Past Events

Description

The Battle of Haçova/Mezőkeresztes in Memory and Myth

On 25 October 1596, an Ottoman army engaged an imperial force on the plain of Mezőkeresztes (Trk. Haçova). On the second day, in disarray and routed, Ottoman forces rallied to drive the enemy back and win an unexpected, total victory. The battle went down in legend. Witnesses and later authors claimed that something wondrous had happened that day, something miraculous, and ranked it above even the great victories at Çaldıran (1514) and Mohács (1526). The outcome, they said, was clearly “no work of man (sun‘-ı beşer degildür).” This talk explores sources’ miraculous interpretations of Haçova. It draws on accounts from the 16th to 19th centuries to argue that the battle was a sort of protean event and to show how Haçova took on distinct “political theologies” over time, serving as a symbol for how groups within the elite thought about the polity and its relationship with the divine.

Description

The Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, in Collaboration with the Embassy of Canada in Washington, the International Democratic Forum (National Endowment for Democracy), and the Donner Canadian Foundation invite you to the twentieth annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World.

This year’s lecture Power, Performance, and Legitimacy: Renewing Global Democratic Momentum, will be delivered by Larry Diamond, Mosbacher Senior Fellow of Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and Founding Coeditor, Journal of Democracy.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

ABOUT THE SEMINAR

This seminar traces state asymmetry as an analytical framework for the study of forms of power in authoritarian systems. Through the lens of a long term study of Tibet’s governance in the People’s Republic of China, the study of the politics of space is posited as a means for illuminating ongoing processes of regionalization and the construction of new scales of policy interests, casting new light on the reterritorialization of Tibet and the partitioning of its governance within the Chinese state. This structural approach to asymmetry in authoritarian states offers insights into the operation and analytics of power that are obscured by prevailing discourses on political disputes and contested regions that focus on minoritization and assimilation of ethnonational groups. By taking into account the spatial differentiation of policy interests and governance structures within authoritarian systems, state asymmetry provides a research framework that challenges conventional notions of authoritarian state power while offering a model that can better predict political behavior and the emergence of political conflict.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tashi Rabgey is Research Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University where she focuses on territorial politics, autonomous governance and state asymmetry with a specialization on Tibet and China. She directs the Research Initiative on Multination States (RIMS) at the Elliott School of International Affairs as well as the Tibet Governance Project (Tibet GovLab) which advances research on governance and public policy in contemporary Tibet. Dr. Rabgey led the development of the Tibet Governance and Practice Forum (TGAP), a seven-year research initiative that engaged policy researchers from the Chinese State Council in Beijing, as well as global academic partners including the University of Oslo, UQÁM, the University of Deusto and Harvard. Her work on TGAP developed new field-based knowledge and analytical insights on the institutional structure and dynamics of China’s policymaking in Tibet and other regional autonomies. She is also completing a long term project on legal pluralism, nationality law and the effects of sovereignty in post-democratization Taiwan. She directs experimental programs on regional governance and autonomy in collaboration with the University of the Basque Country and was recently a visiting professor at the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr (Iraqi Kurdistan) where she supervises Ph.D. students and Kurdish graduate students of law.

(Chair) Jacques Bertrand is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, as well as Director of the Collaborative Master’s Specialization in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies (Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Affairs). He was the founding director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the Asian Institute. He is also the co-founder of the Postcor Lab at the University of Toronto, a research hub for the study of civil wars and war-to-peace transitions. His most recent books include  Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (w/ Ardeth Thawnghmung and Alexandre Pelletier, Cornell UP, July 2022) and Democracy and Nationalist Struggles in Southeast Asia: From secessionist mobilization to conflict resolution (Cambridge UP, 2021).

Description

https://www.routledge.com/The-Turkic-Peoples-in-World-History/Lee/p/book/9781032170015

This new publication is a thorough and rare introduction to the Turkic world and its role in world history, providing a concise history of the Turkic peoples as well as a critical discussion of their identities and origins.  The “Turks” stepped on to the stage of history by establishing the Türk Qaghanate, the first trans-Eurasian empire in history, in 552 CE. In the following millennium, they went on to create empires that had a profound impact on world history such as the Uyghur, Khazar, and Ottoman empires. They also participated in building the Mongol empire, and these Turko-Mongol empires are credited with shaping the destinies of pre-modern China, the Middle East, and Europe. By treating the history of the Turkic peoples as a process of amalgamation and integration, rather than simply categorizing the Turkic peoples chronologically or geographically, this book offers new insights into Turkic history.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

Chinese hydropower first captured the world’s imagination not—as one would expect—by going big, but rather by being small. By the end of the 1970s, the Chinese claimed to have built just under 90,000 small hydropower stations across the country. Over the ensuing decade, this small hydropower expertise and technology attracted interest across the world, both in the Global South and in the Global North. China also came to play an increasingly central role in a host of ambitious international small hydropower conferences—in places like Kathmandu, Nairobi, and Hangzhou. In this talk, I trace and contextualize this story in light of histories of hydropower, energy, and global development.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Arunabh Ghosh (BA Haverford, PhD Columbia) is an associate professor in the History Department at Harvard University. He is the author of Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Princeton, 2020). Current projects include a history of small hydropower in the PRC and a history of China-India scientific networks.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Between people and the environment, between inside and outside, not only the skin but also the clothing above it serves as an important protection and mediator. Fashion, in turn, represents the expansion of one’s own identity and can be distinguished from the functional concept of clothing. On the one hand, fashion itself should be understood as a medium in its dimension that conveys meaning; on the other hand, fashion is a textile shell that, since its commercialization, has also been deeply intertwined with existing media technologies. The article takes this ambivalence as a starting point and would like to look at fashion and its media implications and dependencies from three perspectives: Firstly, the surveillance character of smart fashion should be questioned. Secondly, fashionable case studies will be reflected from the perspective of sur/subveillance mechanisms and finally a collection with anti-surveillance efforts will be considered.

About the Speaker

Silke Roesler-Keilholz is a research assistant at the Chair of Media Studies at the University of Regensburg. In her habilitation project (3rd book) with the working title “Rhizomatic Subveillance. SurveillanceArchitecture(s)”, she expands the spatial theoretical reflection of her dissertation “Doing City. New York in the field of tension between media practices” (published in 2010) by a topological dimension. Current fields of work include what she calls the theory of subveillance, aesthetics of postfeminism, spatial theories and fashion media studies.

Description

Join us on Thursday, December 14 at 2:30 PM ET as Yasheng Huang, Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, discusses his book The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline with John Yasuda, Assistant Prosessor at Johns Hopkins University and the Munk School’s Professor Lynette Ong.

About The Book:

The long history of China’s relationship between stability, diversity, and prosperity, and how its current leadership threatens this delicate balance

Chinese society has been shaped by the interplay of the EAST—exams, autocracy, stability, and technology—from ancient times through the present. Beginning with the Sui dynasty’s introduction of the civil service exam, known as Keju, in 587 CE—and continuing through the personnel management system used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—Chinese autocracies have developed exceptional tools for homogenizing ideas, norms, and practices. But this uniformity came with a huge downside: stifled creativity.

Yasheng Huang shows how China transitioned from dynamism to extreme stagnation after the Keju was instituted. China’s most prosperous periods, such as during the Tang dynasty (618–907) and under the reformist CCP, occurred when its emphasis on scale (the size of bureaucracy) was balanced with scope (diversity of ideas).

Considering China’s remarkable success over the past half-century, Huang sees signs of danger in the political and economic reversals under Xi Jinping. The CCP has again vaulted conformity above new ideas, reverting to the Keju model that eventually led to technological decline. It is a lesson from China’s own history, Huang argues, that Chinese leaders would be wise to take seriously.  

About The Speakers:

Yasheng Huang is the Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His books include Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State.

John Yasuda is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, specializing in regulatory governance, bureaucratic politics, and comparative political economy.  His most recent book is On Feeding the Masses: An Anatomy of Regulatory Failure in China.  

