engaged in a conceptually similar project, as she strives to develop better ways of translating climate projections and bridge the gap between scientists and stakeholders.  

Diane Burko – whose visual art incorporates scientific data – will discuss her use of coral reef bleaching metrics in aestheticized images of underwater beauty.   

Cate Sandilands, of York University’s Environmental Studies program – proposes new solutions to a persistent problem: how to effectively communicate environmental crisis to a wide audience. Sandilands believes narrative is key: “Public climate change stories shape how we understand the present, imagine the future, and conceive of possible interventions between the now and the then.”  

Gavin Schmidt, of the NASA Institute for Space Studies, pairs his work on climate change drivers with scientific context for pop culture discussions of environmental crisis.

Madhur Anand, a poet and a professor of ecology and environmental sciences at the University of Guelph, where she mixes poetic and scientific  approaches to articulating current and impending crises.  

Paul Kushner, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto, studies the links between ice, snow, and changing atmospheric circulation, while advocating for scientists to speak up about the risks and realities of climate change.  

Bhavani Raman, a JHI fellow and historian at the University of Toronto, who studies the history of colonialism and environmental law, with a particular focus on South Asia, such as in her exploration of the geographies of coastal flooding in Chennai.  ‘The Science and Art of Climate Change’ will extend the reach of ‘Strange Weather’ beyond 2019-2020.

This symposium was a key step in the  School of the Environment’s exploration – evident in April 2019’s cross-disciplinary colloquium ‘Imagining a Post-Carbon World’ – of better integrating humanists into the School. To this end, the event explored both theories of cross-disciplinary work and methodological questions of how exactly to enact such a timely and productive practice.

Description

China is a new great power entering a geopolitically tense region of Central Europe, where Russia, Western Europe, and the U.S. have competed throughout the 20th century for influence. China benefitted from growing scepticism towards the West after the 2008 crisis and was looked upon by many in the region as an alternative. At the same time, with most of the economic expectations of China remaining unfulfilled, the frustration of China has grown as well, aided also by the different outlooks of Communism and the general suspicions of great powers in the region. The presentation will look into political, economic, and social aspects of China-Central Europe relations and its implications for Europe, in general, to show that even though China has presented new challenges, it is unlikely to compete on equal footing with the established great powers in the region.

Richard Q. Turcsányi is a Key Researcher at Palacky University Olomouc, Assistant Professor at Mendel University in Brno, and Program Director at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (www.ceias.eu). He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and further degrees in economy and political science. In past, he conducted long-term study and research stays at the University of Toronto, Peking University, National Chengchi University in Taipei, and the European Institute for Asian Studies in Brussels. His research interests include Chinese foreign policy, relations between China and (Central and Eastern) Europe, and international relations of Asia-Pacific.

Description

This paper examines the oldest existing museum in the Philippines, the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Museum of Arts and Sciences, as a cabinet of curiosity and a catalyst of conversion. By Spanish royal decree, its early collection acquired through colonial expeditions, complex evangelical networks, and commercial expositions formed the classroom materials for the Natural History course taught by Dominican friars. By 1877, the fauna, flora, and mineral—from the minute to the monumental, from the ordinary to the odd—were inventoried in a three-volume catalogue raisonné. Its collection has since elicited a sense of wonder in nature’s perfection and diversity. Within the broader philosophical contexts of natural and revealed theology and the revival of Thomism after Charles Darwin’s publication of his theory of evolution through natural selection, the museum’s pursuit of scientific knowledge masked its pursuit of sacred truth, engendering an epiphany through the embalmed and serving the divine through the drama of its dioramas. Operating as a mode of signification and translation of the Word, the museum became a biblical exegesis of the origin of species to archive God, preserving faith in formaldehyde as a means of maintaining the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines.

Pearlie Rose S. Baluyut received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. A two-time Fulbright U.S. Scholar (Student/Faculty Grant), a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, and a Faculty Learning Community Participant through the NEH Humanities Initiative Grant, she is the co-editor of Confrontations, Crossings, and Convergence: Photographs of the Philippines and the United States, 1898-1998 (1998) and author of Institutions and Icons of Patronage: Arts and Culture in the Philippines during the Marcos Years, 1965-1986 (2012). Besides teaching art history and museum studies at several institutions in the United States, France, and the Philippines, she also served as Advisor for the Arts at the National Museum of the Philippines before her appointment as Project Manager/Curator of the Philippines at the Venice Biennale by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Currently, Baluyut is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Art Department and Affiliate Faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oneonta and Chair of the College Art Association’s International Committee.

Description

About the Lecture:  The trilateral relationship among China, Japan and the United States has generally been stable, and it explained the regional order in East Asia since the 1970s. The trilateral relationship has been stabilized primarily by the stability of the US-China and US-Japan relations, and secondly by the fact that American preponderance has been maintained and the commitment to Asia is certain, with the remaining two parties formulating strategies on the basis of that balance of power. Although Japan-China relations have been repeatedly confronted and approached politically over time, they have not shaken the trilateral relationship to that extent. Also, in the area of regionalism, the role of the United States has gradually become more important and contributed to the stability of order.  Now, however, the fundamental conditions of the trilateral relationship are changing because of a shift in the balance of power, a loss of confidence on American diplomacy, and the overwhelming importance of the Chinese economy. Relations between the United States and China are described as an era of competition, or as an era of confrontation. How will a change in the relationship between Japan, the United States and China affect the order of Asia? What does good Japan-China relations mean? Is the Japan-U.S. relationship still strong? How will the answers to these questions affect Canada and Canadian foreign policy?    

