Past Events

Description

While scientific inquiry is often expected to be free from ideological interference, religiosity has become a feature in Indonesian higher education. In this paper, we explore the formation of scholars’ identity in terms of religious orientation. We show that many student groups in Indonesia have made it a mission to raise religious consciousness and experiences on campus. Over the last 20 years, there are significant tensions between managing students’ exposure to religiously conservative efforts, maintaining religious tolerance, and balancing these elements with religious freedom and association. These questions are important because they determine the kinds of identities and organizational forms that students contribute to nation-building projects.

Teti A. Argo is a Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Bandung Institute of Technology – Indonesia. Her research on religious conservatism in universities is a part of a larger research dedicated to looking at the role of higher education and nation building.

Frans A. Prasetyo holds a masters degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia. He is currently a fellow at the University of Toronto.

Description

During the German occupation, to a large part of the Polish people, everyday struggle for existence was more challenging than participation in resistance and armed conflict. The lecture will analyze and categorize strategies of survival that, according to contemporary definitions, form systems of values, which identify existing threats and provide survival mechanisms. The scope of the lecture will be limited to the Polish intelligentsia mostly in the German-occupied General Government, with limited focus on the Polish areas incorporated directly into the Reich.

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

Description

The Sorbs of Lusatia are a Slavic minority community which has traditionally lived in parts of present-day Saxony and Brandenburg in Germany. Their identity is primarily expressed through the use of Upper and Lower Sorbian, West Slavic languages currently spoken by approximately 20,000 people in total. It is also reflected in these individuals’ self-identification as Sorbs, as members of the Sorbian society, who cultivate and receive Sorbian culture, wear Sorbian costumes, attend Sorbian religious services or participate in the teaching of Sorbian.

In my talk, I will discuss a number of factors that play a role in the maintenance of the Sorbian identity. These include the political representation of Sorbian interests on the state level, education (from preschools to elementary and high schools), higher education and research, religion, media (magazines, newspapers, radio, television, internet) and cultural institutions (music ensembles, book publishers, museums, theaters).
I will also explore the conditions necessary for the maintenance of the Sorbian language, culture and identity. Above all, and as history has shown, the state must be able to create policies which promote a minority-friendly atmosphere. Every citizen living in a bilingual territory is deserving of support. However, from the more contemporary perspective, the efforts for the continued existence of the Sorbian people can only succeed if their own initiatives, the tolerance and support of these initiatives from all citizens, and initiatives favoring government intervention work in cooperation with one another.

The Sorbs’ own efforts will be able to develop only to the degree that they are accepted by the German population, as the minority is always dependent on the goodwill of the majority. The specific situation of the Sorbs as an ethnic group lacking a “home country” in which they would be the majority is accompanied by the fact that, to date, no adequate answers to many fundamental questions have been found.

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

Description

As the twentieth century ended, Canada was completing its sixth term on the United Nations Security Council, more terms than all but three other non-permanent members. A decade later, Ottawa’s attempt to return to the council was dramatically rejected by its global peers, leaving Canadians – and international observers – shocked and disappointed. Drawing from more than twenty archival libraries and more than eighty interviews with experts and practitioners, Canada on the United Nations Security Council tells the story of that defeat and what it means for future campaigns, describing and analyzing Canada’s attempts since 1946, both successful and unsuccessful, to gain a seat as a non-permanent member. It also reveals that while the Canadian commitment to the United Nations itself has always been strong, Ottawa’s attitude towards the Security Council, and to service upon it, has been much less consistent. Nonetheless, the benefits of council membership have consistently equaled or outweighed the costs of participation. Impeccably researched and clearly written, Canada on the United Nations Security Council is the definitive history of the Canadian experience on the world’s most powerful stage.

Light refreshments served.

Description

APSIA fairs can help you take the next step in your career!

Meet admissions officers from APSIA member schools. Discuss admissions requirements, curricula, financial aid packages, joint degree programs, and career opportunities. Collect application information.

List of Exhibitors:

Carleton University Norman Paterson School of International Affairs
Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs
George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs
Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
The Graduate Institute, Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government
IE University School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
National University of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
Sciences Po Paris School of International Affairs
Syracuse University The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Texas A&M University Bush School of Government & Public Service
Tufts University The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
University of California, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy
University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies
University of Maryland School of Public Policy
University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
University of Southern California Master of Public Diplomacy
University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

Tips for Success

There isn’t a dress code, but most people opt for business casual.
Bring business cards if you have them. You can provide these instead of filling out information request cards.
Make sure you have a bag to carry the materials you collect from the exhibitors

Description

Click here to watch the webcast.  Experts from multiple disciplines have argued in principle for the benefits of metropolitan governance, but how has it played out in practice? On September 19, Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance Visiting Scholar, Alan Harding, will address this question by drawing on his experience as Chief Economic Adviser to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority as well as his many years of academic research on metropolitan governance.  In his presentation, Professor Harding will assess the arguments produced in favour of metropolitan governance, the extent to which real-world reforms have been driven by these arguments, the barriers that stand in the way of “rational” reform, and how Greater Manchester’s experience with metropolitan governance points to ways of overcoming at least some of those barriers. He will end by speculating on whether metropolitan governance is an idea whose time has come or a diversion from the real challenges facing decision-makers in a complex, interconnected world.  Seating is limited for this event, and registration is required.  This event is part of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy Distinguished Lecture Series.  About the Speaker Alan Harding is Chief Economic Adviser at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and a visiting Professor at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research in the Alliance Manchester Business School. He oversees the analytical work that supports GMCA’s research and intelligence, strategy development and evaluation efforts. Most recently, he was centrally involved in the production of the Greater Manchester Independent Prosperity Review, a major collaborative initiative with leading academic experts designed to provide the evidence base for one of the UK’s first modern local industrial strategies. Previously, Alan spent 30 years in academia leading specialist research Institutes and Centres in the north of England, focusing on urban-regional development, policy, and governance. He is best known for his role in re-establishing the importance of the city-region as a scale for policy design and delivery in England.  About the Moderator Shirley Hoy has had a lengthy public service career including serving as Toronto’s City Manager from 2001 to 2008 and working as an Assistant Deputy Minister in three Ontario ministries. She held various policy and planning-related positions in the former Metro Toronto government, including with the Department of Community Services, as General Manager and Corporate Secretary at Exhibition Place and as Executive Director in the Metro Chairman’s office. Ms. Hoy also served as Commissioner of Community and Neighbourhood Services, where she provided leadership on many major services ranging from social assistance, homes for the aged, housing and support, public health, and parks and recreation. Following her term as Toronto City Manager, she served 5 years as the CEO of the Toronto Lands Corporation.