Lynette H. Ong is Professor of Political Science, jointly appointed at the department and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She is an expert on China, having conducted on-the-ground research in the country since the late 1990s. In addition, she has also published on the broader Indo-Pacific region, including Southeast Asia and India. Her most recent book is Outsourcing epression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China.

Description

The talk explores the perspectives of the Republic of Turkey on translation throughout its first century and uses six national publishing congresses and their printed reports and/or minutes as evidence for tracing the trajectory of translation, as an activity, profession, and a cultural and educational instrument. I will argue that the "official" view on translation took a series of turns which were all closely aligned with national political concerns.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Are you applying to the Master of Global Affairs (MGA) & Master of Public Policy (MPP) Programs via the School of Graduate Studies Online Admissions Portal (GradApp), for Fall 2024 entry?

Do you have specific application questions?

If you do, then this session is for you! Register today!

Description

This talk was based on a book that Dr. Zaloznaya was currently writing about the political language and the channels of influence that anti-corruptionism (or efforts to combat corruption) generates on geopolitical arena. The book’s empirical analysis focuses on wartime Ukraine and its interactions with its international partners, such as the United States and the European Union, as well as its adversaries (primarily, Russia), as an ultimate “laboratory” for the geopolitics of anti-corruptionism.  Relying on in-depth interviews with anti-corruption experts in Ukraine and abroad, INGO reports, and media analyses, it explores how and why  fighting corruption has become the main focus of the Ukrainian civil society after the Revolution of Dignity of 2014. Next, the book (and the talk) traces the development of several channels of geo-political pressure via anti-corruptionism, including the transformation of Ukraine’s grass-roots anti-corruption groups into quasi-state actors with extensive domestic and international negotiating powers, inclusion of Western actors onto the boards of Ukrainian state-owned enterprises, and imposition of invasive transparency requirements on Ukraine’s major political and economic processes. Lastly, the book, and the talk, consider the ways whereby the Ukrainian government relies on anti-corruptionism to communicate with its constituents and with foreign governments, and how this symbolic politics of anti-corruptionism contributes to the emergence of Ukraine’s new national identity during the war.

Marina Zaloznaya joined the University of Iowa’s Sociology & Criminology faculty in 2012 and Iowa Political Science faculty in 2021, after she received a Master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University. Since 2022, she has also served as the Director of the European Studies Group at the University of Iowa, and the Executive Director of the Corruption in the Global South Research Consortium.

Dr. Zaloznaya’s research explores public sector corruption, political behavior, and gender in non-democratic regimes from a range of methodological perspectives, including ethnography, survey methods, comparative-historical, and network analyses. Her first book, The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption (Cambridge University Press 2017) analyzed the impact of hybrid political systems in Ukraine and Belarus on petty corruption in local universities. In a more recent project, funded by two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, Dr. Zaloznaya and her collaborators carried out a series of national representative surveys in Russia, China, Ukraine, and Georgia. Using these rich data, they analyzed individual-level causes, social network properties, and gendered patterns of public sector corruption. Results of these analyses have appeared in a range of top academic journals, including Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Social Forces, American Review of Sociology, Electoral Studies, Sociology of Development, Theoretical Criminology, and so on. Dr. Zaloznaya is also a co-author of a forthcoming agenda-setting edited volume on Sociology of Corruption (Cambridge University Press), and a research monograph, entitled Street-Level Corruption and Post-Communist Governance: Citizen-Bureaucrat Encounters in Russia, China, Ukraine, and Georgia.

Description

This is an online event.

Interested in the Master of Arts Degree in European and Russian Affairs? Do you want to study the histories, politics, economies, and societies of Europe, Russia, and Eurasia with world-renowned scholars? Are you interested in a funded international summer internship or a semester of study abroad?

Recognized as one of the best of its kind in North America, the two-year Master of Arts program offered at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies offers students the opportunity to pursue a comprehensive, rigorous, and hands-on degree at Canada’s leading research university.

Join us virtually for the CERES MA Open House on Wednesday, January 10, 12 – 1 pm. Learn about admissions and meet CERES faculty and students.

Apply by February 1, 2024 to be considered for funding: https://archive.munkschool.utoronto.ca/ceres-ma/how-apply

Description

The vast majority of private construction works in the world are created without the participation of an architect. The public sector, through law and regulation, has opened the way for architects to provide services to both the public and private sectors. However, just respecting legal standards and regulations is not enough to produce high quality architecture. The key to achieving quality is to compare the best work that can be produced on a given subject, in this respect the Czech Republic, a small country in the centre of Europe, is an exception that democratises the process of procuring architectural services and allows transparent access to all architects on public contracts. It is a programme occupying a small percentage of contracts, but with an increasing tendency to appeal not only to domestic but also to foreign architects.

Igor Kovačević is a lecturer at VŠUP and North Carolina State University. He has been involved in a number of international projects and is active as an architect, urban planner, curator and theorist. By focusing on urbanity as such, CCEA develops new forms of communication between architects and other disciplines, artists, theorists, political representation, urban planners, sociologists, and other professions. Kovačević sits on juries of national and international competitions and leads the CCEA’s architectural competitions group.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

How should we understand the opportunities and risks presented by nuclear energy in the 21st century? Japan responded to the 1970s oil shocks with a robust program of nuclear energy development, successfully mitigating the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. However, the Fukushima nuclear disaster – triggered by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami – raised serious questions about nuclear safety and regulatory practices across the world. Akira Tokuhiro discussed how nuclear energy and energy systems more generally fit into broader socio-economic and political challenges confronting the international order. His analysis drew on probabilities and scenarios per energy system analyses to consider the post “3.11” (Fukushima Daiichi) transition to 2030 as well as the longer-term transformation to 2050. Furthermore, he discussed how the geopolitics of nuclear issues impacts Japan’s role as a G7 country in the Asia-Pacific region.

The speaker is an engineering professor who specializes in nuclear reactor safety-in-design via a system engineering mindset, investigating the analytical complexities of many connected sub-systems – predominantly technical but also socio-technical. His methods are mainly probabilistic – Oppenheimer-like in consideration of events with small probabilities but large consequences – drawing on computational simulations among other approaches. These are typically problems with large number of scenarios, calling for optimization and a concurrent (societal) need for willing (and unwilling) decision-making, often necessitating the use of heuristics.

Lunch will be provided.

Akira Tokuhiro is a Professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, Ontario Institute of Technology (“Ontario Tech”) in Oshawa, Ontario in February 2017. He completed his Dean appointment in September 2021. He holds a large interest in climate change, energy, nuclear energy and complex issues and problems based on data science.  He joined Ontario Tech from NuScale Power LLC (US), a startup that received Design Certification Application approval of its SMR (small modular reactor) design. Earlier he served as Director and Professor, Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at the University of Idaho. He has also held appointments at Pacific Northwest (PNNL), Idaho and Argonne National Laboratories in the U.S. At PNNL, he served on the US-DOE team during the US-Japan bilateral meetings on nuclear energy R&D. He holds a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering (Purdue University), M.S. in Mechanical Engineering (University of Rochester), B.S.E. in Engineering-Physics (Purdue University) and 10 years of international R&D experience at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland) and Japan Atomic Energy Agency. Notably, he served on the American Nuclear Society President’s Committee on the Fukushima Accident and served as technical editor on a book on the accident, “On the Brink: The Inside Story of Fukushima Daiichi”. A movie (Fukushima 50) and Netflix-Japan series (The Days) were based on this book and the original Japanese best-seller.

Description

Interested in the Master of Arts Degree in European and Russian Affairs? Have questions about the application or supporting documents? Join us virtually for the CERES MA Q&A for Prospective Students on Thursday, January 18, 4 – 5 pm. Associate Director Robert Austin and Program Coordinator Katia Malyuzhinets will be happy to answer your questions.

Description

OCAD University’s Faculty of Art presents: Art Creates Change, The Kim Pruesse Speakers Series. Supported in part by the Centre for South Asian Studies, Asian Institute. 