Speaker Biography:  Ryo Sahashi is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo.  Dr. Sahashi specializes on international politics in East Asia, and his most recent book is In a Search for Coexistence: the United States and Two Chinas during the Cold War (Tokyo: Keiso, 2015). He recently edited Looking for Leadership: The Dilemma of Political Leadership in Japan (Tokyo and New York: Japan Center for International Exchange, 2015) in English, and wrote on the impact of rising China on Asian order, Japan’s security policy and Japan-Taiwan relations. Concurrently, he serves as Research Fellow, Japan Center for International Exchange. He frequently contributes to NHK, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun and other major media outlets. Dr Sahashi taught at Kanagawa University as professor until March of 2019 and has been Visiting Associate Professor at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, as well as Shigeru Yoshida Chair at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). He joined the University of Tokyo with tenure in April 2019, and concurrently was Associate Professor at the institution’s Future Vision Research Institute.  He also served as adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, the Tokyo Foundation-German Marshall Fund of the United States Partnership Fellow, and as a Guest Researcher for First Special Committee Research Office, House of Councilors. He is a member of the UK-Japan 21st Century Committee.

Description

Marcel Cadieux was perhaps the most influential Francophone diplomat and civil servant in Canadian history. The son of a Montreal letter carrier, he joined the Department of External Affairs in 1941, rising in time to become the first Francophone ambassador to the United States, as well as head of the department. His career intersects with many of the crucial moments in Canadian foreign policy from the Second World War through the Cold War, Vietnam War, and the coming of détente. Drawing on Cadieux’s unpublished diary, Brendan Kelly’s biography illuminates events and personalities that are still debated today.

Brendan Kelly is a Junior Fellow of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, and teaches in the International Relations Program at Trinity College, University of Toronto. He is also Book Review Editor of International Journal.

Description

Classical Turkish Literature is full of road and journey stories. In classical texts of Turkish literature, the journey is circular. This cyclicality is largely related to the perception of the universe by Sufism and this perception was inspired by Ptolemy’s theory. Turkish literature constructs the perception of the mystical universe through the wahdat al-wujud theory. According to Sufism, the soul is in state of homesickness. Sufi stories also tell the story of the return of the soul to the homeland (God). This is also the return of the individual to find himself. There is a saying attributed to the prophet of Islam: “To know yourself is to know Allah” (man ‘arafa nafsahu faqad ‘arafa rabbahu). This journey is also the journey of self-maturation. We can trace these themes in pre-Islamic Turkish literature going back to Uighur Buddhist texts and in the Islamic period examples inspired by Persian and Arabic literature: Turkish epics and Uighur Buddhist and Manichean texts (9th and 10th centuries), Iranian masnavis (especially ‘Attar in the 12th century and Jami‘ in the15th century), Arabic symbolic stories (Ibn Tufeyl’s Arabic philosophical novel and an allegorical Hayy bın Yaqzan, early 12th century) were sources of road stories in Turkish literature. This seminar will focus on the mystical lines of this journey with examples from Turkish literature from the 13th through the19th centuries.

Description

This talk introduces Empire’s Legacy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), which challenges the claim that globalization and its losers explain right-wing populism today. In France, a potential born of older relations between colonizers and colonized has revitalized the party of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen. Starting with the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, Empire’s Legacy analyzes shifting settler identities under colonialism; and their place, nature, and transmission in the postcolonial Fifth Republic. Drawing on archival research, subject interviews, and electoral surveys, Empire’s Legacy charts an interdisciplinary course between history, sociology, political science, and discourse analysis. It also combines analysis at the local, national, and international levels. This shows the importance of ethnic cleavages, social milieus, government probity, and political responses. As such, Empire’s Legacy has implications for other party families, social movements, and subaltern politics.
 
John Veugelers is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He has written widely on the far right, immigration politics, social movements, and voluntary associations in Canada, France, and Italy. His articles have appeared in a range of scholarly journals that includes: Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Comparative European Politics, European Journal of Political Research, Sociological Quarterly, Current Sociology, Acta Sociologica, and West European Politics. A recipient of awards for outstanding teaching at the University of Toronto, he has been a visiting professor at universities in Europe, Asia, and Africa; and a visiting fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.
 

Description

Applying an anti-Black racism lens, this conference seeks to explore various urban policy issues affecting Toronto’s Black communities.

About this Event
In collaboration with the City of Toronto’s Confronting Anti-Black Racism Unit and the University of Toronto’s Urban Policy Lab, this conference seeks to explore various urban policy issues and how they currently, and will be affecting Toronto’s Black communities for years to come.

Under this year’s theme, Black Inclusion & Innovation, panel topics include:

Innovation in Black Communities
Mental Health
Art, Music & Culture
The Black Economy & Finance
Future of Work
Political Activism

Join us as we discuss innovative approaches to advance Toronto’s Black communities.

For more information about the conference and guest speakers, please visit the Toronto Black Policy Conference Website.