Description

This talk is interested in how Korean literary and cultural critics have defined the idea of literature and what roles the idea serves in their larger arguments about the human being and history. It focuses in particular on mid-century Korea, from the late Japanese colonial period until the 1950s. The intention behind this periodization is to recognize both continuity and discontinuity between “before and after liberation,” particularly in relation to concepts of the human and their intersection with imperial, colonial, and national politics. Through texts by Paek Ch’ŏl, Ch’oe Chaesŏ, Sŏ Insik, and An Hamgwang, published in the Japanese empire, South Korea, and North Korea, I will discuss how and why these critics conceived of literature as the most important mediation between transcendental concepts, including moral and political ideas, and the everyday experiences of modernity. This situating of literature between ideas and experience was connected to the figure of the human, the “empirico-transcendental doublet” of modernity (Foucault), and thereby to modes of governmentality between Japanese empire, US and Soviet occupation, and the Korean national population. This talk comes out of a current book project, a collection of translations titled Humanism, Empire, and Nation: Korean Literary and Cultural Criticism.

Travis Workman is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). He has published articles in journals such as PMLA and positions and book chapters in volumes such as The Korean Popular Culture Reader and Rediscovering Korean Cinema. He is currently working on a collection of translations, Humanism, Empire, and Nation: Korean Literary and Cultural Criticism and a book manuscript, Political Moods: Melodrama and the Cold War in Korean Film.

Description

Inger Enkvist is professor em. of Spanish and Latin-American literature at Lund University, Sweden and also a well-know author of books on education published mainly in Spanish and Swedish. She has some 40 books published and more than 200 articles. In Spanish she has written on the Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa and the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo. She has published on Spanish philosophers and Latin-American Icons. In education, she has published books on the Swedish education reforms and books on international comparison in education. Her current research focuses on new trends in teacher education and how to reform teacher education in Sweden.

Sweden introduced the “comprehensive school” in 1962. Obligatory school up to the age of 16 was to lead to social harmony and equality, and there was to be no specific learning targets to be acquired in order to graduate. Reforms in 1969 and in 1976 put still more emphasis on a social and caring approach. In 1985, the teacher education was changed in order to prepare teachers for the new role that teachers were to adopt.This basic model was not changed in the 90s, but the 90s also saw a radical decentralization and the introduction of a kind of charter schools plus a new type of curriculum. In 2001 there was a reform that introduced a teacher education based on the basic equality between different kinds of teachers. A number of reforms 2010-2011 introduced some changes but did not touch the basic model neither for schools nor for teacher education.

Description

For nearly five years, the Minsk Agreements have been successful in sustaining violence in Ukraine at a low level. The public awareness of the conflict in which nothing really happens has also been steadily going down. And, when invoked, the war in Ukraine is usually discussed solely in geopolitical or military terms.

Missing from this picture are six million people who live in the war zone in eastern Ukraine. Still dealing with the trauma of direct violence in 2014-2015, they are currently exposed to indirect consequences of war. Disrupted infrastructure, restrictions on movement, diseases, lack of access to basic services, unemployment, and shadow economy – these are the everyday realities of life in the vicinity of the war in Ukraine. At the same time, these factors shape a unique local culture of resilience. People come up with creative strategies of traveling, safety, parenting, entrepreneurship, and mutual assistance.

Alisa Sopova is a journalist from Donetsk and currently an MA candidate in Regional Studies (Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia) program at Harvard University. Previously news editor for Donbass, the biggest newspaper in Donetsk Region of Ukraine, since 2014 she has been extensively covering the military conflict in the area for a number of media including the New York Times, Time magazine, and the Guardian. Alisa has joined Harvard as a first Nieman fellow from Ukraine and stayed to continue her research of everyday coping strategies employed by residents in the frontline communities.

Description

Featuring presentations from the Asian Institute’s 2018-19 RICHARD CHARLES LEE INSIGHTS THROUGH ASIA CHALLENGE (ITAC) & BIG IDEAS COMPETITION: EXPLORING GLOBAL TAIWAN Student Research Awardees

Event Program

12:00-1:15PM
Richard Charles Lee Insights through Asia Challenge (ITAC) Presentations

Yujuan (Emmy) Fu, Ethics, Society & Law; Literature & Critical Theory
Jennifer Han, Peace, Conflict & Justice and Political Science
Sites of (Un)belonging: Spaces/Faces of Honjok Youth in Seoul, South Korea

Amrita Kumar-Ratta, MGA, PhD Student, Department of Geography and Planning
Shades of Brown Girl: The Many Colours of Transnational South Asian Femininity

Katie Kwang, Psychology; Economics
Benita Leong, History; Political Science (UTM)
Hui Wen Zheng, Contemporary Asian Studies; Peace, Conflict, and Justice
Moving in and moving out: understanding the effects of social exclusion on the mental health of rural-urban migrants in Shenzhen

Zixian Liu, PhD Candidate, Department of History
Rural Land Marketization, the Displacement of the Urban Poor and the Neoliberalizing Developmental State in Beijing

Habiba Maher
Aliza Rahman
Asian Modest Fashion in the Museum Space

Minh Anh (Mia) Nguyen, Contemporary Asian Studies; Political Science
Unwanted Children

Man (Angela) Xu, Sociology Department
The Invisible Hand of South-South Globalization: A Study of Chinese Migrants in Tehran

1:15-1:45PM
Lunch Break

1:45-3:00PM
Big Ideas Competition: Exploring Global Taiwan Presentations

Adam Zivokinovic (“Zivo”) – Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
Ji Chen (Tony) Yin – Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
The Referendum