ABOUT THE EVENT 

Governor General’s Award recipient and acclaimed documentary filmmaker, Ali Kazimi, will address issues of history and social justice from a diaspora lense; specifically, one rooted in India. Kazimi will show clips that speak to the centrality of relational filmmaking in his practice, and the ethical and moral dilemmas in addressing issues of race and representation. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ali Kazimi (pronounced Ka-Zim-E) is filmmaker, writer, and visual artist whose work deals with race, social justice, migration, history, memory and archive. In 2019 he received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, as well as a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa from the University of British Columbia. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. 

His critically acclaimed films have been shown at festivals around the world, winning national and international honours and awards. His awards include the Donald Brittain/Gemini Award for Best Social/Political Documentary; Golden Gate Award, San Fran. Intl. Film Fest; Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival; Best Director & Best Political Documentary, Hot Docs and Audience Awards for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and Los Angeles Indian Film Festival. His most recent feature documentary Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence premiered at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in May 2023. The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Planet In Focus Canadian International Environmental Film Festival, and was screened as part of the prestigious Front Light program at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam 

Ali Kazimi is also a Professor of Cinema & Media Arts, at the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, York University. He served as Department Chair from 2015 to 2016, and was promoted to in 2022. In 2021, Ali Kazimi was elected as a Senior Fellow at Massey College.

Description

Book launch of Jaivet Ealom’s Escape from Manus Prison: One Man’s Daring Quest for Freedom (Penguin Random House Canada, 2022). Moderated by Elizabeth Wijaya, the roundtable features Jaivet Ealom, Thy Phu, Maral Aguilar-Moradipour, Matthew Walton, and Palita Chunsaengchan.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Courtesy of Penguin Random House Canada

The awe-inspiring story of the only person to successfully escape Australia’s notorious offshore detention centre–and his long search for freedom.

In 2013 Jaivet Ealom fled Myanmar’s brutal regime, where Rohingya like him were being persecuted and killed, and boarded a boat of asylum seekers bound for Australia. Instead of finding refuge, he was transported to Australia’s infamous Manus Regional Processing Centre.

Blistering hot days spent in shipping containers on the island melted into weeks, then years . . . until, finally, facing either jail in Papua New Guinea or being returned to almost certain death in Myanmar, he took matters into his own hands.

Drawing inspiration from the hit show Prison Break, Jaivet meticulously planned his escape. He made it out alive but was stateless, with no ID or passport. While the nightmare of Manus was behind him, his true escape to freedom had only just begun.

How Jaivet made it to sanctuary in Canada in a six-month-long odyssey by foot, boat, car, and plane, with nothing but his instinct for survival, is miraculous. His story will astonish, anger and inspire you. It will make you reassess what it means to give refuge and redefine what can be achieved by one man determined to beat the odds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jaivet Ealom was born in Myanmar and now resides in Toronto, where he has become a prominent spokesperson for the Rohingya community. He is a member of the Refugee Advisory Network of Canada and is on the leadership team of the Canadian Rohingya Development Initiative. In his roles as co-founder of the Rohingya Centre of Canada as well as Northern Lights Canada he aims to help some of the world’s most vulnerable refugees. Jaivet recently completed his study at the University of Toronto and is currently serving as the CEO of Rohingya Center of Canada.

ABOUT THE PANEL

Maral Aguilar-Moradipour  is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough, in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include critical refugee studies; cultural studies; digital humanities; diasporic literature and theory; Indigenous literature and thought; and critical race and gender studies. She has published in literary and academic journals such as English Studies in Canada and Postcolonial Text.

Palita Chunsaengchan is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian cinema at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Her book manuscript, A History of Chimeric Cinema: Thai Film Culture (1880-1942), traces cinema’s complex intertwinement with questions of sovereignty, modernity, and democracy in Siam/Thailand. Her past publications appeared in Asian Cinema and SOJOURN. Her upcoming article on cine-poetry in one of the earliest Thai film magazines is currently in production at the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. She is also one of the contributors of The Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which will be out in print in February 2024.

Thy Phu is a Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora and Visual Justice at the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Toronto. She is author of two books on photography, war, and citizenship, and co-editor of the book volume, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada. She is also a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee and Migration Studies Network of Canada.

Matthew Walton is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was the inaugural Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on religion and politics in Southeast Asia, with a special emphasis on Buddhism in Myanmar. Matt’s first book, Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar, was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a comparative study of Buddhist political thought across the Theravada world. Matt was P-I for an ESRC-funded 2-year research project entitled “Understanding ‘Buddhist nationalism’ in Myanmar” and was a co-founder of the Myanmar Media and Society project and of the Burma/Myanmar blog Tea Circle.

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

Description

This talk is based on a paper written by Amanda Gregg (co-authored with Amy Dayton and Steven Nafziger). The paper investigates how the rules that corporations wrote for themselves related to their financing and performance in an environment characterized by poor investor protections, Imperial Russia. We present new data on detailed governance provisions from Imperial Russian corporate charters, which we connect to a comprehensive panel database of corporate balance sheets from 1899 to 1914. This investigation reveals the tradeoffs weighed by Imperial Russian corporations and demonstrates the surprising flexibility that Russian corporations enjoyed, conditional on obtaining a corporate charter.

Amanda Gregg is Associate Professor of Economics at Middlebury College. She joined Middlebury in 2015 after completing her Ph.D. in Economics at Yale University. Her research concerns industrial development, productivity, and commercial law in Late Imperial Russia. Recent publications include “Factory Productivity and the Concession System of Incorporation in Late Imperial Russia" in the American Economic Review and “Capital Structure and Corporate Performance in Late Imperial Russia” with Steven Nafziger in the European Review of Economic History.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

The problem of environmental pollution in South Korea became prominent in the 1960s and escalated into a “disaster” situation in the 1970s. This talk focuses on complaints and litigation activities centered on residents of high-pollution areas in the 1970s, when environmental pollution became a serious problem in South Korea. These residents fought for the right to live as victims, who had been hidden behind economic development, exports, and growth at the time and until now. Ko will examine their struggle for the right to live, and highlight the problems of the pollution control system and government administration at the time. In addition, by examining the historical significance and limitations of the pollution problem in the 1970s, we would like to consider the relationship between the Global North and the Global South today. This study can be said to be a kind of “people’s history of pollution”. It is also part of Ko’s long-term plan to publish a book called “A History of Environmental Pollution in Korea in the 20th Century”.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Taewoo Ko (고태우) is an assistant professor in the Department of Korean History at Seoul National University in South Korea, and is studying modern Korean history and environmental history of the 20th century. In his doctoral dissertation, he revealed how Japanese-centered civil engineering contractors formed relationships with the Japanese Government-General of Korea in colonial Joseon and pursued profits, and the limitations of colonial development in the process. In 2019 after receiving his Ph.D., he became a research professor at Chosun University, Gwangju City, and was appointed the Department of Korean History at Seoul National University in 2020. Along with research on colonial Korea, he is currently researching the environmental history of East Asia, focusing on Korea in the 20th century. He historically examines environmental pollution, human responses to disasters, and the destruction and restoration of ecosystems in Korea under a critical perspective on capitalism. He is also interested in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene and post-humanism.

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

Description courtesy of the Stanford University Press

Over the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of waste materials and the lives of those who toil with them? In Lahore, like in many parts of Pakistan and South Asia, waste workers—whether municipal employees or informal laborers—are drawn from low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups and dispose the collective refuse of the city’s 11 million inhabitants. Bringing workers into contact with potentially polluting materials reinforces their stigmatization and marginalization, and yet, their work allows life to go on across Lahore and beyond. This historical and ethnographic account examines how waste work has been central to organizing and transforming the city of Lahore—its landscape, infrastructures, and life—across historical moments, from the colonial period to the present.