Description

In Spring 2015, Nepal experienced two massive earthquakes. Later that year, the country’s constitution was ‘fast-tracked’ to a hurried conclusion after a nearly decade-long wait since the 2006 end of the country’s Maoist-state civil conflict. This paper considers how the temporal tool of the deadline has yielded particular political and material results within Nepal’s ongoing experience of transformation. Whether used to bring political actors from seven major parties to the bargaining table, or nearly 1 million individual householders to the local administrative office to begin their application for reconstruction subsidies, the deadline is a commonly experienced mediator of relationships between the Nepali state and its citizens. Familiarity with this temporal tool also leads to experimentation: when deadlines are believed to be extendable, they may not lead to the desired result. But even when deadlines are repeatedly extended—as they were both for Nepal’s constitution drafters and for homeowners seeking reconstruction subsidies—they effect significant political and material transformations on the ground. Individuals hedge their bets by building particular kinds of political and material structures that are at once possible to complete quickly, and open to expansion should timeframes allow. From the vantage point of 2019, four years after both the earthquakes and the constitution, this paper explores how the dual processes of post-conflict state restructuring and post-earthquake reconstruction intertwine at the experiential level to yield large-scale structural transformations—in which the deadline may both enable and constrain new forms of political and material life.

Sara Shneiderman is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute of Asian Research at UBC’s School of Public Policy & Global Affairs. She is the author of Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India(University of Pennsylvania Press 2015; winner of the 2017 James Fisher Prize for First Books on the Himalayan Region) and co-editor of Darjeeling Reconsidered: Histories, Politics, Environments (Oxford University Press, 2018). She has also published widely on the themes of ethnicity, mobility, citizenship, and borders in the Himalayas and South Asia. Her current transdisciplinary research partnership funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) focuses on the social and political dimensions of post-earthquake reconstruction in Nepal in collaboration with Social Science Baha, the Department of Anthropology at Tribhuvan University, and several other partners. At UBC, she coordinates the Himalaya Program, and served as Co-Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research from 2017-2019.

Description

In an era of increasing political polarization, compromise seems difficult to come by. Simultaneously, recent reports show public trust in government is declining. Both conditions can make public consultation more difficult as communities become reticent to engage with one another and with institutions. However, bringing people together in thoughtful dialogue may be especially important in this environment.

On December 3, experts from different sectors will discuss the role of public consultation in policy development within the context of increasing polarization and erosion of trust. Panelists will explore connections between consultation and good governance, and will offer strategies for improving policy outcomes in our cities through more effective and inclusive consultation processes.

Speakers

Cheryll Case is an urban planner and designer specialized in community engagement and research. She is Urban Design Coordinator with the City of Brampton, where she supports strategic initiatives including the Brampton 2040 Vision, and the Founder and Principal Urban Planner of her own consultancy, CP Planning. Cheryll is an editor of House Divided: How the Missing Middle Will Solve Toronto’s Housing Crisis.

Lindsay (Swooping Hawk) Kretschmer is Executive Director of the Toronto Aboriginal Support Services Council (TASSC). Lindsay’s family comes from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. She is German and Mohawk; Wolf Clan and her spirit name is Swooping Hawk. Lindsay has worked in the non-profit sector for nearly 20 years, most recently as the Executive Director of the Ontario Aboriginal HIV/AIDS Strategy.

John Robinson is a Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School, and 2019 Visiting Professor at Utrecht University. At U of T, he is Presidential Advisor on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability.

Nicole Swerhun is the founder of Swerhun Inc. The Swerhun team designs and delivers public consultation processes that make complex, often controversial and high profile, multi-stakeholder projects constructive and manageable. Nicole has led the design and delivery of hundreds of public consultation projects, including work in post-war Bosnia, post-Katrina New Orleans, and in cities across Canada and the US.

Moderator

Dave Meslin is an activist, artist, and community organizer who inspires better engagement between governments and citizens. He is the author of Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up. He formed the Toronto Public Space Committee, which published the first issue of Spacing Magazine, an award-winning urban affairs publication. Dave appears as an expert on political engagement on national media.

Description

In 1944, the U.S. Navy established the War Crimes Tribunals Program in Guam, one of several Japanese colonies located in the Pacific. For the next five years, the military commission reviewed war crimes cases about assault, murder, treason, and other acts against white civility. Throughout this period, the tribunal also featured more than 100 indigenous Chamorro and Chamorro-Japanese testimonies about Japanese militarism, policing, and torture in Guam. How did these testimonies support the U.S. effort to eradicate Japan’s sovereignty and remake the political bodies and territorial borders of Guam and the Pacific Islands more generally? By drawing on various philosophies and proverbs about life and death, this talk examines the legal and political impact of military courts, native testimonies, and white supremacist violence.

Keith L. Camacho is an associate professor in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the author of Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam, the co-editor of Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, and the former senior editor of Amerasia Journal.

* Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam by Keith L. Camacho will be available for purchase at the venue.

Description

Since the election of the new president of the Republic of Uzbekistan (2016), the republic has faced sweeping transformations. The reforms have targeted civic, economic, as well as many government structures. On the eve of elections set to take place on Dec. 22, many wonder if now is the right time to expand reforms into the parliamentary arena, which until now has changed little. This talk raises key questions regarding the possible future of the division of power in Uzbekistan and relations between the government and political parties

Description

The nineteenth century was defined by the global problem of property. Focusing on France, a country whose revolution purportedly birthed a new, liberal form of private property, this paper explores the nineteenth-century debate on ‘mobilization’, or legal modes of turning land into a circulating value. It focuses particularly on the role of imperial entanglements in shaping arguments and experiments in mobilization. In the second half of the century a series of laws advanced the visibility and alienability of real property in Algeria and Tunisia, and it was here that France went furthest with measures of financializing land, experimenting with credit instruments based on real property that were long debated but never introduced in the metropole. Building on recent scholarship that has illuminated the legal transformations in property rights that occurred around the nineteenth-century Mediterranean, this paper demonstrates the degree to which these processes implicated metropolitan and imperial landholding in a common project of commercial and financial modernization.

