Past Events

Description

This research project examines the transnational circuits of the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry in South Korea to demonstrate how the concepts of reproductive rights and labor have been contested, negotiated, and reconstructed by various actors—including infertile couples, gamete donors, gestational surrogates, state agents, and medical professionals—across national boundaries. This study envisions reproductive ethics as part of a transnational feminist agenda by examining the ethical issues raised by the complicated relationships between intended parents and gamete donors/gestational surrogates. Drawing on three years of multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Ukraine, this project disputes the unilateral understanding of ART, which is typically conceptualized as having a unidirectional flow from the “West” to Asia, by focusing on the complex relations between Korean intended parents and non-Korean gamete providers and gestational surrogates.

Dr. Sunhye Kim is currently the Soon Young Kim Postdoctoral Fellow in Korean Studies at the Korea Institute, Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D. in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland in 2018. She received her B.A. and B.A in Sociology at Yonsei University, Seoul, and worked at the Korean Women’s Development Institute as a researcher. Sunhye’s research and teaching interests are related to the politics of human (re)production in transnational Asia; in particular, her research centers on the study of the transnational circuits of the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry as a site of interdisciplinary inquiry.

Description

Join us for a conversation with David Miller, former mayor of Toronto, current C40 Regional Director for North America, and C40 Ambassador for Inclusive Climate Action to make sense of the City of Toronto election results and what they mean for Toronto’s role in responding to the global climate and sustainability crises.

The conversation will be moderated by Sara Hughes, Assistant Professor of Political Science and a member of the Environmental Governance Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Her research focuses on what cities can do to mitigate climate change and environmental degradation. Watch her TEDX here.

Description

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

Representatives from the following programs will be on hand:

Collaborative Master’s and Doctoral Program in South Asian Studies
Collaborative Master’s Program in Asia-Pacific Studies
Master of Arts in European and Russian Affairs
Master of Global Affairs
Master of Public Policy

A separate information session will be held for the Master of Global Affairs program 12:00-1:00pm.

For more information please contact: mga@utoronto.ca

To register please visit: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/munk-school-of-global-affairs-and-public-policy-graduate-programs-open-house-tickets-51304850188

Description

This event will celebrate two recently published books on the 19th century Ukraine: “Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s” by Johannes Remy (2016) and “Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905” by Serhiy Bilenky (2017).

Contrary to the prevailing opinion, the idea of Ukrainian independence did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth-century. In Brothers and Enemies, Johannes Remy reveals that the roots of Ukrainian independence were planted fifty years earlier. Remy contextualizes the Ukrainian national movement against the backdrop of the Russian Empire and its policy of oppression in the mid-nineteenth-century. Remy utilizes a wide range of unpublished archival sources to shed light on topics that are absent from current discourse including: Ilarion Vasilchikov’s alliance with Ukrainian activists in 1861, the forged revolutionary proclamation used to deport Pavlo Chubynsky (who is known today as the author of the Ukrainian national anthem), and the 1864 negotiations between Kyiv activists and the Polish National Government. Brothers and Enemies is the first systematic study of imperial censorship policies during the period and will be of interest to those who seek a better understanding of the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century Kyiv was an important city in the European part of the Russian empire, rivaling Warsaw in economic and strategic significance. It also held the unrivaled spiritual and ideological position as Russia’s own Jerusalem. In Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands, Serhiy Bilenky examines issues of space, urban planning, socio-spatial form, and the perceptions of change in imperial Kyiv. Combining cultural and social history with urban studies, Bilenky unearths a wide range of unpublished archival materials and argues that the changes experienced by the city prior to the revolution of 1917 were no less dramatic and traumatic than those of the Communist and post-Communist era. In fact, much of Kyiv’s contemporary urban form, architecture, and natural setting were shaped by imperial modernizers during the long nineteenth century. The author also explores a general culture of imperial urbanism in Eastern Europe. Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands is the first work to approach the history of Kyiv from an interdisciplinary perspective and showcases Kyiv’s rightful place as a city worthy of attention from historians, urbanists, and literary scholars.

Description

Open, collective, experimental and sustainable. Taiwan’s first Digital Minister Audrey Tang’s talk will show what happens when people who grew up on the internet get their hands on the building blocks of government. As a self-described “conservative anarchist” and a so-called “white-hat hacker,” Audrey Tang will show how she works with her team to channel greater combinations of intelligence into policy-making decisions and public services delivery. She will also discuss “tech for good” and how Taiwan is “SDG indexing everything.” For more information, please view two recent articles on Apolitical (links below) which help elucidate Audrey and her philosophy.

“Reprogramming power: Audrey Tang is bringing hacker culture to the state”

“Meet the network tearing down walls between departments in Taiwan”

Speaker’s Biography:

Audrey Tang (唐鳳)
Digital Minister, Taiwan

Audrey is known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin.

In the public sector, Audrey serves on Taiwan National Development Council’s open data committee and K-12 curriculum committee; and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project. Audrey joined the cabinet as Digital Minister on Oct 1st, 2016.

In the private sector, Audrey works as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design.

In the third sector, Audrey actively contributes to Taiwan’s g0v (“gov-zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government”.

Description

A featured event for Holocaust Education Week presented by the cultural service of the French Embassy, the Goethe Institut Toronto, the Austrian Embassy, the Alliance Française, in collaboration with the CEFMF (Centre d’études de la France et du Monde Francophone) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, with the support of the EUNIC Cluster Fund.

Entrance free

This event will be held in English. Please follow the registration link above for a full program.

With millions of pages of historical documents, photographs and film recorded by perpetrators, victims and rescuers, along with thousands of hours of recorded testimony from survivors as well as perpetrators, the Holocaust is the most documented case of genocide in the world. Yet much remains unknown, awaiting discovery.

This year’s program sheds light on untold stories, new research, and marginalized histories of the Holocaust. Holocaust Education Week 2018 creates a platform for them to be heard and understood, expanding the familiar picture and leading us to a more robust and complex understanding of the multidimensional nature of the Holocaust.

The postwar trials, the opening of the Red Cross archives through the International Tracing Service, and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe which enabled scholars to access Soviet-era holdings, all contributed to new insights into the complexity and context of how the Holocaust unfolded. Yet even with access to these extensive collections, much remains unknown, awaiting discovery.

In partnership with the Neuberger Center and Holocaust Education Week, the Toronto EUNIC cluster (Goethe Institute, Alliance Française, Austrian Forum, Istituto Italiano) and the Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World (CEFMF) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy are working to cast light on lesser-known narratives of the Holocaust, gathered through original and innovative archival work.

Description

Event description:

As part of the events related to the 100th Anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s Independence in 1918, CERES is hosting a talk on events in contemporary Slovakia with one of the region’s leading experts.

Speaker: Milan Nič, Senior Fellow, German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), Berlin
Milan Nič is a senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin and outgoing head of Europe program at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia. He is also non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
His expertise includes the EU, Central Europe and the Visegrad Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), European security, the Western Balkans, EU and NATO enlargement, and transatlantic relations.
Nič began his professional carrier as a broadcaster at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty covering the transition period in Central and Eastern Europe. He was later program director at the Pontis Foundation, adviser to the High Representative/EU Special Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina Miroslav Lajčák, and senior adviser to the Deputy Foreign Minister of Slovakia in the government of Iveta Radičová (2010-2012). In 2010, he co-authored a book of essays on the EU and Slovak foreign policy with Tomas Valasek, Balazs Jarabik, Jana Kobzova, and others.
Nič earned his MPhil from the Charles University in Prague, his MA at the Central European University in Budapest, and also studied at the Bologna Center of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

CERES

Chair: Robert C Austin

Description

During the Cold War, more than 36,000 individuals entering Canada claimed Czechoslovakia as their country of citizenship. A defining characteristic of this migration of predominantly political refugees was the prevalence of anti-communist and democratic values. Diplomats, industrialists, politicians, professionals, workers, and students fled to the West in search of freedom, security, and economic opportunity.