Building upon conversations about changing configurations of work and labor under capitalism, and utilizing a theoretical framework of reproduction, Waqas H. Butt traces how forms of life in Punjab, organized around caste-based relations, have become embedded in infrastructures across Pakistan, making them crucial to numerous processes unfolding at distinct scales. Life Beyond Waste maintains that processes reproducing life in a city like Lahore must be critically assessed along the lines of caste, class, and religion, which have been constitutive features of urbanization across South Asia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Waqas H. Butt is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Butt’s research takes a stigmatized form of labor—waste work—as a point of entry to explore two interrelated questions: how have historical events, both past and ongoing, continually reshaped Pakistan’s fraught urban landscape, and, in what ways have the connections among caste, waste, labor, and infrastructures both endured and transformed across South Asia? Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore and the Punjab, his current book project examines the ways in which waste workers, who are drawn predominantly from low or non-caste groups, have become essential components of urban life through the everyday and intimate workings of waste infrastructures. This work brings together a variety of concerns—materiality of waste and value, histories of caste, stigmatized labor, and urbanization, and global circuits of development and capital—to unpack the unexpected socio-political processes by which urban life is currently unfolding across South Asia and globally

Description

Prior to the twentieth century, international law was predominantly written by and for the ‘civilised nations’ of the white Global North. It justified doctrines of racial inequality and effectively drew a colour line that excluded citizens of the Global South and persons of African descent from participating in international law-making while subjecting them to colonialism and the slave trade.

The International Legal Order’s Colour Line (Oxford UP, 2023) narrates this divide and charts the development of regulation on racism and racial discrimination at the international level, principally within the United Nations. Most notably, it outlines how these themes gained traction once the Global South gained more participation in international law-making after the First World War. It challenges the narrative that human rights are a creation of the Global North by focussing on the decisive contributions that countries of the Global South and people of colour made to anchor anti-racism in international law.  The International Legal Order’s Colour Line provides a comprehensive history and compelling new approach to the history of human

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

A highly decorated general and one of the most prominent combat commanders in American history, Gen. David H. Petraeus, USA (Ret.) has dedicated his life to public service, leading military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and then serving as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

On Monday, January 22, General Petraeus will sit down with Munk School Director, Peter Loewen to discuss the global challenges facing countries today, ongoing international security issues, and his new book Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.

About The Speaker

General David Petraeus, US Army (Ret.) is one of the leading battlefield commanders and strategists of our time. He served over 37 years in the US military culminating his career with six consecutive commands as a general officer, five of which were in combat, including the Surge in Iraq, US Central Command, and NATO/US Forces in Afghanistan. He subsequently served as Director of the CIA, following confirmation by the Senate by a vote of 94-0, during a period of significant achievements in the global war on terror. 

General Petraeus is now a Partner with the global investment firm KKR and Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, which he established in 2013. His awards include four Defense Distinguished Service Medals, the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award, the Bronze Star Medal for Valor, the Combat Action Badge, the Ranger tab, and master parachutist wings.  He has also been decorated by 14 foreign countries and is believed to be the only person in uniform to throw out the first pitch of a World Series game and do the coin toss for a Super Bowl. 

About The Book

Two leading authorities—an acclaimed historian and the outstanding battlefield commander and strategist of our time—collaborate on a landmark examination of war since 1945. Conflict is both a sweeping history of the evolution of warfare up to Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, and a penetrating analysis of what we must learn from the past—and anticipate in the future—in order to navigate an increasingly perilous world. 

In this deep and incisive study, General David Petraeus, who commanded the US-led coalitions in both Iraq, during the Surge, and Afghanistan and former CIA director, and the prize-winning historian Andrew Roberts, explore over 70 years of conflict, drawing significant lessons and insights from their fresh analysis of the past. Drawing on their different perspectives and areas of expertise, Petraeus and Roberts show how often critical mistakes have been repeated time and again, and the challenge, for statesmen and generals alike, of learning to adapt to various new weapon systems, theories and strategies. Among the conflicts examined are the Arab-Israeli wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the two Gulf Wars, the Balkan wars in the former Yugoslavia, and both the Soviet and Coalition wars in Afghanistan, as well as guerilla conflicts in Africa and South America. Conflict culminates with a bracing look at Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, yet another case study in the tragic results when leaders refuse to learn from history, and an assessment of the nature of future warfare. Filled with sharp insight and the wisdom of experience, Conflict is not only a critical assessment of our recent past, but also an essential primer of modern warfare that provides crucial knowledge for waging battle today as well as for understanding what the decades ahead will bring.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Political Scientist Andrew F. Cooper discusses his forthcoming book, The Contestation Impulse in World Politics

This book unravels the centrality of contestation over international institutions under the shadow of crisis. Breaking with the widely accepted image in the mainstream, US-centric literature of an advance of global governance supported by pillars of institutionalized formality, Andrew F. Cooper points to the retention of a habitual impulse towards concertation related to informal institutionalism.

Rather than endorsing the view that world politics is moving inexorably towards a multilateral, rules-based order, he places the onus on the resilience of a hierarchical self-selected concert model that combines a stigmatized legacy with the ability to reproduce in an array of associational designs.

Relying for conceptual guidance on the recovery of a valuable component in the intellectual contribution of Hedley Bull, a compelling case is made that concertation represents a fundamental institution as a peer competitor to multilateralism. In effect, the debate over institutional design is recast away from an emphasis on utilitarian maximization towards a wider set of cardinal— and highly contested—questions: the nature of rules at the global level, the salience of institutional clubs, and the meaning and impact of (in)equality and cooperation/ coordination among states across the incumbent West/non-incumbent Global South divide.

Description

Histories of ecological design often emphasize work that occurred around the 1960s in the United States. How did ecological design approaches evolve in the following decades? This presentation explores the role of environmental science and technology in such work through case studies including research groups active at architecture departments in the southwestern US from the 1970s to the 1990s. Among other approaches, these groups developed planning frameworks and construction systems attuned to the dynamics of the sun and the sea. The presentation situates these American case studies within broader networks, considering how they were influenced by earlier environmental design work from the US and beyond, and how they responded to the changing world of the late twentieth century. Suggesting connections across examples, this discussion has implications for histories of environmental thought and action as well as design.

Anna Renken is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Her research focuses on approaches to the environment in architecture and design since the mid-twentieth century, and she is particularly interested in how designers have collaborated with and learned from environmental scientists.

Description

Beauty was political in the late Ottoman period. This presentation questions how and why beauty shifted from a personal and private aesthetic matter into a public, gendered, scienticized, and medicalized arena equated with civic duty and patriotism in the nineteenth century.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT 

Kazimi will show two films, Shooting Indians (1997) and Beyond Extinction (2022), that deal with the perspective of Indigeneity through an immigrant lens. Moving beyond the White Settler/Indigenous paradigm, the films open up discussions about the relationship between racialized immigrant communites and Indigenous communities, while also addressing the legacies of colonialism. Respondentsinclude: Ryan Rice, Kajri Jain, Stephen Foster, and Indu Vashist. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER Ali Kazimi (pronounced Ka-Zim-E) is filmmaker, writer, and visual artist whose work deals with race, social justice, migration, history, memory and archive. In 2019 he received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts, as well as a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa from the University of British Columbia. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

 His critically acclaimed films have been shown at festivals around the world, winning national and international honours and awards. His awards include the Donald Brittain/Gemini Award for Best Social/Political Documentary; Golden Gate Award, San Fran. Intl. Film Fest; Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival; Best Director & Best Political Documentary, Hot Docs and Audience Awards for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and Los Angeles Indian Film Festival. His most recent feature documentary Beyond Extinction: Sinixt Resurgence premiered at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in May 2023. The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Planet In Focus Canadian International Environmental Film Festival, and was screened as part of the prestigious Front Light program at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam 

Ali Kazimi is also a Professor of Cinema & Media Arts, at the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, York University. He served as Department Chair from 2015 to 2016, and was promoted to in 2022. In 2021, Ali Kazimi was elected as a Senior Fellow at Massey College

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

From election interference to overseas police stations to assassinations, foreign governments have found numerous ways to engage in repression on democratic soil.  It is not simply Beijing trying to influence democratic politics. The assassination of Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar last summer has pointed to potential complicity by India’s Modi’s government, for example. As tensions escalate between Canada and two Asian powerhouses, and elsewhere around the globe, what are the problems and solutions?  Join a panel of experts on transnational repression to probe into this urgent issue.