Anson Au, Department of Sociology; Department of Chinese Literature (Joint Appointment), National Sun Yat-Sen University
The Everyday Politics of LGBTQ Minorities in Taiwan: Discrimination, Legalization, and Community

Sabrina Teng-io Chung, PhD, East Asian Studies
Exhibiting In-Justices: Human Rights Discourses in Taiwan’s Recent Redress Efforts

Yiwei Jin, MA student, Department of Political Science
Hsieh-Piao and the Politics of Personalization in Taiwan

Niki C Yang, Criminology
Celina B. Servanez, Criminology and Sociolegal Studies (graduate department)
Sohrab Naderi, Political Science and Criminology
Anti-Death Penalty Efforts in Taiwan

3:00-4:00PM
Reception

About the Richard Charles Lee Insights through Asia Challenge (ITAC)
The Richard Charles Lee Insights through Asia Challenge (ITAC) is an interdisciplinary experiential learning program at the Asian Institute that offers students the opportunity for an academically rooted, life-changing field research experience in Asia. On the vanguard of supporting the University’s wider goals of internationalization, redesigning undergraduate teaching, and increasing student mobility, ITAC supports students through the complete trajectory of their research, providing workshops on proposal writing, project management, research methods, ethical research practices, and data analysis as well as direct mentoring. Encouraging students to produce their research in various forms ranging from policy reports to documentary films or something else entirely, ITAC is open to undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines, across all three UofT campuses. Out of approximately 100 applications, five to seven research teams are awarded annually by an academic jury. More info: https://archive.munkschool.utoronto.ca/ai/rcl-itac/

About the Big Ideas Competition: Exploring Global Taiwan
The Big Ideas Competition: Exploring Global Taiwan is a student research competition, which supports selected undergraduate and graduate student teams to conduct their outstanding research and creative projects in Taiwan. The Competition provides opportunities for student experience in Taiwan by combining research on issues connected to Taiwanese culture/society with travel, taking classroom learning into the field in order to develop academic research skills and self-confidence. The program is enthusiastically interdisciplinary, encouraging student-researchers across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences to collaborate with complementary skills and knowledge bases.

Throughout the winter, awarded teams collectively participated in workshops on project management, research methods, ethical research practices, data analysis, and safety abroad. Teams work closely with an academic mentor and Asian Institute staff, rigorously developing their research projects before departing for field research in the summer semester. Spending up to a month immersed in local cultures, developing cultural fluencies, and conducting research, students return to write up final reports and produce their projects in the late summer.
More info: https://archive.munkschool.utoronto.ca/ai/global-taiwan-studies-program-big-ideas-competition/

Description

Over the last ten years, Buddhist monks and activist organisations have played an increasingly visible role in South and Southeast Asia. While not an entirely new phenomenon, this new upsurge appears to have unique and alarming features. These include a growing climate of violence, the increasing use of law and policy in the exclusion of Muslim minorities and the spread of social media and other technologies alternately used to mobilise, educate, communicate and incite. This ‘new Buddhicization’ of political life comes at a time of renewed or continued autocratic and populist tendencies in the politics of Theravada majority countries. Scholars have responded to these trends, but largely without addressing them holistically, institutionally and comparatively.

This interactive and conversation-oriented workshop—led by scholars with expertise in Buddhism, politics and law in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand respectively—aims to map out a path forward for researching the ‘new Buddhicization’ of public life in the region. This research programme would seek to identify new patterns, processes and problems that ought to be the focus of scholarship, moving beyond investigations into the motivations and activities of individual monks or groups to ask broader comparative questions about the structural conditions that enable or accelerate the processes described above. We invite colleagues with related interests and expertise to provide feedback on this programme in its early stages.

For example, how are the current dynamics different from previous moments of politicised Buddhism in the region? What trends or patterns can be found in the countries’ legal, political and social systems and how have Buddhist actors worked to influence institutional changes? What historical factors—premodern, colonial, postcolonial, etc.— seem relevant or determinative? What features of Buddhist ecclesiastical organisation and governance enable or discourage the rise of groups like Ma Ba Tha or Bodu Bala Sena? Under what conditions have Buddhist pressure groups been particularly successful (or not) across the Bay of Bengal? Are there key features of Buddhist political philosophy or tropes of Buddhist literature that appear prominently in the speeches given by prominent monks? What new methodologies will be important in considering these new trends? What gaps exist in currently available data that would enable more robust comparisons and analysis over time? What blind spots have been left by existing scholarship?

Tomas Larsson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St John’s College. Tomas has a PhD in Government from Cornell University. He is the author of Land and Loyalty: Security and the Development of Property Rights in Thailand, published by Cornell University Press in 2012. In recent years his research has increasingly focused on religion and politics, and especially on various aspects of state regulation of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, resulting in a number of publications in journals such as International Political Science Review, Modern Asian Studies, and Journal of Law and Religion.

Benjamin Schonthal is Associate Professor of Buddhism and Asian Religions at the University of Otago in New Zealand, where he is also Associate Dean (International) for the Humanities Division. He received his Ph.D. in the field of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, where his dissertation received the 2013 Law & Society Association Dissertation Award. Ben’s work examines the intersections of religion, law and politics in late-colonial and contemporary Southern Asia, with a particular focus on Buddhism and law in Sri Lanka. His research appears in The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Journal of the American Academy of Religions and other places. Ben is the author of Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2016. His current research project, supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand, looks at the interactions of state law and Buddhist monastic law in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southern Asia.

Matthew J. 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. His articles on Buddhism, ethnicity, politics and political thought in Myanmar have appeared in Politics & Religion, Journal of Burma Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Contemporary Buddhism, Buddhism, Law & Society, and Asian Survey. 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.

Description

In 2016, the UK voted by a majority of 52 per cent to leave the European Union. ‘Brexit’ the Prime Minister declared, ‘means Brexit’. Three years later the project is still not defined and no form of it has succeeded in getting through Parliament. The resulting political turmoil has pushed the largely unwritten constitution to its limits and may break up the United Kingdom itself. Brexit comes in several, incompatible, versions, from hyper-globalism to national protectionism. It is predicated on the return to a unitary nation-state, an English concept that contradicts the vision of the UK (especially since 1999) as a plurinational, post-sovereign union.