Jan Raska’s Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada explores how these newcomers joined or formed ethnocultural organizations to help in their attempts to affect developments in Czechoslovakia and Canadian foreign policy towards their homeland. Canadian authorities further legitimized the Czech refugees’ anti-communist agenda and increased their influence in Czechoslovak institutions. In turn, these organizations supported Canada’s Cold War agenda of securing the state from communist infiltration. Ultimately, an adherence to anti-communism, the promotion of Canadian citizenship, and the cultivation of a Czechoslovak ethnocultural heritage accelerated Czech refugees’ socioeconomic and political integration in Cold War Canada.

By analyzing oral histories, government files, ethnic newspapers, and community archival records, Raska reveals how Czech refugees secured admission as desirable immigrants and navigated existing social, cultural, and political norms in Cold War Canada.

Jan Raska, PhD is a historian with the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, Halifax.

Description

Making and Re-Making Europe: The Czech and Slovak Contribution Draft Agenda

Conference Patron: The Cvachovec Foundation

7 – 9 November 2018

In honour of the celebration in 2018 of the founding of Czechoslovakia, remembering fifty years since the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, and the events of 1989 and after, the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy will hold a two-day conference to mark these important anniversaries and give visibility to the contribution of Czechs and Slovaks in Europe and North America. The conference combines academic panels, films and a graduate student conference.

November 7

Pre-conference events:

2:00-4:00 pm – Slovakia: Big Dreams and Fears of a Small Country – Milan Nič

4:00-5:15 pm – Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada – Jan Raska

Conference opening:

5:30 PM Evening Cultural Event
Havel and Underground Culture.
Michael Kilburn, Endicott College, Beverly, Massachusetts. Paul Wilson, Writer and Translator.
Michael Žantovský, Václav Havel Library, Prague, Czech Republic.

Dramatic Readings from Tom Stoppard’s “Rock and Roll” and Václav Havel’s “Protest”

Two Photo exhibits are open to the public in Cloister of the Munk School for viewing throughout the conference.

Description

ABSTRACT:

Recent scholarship from the US and Asia critiques how US historiographies of post-war development in Asia, shaped by Cold War liberalism, painted imperialism in Asia as largely benevolent, supporting the universal interests of humanism, democracy, and freedom. In this talk, I will look into Wu Nien-Jen’s film Buddha Bless America (1996) to offer critical reflections on the connection between militarism and the postcolonial development of nation building in its “authoritarian” forms, especially measured against the Western liberal language of rights, democracy and sovereignty. I examine how this cultural text renders imperialist violence visible in what is otherwise portrayed as unqualified medical humanitarianism and development, even as it reifies a liberal language of medical and scientific progress for national rehabilitation in the mutual co-constitution of US and Taiwan modernities from the 1960s onwards. Perceiving Buddha Bless America as a putatively post-Cold War cultural production that is integral to the historical reconstruction of Taiwanese liberal nationalism, my reading suggests that a post-authoritarian democratization – one that would be achieved by demanding rights and liberty via Western modernity – paradoxically obscures the process of re-militarization in a racialized biopolitical regime of organizing and managing life, labor, security, health, and dis/ability.

BIOGRAPHY:

Professor Chien-Ting Lin teaches in the English Department of the National Central University of Chungli, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in literature and cultural studies from University of California, San Diego. He has published his research in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Review of International American Studies, and Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies. His current book project tentatively entitled, Fugitive Subjects of “Secret Doctors”: Politics of Life and Labor in Taiwan’s Medical Modernity, investigates transpacific colonial and neocolonial formations of knowledge production and hierarchies of reproductive labor and life politics within different periods of Taiwan’s medical modernization.

Description

Pension reform is all over the news in contemporary Russia. This talk will look at another period in which pension reform was a ‘hot topic’: the postwar years. During the Second World War, the Soviet government’s spending on pensions and other social welfare benefits tripled, yet, most pensions were far from enough to meet the cost of living and pensioners remained some of the poorest members of Soviet society. This talk will place pension reform within the Soviet state’s larger economic project of improving living standards by increasing the real value of money in ordinary citizens’ hands, a project that began in the late Stalin years but came to fruition under Khrushchev in 1956.

Kristy Ironside is an Assistant Professor of Russian History at McGill University. She is currently writing a book on the role of money in the pursuit of prosperity in the postwar Soviet Union. She has published articles on the Soviet welfare state, lotteries, taxation, and fundraising in Kritika, Slavic Review, the Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, Europe-Asia Studies, and the Journal of Social History. She recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post on pension reform in contemporary Russia.

Description

ABSTRACT:

In the eyes of many foreign observers, one of the most puzzling aspects of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) was the continual in-fighting among anticommunists. Most accounts depict these internal conflicts as simply a struggle for power, but I contend that they also constituted a battle of ideas. Specifically, the presentation examines the debate between Ngô Đình Diệm and rival anticommunist nationalists in the summer and fall of 1955. Virtually all anticommunists agreed that the regime should become a constitutional republic, and they unanimously called for a democracy. Yet the seeming consensus belied starkly different definitions of democratic government. Diệm’s faction and the political parties associated with the southern sects called for a hybrid regime, that is, a regime that combined elements of authoritarianism and democracy. The sect parties demanded greater pluralism than Diệm, though the difference was of degree rather than of kind. The debate took a decidedly more liberal direction under the influence of the émigré politician Phan Quang Đán. Đán advocated for a militant democracy, that is, a full-fledged democracy that minimally limited liberty only to protect itself from extremist forces seeking to subvert democracy. In the end, Diệm prevailed over his rivals because he and his followers controlled the government. By seriously examining the diversity of political ideas in the RVN, the presentation suggests that the regime’s seeming intractable factionalism arose from substantive disagreements rather than factional squabbling.

Description

ABSTRACT:

If, as Umberto Eco has argued, a work of art can be read as an “epistemological metaphor,” then the fictional world created by a film can also be read as an analogical comment on the knowability of the “real” world. This paper explores two models of cinematic realism, one totalizing and one apophatic, the former represented by Edward Yang’s Yi Yi and the latter by the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien. The former raises the ideal of cinema as a means of revealing even the hidden aspects of reality and thereby providing increased epistemological certainty. In contrast, through techniques including editing ellipses and the mobilization of off-screen space, Hou’s realism paradoxically represents a reality that defies or exceeds representation and therefore can only be represented in a negative or subtractive manner. It will further be argued that the two modes of realism reflect opposing impulses in a central dialectic of modernity.

BIOGRAPHY:

Jason McGrath is Associate Professor in Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota, with affiliations in Moving Image Studies and Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. His current book project is entitled Inscribing the Real: Realism and Convention in Chinese Cinema from the Silent Era to the Digital Age.

Description

Five years ago Ukraine erupted in massive protests that came to be known as the Euromaidan. What’s changed and what hasn’t in the time that has passed? A panel of international and Canadian experts look at the key issues from a variety of perspectives.