Dr. Alexia Yates is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Manchester, where she researches urban history and the history of economic life in Europe. Her first book, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital (Harvard University Press, 2015), won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize for Best Book in Non-Canadian History from the Canadian Historical Association in 2016. She is currently working on a book on the culture and politics of finance in modern France and as well as a text on real estate and global urban history.

Description

Kunti, a dalit (“untouchable” caste) woman, became the poster child for the nation-wide movement in India against the abolition of the system of indentured labor in 1917. The system, managed by the colonial government in India, had supplied approximately 1.3 million workers from India to plantations overseas in the aftermath of the abolition of Atlantic slavery in the 1830s. This paper explores how a woman at the very bottom of the caste hierarchy in India became the face for an empire-wide change. It will argue that Kunti’s role in the movement illustrates an important dimension of the abolitionist movement: the construction of the “people” (or the demos) as the subject of a new kind of politics in late colonial India.

Mrinalini Sinha is Alice Freeman Palmer Professor in the Department of History and Professor (by courtesy) in the Departments of English Language and Literature and of Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has written on various aspects of the political history of colonial India, with a focus on anti-colonialism, gender, and transregional approaches. She is the author of Colonial Masculinity: The ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late nineteenth century (1995) and of Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (2006), winner of the Joan Kelley Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association and the Albion Book Prize from the North American Conference of British Studies. She is currently working on a book project with the working title, “Complete Political Independence: The Curious History of a Nationalist Indian Demand,” for which she received the 2012 John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Sinha is also a past President of the Association of Asian Studies (2015).

Description

As the anthropologist Rubie S. Watson once asked, “How do people remember events that ‘did not occur’? How do people ‘remember what is meant to be forgotten”? This lecture will explore the decade between 1945 and 1955, when the Holodomor was “first remembered”. It will examine the active construction and transmission of a social memory of the Terror-Famine among post-war refugees from the Soviet Union. It will also consider how remembrance of the Holodomor shaped and, in turn, was shaped by the emerging Cold War.

After 1945, the Holodomor became part of making the case in the West for legal recognition and assistance for refugees fleeing Communism. As the Cold War escalated, famine survivors were increasingly called on as witnesses in a fierce political debate in the U.S. about the nature of the Soviet Union and U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union.

Olga Andriewsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Trent University. She teaches and researches in the area of late imperial and Soviet history. She is the author of “Towards a Decentered History: The Study of the Holodomor and Ukrainian Historiography” (Contextualizing the Holodomor). She has also written numerous articles on identity and politics in late Imperial Russia. Her article “The Russian-Ukrainian Discourse and the Failure of the ‘Little Russian Solution’, 1782-1917” in Culture, Nation, Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600-1945 was awarded the AAUS prize for best academic article in 2004.

Description

This is a 60-minute conversation about public storytelling. You bring three questions and a notebook. Together, we’ll explore ways to
prepare, practice and present on big stages and in conference rooms. We’ll talk about how to create a mental teleprompter, tap
into audience empathy and utilize feedback. In one hour, we’ll produce a self-help checklist to deepen your storytelling ability.

Dr. MacInnis was formerly a member of the Trudeau Centre Advisory Board. He is a scientist and storyteller. The first person to explore the ocean beneath the North Pole, he was among the first to dive to the Titanic. A motivational speaker at IBM, Visa, Rolex, Toyota, Microsoft and the US Naval Academy, he’s hosted and written radio and television programs for CBS, CBC and the Discovery Channel. Currently, he’s producing a podcast called Beautiful Minds.

Description

Pierre Guimond is currently Diplomat in Residence and Senior Fellow at the Graduate School of International Studies of Laval University. Prior that he was Minister-Counsellor and Head of the Foreign Policy and Diplomacy Section of the Canadian Embassy in Paris.
He started his career in 1979 at the Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs of the Government of Québec with assignments as desk officer in federal-provincial relations and then Head of the public affairs section of the Québec Government Office in Toronto. He joined the Canadian Foreign Service in 1987 and served in Prague, Bonn and Vienna before becoming Ambassador to Hungary, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina from 2007 to 2010. At the headquarters of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, he served as desk officer for the Policy and Strategic Analysis Division, USSR and Central and Eastern Europe Division. He was also deputy director of the European Union Division and Senior Departmental Assistant to Minister of Foreign Affairs Bill Graham. He later became Director of the European Union Division, Eastern Europe and Balkans Division and Policy Planning Division. Mr. Guimond also had an assignment as foreign policy advisor in the Foreign Policy and Defense Secretariat of the Privy Council Office. A graduate of Laval University in Political science, he is also an Auditor of the French Institut des Hautes études de défense nationale. He is a member of the External Advisor Committee of the Canadian Foreign Service Institute, member of the board of Canadian associations on international affairs and is a frequent commentator on French Canadian media.