About the Speaker
Michael Keating is Professor of Politics at the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh and Director of the Centre on Constitutional Change (CCC). He has a BA from the University of Oxford and in 1975 was the first PhD graduate from what is now Glasgow Caledonian University. In 1981 he gained the title of incorporated linguist (Institute of Linguists) and speaks English, French, Spanish and Italian. Michael is a fellow of the British Academy, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Academy of Social Sciences and European Academy and has taught in universities in Scotland, England, Canada, the USA, France and Spain and at the European University Institute in Italy. Among his publications since 2000 are Plurinational Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001); The Independence of Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Rescaling the European State (Oxford University Press, 2013) and (edited) Debating Scotland. Issues of Independence and Union in the 2014 Referendum (Oxford University Press in 2017). With Donatella della Porta, he edited Methods and Approaches in the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and with David McCrone he edited The Crisis of Social Democracy in Europe (Edinburgh University Press, He is currently leading a major project on the UK constitution and Brexit and preparing a monograph on constitutional accommodation in the UK and Ireland for Oxford University Press.

Description

Drawing on 125 unpublished diaries from the Soviet archives, this lecture offers an intimate look at the Leningrad Blockade, one of the longest and deadliest sieges in history. The talk examines how Leningraders trapped inside the city came to intellectual grips with extreme starvation and isolation. In the process of contemplating the meaning of their suffering, they placed themselves, their city, and the Soviet experience under a critical microscope.
 
Alexis Peri received her PhD in history from the University of California Berkeley, and is an Associate Professor of History at Boston University. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, the book upon which the talk is based, was published by Harvard University Press in 2017 and won the Pushkin Book Prize, the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Book Prize for Cultural Studies. She is working on a new book project about Soviet and American pen-friendships during WWII and the Cold War. It is entitled Dear Unknown Friend: Soviet and American Women Discovered the Power of the Personal.

Description

Jelena Subotic (PhD, Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007) is Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, USA. She is the author of two books: Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2009, Serbian translation 2010) and Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, forthcoming, 2019). Professor Subotic is the author of more than twenty scholarly articles on international relations theory, memory politics, national identity, human rights, and the politics of the Western Balkans.

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

Description

This lecture examines a form of international relations that arises when emerging states share an inhabited borderland: “state-shadowing”. Authority over people is crucial to effective sovereignty, yet international borderlands are often porous and heterogeneous. Borderlanders have the possibility to look across, observe and compare different state-making and nation-building projects. When neighboring states seek to consolidate in such situations, physical closeness can become a contest to prove their superiority over the state next door—which constitutes an always discernible, readily available, and equally viable alternative political project—to local people. This fear of comparison is particularly high in post-colonial polities like China and India, struggling to transform into nations. The triangular relationship between states and non-state actors in borderland situations turn state-making and nation-building into emulative, mirroring, and competitive attempts at self-definition against the other polity. As China and India’s Himalayan encounter in the 20th century attests, this fear of being compared can escalate into a destructive security dilemma. The concept of state-shadowing thus offers a framework to understand how proximity, mobility and governmentality structure the low politics between neighbouring post-colonial states, and potentially contribute to conflict.

A specialist of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean, Dr. Guyot-Réchard holds a senior lectureship (associate professorship) in contemporary international history at King’s College London. Her award-winning work focuses on the long-term impact of decolonization, particularly in terms of international politics. She has written extensively on the strategic borderlands between India, China and Burma. More recent work focuses on India’s practice of diplomacy and on South Asia and the international order and on the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean since 1945. She regularly intervenes on South Asia-related issues in international media and policy circles.

Description

In conflict zones around the world, both state and non-state actors deliver governance at local levels. This paper explores the long-term impact of individual exposure to ‘wartime governance’ on social and political behaviour in Angola. We operationalize wartime governance as the local policy choices and practices of a ruling actor. Building on detailed ethnographic and historical insights, we use survey data and a natural experiment to show that involvement in wartime governance by armed groups makes Angolan war veterans more likely to participate in local collective action twelve years after the end of the war. This effect is underpinned by a social learning mechanism and a shift in political preferences, but has no bearing on political mobilization at the national level or social relations within the family. These results highlight an important institutional legacy of civil wars and expose challenges and opportunities for bottom-up approaches to post-conflict state-building and local development.

Description

Coinciding with the current Canadian Federal Election season, the Contemporary Asian Studies Student Union (CASSU) is pleased to host a panel discussion on Asian-Canadian Identity in Canadian Electoral Politics. The event focuses on examining Asian representation in Canadian Electoral Politics, exploring the unique sociopolitical conditions that candidates, politicians, and public servants who identify as of Asian-descent experience when navigating Canadian electoral politics.

Topics of discussion will range from the public perception of Asian-Canadian political leaders in Canada, specific sociopolitical experiences and hurdles that candidates encounter when running for office, and projected shifts in voting behaviour as a result of demographic changes in Canada (i.e. influx of newcomers).

SPEAKERS:
Professor Ludovic Rheault
Ludovic Rheault is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Toronto. Prior to his appointment as faculty, he joined an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow in 2014. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Riverside. Prof. Rheault obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Montreal in 2013.

Professor Rheault’s research interests focus on areas of the Canadian government, and applications of statistical methods to examine public opinions and policy-related questions. As a member of the French-Canadian minority, he will provide examples illustrating the challenges involved with cultural diversity in Canadian federal politics. In addition, Professor Rheault will provide statistical Canadian electoral insights on the topic.

Kuo Yin
Kuo Yin began her career in Canadian politics as a constituency assistant for the Member of Parliament in Toronto. She later held the position of parliamentary assistant at the House of Commons in Ottawa. Prior working in federal politics, Yin studied, worked and lived in Edmonton, Washington D.C and Oxford. According to Yin, “What makes me feel powerful as an Asian woman in Canadian politics is that I was given a variety of opportunities on different platforms to lead this country towards the direction where Canadians want to be.”