Marta Dyczok is Associate Professor at the Departments of History and Political Science, Western University, and Adjunct Professor at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. She has published five books, including Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Broadcasting through Information Wars with Hromadske Radio (2016) Ukraine Twenty Years After Independence: Assessments, Perspectives, Challenges (co-edited with Giovanna Brogi, 2015), Media, Democracy and Freedom. The Post-Communist Experience (co-edited with Oxana Gaman-Golutvina, 2009), articles in various journals including The Russian Journal of Communication (2014), Demokratizatsiya (2014), and regularly provides media commentary. Her doctorate is from Oxford University and she researches mass media, memory, migration, and history.

Olexiy Haran is Professor of Comparative Politics at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy (UKMA). In 1991 93, he was Dean and organizer of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the re-born Kyiv Mohyla Academy. Since 2002, he has served as Founding Director of the UKMA School for Policy Analysis, and since 2015 as Research Director at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a leading Ukrainian analytical and sociological think tank. He is the co-editor of Constructing a Political Nation: Changes in the Attitudes of Ukrainians during the War in the Donbas (2017), Ukraine in Europe: Questions and Answers (2009), Russia and Ukraine: Ten Years of Transformation (Moscow 2003) and several other books. Also, he is a frequent commentator in Ukrainian and international media.In winter 2013-2014, Prof. Haran was a member of the Council of ‘Maidan’ movement. As a political scientist he spent several weeks at the frontline nearby Mariupol, Luhansk, Avdiivka, and Donetsk airport. He is a member of Public Council under Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and a member of Washington-based Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS-Eurasia).

Dr. Olga Onuch (DPhil Oxford 2010) is a Senior Lecturer [Associate Professor] in Politics. She joined the University of Manchester in 2014, after holding research posts at the University of Toronto (2010-2011), University of Oxford (2011-2014) and Harvard University (2013-2014). She is an Associate of Nuffield College (Oxford) and of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Onuch was also a Research Fellow at the Davis Center (Harvard) in 2017. Onuch’s comparative study of protest (as well as elections, migration & identity) in Eastern Europe and Latin America has made her a leading expert in Ukrainian and Argentine politics specifically, but also in inter-regional comparative analysis. Her book “Mapping Mass Mobilizations” (2014, reviewed in Europe-Asia Studies), explores the processes leading up to mass protest engagement in Ukraine (2004) and Argentina (2001). She is the author of several scholarly articles (in Journal of Democracy, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Post-Soviet Affairs, GeoPolitics among other journals), book chapters, and policy briefs.

Description

The nature of Chinese investment abroad is changing. As China reaffirms its commitment to its “going global” strategy and the One Belt One Road initiative, China’s continued investment in regions such as Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia has caught the world’s attention. What are the implications of China’s shifting investment strategy for the global economy and the international system? To what extent are security and geopolitical concerns about Chinese investment abroad (both by the state and by the private sector) justified? How does China’s investment strategy reflect its shifting state and foreign policy challenges? How have these challenges changed the relationship between the Chinese government and the private sector, or transformed the Chinese approach to foreign investment? Please join us for this important dialogue with Professor Lynette Ong and Professor Howard Lin on November 13th, from 12:30pm-2pm. This event will take place in Room 108N, 1 Devonshire Place (North House, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy).

Description

In his presentation, Uzbekistan’s Ambassador to the United States and Canada, Javlon Vakhabov, will discuss significant economic, political, and social reforms in Uzbekistan, as well as prospects for close partnerships in Canada.

Description

The Trudeau Centre Fellow in Peace, Conflict and Justice is for Political Science doctoral students at the University of Toronto who are conducting research in areas related to peace, conflict and justice. You can read about our three PCJ fellows here.

The recipients of this award become fellows of the Centre and have the opportunity to participate in its academic life. This includes presenting about their research at a ‘Trudeau Fellows Talk’ organized by the PCJ Society.

Description

Abstract:  Over the course of the 20th century, the United States’ military thinking has increasingly focused on the interaction between soldiers and technology, from ideas like cybernetics through to a present focus on technologies like electrical brain stimulation, exoskeletons and augmented reality visors. This project addressed these present technological fascinations and how they exemplify a particular and novel approach to the relationship between soldier and technology. In examining this relationship, I traced the political economy, material implications, and ideologies surrounding and producing these emerging technologies, many of which have not (and may never) see the battlefield. This project followed three sites of military technological development and circulation: The Academy, The Start-Up City, and The Arms Fair in order to understand how war and its fighters are imagined and made, before and beyond the battlefield

Description

In Detained Daniel Livermore analyzes the emergence of Islamic fundamentalist extremism and its Canadian implications, including the erroneous investigations that targeted Canadians and led to their detentions in Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia, and Sudan. Scrutinizing the most prominent cases, he details the role of Canadian agencies in the imprisonments and relates how subsequent court cases brought the situations to light, resulting in settlements and apologies to Ahmad Abou-El-Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and Maher Arar, among others. Drawing on his experience in Canada’s foreign ministry, Livermore explains how an essentially misguided War on Terror emerged and how Canadian-American cooperation went wrong.

Daniel Livermore, former director general of security and intelligence at the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, is senior fellow at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and senior visiting fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at Trinity College and the Munk School, University of Toronto.

Description

The Munk School is proud to host Dr. Jesús Seade, lead Mexican negotiator on NAFTA, for a keynote address on November 15, 2018.
Dr. Seade will discuss the future of North American trade and will then engage in a Q&A from the audience.
The event is open to the public.

Dr. Jesús Seade

Dr. Jesús Seade, holds D.Phil. and B.Phil. degrees (Economics) from Oxford University and BSc in Chemical Engineering from Mexico’s UNAM. He has led a very global career straddling academia (in UK, France, Mexico, Hong Kong and China) and high-level public service nationally and internationally (Mexico’s multilateral ambassador in the creation of WTO; and top or senior officer in the three leading global economic bodies: WTO in Geneva, and World Bank and IMF in Washington DC). As Ambassador to GATT, he led Mexico’s playing a very influential and constructive role in the creation of WTO. As WTO Deputy Director-General he led economic work and relations with governments, legislatures, press and business sectors in member countries around the world. As IMF Senior Advisor he held final responsibility, under the IMF Board, for IMF policies (inc. each disbursement) towards three major countries in financial crisis in 1998-2001: Brazil, Argentina and Turkey, and later presided over all IMF transparency work (fiscal, banking and data). As an academic, he has influential publications listed in doctoral programs in the US and Europe for over 30 years, in public finance, market structure and international trade. In Hong Kong and China he has been Vice-President of two leading universities and, in HK, he was a member of the Advisory Boards of the ministers of trade and of financial services. He has been appointed Chief NAFTA Negotiator of the Government of the virtual President Elect of Mexico Mr. Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Description

The registration for this event is now CLOSED. Rush tickets will be available but entries are not guaranteed.

Please arrive 30 minutes before the show at the Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave. (entrance off of St. George Street).

Canada/Malaysia 2017
82:00
English, Malay with English subtitles
PG • Toronto Premiere

Director
Ashley Duong (in attendance)

Cast
Mutang Urud
Noeli Urud
Agan Urud
Natasha Blanchet-Cohen

Official Selection
2018 CAAMFest
2017 LA Asian Pacific Film Fest

Much has changed in Sarawak, Malaysia since Mutang Urud was exiled to Montreal, Canada, more than 20 years ago. A renowned activist for Indigenous rights, Mutang has started a family and now lives as a stay-at-home dad. Filmmaker Ashley Duong follows Mutang as he travels with his family back to Borneo to reunite with his village relations, their travel visa contingent on Mutang staying away from the local politics.