ABOUT THE PANEL

Sanjay Ruparelia is an Associate Professor of Politics, and the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair, at Toronto Metropolitan University. His major publications include Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India; The Indian Ideology; and Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation. Ruparelia serves as co-chair of the Participedia network and associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Politics, and hosts On the Frontlines of Democracy, a monthly podcast/lecture series. He is currently a visiting fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, USA, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa.

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra, PhD, is a Historian, exhibit curator, storyteller, and founder of Belonging Matters Consulting. She is a passionate activist, building bridges between community and academia through museum work and has been featured in the Knowledge Network series “B.C: An Untold History,” as well as been featured on local, and international podcasts and media.

Suzanne Scoggins, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Asian Studies at Clark University. Her research focuses on policing and security in reform era China and explores themes of local governance, state legitimacy, and authoritarian control. Her first book, Policing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest, is out with Cornell University Press, and her academic articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, the Journal of Chinese Political Science, and the China Quarterly, among others.

Noura Aljizawi is a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. Her work takes an in-depth look at human rights issues connected to disinformation, digital authoritarianism, and digital transnational repression. She also serves on the board of the Center for Victims of Torture and is a member of Humanitarian Dialogue’s expert group as well as Just Tech and Migration Community’s steering committee. Her work on Security Planner, a platform that provides peer-reviewed recommendations for staying safe online, was recognized with an Excellence in Innovation Award by the University of Toronto.

(Introductory Remarks and Co-Chair) Joanna Chiu is a senior reporter covering national and foreign stories for the Toronto Star and the author of China Unbound: A New World Disorder. As a globally-recognized authority on China, Chiu is a regular commentator for international broadcast media. She was previously based in Beijing as a foreign correspondent, including for Agence France Presse (AFP) and Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) specializing in coverage of Chinese politics, economy and legal affairs. In Hong Kong, she reported for the South China Morning Post, The Economist magazine and The Associated Press.

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

(Concluding Remarks and Co-Chair) Solarina Ho is the Toronto chair of NüVoices and a co-host of the NüVoices podcast. She is a freelance journalist and writer, covering a broad range of general, health, and business news for a variety of publications and organizations. She spent nearly 15 years as a correspondent for Reuters and has also written for publications and outlets including CTVNews.ca, The Globe and Mail, WebMD/Medscape, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Description

While detectives and forensic experts have long examined fibres, footprints and clothing, which provide important clues as to the identities of victims and perpetrators, the value of this “trace evidence” has been overshadowed by other technologies, including DNA analysis. Yet clothing played a key and often forgotten role in many forms of personal and state identification. This talk takes us back to the origins of so-called “scientific policing” and forensic analysis as they were emerging as more formalized disciplines in France. Professor Alison Matthews David will share original research from my SSHRC-funded Fabric of Crime project, including work on the missing persons registers or “disparus” of the Paris Morgue, which contain surprisingly colourful scraps of working-class dress, the blood-soaked nightwear of the 1847 Choiseul-Praslin assassination, the domestic servants’ wardrobes hoarded by Dumollard the serial “Maid-Killer” in the early 1860s, and L’affaire de la Rue Princesse (1869), in which the tailor Beauvoir murdered and dismembered one of his clients. The talk will also provide a sneak preview of our co-curated exhibition Exhibit A: Investigating Footwear and Crime, opening soon at the Bata Shoe Museum (April 2024).

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

This event will showcase the aesthetics of Korean pansori, a vocal tradition of story-singing, and explore the Korean conceptualization and practice of voicing. Sangah Lee will present excerpts from traditional repertoires and new vocal pieces created in collaboration with Korean-Canadian artists. This project aims to integrate traditional Korean music into the local musical landscape by hosting the first full pansori-focused concert in Toronto.

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

Sangah Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include voice on the margins, music and social activism, gender, disability, and the aesthetics of Korean vocality. As a pansori performer and instructor, Lee has collaborated with various Canadian institutions and arts organizations, including the Korean Education Centre Canada, Royal Ontario Museum, and Aga Khan Museum, to organize educational and artistic programs that facilitate cross-cultural interactions. She currently serves as the artistic director for Canada Pansori Center, which aims to promote Korean cultural traditions and foster meaningful connections among diverse communities in Canada.

This event also features Eunji Kim on Korean percussions, Roa Lee on Gayageum (a Korean 12- or 25- stringed zither), Yerin Lee on Daegeum (a Korean transverse flute), Jihyun Back on dance, and Jay Yoo on guitar.  

Description

Serhiy Bilenky will present his new book Laboratory of Modernity Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914

When the powers of Europe were at their prime, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, each imposing different political, social, and cultural models on its subjects. This inevitably led to great diversity in the lives of its inhabitants, shaping modern Ukraine into the multiethnic country it is today.

Making innovative use of methods of social and cultural history, gender studies, literary theory, and sociology, Laboratory of Modernity explores the history of Ukraine throughout the long nineteenth century and offers a unique study of its pluralistic society, culture, and political scene. Despite being subjected to different and conflicting power models during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ukraine was not only imagined as a distinct entity with a unique culture and history but was also realized as a set of social and political institutions. The story of modern Ukraine is geopolitically complex, encompassing the historical narratives of several major communities – including ethnic Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Russians – who for centuries lived side by side.

The first comprehensive study of nineteenth-century Ukraine in English, Laboratory of Modernity traces the historical origins of some of the most pressing issues facing Ukraine and the international community today.

The book can be accessed here: https://www.mqup.ca/laboratory-of-modernity-products-9780228017578.php

Serhiy Bilenky is a research associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta.

Description

In the months before we began to learn about the world-altering scale of the Covid-19 pandemic, Campbell was teaching at a University in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and preparing to return to a distant northern village after many years away. One Indigenous Evenki friend said to him at that time, “we are far from war and pestilence, these things just pass us by.” The world of armed conflict and infectious disease, seen from the Central Siberian Plateau, does seem far away at times. And yet that place, too, has been touched by disease and forced military conscriptions. Despite a sense of remoteness and the feel of a radically different pace for life, Evenkiia’s ‘magnitude of difference’ belies a density of shared experience. In this talk, Campbell explores insights from a nearly twenty-five-year friendship that has been renewed and sustained through social media and direct messaging. After sharing a series of photos Campbell’s friend wanted him to include in an ethnographic art installation, he wrote: “And tell them we’re for peace”— this message became the centerpiece of our collaboration. The photograph in these conditions builds on a unique mode of personal exchange: we remember each other’s visage and being through the surface of the image but our care for one another emerges through its density.  This work explores the shared and divergent temporalities of distant relations through the social space of photographs.

Craig Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been conducting anthropological research in Siberia since the late 1990s. He has written extensively on themes associated with photography, multimodal anthropology, Siberia and the Yenisei North, culture and political struggles of Indigenous Siberians, travel and mobility, and socialist colonialism. In 2014 he published a book called Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberia. He has been working on ‘future feelings’ and the cultural history of an unbuilt hydro-electric dam in subarctic Krasnoyarsk Krai. He has also been exploring the utility of the concept of ‘borealism’ in the context of Indigenous Siberia. Most recently he mounted an exhibition titled Agit Kino: and tell them we’re for peace in Austin, Texas. He is the lead editor for a photo essay magazine called Writing with Light and one of the directors of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography. He is Assistant director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and a member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies advisory council at the University of Texas at Austin.

Light refreshments will be provided at the event.

Description

Azad Essa will discuss his 2023 book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel with Profs. Francis Cody and Alejandro Paz.