Tenzin Sudip Chogkyi
Tenzin Chogkyi was born in Tibet and raised in India. She came to Toronto 15 years ago to study filmmaking. Prior to joining politics, Tenzin worked for the Canadian Oscar nominee, Deepa Mehta.

Over the past 4 years, Tenzin has served as the Community Liaison for MP Arif Virani at the Parkdale-High Park riding. Parkdale is home to the largest Tibetan community outside of India. In addition to her active role at the office, she is also the coordinator for Parliamentary Friends of Tibet Canada Friendship group.

Description

In 2015 the decommunization laws in Ukraine gave open access to the GPU-NKVD-KGB archives, and historians immediately seized the opportunity to study new types of secret police documents which had been inaccessible earlier. Among them were the almost unknown dela-formulyary, i.e. surveillance files on the Ukrainian scholars who worked at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in the 1920s–1930s.
These files were prepared for many years and contained all information about researchers and their milieu. They consisted of several types of documents – track records, questionnaires, characteristics, references, secret police supervisory materials, copies of testimonies of the detainees, copies of opened and inspected correspondence, as well as numerous “bulletins” and “informational messages” from the secret informants.

Despite the fact that there are practically no official archival materials on secret informants (their personal files were either obliterated or moved to Russia), it is very likely that their names can be identified. In her talk Oksana Yurkova will present her analysis of the surveillance files and discuss the problem of secret informants among Ukrainian scholars in the 1920s–1930s. Also she will present her research on deciphering of the academic secret informants’ nicknames.

Dr. Oksana Yurkova is a Leading Researcher at the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine.
She studies Ukrainian historiography of the 20th century, especially focusing on the interwar period (1920s–1930s), the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky and his Kyiv historical school, as well as the activity of Ukrainian historical institutions of that period; iconography; anthropology of academic life; electronic information resources. In 2015, she initiated the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Digital Archives which collects and presents all printed and archival materials dealing with this famous historian and political figure (http://hrushevsky.nbuv.gov.ua/ ).
In 2019 the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies awarded her the Kolasky Visiting Research Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Law, Education, and Library Sciences 2019–2020. In Toronto she works on the project “Canadian Sources for the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Digital Archives.” For more details see her web-page http://resource.history.org.ua/person/0000512

Description

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the failed coup d’état against Hitler on 20 July 1944, there has been a considerable surge of publications on the topic. Some such books, at times by amateur historians, have focused on the personality of Stauffenberg, the mastermind behind the conspiracy and the man who planted the bomb. Was he driven by religious and ethical motives, by his allegiance to the circle around esoteric author Stefan George, or was he motivated by purely military considerations?

Winfried Heinemann argues that, in the same way the political resistance was influenced by Weimar-era thought, so too were the military conspirators shaped by their experience in the Reichswehr (Army of the Weimar Republic). He will place the revolt in the context of the Third Reich’s polycratic structures, and explain how that in turn prevented the postwar West German Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces) from identifying too easily with the conspirators.

Winfried Heinemann was born in Dortmund and studied history and English language at Bochum University and King’s College, London. From 1983 to 2018, he served as an officer in the German Army. Since 1986, he was attached to the German Armed Forces ‘ Centre for Military History in Freiburg, later in Potsdam. After taking his PhD with a thesis on the early diplomatic history of NATO, he went on to direct the East German Military History branch, then the departments for research and for historical education. He retired as the Chief of Staff and Deputy Commander of the Centre.

Gavin Wiens (commentator) completed his PhD in the Department of History at the University of Toronto in 2019. His dissertation argued that the German army remained a decentralized, contingent-based institution between the Wars of Unification and the end of the First World War and that the distribution of military power among Germany’s lesser kings, grand dukes, and princes played a crucial role in legitimizing and perpetuating monarchical rule during a period of rapid economic and social change. He has published essays on the composition and operations of the German army during the First World War and he has held grants and fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Central European History Society, the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on the activities of German military attachés and advisors in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America between the Napoleonic Wars and the end of the Cold War.

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

Description

This talk focuses on the dark nights of desire, on the difficulties and ordeals lovers have to face and overcome in the pursuit of fulfilment, and also on the tricks that their ingenuity manages to invent in order to escape detection, which sometimes can lead to disgrace or even death. Indian literature covers both illicit and marital love with great nuance. It ranges from problems to do with secrecy to problems of marital privacy in a crowded extended family situation. The differences between literary representations and visual representations of love stories will also be dealt with.

Dr. Fabrizia Baldissera teaches Sanskrit Language and Literature at University of Florence. She lectures abroad extensively. Her interests are kāvya, satire, Goddess worship, dance, Indian alchemy and Arthaśāstra. Her books include The Narmamālā of Kṣemendra; Śāradātilakabhāṇa; L’universo di Kāma; King and Devī and Emotions in Indian Dramas and Dances.

Description

The talk will be based on my newly published book Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War (University of Washington Press). The book examines the life of the Sri Lankan Tamil community in the time of war and migration before the war was ended in 2009. Three decades of war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009, but the prolonged violence during the war devastated the Sri Lankan Tamil community, leading to a serious disruption of ordinary life and mass migrations to escape the violence of the state and of Tamil militants. Jaffna Tamils are now widely dispersed across the world – predominantly in Canada, continental Europe, UK, Australia and India. In the book I have focused on marriage processes (arrangements of transnational marriages), transit places where the actual marriage performance takes place, figures (e.g. marriage brokers, photographers) who facilitate marriages, visual documents (e.g. wedding photos), and laws, in order to understand how Sri Lankan Tamils, who have been dispersed across spaces, rebuilt and shaped their fragmented lives and communities through these documents/figures/ spaces/zones. This study suggests that those fragmented communities were rekindled by ‘in-betweens’ associated with the marriage process, actors like wedding photographers or marriage brokers, legal corpuses, and transit places. The practices, ceremonies, and performances during the marriage process hold an imagined and lived future/s, entangled with past and present. This book deals with temporalities, documents, relatedness and political violence.