Pierre Guimond’s first posting abroad as a junior diplomat was as Third Secretary and Vice Consul at the Canadian Embassy to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic from the summer of 1988 to that of 1990, a time known in that country as the end of the period of “Normalisation”. While his basic tasks were, among others, to understand the local political scene and reporting back to Ottawa, doing that meant that Guimond had to maintain close contacts with many individuals known as ‘dissidents” by the Soviet-styled local authorities. Although “the” Canadian government expert on Czechoslovakia at the time, he, like so many other observers, failed to see coming the rapid transformation that was to occur in this Central European countries in the Fall of 1989 and which led to the lead dissident being elected President of the Republic. A key witness to both the political oppression and the uprising of the Czech and Slovak peoples, this diplomat ended up providing some support to members of the dissident movement, that included Vaclav Havel, in their communication with “the West”.

Description

Inequality threatens equality of opportunity, but different types of inequality do so in different ways. Top-end inequality reinforces privilege, bottom-end inequality stifles upward mobility, and together they create middle class angst and insecurity.
Canadians have dodged the corrosive and divisive politics that a toxic combination of higher polarization and lower mobility have enabled in the United States. In part this is because of a progressive social policy legacy. But in an era of higher inequality and wide regional differences this legacy needs to be continually reshaped to ensure opportunity and resilience for the next generation, no matter their family background or where they grow up.

Miles Corak will present three facts about the relationship between inequality and social mobility, and draw from research using big data to highlight the accomplishments of Canadian public policy, and the next set of challenges.

About our Speaker
Miles Corak is a professor of economics with The Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

His research focuses on social mobility, inequality, and child rights. His findings documenting that higher inequality is associated with lower economic opportunity have been widely cited, and used by policy-makers worldwide. The Globe and Mail, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and the BBC have all used Corak’s research on “The Great Gatsby Curve,” as has the White House.

Dr. Corak is a graduate of McGill and Queen’s Universities, has held appointments with the University of Ottawa and Statistics Canada, and has been a visiting researcher with the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy; the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the University of London; the Office of Population Research at Princeton University; and the Russell Sage Foundation. He was a visiting professor with the Department of Economics at Harvard University, and during 2017, served as the economist in residence with the Canadian federal government, advising the Minister of Economic and Social Development on social policy reform and the country’s poverty reduction strategy. Visit MilesCorak.com or follow him @MilesCorak.

Description

The lecture will be followed by a reception, 6:00 – 7:00 PM.

Professor Jie-Hyun Lim’s book project of “victimhood nationalism” aims to illustrate competing memories of victimhood in the postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the global memory space across East and West. Throughout this book, he explores the dialectical interplay of global and national memory with a critical inquiry of the dichotomy of: perpetrators vs. victims, collective guilt vs. innocence, national vs. cosmopolitan memory, historical actors vs. passive objects, over-contextualization vs. de-contextualization, historical conformism vs. presentism, etc. With the emergence of global memory space, unconnected historical actors and memory activists are linked mnemonically a posteriori in the global mnemoscape and memories of victimhood have become more contested. With the histoire croisée as the methodological background, he will trace the global history of victimhood nationalism by drawing entangled memories between victimizers and victimized.

Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Transnational History and director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He is also a principal investigator of the research project on the “Mnemonic Solidarity: colonialism, war, and genocide in the global memory space” and the series editor of “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave. His most recent book is Memory War: How Could Perpetrators Become Victims? (2019).

Description

Join us for an indepth and interactive discussion with

Jane Philpott
Former Minister of Indigenous Services, Government of Canada
Former President of the Treasury Board, Government of Canada
Former MP for Markham-Stouffville

Lisa Raitt
Former Deputy Leader, Conservative Party of Canada
Former MP for Milton and Halton

Megan Leslie
President & CEO, World Wild Life Fund Canada
Former Deputy Leader, New Democratic Party
Senior Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

moderated by

Paul Wells
Journalist/Senior Writer, Maclean’s

Description

What is the global governance of migration? Why is it emerging? Which are the major institutions and actors involved? Can we distinguish between the global governance of migration and that of asylum? And is there such a thing as an orderly, safe and regular migration? My talk will comment on why and how the global governance of migration-and-asylum (hyphenated on purpose) is emerging today under a blueprint that emphasizes orderly, safe, regular flows when the reality is that most flows are disorderly, unsafe, and partly regular or indeed largely unauthorized. I will discuss how the global governance of migration and asylum is inscribed in the paradigm of risk society and why we need to go beyond this paradigm acknowledging uncertainty and rethinking migration and asylum governance as ‘mess management’.