The remote village in Sarawak, however, is not like he remembers it. His cousins who once fought for the forest alongside him have joined forces with the logging companies that are destroying it. Despite the threat of a lingering arrest warrant, Mutang can’t deny his activism. A Time To Swim traces Mutang’s search for belonging in a village where everyone is related, yet the very idea of home and heritage seems to be slipping away. – KE

Ashley Duong is a Montreal-based filmmaker and multimedia storyteller working to amplify marginalized voices. A Time to Swim is her feature-length directorial debut. She has also recently produced Land and Legends, an interactive podcast about the connection between the landscapes and myths of the Kelabit.

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

Please note, registration opens 30 minutes before showtime. Please arrive early as all tickets become void as of 15 minutes before showtime.

Description

ABSTRACT:

My talk advances consideration of the relations between the settler-colonial logic of elimination and the capitalist logic of exploitation through the prism of racism. The settler-colonial studies paradigm has convincingly established that its distinct mode of domination is the structure of elimination, not exploitation, and racism plays a decisive role in this eliminatory politics. But it rarely explores the way in which racism not only mediates but also shapes the relations between elimination and exploitation in the formation of capitalist society. This talk is an attempt to address this under-theorized terrain by taking the Ainu – indigenous people of present-day Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, and Kuril Islands – and their systematic dispossession by Meiji-era imperial Japan as a focal point of analysis.

BIOGRAPHY:

Katsuya Hirano teaches history at UCLA. He is the author of The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan (U of Chicago Press). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on cultural and intellectual history of Japan, Fukushima nuclear disaster, settler colonialism, and critical theory, including “Thanatopolitics in the Making of Japan’s Hokkaido: Settler Colonialism and Primitive Accumulation” (Critical Historical Studies). His current book project examines the relation between racism and capitalism in the making of the imperial Japanese nation with a focus on the settler-colonization of the lands that once belonged to the indigenous Ainu.

Description

Contemporary International History is a highly popular graduate program at outstanding universities, and undergraduate courses in the field are often filled first. Popular histories and even academic studies of wars since 1939 occupy frequently appear on bestseller lists, and filmmakers seek out spy stories and tales of international intrigue. Yet within the university, particularly in history departments, contemporary international history has been in retreat for several decades. Many smaller departments lack a specialist in the field, and historians in most universities do not participate in thriving International Relations programs. There is no counterpart among historians to the International Studies Association with its large annual conference and significant international range. This conference will assess the state of the field of Contemporary International History, its past, present, and future. Bringing together prominent international scholars, political scientists whose work reflects historical research, and younger academics undertaking new directions, the conference will provide a better understanding of the importance of Contemporary International History in the academy and in public discourse and policymaking.

Sunday, November 18
12:30 – 12:40 pm Welcome Remarks
Provost Mayo Moran and Professor Carol Chin

12:40 – 2:00 pm
Panel One: The State of United States International History
Daniel Sargent, University of California, Berkeley
William Hitchcock, University of Virginia
Chair / Commentator: Carol Chin, University of Toronto

2:00 – 2:20 pm Coffee Break

2:20 – 3:50 pm
Panel Two: The State of Canadian International History
Asa McKercher, Royal Military College
Greg Donaghy, Dept. of Global Affairs
Jack Cunningham, Trinity College, University of Toronto
Chair / Commentator: Jon Allen, Munk School of Global Affairs and
Public Policy, University of Toronto

3:50 – 5:10 pm
Panel Three: Launch of Canada Declassified
Matt Wiseman, University of Toronto
Tim Sayle, University of Toronto
John Dirks, Trinity College
Elizabetta Kerr, University of Toronto
Chair / Commentator: John Kirton, University of Toronto

Monday, November 19

9:15 – 10:30 am
Keynote Address: Margaret MacMillan, Oxford University
Chair: The Hon. Bill Graham (introduced by Provost Mayo Moran)

10:30 – 10:45 am
Coffee Break

10:45 – 12:15 pm
Panel Four: New Approaches to International History
Julie Gilmour, University of Toronto
Simon Miles, Duke University
Chair / Commentator: Andres Kasekamp, University of Toronto

12:15 – 1:30 pm Lunch

1:30 – 3:00pm
Address: International History Today and Tomorrow
Fredrik Logevall, Harvard University (introduced by Janice Stein) Chair / Commentator: Ron Pruessen, University of Toronto

3:00 – 3:15 pm Coffee Break

3:15 – 4:45 pm
Panel Six: The Next Generation of International Historians
Susan Colbourn, Yale University Tim Sayle, University of Toronto Cindy Ewing, University Of Toronto
Michael Morgan, University of NorthCarolina
Chair / Commentator: John English, University of Toronto

4:45 – 5:00 pm
Closing Remarks
Robert Bothwell, University of Toronto

5:00 – 6:00 pm
Book Launch: The Final Act
Michael Morgan

Description

The topic of this academic seminar is situated in the global shift of retreating American global leadership. America’s protectionist and isolationist tendencies have given rise to competing views about the world order, and contending emerging powers who may champion or restructure the liberal rules-based international system. China’s increasingly proactive foreign policy and the initiative of European states to uphold principles such as free trade hint at future prospects for further collaboration among like-minded partners, outside of traditional alliance networks. For example, in the area of global environmental governance, China’s growing portfolio in renewable energy investment and climate action is aligning it with the interests and positions of countries such as France and Germany. This raises the question of whether Europe and China should still be viewed in a East vs West dichotomy, or rather now as potential partners with shared policy priorities and collaborative approaches to global governance. Please join us – our speakers Professor Robert Austin, Dr. Anton Malkin, Mr. Bowen Yu and Mr. Asif Farooq will discuss China-EU relations, China’s role in the Balkans, Made in China 2025 and its implications for China-EU relations, and more!

Description

Changes to federal housing policy in Mexico in the 1990s helped finance the largest housing boom in the country’s history. During the 2000s, millions of Mexicans acquired mortgages to buy homes in the fringes of cities throughout the country. At the same time, decentralization efforts were under way to increase the capacity of local governments to, among other things, manage urban growth. Yet, even large municipalities have been ill equipped to provide adequate infrastructure and services to the new remote housing locations that have popped up in the last two decades. Furthermore, an increasing number of Mexican households have struggled to keep up with their mortgage payments with the result that some new developments have alarmingly high housing vacancy rates, all while about a third of Mexicans live in poor housing conditions.

What can Mexico’s experience teach other cities and countries as they confront their own housing challenges? On November 19, IMFG Post-Doctoral Fellow Alejandra Reyes will present on the tension between federal housing finance strategies and municipal governance and implementation, the policy shortcomings at different levels, and the implications of a lack of coordination.

Speaker

Alejandra Reyes is the 2018-2019 Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance. She received her BA in Architecture at UC Berkeley and an MS and PhD in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of housing and urban development, policy and governance, and socioeconomic disparities.