ABOUT THE TALK

Under Narendra Modi, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with its trajectory towards authoritarianism and a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ (Hindu State), little attention has been paid to the linkages between Modi’s India and the governments from which it has drawn inspiration, as well as military and technical support. India once called Zionism racism, but, as Azad Essa argues, the state of Israel has increasingly become a cornerstone of India’s foreign policy. Looking to replicate the ‘ethnic state’ in the image of Israel in policy and practice, the annexation of Kashmir increasingly resembles Israel’s settler-colonial project of the occupied West Bank. The ideological and political linkages between the two states are alarming; their brands of ethnonationalism deeply intertwined.

Hostile Homelands puts India’s relationship with Israel in its historical context, looking at the origins of Zionism and Hindutva; India’s changing position on Palestine; and the countries’ growing military-industrial relationship from the 1990s. Lucid and persuasive, Essa demonstrates that the India-Israel alliance spells significant consequences for democracy, the rule of law and justice worldwide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Azad Essa is an award-winning journalist and author based between Johannesburg and New York City. He is currently a senior reporter for Middle East Eye covering American foreign policy, Islamophobia and race in the US. He is the author of The Moslems are Coming and Zuma’s Bastard and has written for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and the Guardian. Linah Alsaafin is a Palestinian journalist and writer whose work has appeared in OpenDemocracy, Al Monitor, Middle East Eye, the Times Literary Supplement, and Al Jazeera.

ABOUT THE PANEL

Francis Cody is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, where he is the Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Contemporary Asian Studies and the Centre for South Asian Studies. His research focuses on language, politics, and media in southern India. He first brought these interests to bear on a study of citizenship, literacy, and social movement politics in Tamil Nadu.

Alejandro Paz is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-chair of the Hearing Palestine Initiative. Professor Paz’s research addresses the role of language in globalization, transnationalism and diaspora. He is also interested in the relation between public communication, media, and citizenship with a regional focus on Israel and the Middle East.

Description

Despite the concern over teachers’ heavy workload both in Japan and the U.S. especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known about how teachers’ work is distributed across various tasks and responsibilities and to what extent their workload is equitably distributed across various school and teacher characteristics. Dr. Motoko Akiba explored the distribution and disparities in teachers’ workload using nationally representative teacher and school survey data from the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) in Japan and the U.S.  Policy and leadership implications will be discussed regarding how to support the teaching profession by assigning reasonable and equitable workload to teachers in both countries.

Dr. Motoko Akiba is a Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Florida State University (FSU). She received a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Tsukuba in Japan and a dual-title Ph.D. in Educational Theory & Policy and Comparative & International Education from Pennsylvania State University-University Park. She worked as a post-doc at Mills College to conduct lesson study research, a senior researcher at McREL, a faculty member at the University of Missouri-Columbia before joining FSU. Dr. Akiba’s research expertise is in comparative teacher policy, teachers’ working conditions, and teacher equity. She is a recipient of the NSF Career Award and published 4 books and many journal articles including International handbook of teacher quality and policy (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2018), Teacher reforms around the world (Emerald Books, 2013), and Improving teacher quality: The U.S. teaching force in global context (Teachers College Press, 2009). She enjoys teaching aspiring school leaders in the Educational Leadership program and critical survey research methods.    

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan and the Initiative for Education Policy and Innovation, University of Toronto.

Description

This talk will draw on Sergey Radchenko’s forthcoming book, To Run the World: the Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, to explore how the Soviet and Russian leaders formulated and pursued their foreign policy aims during the Cold War, and in its aftermath.

Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Professor Radchenko’s books include To Run the World: the Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge UP, forthcoming in 2024), Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Wilson Center Press & Stanford UP, 2009), and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia (Oxford UP, 2014). Professor Radchenko is a native of Sakhalin Island, Russia, was educated in the US, Hong Kong, and the UK, where he received his PhD in 2005 (LSE). Before he joined SAIS, Professor Radchenko worked and lived in Mongolia, China, and Wales.

Description

Facing the globalised economic competition, education came under increasing pressure to raise necessary human resources in Japan. In other words, Japan needs to solve the paradox of internationalising its national education system. The business sector was particularly vocal of this demand and the government labelled such resources ‘Global Human Resources’ (Gurobaru Jinzai), launching several internationalisation measures since 2012. Using one of them, the policy goal of establishing 200 International Baccalaureate schools, as an example, Professor Iwabuchi will examine how this internationalisation attempt emerged, changed, and exercised influence on schools in Japan. As in other studies, business actors played a key role. Yet, a new policy actor (the Cabinet) drove the reform, interacting with the Ministry of Education. By analysing the policy process of this reform, Professor Iwabuchi will highlight how complex interactions between the two affected the policy process and outcome. In addition, Professor Iwabuchi will present the cross-level perspective on education by showing the result of his current study on how teachers respond to the policy imperatives.

Lunch will be provided.

Kazuaki Iwabuchi, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Education, the University of Tokyo, Japan. He earned his doctoral degree in comparative and international education from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. He’s been examining the policy aspect of Japan’s attempt to internationalise education. Currently, he’s exploring internationalisation initiatives not only at the policy level but also at the meso-level (Boards of Education) and at the micro-level (teachers).

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan and the Initiative for Education Policy and Innovation, University of Toronto.

Description

Book talk with Andrei S. Markovits

In his memoir The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness (Central European University Press, 2021) that has been translated into German and Romanian, Markovits regales the reader with personal stories that offer insights into the social, political and cultural developments of the second half of the twentieth century in Central Europe and the United States. For the book talk at CERES, Markovits will focus on Germany’s and German culture’s indispensable centrality in the life of a Romanian-born, Hungarian-speaking, Vienna-schooled, Columbia-educated and Harvard-formed, middle-class Jewish professor of politics and other subjects.

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

Description

Following the 2016 termination of China’s One Child Policy, families now frequently receive financial incentives to birth to more children to absorb the male gender surplus resulting from patriarchal reactions to the policy. This project investigates Chinese women’s compromised consent to biological reproduction. Nationally, women who are now encouraged to give birth survived, rather than having agreed to, the One Child Policy, and that the decision to birth more children is contingent on the economic condition of the family as well as the state’s future-oriented desire to produce a more robust workforce. Transpacifically, Chinese women’s reproductive consent is further complicated by the United Nation’s post-WWII eugenics project, which provided financial, technological, and research support via the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to assist so-called third-world countries birth and population control policies. This project aims to demonstrate how the Chinese maternal body is tethered to and articulated through a transpacific biopolitics of reproductive control, where the consent to life is rendered irrelevant both by the discipline of the maternal body and by the pre-natal selection of birth.

Ran Deng is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Affiliated with the Women & Gender Studies Institute and the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, Ran’s research intersects transpacific critique, media studies, and queer aesthetic theory. (Her dissertation, titled “Beyond a Biopolitics of Consent: A Transpacific Aesthetics of Reproductive Futurity,” explores the potential of aesthetics to redress injustice toward birth, natality, and reproductive autonomy across the Pacific.)

Description

Despite the achievements in writing a non-Eurocentric world history of decolonization, current scholarship has difficulty situating the Lausanne Treaty of July 1923 into the political transformation of the world in the last one hundred years from the world of empires to its current partition into nation states. The recognition of a sovereign Turkish State at the Lausanne Treaty was hailed by contemporary observers in Asia and Africa as the victory of an Eastern/Muslim nation against Western colonialism. Yet, the Treaty also formalized the legal recognition of the colonization of Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, namely Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, by the British and French empires. Abolishment of the Ottoman Caliphate by the Turkish parliament in March 1924, just seven months after the Lausanne Treaty, further complicates the narratives. While Turkish nationalist historiography marks this as a completion of the Republican revolution, it led to the erasure of a Pan-Islamic political symbol for a globalist world making visions across Asia and Africa aiming to critique and reform the unequal racialized imperial world order. This presentation will explore the contradictions of the 1923 and 1924 moments in the broader context of the role of non-European empires and pan-nationalism in the global history of decolonization.

Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies talk co-sponsored by the Michael E. Marmura Lectures in Arabic Studies.