Sidharthan Maunaguru is currently an assistant professor in anthropology at Department of Sociology and South Asian Studies at National University of Singapore. His research interests cover the areas of marriage, migration, religion, diaspora, politics, conscience, ethics, and law. He was awarded a Newton Fellowship by British Academia and Royal Society which was held at University of Edinburgh before he joined NUS. Maunaguru’s work is placed within the South Asian regions and beyond, it often includes multi-site fieldwork and intersects with anthropology, history and philosophy. He has published in Modern Asian Studies, Comparative Studies on Society and History, Religion and Society and Contributions to Indian Sociology. Maunaguru’s book titled Marrying for a Future: Transnational Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War is published in 2019 with University of Washington Press, and another of his article is forthcoming in Current Anthropology.

Marrying for a Future: Transnational Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War will be available for purchase at the venue.

Description

Canada has been praised globally for the outcomes of its settlement and integration policies. Religion is often a factor influencing the initial arrival of migrants, and their transition to life in Canada. What ideas, principles, and beliefs motivate those involved with faith-based settlement organizations? What role do religious communities play in supporting the process of settlement and integration? Are there ways in which they inhibit the process of social integration, or reinforce social divisions? What can secular and faith-based organizations involved in the settlement of recent immigrants learn from each other? How should the academic study of the settlement and integration of immigrants take account of the role played by religion in this process?

Panel Discussion:

Anne Woolger, Founding Director, Matthew House

Bayan Khatib, Executive Director, Syrian Canadian Foundation

Neda Farahmandpour, Manager, Toronto North Local Immigration Partnership, JVS Toronto

This seminar series is organized in partnership by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy with the Baha’i Community of Canada and the University of Toronto Multi-Faith Centre.

Description

Mari Yoshihara spoke about her new book, Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro, which interweaves the history of Leonard Bernstein’s transformation from an American icon to a world maestro with an intimate story of his relationships with two Japanese individuals: Amano Kazuko, a loyal fan who began writing letters to Bernstein in 1947, and Kunihiko Hashimoto, a young man who fell deeply in love with Bernstein in 1979 and later became his business representative. During the period in which these two relationships unfolded, Japan’s place in the world and its relationship vis-à-vis the United States changed dramatically, which in turn shaped Bernstein’s connection to the country. Yoshihara traced the making of a global Bernstein amidst the shifting change of classical music that made this American celebrity turn increasingly to Europe and Japan.   

Mari Yoshihara is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the editor of American Quarterly. Her publications include Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (2003) and Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (2007).  *Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro will be available for purchase at the venue.  

Location The lounge is located on the 14th floor of the Robarts Library. Take the P4 elevator from the 2nd floor of Robarts to the 14th floor. On exiting the elevator, head LEFT and follow signs to EAS.

Description

This event is only open to registered PCJ students.

Description

Prof. Yoshihara, who is the Senior Editor of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association, will offer an informal session about the journal, including advice on submitting an article for publication.

Mari Yoshihara is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the editor of American Quarterly. Her publications include Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (2003) and Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (2007).

Description

Abstract: Despite the demographic significance of the visible minority and Indigenous older adult populations in Canada, there is little information about their aging process. In particular, the role of discrimination in the aging trajectories of these populations remain understudied and undertheorized in the Canadian context. We aim to fill this gap by first providing a synthesis of the stress and aging, life course perspective, and settler colonialism theories to shed light on the shared and unique factors that contribute to the aging process for these non-white populations. Second, using the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), we examine the association between everyday discrimination and two markers of aging, pain and functional limitations. We discuss the implications of the theoretical frameworks and empirical findings for social service and healthcare delivery for visible minority and Indigenous older adults.

Speaker bio: Zoua Vang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and an Associate Member of the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the departments of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Psychiatry (Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry) at McGill University. She is also the founding Director of the Indigenous Maternal Infant Health & Well-being (IMIHW) Lab at McGill. Zoua received her BA in Sociology and Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University.
She spent two years as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology and the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania where she obtained additional training in racial/ethnic health disparities and perinatal health.
Zoua’s current research encompasses (i) migration and health, (ii) Indigenous maternal-infant health, and (iii) discrimination as a social determinant of health and well-being.

Description

Through the interrogation rooms of the Korean War, this talk demonstrates how the individual human subject became both the terrain and the jus ad bellum for this critical U.S. war of ‘intervention’ in postcolonial Korea. In 1952, with the US introduction of voluntary POW repatriation proposal at Panmunjom, the interrogation room and the POW became a flashpoint for an international controversy ultimately about postcolonial sovereignty and political recognition.

The ambitions of empire, revolution and non-alignment converged upon this intimate encounter of military warfare: the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner of war. Which state could supposedly reinvent the most intimate power relation between the colonizer and the colonized, to transform the relationship between the state and subject into one of liberation, democracy or freedom? Tracing two generations of people across the Pacific as they navigate multiple kinds of interrogation from the 1940s and 1950s, this talk lay outs a landscape of interrogation – a dense network of violence, bureaucracy, and migration – that breaks apart the usual temporal bounds of the Korean War as a discrete event.

Monica Kim is Assistant Professor in U.S. and the World History in the Department of History at New York University. Her book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton University Press), is a trans-Pacific history of decolonization told through the experiences of two generations of people creating and navigating military interrogation rooms of the Korean War. She has published work in journals such as Critical Asian Studiesand positions: asia critiqueconcerning U.S. empire, war-making, and decolonization. She is also a member of the Editorial Collective for Radical History Review. Her research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Penn Humanities Forum at University of Pennsylvania, and the Korea Foundation.

*Copies of “The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History” will be available for sale during this event.

Description

Early modern Europeans were preoccupied with the problem of safely crossing
the oceans. Such trips—for trade, war, and colonial expansion—could end in
disaster if the navigator fell ill or relied on outdated maps and
instruments on the treacherous seas. Each polity felt that their neighbours
were more successful in creating new navigators. In this talk, Margaret
Schotte will examine French, British, and Dutch records about training
mariners, arguing that they shared a common set of strategies, which had
originated in Iberia. And yet, in spite of this pan-European educational
model, her analysis reveals unexpected variation in how mariners from
different states approached particular tasks—from assessing the speed of
their vessels to estimating their position. Where the Dutch chose
logarithmic tables, the French turned to instruments. What effects did
these choices have? At a time when maritime knowledge had significant
geopolitical ramifications, we find that nautical science and practice, had
distinct national characteristics.