Seating is limited for this event, and registration is required. Register for this event

Description

THERE IS AN ONGOING DEBATE ABOUT WHETHER JAPAN IS—and if not, whether it can or should become—a “normal country.” For decades the received wisdom has been that Japan—at least in its international presence—lacked something vitally necessary for it to be taken seriously and treated with the respect befitting a country of its size and sophistication.  Despite the general sense that Japan was not a “normal” country, neither the Japanese people, nor their leaders and officials, have been able to agree on the nature of the problem and the appropriate solution. For that matter, it has been a matter of some debate whether there is even a problem to fix. In what sense, if at all, is Japan an “abnormal” country? What would it mean for it to become normal?  In 2011, the University of Toronto Press published a collection of essays on this theme[1]. The purpose of this symposium was to look back on the analysis in that volume to see how well it has stood up in the intervening tumultuous years, and what, if anything, we can learn from that exercise to inform Japanese policy and Japan’s regional and global role in the next several years to come. In addition, in view of the fact that 2018  marked the 90th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Canada and Japan, what role might Canada play as a constructive partner?  [1] Yoshihide Soeya, Masayuki Tadokoro, and David A. Welch, eds., Japan as a ‘Normal Country’? A Nation in Search of Its Place in the World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

 Panelist Biographies:   Yoshihide Soeya is Professor of political science and international relations at the Faculty of Law of Keio University. His areas of interest are politics and security in East Asia, and Japanese diplomacy and its external relations. He received Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1987, majoring in world politics. He served as the Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies of the same university for six years until September 2013, and as the Director of its Center for Contemporary Korean Studies for five years until March 2016. Recently, Dr. Soeya was a Japan Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. from September 2013 to January 2014, and a Korea Foundation Fellow affiliated with the ASAN Institute in Seoul in March-May 2014. His most recent publications in English include “The Rise of China in Asia: Japan at the Nexus,” in Asle Toje, ed., Will China’s Rise be Peaceful? Security, Stability, and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and “The Case for an Alternative Strategy for Japan: Beyond the Article 9-Alliance Regime,” in Michael J. Green and Zack Cooper, eds., Postwar Japan: Growth, Security and Uncertainty since 1945 (Washington D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2017).  

Masayuki Tadokoro is Professor of International Relations at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. Born in Osaka, he attended Kyoto University and the London School of Economics. Previously he was a professor at the National Defense Academy. In 1988-89, he stayed in Washington D.C. a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and in 1991 he taught for a semester as Fulbright Scholar in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary field is international political economy, but he works also on Japanese foreign and security policy. His publications include International Political Economy (Nagoya University Press, 2008); The Dollar transcends “America” (Chuokoron Shinsha, 2001); and The Realities of the UN: A Budgetary Analysis (Yuhikaku, 1996). His recent publications in English include, “After the Dollar?”, International Relations of the Asia Pacific 10:3 (2010); and “Why did Japan fail to become the ‘Britain’ of Asia”, in David Wolff et al., eds., The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective (Brill, 2007). He also edited with David Welch and Yoshihide Soeya, Japan as a ‘Normal Country’?: A Nation in Search of Its Place in the World, (Toronto U.P. 2011). Changed Discourses on Demography in Japan, in Silvio Beretta et al, eds, Italy and Japan: How Similar Are They? , (Springer, 2014).  

David A. Welch is CIGI Chair of Global Security at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. His 2005 book Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change (Princeton University Press) is the inaugural winner of the International Studies Association ISSS Book Award for the best book published in 2005 or 2006, and his 1993 book Justice and the Genesis of War (Cambridge University Press) is the winner of the 1994 Edgar S. Furniss Award for an Outstanding Contribution to National Security Studies.  Welch is also co-author of Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation 10th ed. (Pearson Longman, 2016); Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy had Lived (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Concise History (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 2011); On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis(2nd ed., Noonday 1990); and Cuba on the Brink: Castro, The Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (2nd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).  Welch is also co-editor of Japan as a ‘Normal Country’? A Nation In Search of Its Place in the World (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Frank Cass, 1998).  His articles have appeared in Asian Perspective, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Ethics and International Affairs, Foreign Affairs, The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Intelligence and National Security, International Security, International Journal, International Negotiation, International Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Mershon International Studies Review, The Review of International Studies, and Security Studies.

Description

Yuri Andrukhovych is among the most popular writers in Ukraine today. He is the author of the best selling novels, Recreations, The Moscoviad, Perversion, The Twelve Rings and others. The event will include a book launch for his most recent collection of essays in English, My Final Territory, University of Toronto Press, 2018. Also available will be his most recent Ukrainian novel, Kokhantsi iustytsii (The Darlings of Justice).

Description

The Trudeau Centre Fellow in Peace, Conflict and Justice is for Political Science doctoral students at the University of Toronto who are conducting research in areas related to peace, conflict and justice. You can read about our three PCJ fellows here.

The recipients of this award become fellows of the Centre and have the opportunity to participate in its academic life. This includes presenting about their research at a ‘Trudeau Fellows Talk’ organized by the PCJ Society.

Description

Ori Yehudai teaches Jewish and Israeli history at the University of Toronto.He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago and has previously held positions at NYU and McGill. His main research interests include modern Jewish and Israeli history, migration and displacement, and the reconstruction of the Jewish after the Holocaust. He has recently completed a book manuscript entitled “Leaving Zion: Jewish Emigration from Palestine and Israel after World War II.”

Description

LECTURE IN THE ARTS, HISTORIES, LITERATURES, AND RELIGIONS OF BURMA

One of the Buddha Gotama’s numerous epithets was opamma kusalo muni – sage skilled in parables, exemplified in his life as Mahosadha. The remains of an early second millennium Burmese kingdom, named after its ceremonial center, Pagan, preserve several visual narratives of the story. They incorporate a labyrinth image to represent the setting where medicine curing human ailments was dispensed, and riddles and judicial problems were resolved – antecedent of the Bodhimanda – site of Gotama’s Awakening. Sometime in the late 11th century an unknown artisan, guided by a learned though anonymous Buddhist monk, selected the labyrinth image to reference his society’s conception of the human predicament. That monk’s vastly better known Christian counterparts, a millennium earlier and in another part of the world, chose likewise. The lecture speculates on the reasons and significance of the monk’s choice in the Pagan context.

Biography:

Lilian Handlin is a historian. She received her doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she taught until 1977. She is the author and co-author of several books, including the four volume Liberty in America,1600 to the Present (New York, 1986 – 1995) as well as articles and reviews in American history. More recently, she began to publish articles concerned with Myanmar’s early history, grounded in the material culture surviving the kingdom of Pagan. One of her publications compares two Pagan era narratives of the Vessantara with its first Burmese vernacular version composed by an influential 18th century Burmese monk and commentator. The article was published in Steven Collins, ed., Readings in the Vessantara Jataka (New York, Columbia University Press, 2016). An examination of the myth of the Buddha’s eye teeth, in the Pagan context, appeared this summer in Cristophe Munier Gaillard, ed., Mural Art, Studies on Paintings in Asia (Bangkok 2018).

Description

The Taiwan Alumni Association of Toronto (TAAT) invites all students/researchers interested in Taiwan to an evening of networking and discussion. Come and join us to meet, mingle, and learn more about our activities.

6:30 Reception: Refreshments and light snack will be served

7:00 Keynote Speaker Chungsen Leung: From International Student to MP in One Generation

Description

How did Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election? And what does his victory say about the future of American politics and society? At this event, John Sides will present an overview of his new book, Identity Crisis, and will then engage in conversation with Sam Tanenhaus and the audience on the future of American politics.

John Sides is a Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and the Editor of The Monkey Cage, a Washington Post-hosted blog. Sam Tanenhaus is an award-winning American writer and journalist who has worked as an editor at the New York Times and Vanity Fair. He is presently writing a biography of William F. Buckley and is a Senior Fellow in Public Policy at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a Visiting Professor at St. Michael’s University at the University of Toronto.