Description

A growing literature finds high returns to firms connected to legislative office. Less attention has been paid to benefits from bureaucratic connections and to organizations beyond for-profit firms. Using new data recording the first non-bureaucracy position occupied by all former civil servants in Japan, I first shed light on the descriptive patterns of employment of former civil servants, showing that industries reliant on government contracts and highly regulated industries are overrepresented in hiring compared to the overall economy, and that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) hire roughly one-third of former bureaucrats. Next, I combine this revolving door data with new datasets of all government loans to private firms, stock prices, and all government contracts with NPOs in Japan to test for benefits that accrue to organizations that hire former bureaucrats. Using various differences-in-differences approaches, I find that (1) the volume of government loans increases in the years following a bureaucratic hire, (2) firms receive stock price boosts following high-ranking bureaucratic hires, and (3) the value of contracts negotiated between government agencies and NPOs are higher in years when former bureaucrats are on staff. These findings suggest that the practice of hiring former bureaucrats may represent a form of unofficial government assistance to politically-connected organizations.

Trevor Incerti is an Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the University of Amsterdam. His main area of research is in comparative political economy, and broadly examines economic drivers of political behavior. This includes topics such as money in politics, business-government relations, corruption, interest group influence, and collective action. Much of his work focuses on East Asia, particularly Japan. He also conducts research in quantitative methods, where he is particularly interested in the reliability and validity of measurement strategies. Trevor’s research is published or forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis, among other outlets, and has received coverage by media such as The Economist, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. Trevor received his Ph.D. from Yale University (2022) and B.A. from UC Berkeley (2012), and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

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

Description

With the arrival of large numbers of refugees from Syria and Ukraine to Germany, many German municipalities have signalled that they are experiencing difficulty integrating newcomers into their social infrastructure and stressed housing markets. Towns and cities have expressed that they feel abandoned by the federal government. This development points to a contradiction in migration governance: Whereas central governments are charged with admitting refugees and migrants, local administrations are left with the task of integrating them. Drawing on interviews with mayors and experts in the settlement sector in the state Brandenburg,  I argue that this has led to political and policy entrepreneurship on the part of many local officials, and important changes in the role of cities within migration governance in Germany. While my focus is on Germany I also touch on comparable dynamics in Canada.

About the Speaker

Professor Felicitas Hillmann is currently leading the networking project "Paradigm Shift" at the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning, Technical University Berlin. She is a trained geographer and an experienced interdisciplinary thinker. Her work focusses on international migration, urban transformation, and labour markets. She has published widely. Recent works include Cities, Migration, and Governance: Beyond Scales and Levels (co-edited with Michael Samers, Routledge, 2023).

Description

Under Prime minister Abe Shinzô, Japan showed increased leadership in the Indo-Pacific region. Tokyo was the first to adopt an Indo-Pacific vision (FOIP), which it called "free and open", terms since used by the UK and the EU. The concepts THAT FOIP uses, such as "connectivity" and "qualify infrastructure", have become cornerstones of international cooperation in the region. From 2007, Japan also added a defence dimension to some of its bilateral or multilateral relations, inaugurating a defence diplomacy. Most of its initiatives serve to counterbalance China in the Indo-Pacific or beyond. Under Prime minister Kishida Fumio, China conditions Japan’s position over the war in Ukraine, or on economic security. This lecture, which draws on a book published in French in April 2023 (Le Japon, un leader discret, Eyrolles), will analyse the various dimensions of Japan’s newly found influence on the international scene.

A French and Australian dual citizen, Guibourg Delamotte is a tenured Full-Professor of Political Science at the Japanese studies department of the French Institute of Oriental Studies (Inalco), of which she is presently the Head and a Research Fellow with the French Research Institute on East Asia (Ifrae). She is aso Invited Senior Research Fellow, ROLES-RCAST, the University of Tokyo. She works on Japan’s foreign and security policies, and Japanese domestic politics. She most recently published Le Japon, un leader discret (Eyrolles, 2023), La Démocratie au Japon, singulière et universelle (ENS Ed., 2022), and coedited (with J. Brown and R. Dujarric) The Abe Legacy. How Japan has been shaped by Abe Shinzô, Lexington, 2021.

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

Description

This talk is grounded in over two decades of fieldwork on the preservation of historical memory tabooed by the CCP regime. Drawing on contextualized personal accounts, Rowena He will illuminate the unequal contest between state-imposed interpretations of history and independent scholarship on China’s forbidden past, and their implications for nationalism, democratization, and the field of China studies. Highlighting her extensive interactions with local and mainland Chinese students during Hong Kong’s unprecedented social movement, she illustrates how memory becomes a form of resistance that embodies citizen autonomy and agency. The power of the powerless.

Speaker biography:

Rowena He 何曉清 is a China specialist and historian of modern Chinese society and politics. As a scholar of Tiananmen, the 1989 pro-democracy movement, she is interested in the nexus of history, memory, and power, and their implications for the relationship between academic freedom and public opinion, human rights and democratisation, and youth values and nationalism. Her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggles for Democracy in China was named Top Five Books 2014 by the Asia Society’s China File. The book has been reviewed in the New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Christian Science Monitor, China Journal, Human Rights Quarterly, and other international periodicals. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, and the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin.  

Dr. He is passionate about teaching. She received the Harvard University Certificate of Teaching Excellence for three consecutive years for the Tiananmen courses that she created. She joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019 and received the Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020 and 2021. In October 2023, she was denied a work visa to return to her position as an Associate Professor of History at CUHK. She has also taught at Wellesley College and Saint Michael’s College.

Dr. He publishes and speaks widely beyond the academy. Her op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and the Wall Street Journal. She has been a keynote speaker for the Canada Human Rights National Symposium, testified before a US Congressional hearing, and delivered lectures for the US State Department and the Canada International Council. Her scholarly opinions are regularly sought by the ABC (Australia), Al Jazeera, Associate Press, BBC, CBC, CNN, CTV, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, Guardian, Inside Higher Education, Le Monde, NPR, NBC, the New York Times, Reuters, Time, Times Higher Education, Wall Street Journal, and other international media outlets. She was designated among the Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals 2016.

Born and raised in China, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

In Bundok, Adrian De Leon follows the people of Northern Luzon across space and time, advancing a new vision of the United States’s Pacific empire that begins with the natives and migrants who were at the heart of colonialism and its everyday undoing. From the emergence of Luzon’s eighteenth-century tobacco industry and the Hawaii Sugar Planters’ Association’s documentation of workers to the movement of people and ideas across the Suez Canal and the stories of Filipino farmworkers in the American West, De Leon traces "the Filipino" as a racial category emerging from the labor, subjugation, archiving, and resistance of native people.

We strongly urge attendees of the event to read the Prologue and Introduction of the book, which is available through Jstor

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adrian De Leon is the Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University, and an Assistant Professor of US History at NYU.is a writer, critic, and public historian. He is an expert in the histories of the Philippines and global Filipino migration, U.S. imperialism across the Pacific, and Asian American politics, and has also written on the study of food, popular culture, and migrant music.

He is completing a triptych of works on the Filipino diaspora. The first barangay: an offshore poem (2021), is a lyrical meditation on diaspora, seafaring, and the violence of global modernity. The second, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (2023), is a global history of the co-production of Philippine indigeneity and Filipino diaspora through the imperial plantation. The third, Balikbayan: The Invention of the FIlipino Homeland (under contract), is a history of the Philippine nation-state from its constitutive outsides: overseas migrants, diasporic capital, and settler colonialism.

De Leon is a 2014 graduate of the University of Toronto, Scarborough, where he studied English (BA, Honors), Mathematics, and Biology. In 2019, he received his PhD in History at the University of Toronto. His research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Fulbright Canada, and Massey College. In 2020, he was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal, the highest honor for a dissertation written at a Canadian university.

ABOUT THE DISCUSSANTS

Takashi Fujitani is a Professor of History the Dr. David Chu Chair in Asia Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute, University of Toronto. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Professor  comes to the University of Toronto from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a professor of modern Japanese history for two decades. Professor Fujitani’s books include Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 1996), Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (Duke University Press, 2001), and Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII (University of California Press, 2011). He has held numerous grants and fellowships, including from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Stanford Humanities Center, and Social Science Research Council. He is also editor of the series Asia Pacific Modern (UC Press).

