Past Events

Description

Abstract:

The history of German Indology during NS times has been part of many historical narratives, mostly because it seemed obvious to trace the Nazi idea of an Aryan race back to German Indologists. But the approach had its drawbacks: the focus was on two German Indologists with NS leanings, while the history of others and especially Jewish Indologists in Germany was never studied. It has also proved quite detrimental that the discussion of these topics has often been caught in the political crossfire. All this seemed to leave not enough space for carving out a way in which German Indologists might live with their past. In this talk Jürgen Hanneder shall try to formulate such a perspective and demonstrate that if we look more closely and use more of the rich archival sources, a differentiated picture emerges.

Biography:

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Hanneder has studied Indology, Tibetology and Comparative Religion in various German Universities, then continued in Oxford and Marburg with his PhD, and worked as an assistant professor and in academic projects in Bonn, Halle, and Freiburg. In 2007, he succeeded to the chair of Indology in Marburg in 2007. His main fields of research lie within the Sanskrit literature of Kashmir, which is also a focus of many Indological projects in Marburg, but he is also interested in the history of Indology.

Description

Thursday September 13

2:00 Opening Remarks: Willi Goetschel and Dan Silver

2:15 Omar Lizardo, Simmel’s dialectic of content and form in recent work in cultural sociology

3:00 Thomas Kemple, Simmel’s Sense of Modernity: Adventures in Time and Space

3:45 Coffee Break

4:15 Natàlia Cantó Milà, Simmel’s Sociology of Relations

5:00 Elizabeth Goodstein, Simmel’s Phenomenology of Disciplinarity

Friday September 14

9:15 John McCole, Georg Simmel: Deconstructing the Self and Recovering Authentic Individuality

10:00 Oliver Simons, Georg Simmel’s Theory of Form

10:45 Coffee Break

11:00 Daniel Silver and Milos Brocic, Three Conceptions of Form in Simmel’s Sociology

11:45 Willi Goetschel, Form and Relation: Difference and Alterity in Simmel

12:30 Open Discussion

Description

William I. Hitchcock is the William W. Corcoran Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has written or edited six books on the international, diplomatic and military history of the 20th Century, in particular the era of the world wars and the cold war.

He received his B.A. degree from Kenyon College in 1986, and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1994. His book The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Free Press, 2008), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize, and a Financial Times bestseller.
His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s
He lives in Charlottesville with his wife, Elizabeth Varon, who is a historian of the US Civil War.

Books for sale and signing. Refreshments provided.

Description

Throughout the global economy, big companies are getting bigger. They’re more productive, more profitable, and they pay better. The people lucky enough to work at these companies are doing relatively well. Those who work for the competition aren’t. Policymakers have taken notice. Competition policy is seeing renewed interest and “monopoly” is suddenly on the tip of every columnist’s tongue. However, new research shows that big firms have gotten bigger not so much because of permissive antitrust enforcement, but because these firms have developed highly effective proprietary digital technologies. Indeed, firms–predominately large firms–are investing nearly as much in proprietary software as they invest in new physical capital. This trend has let large firms increasingly dominate their industries, slowed productivity growth, and contributed to unequal and stagnant wages.

James Bessen, an economist, serves as Executive Director of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative at Boston University School of Law. Mr. Bessen has done research on whether patents promote innovation, why innovators share new knowledge, and how technology affects jobs, skills, and wages. With Michael J. Meurer, Bessen wrote Patent Failure (Princeton University Press, 2008), highlighting the problems caused by poorly defined property rights. His research first documented the large economic damage caused by patent trolls and showed the link between information technology and job growth. His latest book, Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth (Yale University Press, 2015), looks at history to understand how new technologies affect wages and skills today. Bessen’s work has been widely cited in the press as well as by the White House, the U.S. Supreme Court, judges at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the Federal Trade Commission. In 1983, Bessen developed the first commercially successful “what-you-see-is-what- you-get” PC publishing program, founding a company that delivered PC-based publishing systems to high-end commercial publishers.

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Description

Abstract:

Bringing knowledge about China to the disciplines has reduced the outsized role that research on Europe and America has on many topics. But mainstreaming China studies also gives rise to certain tradeoffs. How should we manage these tradeoffs and produce research that is both true to China and contributes to the social sciences? In the last 30 years, China scholars have developed many strategies to navigate the territory between area studies and the social sciences. I myself have vacillated about how area studies and political science should interact and inform each other. How are China scholars addressing this issue now, in the era of mixed methods, experiments, “big data,” and causal inference?

Biography:

Kevin O’Brien is the Bedford Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC-Berkeley. A student of contemporary Chinese politics, he has written on legislative politics, local elections, fieldwork strategies, popular protest, policy implementation, protest policing, and political reform. His most recent work centers on the Chinese state and theories of popular contention, particularly as concerns protest control and types of repression that are neither “soft” nor “hard.”