Description

Climate change is an urgent universal crisis facing all human beings. The impacts of climate change are potentially catastrophic and are unevenly distributed among different cities and countries due to environmental, geographical, social, political, and economic factors, rooted in systemic inequalities. Building resilience to climate change is complex, particularly in rapidly growing cities of Southeast Asia. In response to climate change, globalization, and urbanization, many Southeast Asian cities are experiencing a dramatic transformation due to socioeconomic and environmental challenges, especially under China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) initiative.

This symposium invites scholars and practitioners across different sectors to share the latest knowledge development in the field and explore cutting-edge approaches. It hopes to further strengthen links between a community of climate leaders connected to the ground; and generate opportunities for collaboration in future urban climate resilience governance.

The symposium consists of two major sessions: a webinar (8:30-11:30 am) via Facebook Live and a panel discussion (2:00-4:00 pm).

During the webinar, ten scholars and practitioners across the world with expertise in climate issues in Southeast Asia will present their work through Facebook Live (https://www.facebook.com/ucrsea/). Each invited speaker will make a 3-minute elevator pitch to address the most critical environmental/climate issue in the region by answering the following questions briefly:

1. What is the most urgent environmental/climate issue in your city/country?
2. Why is it important?
3. What can we do?

A 10-minute Q&A session will follow each elevator pitch.

To register, please fill out a form found in https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeLnQjKQtoCTe9emvtUMrZeA_tET1SXfxXRWwZ0S8HEQQo4kg/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1.

Description

Although migration scholarship has long theorized how immigrants form new identities and build communities in the hostland, its foundational frameworks have thus far focused largely on the contexts of the sending and receiving countries. Yet, when immigrants arrive from one society to settle in another, their interactions with various immigrant and native groups produce contact across diverse cultures—not just of the society from which they come and to which they now live, but also of societies in faraway foreign lands to which they have never traveled. These ties to places that are neither the immigrants’ homeland nor hostland are facilitated by social media and
24/7 cable news, invoking collective identities that cut across borders and causing spillover effects of global events that shape both how others view immigrants and how immigrants view themselves. Using ethnographic data and Facebook activities of South Asian Muslim Americans in California during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, I trace how: 1) social media moderates the impact of global political events and facilitate feelings of solidarity by filtering who, where, and what matters to the host society and thereby the immigrants in it; and 2) how the immigrants themselves use social media to express and perform feelings of solidarity with peoples in distant foreign lands as they enmesh themselves into the politics of the hostland. Overall, these findings highlight the need to analyze immigrant identity-making within a broader framework that can encompass geopolitics not just in the immigrant sending and receiving countries, but also beyond.

Speaker bio:
Tahseen Shams is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Toronto. Her research interests are in the areas of international migration, globalization, race/ethnicity, nationalism, and religion.
Broadly, she studies how transnational, global forms of inequality intersect with race and ethnicity to affect immigrant groups, particularly those coming from Muslim-majority countries to the United States and Canada. Her work has received funding from the National Science Foundation and has produced publications in Sociological Forum and Ethnic and Racial Studies among others. Currently, she is writing a book on how global geopolitics shapes Muslim American and immigrant identities. She is also pursuing two separate but related research
projects: one on Muslim American panethnicity, and the other on how U.S. sociopolitics surrounding Islam and Muslims affects the identity-work of Muslim immigrants in Canada.

Description

The Trudeau Centre Fellow in Peace, Conflict and Justice is for Political Science doctoral students at the University of Toronto who are conducting research in areas related to peace, conflict and justice. You can read about our three PCJ fellows here.

The recipients of this award become fellows of the Centre and have the opportunity to participate in its academic life. This includes presenting about their research at a ‘Trudeau Fellows Talk’ organized by the PCJ Society.

Description

N.B.: This event will be presented in French.

De Gaulle, le Québec et le Canada: un bilan historiographique 50 ans après /
De Gaulle, Quebec and Canada: An Historiographic Review 50 Years Later

Il y a 50 ans, lorsque de Gaulle a crié à Montréal “Vive le Québec libre”, il a semé la consternation en France, au Canada et seuls les indépendantistes et les nationalistes québécois semblent avoir apprécié son discours. Depuis, l’historiographie s’est chargée de décortiquer les raisons de son discours, ainsi que l’histoire plus large des relations France-Québec sous de Gaulle et les conséquences pour le Québec, de sa présidence. Les avis sont partagés, encore aujourd’hui, concernant la vision de de Gaulle sur le Québec et de ses projets, planifiés ou non, pour ses cousins d’outre-mer. Par contre, l’historiographie récente des relations franco-québécoises, a souligné un élément consensuel entre les chercheurs; celui de l’impact fondamental de de Gaulle sur la redécouverte de la France au Québec, mais aussi au Canada à travers les enjeux de la francophonie au sein même de la jeune diplomatie canadienne. Nous aborderons cette redécouverte à travers un bilan historiographique qui témoigne de la richesse de cette histoire.

When de Gaulle came to Montreal fifty years ago and shouted ‘’Vive le Québec libre’’, he spread dismay among the French and Canadian populations, and only the independentists and nationalists from Quebec seemed to have appreciated his words. Since then, historiography broke down the reasons for his speech as well as the wider historical ‘’France-Québec’’ relationship while de Gaulle was in power and the consequences of his presidency for Quebeckers. To date, opinions remain divided as to what de Gaulle’s vision and future projects for Quebec (his overseas cousins) were, whether these were planned or not. However, the recent historiography highlighted that there was a consensus on one element between the researchers; that being de Gaulle’s fundamental impact on the rediscovery of France in Quebec and in Canada, through what was at stake for the Francophony, within the young Canadian diplomatic circle itself. We will discuss this rediscovery through a historiographical review which testifies to this history’s richness.

Description

Abstract:

Since 1994, when Jurassic Park was dubbed into Hindi and enjoyed unparalleled commercial success for a Hollywood film in India, the number of Hollywood films dubbed into Hindi and released in the Indian market has been steadily increasing. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a dubbing studio in Mumbai observing Hollywood films being dubbed into Hindi, as well as participation in the dubbing of an original Netflix series from Hindi to English, this talk examines the language ideologies about Hindi and English that are articulated, performed, and manifest during the dubbing process. It describes the varied ways that voice artists and dubbing directors navigate and negotiate the complex act of rendering dialogue in Hindi when the original lines are written in English and vice versa. It illustrates how the production of dubbed media is a rich site to examine questions of legitimate language, socio-economic change, social imaginaries of difference, and ideas of belonging in contemporary India.

Biography:

Tejaswini Ganti is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and core faculty in its Program in Culture & Media at New York University. She is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke University Press 2012) and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2nd edition 2013). Her current research examines the politics of language and translation within the Hindi film industry and the formalization of film training through film schools in India.

Description

The Environmental Governance Lab hosts regular EGL Work in Progress Talks. The talks are an informal, interdisciplinary forum where faculty and Ph.D. students can discuss ongoing research in the field of environmental politics, policy, and governance. At these events, two presenters offer a 10-minute overview of an ongoing project to serve as a fodder for discussion. If you are interested in hearing more about this and other Environmental Governance Lab events please email eg.lab@utoronto.ca for more information.

Description

Although the tragedy of the Holodomor (the Great Famine) of 1932-33 figures prominently in public discourse and scholarship in Ukraine today, its gender dimension remains understudied. This talk is based predominantly on an analysis of personal narratives of female survivors of the Holodomor, which allows exploring peculiarities and controversies of women’s experiences of survival under the genocidal circumstances. It focuses on women’s coping strategies and life-saving practices under conditions of total starvation. It also exposes a spectrum of women’s agency aimed to protect family possessions and food supplies from violent expropriations by authorities. The social characteristics, motivations, and roles of local female perpetrators of the famine will be discussed as well.