Kevin P. Coleman is an Associate Professor of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Kevin Coleman’s research examines the intersection between capitalism and photography, primarily in Latin America. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden (2016), a number of book chapters and journal articles, as well as the Principal Investigator of Visualizing the Americas, a major digital humanities project. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the United States Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship. With support from a SSHRC grant, he led three major collaborative inquiries into the relations between capitalism and photography: Capitalism and the Camera (2021), Photography and Culture (2020), and Radical History Review (2018). He is currently working on a documentary film, The Photos We Don’t Get to See, that attempts to make visible how physical violence gets repeated at the level of the archive.

Description

The information age has opened a new front of adversarial statecraft. Deterrence in the 21st Century asks how, and if it is indeed possible, to deter an enemy in the realm of information warfare. Bringing together some of the most respected analysts working today, Deterrence in the 21st Century looks beyond the technical aspects of the use of information and disinformation as adversarial statecraft to seek new avenues to deter the undermining of institutions and societies. This is a thorough, thoughtful, and expert analysis of one of the most difficult and essential security challenges of our time.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

Today, we have a fairly comprehensive idea of colonialism’s forms of knowledge. Scholars have reconstructed the methods and networks of Oriental and Islamic Studies in Europe and across the North Atlantic. Far less is known about the development of such fields in Asia itself. This talk, part of a larger study focused on decolonization’s forms of knowledge, focuses on the history of West Asian Studies in India after 1947. Particular attention will be paid to how ideas of a shared Indo-Arab past impacted scholarly efforts, shaped institutional arrangements, and determined political attachments. An effort will be made to link the content of thought with its conditions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of Transnational History. He works principally on the intellectual history of West and South Asia. His writing has appeared in Modern Intellectual History, American Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Dissent, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Before joining the University of Toronto, Esmat held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Davis and NYU Abu Dhabi. He received his Ph.D in History from Rice University in 2019.

Francis Cody (Chair) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, where he is the Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Contemporary Asian Studies and the Centre for South Asian Studies. He has been teaching at U of T since 2008. His research focuses on language, politics, and media in southern India. He first brought these interests to bear on a study of citizenship, literacy, and social movement politics in Tamil Nadu.  

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

This talk traces the entwined histories of military violence and postcolonial modernization in East Asia and their effects on local and global ecologies. In analyzing avian migratory flyways and other multispecies relations, Kim unpacks the material, political, and ecological entanglements of the Korean DMZ within processes of militarized liberal capitalism. Her framework of "biological peace” offers a critical vantage point for conceptualizing peace beyond human politics, in the context of climate crisis, perpetual war, and ongoing militarization of the planet.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Eleana J. Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (Duke UP, 2022) and Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke UP, 2010), which was awarded the James B. Palais Prize from the Association of Asian Studies and the Social Sciences Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She also co-edited, with David Fedman and Albert Park, Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (Cornell UP, 2023). She is the current President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and serves on the editorial boards of Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Korean Studies, and Critical Asian Studies.

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

Description

What happened to all the busts of Philippe Pétain after 1944? What happened to the millions of Vichy collaborationist and Nazi-related posters, busts, insignia, hats, guns, arm bands, calendars, pamphlets, and children’s books that France was awash in by the mid-1940s? Scholarship on contemporary dilemmas posed by WWII-era material culture, including the thriving trade in small-object memorabilia, has recently spiked, while the history of these artifacts’ survival in the final days of WWII, liberation, and postwar rebuilding remains mostly unwritten. This talk will introduce new research exploring pivotal moments in 1944-1950, as Allied occupiers, French leadership, and the population at large struggled to purge the country and continent of “pernicious objects.”

Dr. Sarah Griswold  is Assistant Professor of European History at Oklahoma State University, focusing on modern France

Description

Using historical records on the universe of inventors and research laboratories, matched to decennial census records between 1850 and 1940, we study how US invention evolved from its early roots in craftsmanship to today’s science-based endeavor. We show that the 1920s are the start of a period in which innovation accelerates and in which the US innovation system undergoes a profound transformation. This transformation stretches from the micro-level to the macro-level, with marked changes visible in the individual characteristics of inventors, the prevalence of teamwork, the ways in which these teams are coordinated and in the geography of US invention.

About The Speaker

Frank Neffke leads the Science of Cities research program at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH). Before joining CSH, he served as the Research Director of the Growth Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on economic transformation and growth. He has written on a variety of topics, such as structural transformation and new growth paths in regional economies, economic complexity, division of labor and teams, the consequences of job displacement and the future of work.  

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

Many studies of China’s relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional influence. Yet, scholars and pundits often fail to appreciate the complexity of the contemporary Chinese state and society, and just how fragmented, decentralized, and internationalized China is today.

This talk points out that a focus on the Chinese state alone is not sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of China’s influence in Southeast Asia. Instead, we must look beyond the Chinese state, to non-state actors from China, such as private businesses and Chinese migrants. These actors affect people’s perception of China in a variety of ways, and they often have wide-ranging as well as long-lasting effects on bilateral relations. Looking beyond the Chinese state’s intentional influence reveals many situations that result in unanticipated changes in Southeast Asia.

This talk proposes that to understand this increasingly globalized China, we need more conceptual flexibility regarding which Chinese actors are important to China’s relations, and how they wield this influence, whether intentional or not.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Enze Han is an Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, The University of Hong Kong. His recent publications include The Ripple Effect: China’s Complex Presence in Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2024), Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State Building between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2019), Contestation and Adaptation: The Politics of National Identity in China (Oxford University Press, 2013), and various articles appearing in The Journal of Politics, International Affairs, World Development, The China Quarterly, Security Studies, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies among many others. During 2015-2016, he was a Friends Founders’ Circle Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, United States. His research has been supported by the Leverhulme Research Fellowship and British Council/Newton Fund. He has been awarded the Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia by the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Initiative on Southeast Asia in 2021. Dr. Han received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the George Washington University, and he was also a postdoctoral research fellow in the China and the World Program at Princeton University.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

In 1933, Diego Rivera began painting Man at the Crossroads, a mural at Rockefeller Center in New York City. After Rivera included a portrait of Bolshevik Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, and refused Nelson Rockefeller’s demand to remove this, the mural was first covered up, and then in February 1934, destroyed. That same year, Rivera painted a refashioned mural, Hombre, el controlador del universo, at the Palacio de Belles Artes in Mexico City. This talk examines this controversy through the lens of Rivera’s relationship with the Communist left, in particular the pro-Moscow Communist Party, the Trotskyist Communist League of America, and the Lovestoneite Communist Party (Opposition), and argues that this provides a fuller understanding of Rivera’s evolving political commitments and the changing politics of his paintings in this period. The talk will also use the controversy as an example of researching the interwar political left and labour movement from a transnational perspective and demonstrates how such a transnational perspective offers advantages over a strictly nationally based vision.

Jacob A. Zumoff is associate professor and chair of the history department and co-chair of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at New Jersey City University (formerly Jersey City State College). After earning his PhD in history at University College London, he has taught in different capacities at universities such as the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, University Massachusetts Boston, and the City University of New York before his present position. His is the author of The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929 (Brill, 2014); The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike (Rutgers, 2021) and an editor of the collected volume, Transnational Communism across the Americas (Illinois, 2023), and has published in journals such as Labour/Le Travail, American Studies, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Caribbean History, and the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.  

Commentator: Alejandra González Jiménez, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Alejandra González Jiménez is a sociocultural anthropologist. Her research focuses on labour, social reproduction, and current reconfigurations of capitalism. She is working on her first book manuscript in which she examines transnational car production in Mexico in the era of free trade.

Moderator: Sean Purdy, Visiting Professor, Centre for the Study of the United States, Munk School, University of Toronto – Professor Doutor II, Departamento de História, Universidade de São Paulo

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

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Munk School of Global Affairs and co-sponsored by the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Information is not yet available.