Description

A conference to celebrate the centenary of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, bringing together scholars and practitioners from various disciplines from the Baltic states and Canada. The focus of the first day of the conference is on demography and migration, integration of the Russian minorities, and contemporary security challenges in the Baltic Sea region. The second day of the conference (September 22), focusing on language, identity, and the preservation of national heritage, takes place at the Estonian Studies Centre, Tartu College (310 Bloor St. W).

12:45-13:00
Words of Welcome

Randall Hanson, Interim Director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
Toomas Lukk, Ambassador of Estonia
Andris Ķesteris, President, Baltic Federation in Canada
Tea Varrak, Secretary-General, Estonian Ministry of Education and Research
Andres Kasekamp, University of Toronto

13:00-14:00 Keynote

Chair: Mihkel Tombak, University of Toronto

Keynote: Mare Ainsaar, University of Tartu
Baltic Population Challenges and their Impact on Societies

14:00-15:15
Panel I: The Challenge of Integration of Russian minorities in the Baltic States

Chair: Merli Tamtik, University of Manitoba

Piret Hartman, Estonian Ministry of Culture
Integration of the Russian-speaking Minority and Return Migration
Irene Käosaar, Integration Foundation, Estonia
Successes and Failures of Integration in Estonia
Juris Dreifelds, Brock University
Latvianization of Minority Schools: Progress or Regress in Ethnic Relations?

15:15-16:00
Coffee, snacks and networking

16:00- 17:30
Panel II: Baltic Regional Security

Chair: Toivo Miljan, Wilfred Laurier University

Aušra Park, Siena College, New York
Leadership and the Foreign Policies of the Baltic States
Aurel Braun, University of Toronto
The Geopolitics of Northeastern Europe in the Era of Trump and Putin
Marcus Kolga, MacDonald-Laurier Institute
Canada, NATO’s Eastern Flank and Russian Information Warfare
Andres Kasekamp, University of Toronto
The Baltic States and the Future of the European Union

Description

ABSTRACT:

This lecture is drawn from the introduction to my forthcoming study, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonialism and British Dissent. Against the grain of influential histories of empire as much postcolonial studies, I will make the case, ‘in a spirit of dialectics’, for lines of influence which run from periphery to metropole (as much as in the other direction). One axis, though not the only one, along which this question can be explored is that of dissent around the question of empire in Britain, with dissidents variously referred to as ‘critics of empire’, ‘imperial sceptics’ or British ‘anti-colonialists’. Without pretending that the field could ever have been level or lines of influence simply reciprocal given the constitutive power differential, I suggest that there was also an anticolonial impact from outside Europe on metropolitan thought, specifically, though not only, on British dissent around and criticism of the colonial project. Resistance to the colonial project in several parts of the British Empire in the nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries helped shape criticism of and opposition to the imperial project within Britain itself. That influence was not necessarily always ideational or to be solely assessed using the tools of intellectual history; it was often exercised by the practice of struggle and by crises occasioned by insurgency.

BIOGRAPHY:

Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures at the University of Cambridge. A professor in the School of English and Fellow of Churchill College, she is the author of Literary Radicalism in India (2005) and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009). Her most recent study, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonialism and British Dissent, is forthcoming from Verso.

Description

Abstract:

Where is the USA in Asia? Washington CSIS Senior Asia VP Mike Green talks about
BY MORE THAN PROVIDENCE
Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783

From a New York Times book review by Gordon G. Chang on April 7, 2017: “It was “by more than Providence” that the United States, over the course of more than two centuries, became the pre-eminent power in Asia and the Pacific. Commerce, faith and notions of self-defense drove Americans westward, not only across a continent but also a wide expanse of ocean, says Michael J. Green, who served as special assistant to President George W. Bush and senior director for Asia on the National Security Council staff.”

Green argues that, going back to 1783, the American strategy in Asia has been to prevent any one country from dominating the Pacific. But with the rise of China, can this strategy hold? And are Americans willing to pay the price?

Bio:

Michael Jonathan Green is senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and director of Asian Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He served on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) from 2001 through 2005, first as director for Asian affairs with responsibility for Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and then as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asia, with responsibility for East Asia and South Asia. Before joining the NSC staff, he was a senior fellow for East Asian security at the Council on Foreign Relations, director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center and the Foreign Policy Institute and assistant professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses, and senior adviser on Asia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He also worked in Japan on the staff of a member of the National Diet.

Dr. Green is also a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, a distinguished scholar at the Asia Pacific Institute in Tokyo, and professor by special appointment at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Strategy Group, the America Australia Leadership Dialogue, the advisory boards of Radio Free Asia and the Center for a New American Security, and the editorial boards of the Washington Quarterly and the Journal of Unification Studies in Korea. He also serves as a trustee at the Asia Foundation, senior adviser at the Asia Group, and associate of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Dr. Green has authored numerous books and articles on East Asian security, including most recently, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (Columbia University Press, 2017). He received his master’s and doctoral degrees from SAIS and did additional graduate and postgraduate research at Tokyo University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Kenyon College with highest honors. He holds a black belt in Iaido (sword) and has won international prizes on the great highland bagpipe.