Dr. Oksana Kis is a historian and anthropologist, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (in Lviv). She obtained her academic degree “kandydat nauk” (Ph.D. equivalent) from Ivan Krypyakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2002. In April 2018, she completed her habilitation (“doctor nauk” degree). Since 2010, Dr. Kis has served as a President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History. She is also a co-founder and a vice-president of the Ukrainian Oral History Association. Oksana Kis is an Editor-in-Chief of the academic web-site Ukraina Moderna. Her research interests include women’s history, feminist anthropology, oral history, and gender transformations in post-socialist countries. Dr. Oksana Kis will be at CERES in October-November 2018.

Description

JAPAN GREW EXPLOSIVELY AND CONSISTENTLY FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY, from the Meiji Restoration until the collapse of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. Since then, it has been unable to restart its economic engine and respond to globalization. How could the same political–economic system produce such strongly contrasting outcomes?  In this talk, Kent E. Calder discussed his  book Circles of Compensation: Economic Growth and the Globalization of Japan (Stanford University Press, 2017), which identifies the crucial variables as classic Japanese forms of socio-political organization: the "circles of compensation." These cooperative groupings of economic, political, and bureaucratic interests dictate corporate and individual responses to such critical issues as investment and innovation; at the micro level, they explain why individuals can be decidedly cautious on their own, yet prone to risk-taking as a collective. Calder examined how these circles operate in seven concrete areas, from food supply to consumer electronics, and deals in special detail with the influence of Japan’s changing financial system. The result is a comprehensive overview of Japan’s circles of compensation as they stand today, and a road map for broadening them in the future.  

Circles of Compensation: Economic Growth and the Globalization of Japan (Stanford University Press, 2017) will be available for purchase at the event.  

About the Author KENT E. CALDER Director, Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies  Dr. Kent E. Calder is Director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies in Washington, DC. He also currently serves as Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and International Research Cooperation at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in the fall of 2014. Before arriving at Johns Hopkins SAIS in 2003, he taught for twenty years at Princeton University, and previous acted as a Visiting Professor at Seoul National University and Lecturer in Government at Harvard University. Dr. Calder has also served as Special Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan (1997-2001), Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (1989-1993 and 1996), and as the first Executive Director of Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations (1979-1980). He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1979, where he worked under the direction of Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer.  A specialist in the political economy of East Asia, Dr. Calder has spent eleven years living and researching in Japan, and four years elsewhere in the region. Some of his major publications include:  Circles of Compensation: Economic Growth and the Globalization of Japan (Stanford University Press, 2017) Singapore: Smart City, Smart State (Brookings Institution Press, 2016) Asia in Washington: Exploring the Penumbra of Transnational Power (Brookings Institution Press, 2014) The New Continentalism: Energy and Twenty-First Century Eurasian Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2012) Pacific Alliance: Reviving U.S.-Japan Relations (Yale University Press, 2009) Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton University, 2007) Pacific Defense: Arms, Energy, and America’s Future in Asia (William Morrow and Company, 1996) Strategic Capitalism: Private Business and Public Purpose in Japanese Industrial Finance (Princeton University Press, 1993) Crisis and Compensation: Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan (Princeton University Press, 1988)

Description

How has the trans-Pacific trade conflict impacted economics and business in Asia? What are the implications for Canada? Join us on December 10 as Bart W. Édes discusses these regional integration trends and more.

Biography:

Bart W. Édes has served as the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB’s) Representative in North America since October 2, 2017. In this capacity, he mobilizes financing for ADB’s developing member countries; shares development knowledge and experience; establishes and deepens partnerships with public, private and nonprofit organizations in North America; and raises public awareness of ADB in Canada and the United States.

His earlier ADB experience includes leading teams responsible for knowledge management, social development, gender equity, the social sectors, civil society engagement, ICT for Development, inclusive business, governance, and public sector management. He guided the formulation of ADB’s Public Communications Policy, which set a new global benchmark for transparency and information sharing among the international financial institutions. Mr. Édes has also served as Alternate Chairperson of ADB’s Appeals Committee, and Member of the ADB Integrity Oversight Committee.

Between 1994 and 2000, Mr. Édes managed communications at SIGMA, a joint initiative of the European Union and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development providing support to public governance reform in Central and Eastern European countries. Mr. Édes has also worked as a journalist, researcher, policy analyst, and specialist on international trade and foreign direct investment.

Description

In light of recent developments in Ukraine toward establishing a unified Ukrainian Orthodox Church, coupled with the ecclesial conflicts between Constantinople and Moscow, this book’s appearance is very timely. In his presentation, Prof. Denysenko will provide an overview of the history of Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine from the early twentieth century to the present. He will touch upon the dynamics of church and state in the attempts to restore an authentic Ukrainian religious identity in the contemporary Orthodox churches, and how these dynamics have played out in the current movement to overcome the divisions among the three Orthodox Churches in Ukraine. This book launch is the second in a series of events looking at Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity and the question of autocephaly hosted by the Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies; the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine; the Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; and the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures.

Description

The independence struggle of East Timor from Indonesia rested on a three-pronged strategy. An aspect of it was to Indonesianize the war that Jakarta had unleashed on the half-island country. Under the overall guidance – and sometimes strict instructions – of their nationalist movement, East Timorese students and activists across Indonesia progressively broke the government’s stranglehold on information about East Timor. They informed the Indonesian public and forged formidable alliances with Indonesian human rights activist and political reformists. These Indonesians rallied against the day-to-day human right violations that the Indonesian military committed in East Timor and gradually came to recognize that the exercise of the right to self-determination in East Timor was a step in the direction of their much-delayed democratic transition. This talk will explore how it was that the East Timorese nationalists marched – and won – in Jakarta while fighting a losing battle in East Timor itself.

Dr. Awet T. Weldemichael is a former refugee goatherd and currently a stateless person. He is an Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in the Department of History at Queen’s University. He holds a Ph.D. in history and LL.M. in public international law. He studied the history and politics of Northeast Africa and Southeast Asia and wrote a dissertation on the East Timorese and Eritrean struggles for independence from Indonesia and Ethiopia, respectively. He is the author of Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation: Eritrea and East Timor Compared (Cambridge, 2013), among others. He has since been researching Northeast African political economy of conflict and his book on the root causes, dynamics and consequences of maritime piracy in Somalia has just been published (Piracy in Somalia: Violence and Development in the Horn of Africa). He has previously held teaching and research positions at African, European and U.S. universities; and has worked for United Nations peacekeeping and The Carter Center election monitoring.

Description

Prof. Brenneis’s talk is based on her recent book, Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015 (2018). It delves into a little-known subject of the cultural legacy of Spaniards deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen during World War II.
Sara Brenneis is an associate professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts who specializes in Spanish historical, literary and cultural studies. Her research examines representations of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Franco dictatorship and the Spanish transition to democracy. In addition to Spaniards in Mauthausen (U of Toronto Press, 2018), she published Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain (2014) and is the co-editor of Spain, World War II, and the Holocaust: History and Representation, (forthcoming, the U of Toronto Press).
 

Description

The Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy is pleased to welcome The Honourable Christy Clark, former Premier of British Columbia on January 22, 2019.
This event is part of the Women in Leadership Series of the David Peterson Public Leadership Program.