Description

Stalin and other early Soviet leaders saw the Caucasus as the USSR’s fruit and vegetable basket, reshaping agricultural practices and altering the natural landscape to favor “export” agriculture. Such beliefs only became realized much later, however, and hardly in the way these leaders envisioned. As the USSR became a consumer society, centered on major Russian cities, Caucasus—and, later, Central Asian—growers realized the money that could be made selling their products directly to northern customers. Municipal officials in Moscow and elsewhere realized the value of this trade to their citizens, who believed in the better quality of fresh fruits, vegetables and even flowers from the Soviet south. Existing in a “gray zone” between first and second economies, this long-distance movement of fresh food and flowers proliferated in the Soviet Union’s last two decades. Images of the time, which still dominate characterizations of the late USSR, showed mostly-empty grocery stores shelves and long queues for food. I argue however that these beliefs of the Soviet Union as a land of scarcity miss the dynamic, and quite capitalist, nature of food sales in the late USSR. This movement—of people and goods—had varied consequences on everything from natural environments in the Soviet south to family life among traders as well as the health of the Russian population. Racism was one significant outgrowth of this trade. Southern traders, denigrated as “blacks” were seen to befoul as well as benefit Moscow with their unofficial and ostensibly exploitative practices. The host Russian population’s racist stereotypes towards these traders began to apply more broadly to Soviet citizens of the Caucasus and Central Asia. In memories, nonetheless, these long-distance food traders believed that the USSR offered them a chance to overcome mundane lives in southern villages and succeed at its very center.

Description

The Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History is delighted to host a roundtable discussion on the history and prospects of the International Joint Commission. Since its creation in 1909, the IJC has been the main mechanism through which Canada and the US have managed their shared border waters and environments.

Join leading experts from Canada and the US in exploring its rich past and uncertain future:
*Meredith Denning (Georgetown)
*Dan Macfarlane (Western Michigan University)
*Kim Richard Nossal (Queen’s)
and many more...

This event celebrates the publication of the new edited collection, The First Century of the International Joint Commission (University of Calgary Press).

Reception to Follow.

Description

This is a book panel on George Anderson & Sujit Choudhry’s recently published edited volume, Territory and Power in Constitutional Transitions (Oxford University Press, 2019). This edited volume, and an accompanying policy paper, are the major outputs of the “Territory and Power” project, a 5-year, thematic, collaborative, global research initiative led by the Center for Constitutional Transitions, the Forum of Federations, and International IDEA, that brought together 24 experts from 13 countries. The research question is how territorial claims relate to constitution-making processes and constitutional design during periods of intense political engagement over constitutional reform or “constitutional moments”. The book includes 17 case studies. Anderson & Choudhry will present the main findings of Territory and Power, followed by commentary by Jacques Bertrand & Lucan Way, who were in participants in this project and contributed chapters.

Sujit Choudhry (WZB Berlin Social Science Research Centre) is one of the world’s leading scholars of comparative constitutional law. His edited volumes include The Migration of Constitutional Ideas (CUP), Constitutional Design for Divided Societies (OUP), the Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (OUP), Territory and Power in Constitutional Transitions(OUP), and Security Sector Reform in Constitutional Transitions (OUP). He is currently working on the public law theory of political parties. He has advised constitutional processes in Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Myanmar, Nepal, South Africa, Tunisia, Ukraine and Yemen.

George Anderson has been a federal deputy minister, president of the Forum of Federations, and member of the UN’s stand-by team of mediation experts. He is a fellow at Queen’s University’s Centre for the Study of Democracy and Diversity. In addition to his extensive work internationally, he is author of the widely translated Federalism: An Introduction and Fiscal Federallsim: A Comparative Introduction, as well as editor of volumes on oil and gas, water, and internal markets in federal systems.

Lucan Ahmad Way is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (2015) and co-author of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (2010). Together with Steven Levitsky, he is completing a book on the durability of autocracies founded in violent social revolution.

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.

Filiz Kahraman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and an affiliate faculty member at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies of the Munk School at the University of Toronto. Her research investigates law and politics from international and comparative perspectives. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining why labor activists in Europe pursue human rights law as a new mobilization strategy and how international law has affected the lives of aggrieved workers on the ground.

Description

After he asserted direct control of New France in the 1660s, Louis XIV’s authority was largely unrestricted. As scholars of his reign have pointed out in relation to the political legitimacy of his regime in France itself, the manufactured symbols of Louis XIV’s kingship finessed the contradictions between his centralization of authority and his continued reliance on local elites. In the case of an overseas colony, there was no possibility that the king would ever favour his distant subjects with his presence. The monarch could be nothing but representation. This paper looks at the representations of monarchical authority in various media: paintings and prints, a statue in Lower Town Québec, currency and medals, and the legal system. The distance of the colony meant in some cases relying on expedients to govern the French population.

Dr. Colin Coates teaches Canadian Studies and History at Glendon College, York University. He has published on the history of rural society in the St Lawrence Valley (The Metamorphosis of Landscape and Community in Early French Canada) and on the history of commemoration (Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord, with Cecilia Morgan). He is currently working on studies of political culture in Louis XIV’s New France and the environmental history of Québec. He recently co-edited The Nature of Canada, with Graeme Wynn.

Description

Post-1997 Hong Kong has become the restive frontier of global China – it is the place where the major strategies of global Chinese power are in full display, and where these have provoked the strongest popular resistance yet to Chinese domination. In this talk, I will first analyze Hong Kong as the testing ground for China’s power playbook around the world – (1) economic statecraft (2) patron-clientelism (3) symbolic violence. How do these mechanisms play out in Hong Kong? Second, I will trace the trajectory of countermovements in Hong Kong to generate lessons about the limits and effectiveness of global China.

Ching Kwan Lee is Dr. Chung Sze-yuen Professor of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her latest books include The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (Chicago 2017) and Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell 2019).