Margaret E. Schotte is an associate professor of history at York
University. Her new monograph, Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), is a comparative study of the development and
dissemination of Dutch, English, and French sailors’ navigational
practices—in the classroom, on board ship, and across international
borders. Schotte traces the impact of print culture on navigational
instruction, and reconsiders the rise of mathematics in European
intellectual and artisanal cultures. She has worked on French travel
narratives and hydrography lessons in New France. Her next project examines
the unexpected mathematical lessons that took place aboard a Dutch East
India Co. ship during the Seven Years’ War. www.margaretschotte.com or:
http://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/mschotte/

Description

This event is only open to registered PCJ students.

Description

The Street Food research project aims at investigating some challenges posed by street food vending, drawing upon 4 case studies: Bangkok, Hanoi, Chicago and Montpellier. This paper will present the cases of Hanoi and Bangkok. In Bangkok, street food is an affordable and easily accessible source of food throughout the city: thus, it contributes to securing the access to food (in terms of availability and affordability), while often providing income to underprivileged households, in particular migrants. Yet, street vendors are currently facing a vehement eviction process, in order to facilitate the traffic. Hanoi follows the same pattern, although moderately, and shut down several informal markets, for food safety reasons. But what are the consequences of this eviction for vendors and for the food system? How do vendors and consumers adapt to this changing urban environment? Moreover, how do planners consider the food issue within urban planning?

Dr. Gwenn Pulliat is a researcher in geography at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She has worked on Southeast Asia for a decade, with a focus on urban development issues. Her research deals with urban food security and the urban environment. In 2017, she has held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, working on the Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia partnership.

Description

Internet voting in Estonia 2005-2019
How Does It Work and Why Does 50% of the Population Vote Online?

In 2005, Estonia was the first country in the world to offer universal remote internet voting in all national elections. Since then, the usage numbers have gradually grown in all e-enabled elections. A new milestone was reached in 2019 when close to 50% of all votes given were electronic. The lecture explores the uptake and usage patterns of internet voting, employing both survey and system log data on voter behavior. Specific attention is devoted to what drives usage growth given that every second vote in Estonia is now given online, but voter turnout has hardly changed over the course of 15 years of internet voting.

Mihkel Solvak (PhD) is a senior research fellow in technology studies and head of institute at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. His research interest include remote internet voting, electoral behavior, uptake and diffusion patterns of digital public services, data driven and machine learning enabled public services. He is affiliated with the Center of IT Impact Studies (CITIS), a research group that prototypes and builds digital public services for Estonian e-government.

Description

Ivan Chorvát is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Studies and Ethnology, Faculty of Arts, Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica (Slovakia) and at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, The University of Trnava (Slovakia). He studied Sociology at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, Society and Politics at the Central European University in Prague (Czech Republic), and completed his doctoral studies at The Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava (1998). His main areas of research include the sociology of family, tourism, leisure and consumption, and the study of sociological theory. I. Chorvát is the author of monographs Man – Father in the Contemporary Family (1999), Travel and Tourism in the Mirror of Time (2007), Leisure in Slovakia from a Sociological Perspective (2011), Consumption and the Consumer Society (2015) and co-editor of Family in Slovakia in Theory and Research (2015) and Leisure, Culture and Society: Czech Republic and Slovakia (forthcoming).

Description

Friday October 25

2:00-2:15 Opening Remarks

2:15-3:00
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, The Same Is the Different: Nature, Fortune, History in Machiavelli

3:00-3:45
Oleg Gelikman, The Quake of the Real: on the Ontology of Relation in Montaigne

3:45-4:15 Coffee Break

4:15-5:00
Willi Goetschel, Writing Otherwise: Montaigne and La Boëtie

5:00-5:45
Warren Montag, “To Quit the Principles of Human Nature:” Locke’s Notion of the Inhuman

Saturday October 26

10:15-11:00
Tracie Matysik, Substance as Contingency in the Young Karl Marx

11:00-11:45
Michael Rosenthal, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Aesthetics to Make Sense of Immorality in Politics: Exempla, Thought-Images, and the Eichmann Trial

12:00-1:30
Lunch

1:30-2:15 James McNaughton, Beckett’s Political Aesthetic

2:15-3:00 David Suchoff, De-Colonizing Dialect: Beckett’s Palestinian and Irish Canines

3:00-3:15
Coffee Break

3:15-4:00
Omar Rivera, Resistance as Alterity in Decolonial Aesthetics

4:00-4:45
Amogh Sahu, Skepticism and the Philosophy of Difference

5:00-5:30
Open Discussion

Description

This case study of Nepali literature shows how literature can reflect the expanding spheres of knowledge in societies like that of Nepal where multiple cultural modes prevail. I will present a study on the expanding sphere of Nepali literature in areas such as the choice of subject for writing, the growth of ‘print capitalism’ or printing and dissemination from the last decades of the 19th century, the role of literary journals in keeping up the creative and free spirit under the autocratic regimes, and the creation of the reading public. The presentation will show how in the first half of the twentieth century did Nepali poetry use romanticism as the important literary trend, and how the literary writers, critics and academics see and interpret modernism, and people understand it in common parlance. I will mention my own experience as a playwright in the selection of the motifs for the plays and how that reflects the sphere of creative writing, in terms of cultural diversity and plurality of subjects.

Abhi Subedi (PhD) received his higher education in Nepal and Britain. He is an essayist, literary critic, linguist, playwright, and poet. He has over two-dozen books on different subjects to his credit. Professor Subedi has taught since 1970. He writes on issues of freedom, culture, literature, arts and social transformations.