Christy Clark’s political career is full of firsts for Canadian women. Her hard-won record includes being the longest serving female Premier in Canadian history, the only female Premier ever to be re-elected in Canada, and the first Cabinet Minister in Canada to give birth while holding office. She was also the first Premier in the country to openly discuss personal experiences of sexual assault.
Over her 6 ½ years as Premier, she defied the critics by proving herself as the best economic manager in the country. She balanced 5 consecutive balanced budgets, diversified BC’s economy with a visionary plan and ensured BC led the country in job creation. When she left office in 2017, the province had the strongest economy in Canada for more than one year running – the first time that’s happened since before she was born in 1965.
Her success was founded on her ability to create and communicate a bold vision for growth, her gift for building and executing on a detailed plan, and a strong capacity to predict, mitigate and manage risks.
When she retired, BC was on-track to eliminating its operating debt by 2020 – the first time since 1976. BC was also the only remaining Canadian province with a AAA credit rating.  
Prior to becoming Premier, she was the host of the Christy Clark Show on CKNW 980 and a columnist for the Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers. She used all these platforms to establish a province-wide anti bullying campaign that continues to grow.
Today she is a Senior Advisor at the internationally recognized law firm, Bennett Jones LLP. She also sits as a Board Director for Shaw Communications Inc., and for Recipe Unlimited Corporation. In addition, she serves as an Advisor for ThoughtWire Corp., an organization focused on advancing the Canadian tech sector. Recently she has also been appointed as an Associate Member for the InterAction Council. This is an international organization where former heads of state come together to find solutions to the political, economic and social problems of today’s world.
In November, 2018 she was recognized as one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network (WXN). She was also inducted into the WXN Hall of Fame.
Clark is now also being credited for bringing the liquefied natural gas industry to British Columbia. LNG Canada just approved a $40B LNG project in Kitimat, British Columbia. This is the single largest private sector investment in Canadian history.

Description

Lost in Transition: What’s Next for the Left in Post-Soviet States
Protests, political activism and the growth of social and political movements have been a defining feature of the Russian political landscape during the 1990s. With the arrival of Vladimir Putin in 2000, political activism declined, only to be brought back to life after the contested parliamentary election of 2011. Since then, the Russian political landscape has become diverse with groups ranging from pro-Western liberals to hard-line nationalists and left-wing Marxists. This presentation offers an overview of the transformation of the non-systemic left-wing political movements in post-Soviet Russia, paying particular attention to the formidable revival of these movements since the late 2000s and the structural impediments to their further participation in the political system. This case study is part of a bigger ongoing book project that provides insights into the factors undermining the development of the left-wing politics and the consolidation of the leftist forces in the post-soviet states.

Elena Maltseva is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Canada. Elena holds a PhD degree in Political Science from the University of Toronto (2012). Her current research focuses on left-wing politics in post-Soviet states, social security reforms, labour issues and regime stability in post-communist countries.

Description

From whatever subject position we “indigenize”, we are always indigenizing something–something deeply entangled with colonial processes. What has this meant in the case of New France? As early modern spatial or political phenomenon, it was elusive even to contemporaries. As historiographic artifact, it has been naturalized in startlingly different ways. Efforts to recreate the lived experience and vantage points of Indigenous polities have been ongoing for decades now; in recent years, they have been deeply enriched by deliberate, community-based cultural revitalization projects. But the politics of cross-cultural knowledge remain complex, and play out differently in France, the United States, Quebec, and elsewhere in Canada. Efforts to dismantle colonialist understandings of New France are correspondingly fractured. Still, they have been fruitful, and shed important light on the workings of the early modern empires.

Trained as both a historian and an economist, Professor Desbarats is a founding member of the French Atlantic History Group.  Her research and writing concerns mainly the history of the early modern colonial state, particularly its financial aspects.  In both her teaching and writing, she has a deep interest in decolonizing French imperial history, beginning with narratives relating to New France.  She has published historiographic pieces on that topic in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly, the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française and the Journal of Early American History.  Her attempts to understand “early modern” indigenous vantage points have led her to think differently about the financing of empires, and the history of economic thought itself.  Canada’s seventeenth-century playing-card currency appears less as a picturesque footnote known only to monetary specialists, and more of a window into technologies of imperial violence and expansion.  Such themes are explored in her SSHRC-financed book- in-progress, “Money and Empire in New France.” In the same spirit, she is also co-writing, with Allan Greer, New France: A Concise History, under contract with Oxford University Press.
In cooperation with the Jesuit Archives in Montreal, and with graduate students Fannie Dionne and Sandra-Lynn Leclaire, she is also engaged in a pilot project to identify, transcribe and digitize early modern iroquoian/French language material written down by Jesuit missionaries
 

Description

Established in 2008 our Annual Graduate Research Conference is now recognized as a premier inter-university forum for graduate students in the field of ethnic studies to come and present their work.

The main purpose of our conference is to provide graduate students with an opportunity to present their work in a professional yet convivial atmosphere in preparation for more formal settings.

9:00-9:10 Registration for Day One Conference Sessions

9:10-9:15 Opening Remarks: Prof. Jeffrey G. Reitz, Harney Program
Director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
9:15-10:55 SESSION 1 Education and Integration

11:00-12:40 SESSION 2 Pathways to Multiculturalism

14:00-16:00 KEYNOTE LECTURE

Speaker: Prof. Rima Wilkes, Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia

“Acknowledgment of Indigenous Lands, Treaties and Peoples: Too much? Or not enough?”

**Please register separately for this event at https://archive.munkschool.utoronto.ca/event/27005/

Description

This special event will serve as the keynote lecture for the R.F. Harney 12th Annual Ethnic and Pluralism Studies Graduate Research Conference.

Acknowledgement of Indigenous territory, treaties and peoples is now a widespread practice at institutions across Canada.
For some individuals this practice is straightforward. For others the practice is baffling. In this lecture/workshop, we will begin with an
overview of acknowledgments, including at 98 Canadian universities.
We will then discuss some problems with land acknowledgments and turn to the question of how to move forward. The aim is not to provide a final definitive word on the subject. Rather the hope is that this discussion will contribute to a conversation about practice, challenges and possibilities.

Rima Wilkes is Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia and the Past President of the Canadian Sociological Association (2017-2018). She was the Executive Editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology (2013-2016). Her most recent publications include: 2018 Wilkes, Rima and Cary Wu. “Ethnicity, Democracy, Trust: A Majority-Minority Approach.” Social Forces 97(1):465-494. Wilkes, Rima, Aaron Duong, Linc Kesler and Howard Ramos. 2017. “Canadian University Acknowledgment of Indigenous Lands, Treaties and Peoples.” Canadian Review of Sociology 54(1): 89-120., Wu, Cary and Rima Wilkes. 2017. “Local-National Political Trust Patterns: Why China is an Exception.” International Political Science Review 54(1): 89-120.; Wu, Cary and Rima Wilkes. 2017. “International Student Migration and the Search for Home” Geoforum 80: 123-132.; Panesar, Nilum, Pottie-Sherman, Yolande and Rima Wilkes. 2017. “The Komagata Through a Media Lens: Racial, Economic, and Political Threat in Newspaper Coverage of the 1914 Komagata Maru Affair” Canadian Ethnic Studies 49: 85-101.

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion, during which Prof. Cheryl Suzack (University of Toronto, Department of English and Centre for Indigenous Studies) and Prof. Douglas Sanderson (University of Toronto, Faculty of Law and Faculty Advisor, Aboriginal Law Students Association) will offer commentary on the presentation based on their experience in indigenous studies and the specific issue of land acknowledgments. The event will be moderated by Prof. Jeffrey Reitz, Director of the Harney Program in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.