RELATED EVENT: “Stand with Hong Kong Journalists” Photo Exhibit
DATES: December 2, 2019 – January 6, 2020
HOURS: please click here for regular and winter holidays hours
LOCATION: Hart House, University of Toronto, 7 Hart House Circle
Please click here for more information
PRESENTING PARTNERS:
Hart House, University of Toronto 
Stand With Hong Kong Journalists (SWHKJ)
The International Human Rights Program, University of Toronto Faculty of Law 

Description

By the end of April 1920, three brigades of the Red Ukrainian Halych Army were staying on the frontline in the central Ukraine. This were the remains of Ukrainian forces, which after being thrown out from Eastern Galicia in July 1919, merged with the Army of Ukraine People’s Republic and together launched Kyiv offensive during the summer of 1919. However, because of typhus epidemy, the result of which was loss of combat capabilities, Galicians were forced to join the Denikin’s Volunteer Army in November 1919 and eventually crossed over to the side of Bolsheviks. After the riot against Soviets in the end of April, two brigades once again tried crossed over the sides in hope to re-merge with Petlura’s units, whereas third brigade stayed with Soviets until it was crushed near Korosten. Yet Polish military authorities with acceptance from Military Ministry of Ukrainian People’s Republic decided to disarm Galician units, put them into temporary camps in the Ukraine, then moved to Galicia, and eventually divided into two parts: vast majority of privates and N.C.Os were released to homes, whereas the smaller part, consisted mostly of officers, were transported to the camp of Tuchola for further internment. They have been staying in the Polish captivity for a few months, usually 8 – 9, though some of them were there for over one year, and the very last of Ukrainians were released only after over two years, in October 1922.

Description

Zosa Szajkowski, a Polish-born Jewish historian, took tens of thousands of Jewish documents from Europe in the 1940s and ‘50s and moved them, illicitly, to New York. He eventually sold them to Jewish research libraries in the United States and Israel. Was this a heroic act of salvage, or simply theft?

Join us for a lecture by Lisa Leff, author of The Archive Thief, Professor of History at American University, and Director of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The event will be moderated by Doris Bergen, with responses by Eric Jennings and Sara R. Horowitz.

A reception will precede the event, starting at 3:30 pm.

Description

As immigrants in Canada settle and integrate into society, most eventually become citizens. Citizenship is more than just a legal status, it comes with expectations of social participation and civic engagement. On one hand, religion promotes bonds of fellowship and social cooperation that help to enrich civic participation; however, in some cases it can also reinforce social divisions of “us” and “them”. In what ways, and under what conditions, does religion help or hinder this process of civic participation for newcomers to Canada? What can be done to strengthen the participation of newcomers in Canadian society in a way that does not enforce a rigid or closed secularism? How should religious groups structure inter-faith dialogue differently to promote greater civic engagement? What other spaces exist for this conversation to develop?

Seminar Series on Religion and Migration in Canada

This seminar series explores the role of religion in migration to Canada, with regard to settlement and integration, accommodation and reaction, and citizenship and participation. Each seminar brings together scholars and practitioners to discuss the ways in which religious belief and practice, religious community life, and religious institutions influence migrant pathways to participation in Canadian life and society. This seminar series is organized in partnership with the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the Baha’i Community of Canada and the University of Toronto Multi-Faith Centre.

Description

This talk comes to grips with LGBTQ discourse in Russia outside of the familiar political and social narratives of oppression and violence that have been prevalent since the 2013 “anti-gay-propaganda” legislation. It turns instead to the cultural sphere and challenges its widely held perception as an arena for exclusively heteronormative discourse by revealing queerness as an increasingly popular object of artistic exploration and a recurrent performative strategy within the Russian performing arts and dramatic writing of the 21st century. I zoom into the stories of drag queens, transgender persons, gays, lesbians, and multiple queer selves and others to unveil the unique combination of linguistic, performative, and visual means that shape queerness as a Russian cultural imaginary. Apart from discussing the portrayals of queerness that emerge on stage and in dramatic texts, I will also focus on the institutional context in which these images are produced, paying attention, among other things, to the geographical determinants of the possibilities of individual narratives.

Tatiana Klepikova is a Faculty of Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, where she is working on her postdoctoral project about contemporary Russian queer theater and drama. She defended her Ph.D. in Slavic Literary Studies at the University of Passau, Germany, in 2019, after obtaining degrees in Teaching Foreign Languages (English and Spanish) in Yaroslavl (Russia), and Russian and East-Central European Studies in Passau. She is co-editor of several collections of interdisciplinary essays on privacy, including Outside the “Comfort Zone”: Private and Public Spheres in Late Socialist Europe (forthcoming in 2020 by De Gruyter). Her broader research interests include Soviet and contemporary Russian history and culture, political art, cultural privacy studies, queer studies, performance studies, and histories and cultures of LGBT communities in Eastern Europe.

Description

Taiwan will hold its 7th direct Presidential election on January 11, 2020. The incumbent candidate, President Tsai Ing-wen (Democratic Progressive Party – DPP) will face off the opposition candidates, the Kaohsiung mayor of Han Kuo-yu (Chinese Nationalist Party – KMT), and the People First Party (PFP) candidate, James Soong. After suffering a huge defeat in the 2018 local elections, polls suggest Tsai Ing-wen in the lead. The two key election issues this time are China, particularly in light of Hong Kong protests, and Taiwan’s economy.

We will bring together a distinguished group of Taiwan specialists to discuss and help us understand the election outcomes and their implications for Taiwan, Canada, global economy and international relations.

Please join us for the Panel Discussion followed by reception.