Description

Conventional wisdom suggests that great power patrons prop up client dictatorships. However, this is generally assumed rather than systematically analyzed. In this paper, I offer the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between foreign sponsorship and authoritarian regime survival with the use of an original dataset of all autocratic client regimes in the postwar period. These results demonstrate that patronage from Western powers – the United States, France, and the United Kingdom – is not associated with client regime survival. Instead, only Soviet sponsorship reduces the risk of regime collapse. I explain this variation by considering the effects of foreign sponsorship on the likelihood of military coups d’etat. I argue that the Soviet Union directly aided its clients in imposing a series of highly effective coup prevention strategies. In contrast, the United States and its allies did not directly aid their clients in coup prevention which left regimes vulnerable to military overthrow.

Description

During World War I (WWI), approximately 300 Chinese soldiers enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force despite rampant anti-Chinese discrimination. Anonymous until recently, Frederick “Freddy” Lee was one of those soldiers.

Born into a Chinese Canadian Merchant family in Kamloops, BC, Freddy volunteered for the war, enlisting with the 172nd Battalion and served in a vital role as a machine gunner. Freddy fought in and survived the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1916, but was later killed in the Battle of Hill 70 in August 1917 at only 21 years of age. He fought and died as a Canadian. Freddy was among the 11,286 Canadians killed in France with no known graves.

Freddy’s story is one that not only symbolizes the strength and determination of Chinese Canadians’ long struggle to gain acceptance as full Canadian citizens, but also embodies the Canadian spirit of “strength in diversity”, where Canadians of all ethnicities contributed to the history and development of their nation.

While featuring Frederick Lee, the symposium will present a larger Chinese Canadian story. Based on historical research by experts on Chinese Canadian studies and WWI, along with invaluable insights from key figures involved in various Frederick Lee projects, the event will shine new light on Chinese Canadians’ contributions to Canadian history.

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

Description

This talk addresses the tensions which arose in the Russian emigre community in France during and after WWII. These tensions resulted from the divergent experiences and interpretations of the war by the Russian and Russian-Jewish cultural elites who had emigrated to France after the communist coup of 1917. Examining, on the basis of largely unpublished archival materials, attitudes toward Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime among exiled Russian-speaking writers and intellectuals, those who stayed in war-time France and those who took refuge in the United Stated, the talk will focus on Russian reactions to German and French anti-Semitic policies. The goal is to deepen our understanding of the precipitous decline of the Russian emigre cultural community, which thrived in interwar France, by exploring a taboo aspect of its final years, obfuscated in scholarly literature — namely, its fracturing along ethnic lines under the impact of the Holocaust. The talk will argue that traumatic war experience, including the manifest or perceived political attitudes of ethnic Russians in France, modified the cultural identity of the exiled Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, which had been the backbone of interwar Russian emigre cultural life, weakening its commitment to Russia Abroad and thereby accelerating the cultural community’s fragmentation and decline in France.
Leonid Livak is a professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Centre for Jewish Studies, and an associated researcher at the Centre d’études des Mondes Russe, Caucasien & Centre-Européen (EHESS-Paris). He has published extensively on Russian-French and Russian-Jewish cultural history, and on Russian and transnational modernism. Among his books are: How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Emigre Literature and French Modernism (2003); Le Studio franco-russe (2005); Russian Emigres in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France (2010); The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination (2010); In Search of Russian Modernism (2018). As part of his current research project, “The Final Chapter of Russia Abroad,” he is writing the cultural history of the decline of the Russian emigre community in France.

Description

Lyse Doucet has been reporting for the BBC for nearly 30 years, with posts in Abidjan, Kabul, Islamabad, Tehran, Amman and Jerusalem. In 1999 she joined the BBC’s team of presenters but most of her time is spent going back to regions where she lived, and also discovering new ones too.
Lyse often presents from the field for BBC World News, and the BBC World Service’s flagship Newshour programme, as well as the News Channel. She works as a correspondent too, reporting across the BBC’s global and domestic TV and radio outlets. She also writes for BBC online and posts – judiciously! – on Twitter and Facebook.
Lyse feels at home in many places but is still Canadian. She was educated in Canada, at Queen’s University, and the University of Toronto, and has been awarded several honorary doctorates as well as major journalism awards.

Janice Gross Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and was the Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto (serving from 1998 to the end of 2014). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. Her most recent publications include Networks of Knowledge: Innovation in International Learning (2000); The Cult of Efficiency (2001); and Street Protests and Fantasy Parks (2001). She is a contributor to Canada by Picasso (2006) and the co-author of The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (2007). She was the Massey Lecturer in 2001 and a Trudeau Fellow. She was awarded the Molson Prize by the Canada Council for an outstanding contribution by a social scientist to public debate. She is an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorate of Laws by the University of Alberta, the University of Cape Breton, McMaster University, and Hebrew University.

Description

The rise of China has coincided with, in the United States, a growing skepticism of “neoliberal” economic assumptions that were previously shared by policy elites across the U.S. political spectrum for decades. Are the two phenomena related? What might their relationship suggest about the future of U.S. domestic and foreign policy?

Tarun Chhabra is a fellow with the International Order and Strategy program at the Brookings Institution as well as Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. He has worked on the White House National Security Council staff, at the Pentagon, and at the United Nations. He also has been a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House and a Graduate Fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Chhabra holds a law degree from Harvard, where he was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans, an M.Phil in international relations from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. from Stanford.

Description

“Transformations of the Mind: Technology and the Future of Creativity”
A conversation with Jacek Dukaj

To RSVP, please email Prof. Aleksandra Swiecka at aleksandra.swiecka@utoronto.ca

Description

Translation is one of the spheres where the effects of an ideology are most visible because what is allowed and proscribed to exist in a culture is immediately reflected on the constraints surrounding the agents of translators e.g. the translators editors publishers and their resulting translational behavior. Rethinking the issue of translator agency within a framework of censorship can shed light on both the unusual and imperceptible constraints that impinge on translational activity. Through a review of a variety of scandalous translation cases that have generated much legal academic and public debate in Turkey this talk explores the question of translator agency under an emerging authoritarian regime with a focus on the institutional forms of censorship in the production of translated literature. By casting light on the multifaceted power relations between the agents of translation and institutions of power a study on censorship and translator agency also contributes to ongoing studies of how larger systems of culture and literature evolve.