Description

9:45-10:00 Registration for Day One
10:00-10:05: Opening remarks
10:05-11:25 SESSION 1: “Canadian Urban Integration”
12:25-13:45 SESSION 2: “Borders”
14:00-16:00 Keynote Lecture: “Refuge beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers” by David FitzGerald (University of California San Diego). Separate registration required.

Register for Day 2 conference.

Description

Media pundits, politicians, and the public are often skeptical or ambivalent about granting asylum. They fear that asylum-seekers will impose economic and cultural costs and pose security threats to nationals. Consequently, governments of rich, democratic countries attempt to limit who can approach their borders, which often leads to refugees breaking immigration laws.

In Refuge beyond Reach, David Scott FitzGerald traces how rich democracies have deliberately and systematically shut down most legal paths to safety. Drawing on official government documents, information obtained via WikiLeaks, and interviews with asylum seekers, he finds that for ninety-nine percent of refugees, the only way to find safety in one of the prosperous democracies of the Global North is to reach its territory and then ask for asylum. FitzGerald shows how the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia comply with the letter of law while violating the spirit of those laws through a range of deterrence methods — first designed to keep out Jews fleeing the Nazis — that have now evolved into a pervasive global system of “remote control.”
While some of the most draconian remote control practices continue in secret, FitzGerald identifies some pressure points and finds that a diffuse humanitarian obligation to help those in need is more difficult for governments to evade than the law alone.

Refuge beyond Reach addresses one of the world’s most pressing challenges — how to manage flows of refugees and other types of migrants — and helps to identify the conditions under which individuals can access the protection of their universal rights.

David FitzGerald is Theodore E. Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations, Professor of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research analyzes policies regulating migration and asylum in countries of origin, transit, and destination. FitzGerald’s books include Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas, which won the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Scholarly Book Award, and A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages its Migration.

This event is co-funded by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office.

Register for Day 1 Conference
Register for Day 2 Conference

Description

Toxic Regimes: Agent Orange, Science, and Pollution in Ontario, 1960s-1990s.  In late 1989, chemical tests in Elmira, Ontario revealed the presence of dimethylnitrosamine (NDMA), a common by-product of rubber, organic chemical and other manufacturing processes, in the local water supply. Local government officials immediately shut down two town wells upon this discovery, and closed the remainder of the wells the following year. While NDMA posed a potential threat to human and environmental health, a longer legacy of equally, if not more, potentially dangerous chemical contaminants already existed in this small industrial town. Some of the most pertinent chemicals manufactured in Elmira as early as the 1950s were 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T — two herbicides which, when combined, constituted the chemical munition commonly known as Agent Orange. Indeed, one of the corporations based in Elmira supplied Agent Orange to the US Department of Defense during the 1960s, as the US military advanced its mass use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War. In this talk, I discussed how the production, waste, and scientific knowledge of Agent Orange in Elmira was indelibly bound to an emergent local water and environmental crisis in the latter half of the twentieth century, as well as a greater network of Cold War technology and exposures.     

Biography: Rohini is a PhD student in the History department. Her research focuses on the intersections of the history of science, environmental history, labour history, and Cold War politics in the North American and transnational context. She has an undergraduate degree in engineering and a Masters in modern history.

Description

10:00-10:15 Registration for Day Two
10:15-11:45 SESSION 3 “Health”
12:45-14:15 SESSION 4 “Segregation/Incarceration”
14:30-16:00 SESSION 5 “Representation”

Register for DAY 1 conference
Register for the keynote lecture on DAY 1

Description

More ethnic minority candidates ran for office in the 2019 Canadian federal election than ever before. Many other democratic states around the world are experiencing a similar increase in the number of ethnic minority candidates running in elections due to the growth of their populations with diverse ethnic backgrounds over the past few decades. In contrast to this trend, few ethnic minority candidates have run for office in Japan to date. Given that Japan has already accepted some, and may accept more immigrants in the future, Japanese people are likely to see more ethnically non-Japanese candidates in the near future. If these candidates run for election at the national level, would Japanese voters support them? Which voters would be more or less likely to vote for these candidates and why? Studying these counterfactual questions presents important implications not just for understanding Japanese voters, but for electoral democracy in many countries worldwide.

To discuss these questions, Professor Go Murakami presented the major results of three online voting experiments he conducted in Japan between 2011 and 2019. In these experiments, he showed several hypothetical candidate profiles to participants and asked them to vote for one. In the study, one of the candidates’ ethnicity was randomly altered to be either Japanese, Korean or Chinese. The study showed that a significant proportion of Japanese voters avoided supporting the non-ethnic minority candidate, an effect that depended largely on voters’ partisanship, ethnic group attitudes, and relevant policy preference. During this presentation, Professor Murakami discussed the implications of these findings for future Japanese elections.  

Biography:  Go Murakami is an Associate Professor in the College of Law at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Mississauga. He received a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia. Professor Murakami studies political psychology and behaviour, with special interests in race, ethnicity and immigration. His recent publication includes "Effects of Candidates’ Ethnicity on Vote Choice in Japan: An Experimental Approach" (Ritsumeikan Law Review, 2019) and "Survey Experiment on Majority Building" In Yoichi Hizen, ed., Experimental Politics (with Kiichiro Arai and Masaru Kohno, 2016 [in Japanese]).

Description

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.