“By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783” will be available for sale and the author will be available for signing.

Description

Desmond King is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Government at Nuffield College, Oxford. Professor King is one of the leading scholars of American political development. He has written widely on race (Still A House Divided, with Rogers Smith 2011), immigration (Making Americans, 2001), eugenics (Sterilized by the State, with Randall Hansen 2013), and national identity (The Liberty of Strangers, 2006). In this lecture, Professor King will use a developmental, historical lens to understand the place of populism in contemporary American politics.

Description

Taxation has been seen as the domain of charisma-free accountants, lawyers and number crunchers – an unlikely place to encounter big societal questions about democracy, equity or good governance. Yet it is exactly these issues that pervade conversations about taxation among policymakers, tax collectors, civil society activists, journalists and foreign aid donors in Africa today. Tax has become viewed as central to African development.

Written by leading international experts, Taxing Africa offers a cutting-edge analysis of the continent’s tax regime, displaying the crucial role such arrangements have on attempts to create social justice and push economic advancement. From tax evasion by multinational corporations and African elites to how ordinary people navigate complex webs of ‘informal’ local taxation, the book examines the crucial potential for reform.

Wilson Prichard is an Associate Professor jointly appointed to the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and is the Research Director of International Center for Tax and Development. His broad research focus is in international development, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa, and he has an interdisciplinary background in comparative politics, international political economy and economics. His current research explores the political foundations of development, with a focus on the differential implications of taxation, resource wealth, and foreign aid for development outcomes, particularly in post-conflict settings. He works closely with civil society organizations, national governments, regional organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, and international agencies and institutions, including the World Bank, IMF, OECD, the UN, and various aid agencies.

Description

The Poll-itical Perspective: Understanding American Millennial Voter Behavior

 “Millennials are the largest generation in the history of America and the largest generation in the history of the world”. With the 2018 U.S. Midterm elections just around the corner, all 435 House seats, over a third of the seats in the Senate, and 39 state and territorial gubernatorial positions are at stake. What are some of the fascinating trends that have been shaping millennial voting behavior for this November? Described by The Washington Post as one of the world’s leading authorities on understanding global attitudes among Millennials, Professor John Della Volpe used fresh polling data as a launch point to discuss cultural, political and social trends driving this generation. After his talk, Professor Della Volpe  opened up the floor to student leaders and the general audience for a Q&A period.     

John Della Volpe is the Director of Polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics (IOP), and has been leading the institute’s polling initiatives on understanding American youth since 2000. The IOP has accurately predicted youth turnout in every election since, and has provided insight into pre-/post- 9/11 attitudes, and into generational shifts in foreign policy, among other topics. In 2008, he received an Eisenhower Fellowship for which he traveled extensively throughout China, Hong Kong, and Korea (including a supervised day in North Korea) studying Millennials; in 2011, he was appointed to the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission on Media.  John is also founder of SocialSphere, a Cambridge based public opinion and analytics company. He appears regularly on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and his insights have appeared in U.S. media, including on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper.   Full bio is here: http://iop.harvard.edu/about/staff/john-della-volpe

Description

Abstract:

Prior work on the retreat from intermarriage usually treats Hispanic as a monolithic group, ignoring racial diversity within the Hispanic population. As a result, two questions of fundamental importance to the marital assimilation of Hispanics have remained unanswered: (1) did all Hispanic subgroups, irrespective of their race, experience a retreat from intermarriage? and (2) to what extent did the racial diversification of the Hispanic population contribute to their retreat from intermarriage? To address these questions, I document how the permeability of racial, ethnic, and national boundaries changed during the 1990s. My results underscore the heterogeneity in the marital assimilation of Hispanics. Not all Hispanic subgroups experienced a retreat from intermarriage. Rates of intermarriage with non-Hispanic Whites decreased among Hispanic Whites and Hispanic SORs, but they increased among Hispanic Blacks. Changes in Hispanic men and women’s willingness to marry Hispanic partners of a different race also varied by race. The odds of intermarriage between Hispanic Whites and non-White Hispanics increased during the 1990s, while the odds of intermarriage between Hispanic Blacks and Hispanic SORs decreased during this time. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of considering race when studying the intermarriage behavior of Hispanics.

Speaker’s bio:

Kate H. Choi is a social demographer interested in the causes and　consequences of family formation, namely how crossing social and national boundaries influence family formation and wellbeing. She contributes to this literature by pursuing two lines of scientific inquiry: (1) investigating how institutional opportunities and constraints arising due to international migration shape family formation and (2) examining how crossing ethnoracial, educational, and age boundaries in spousal selection influence the health and wellbeing of individuals and their offspring. Her work has been published in several renowned journals, including Demography, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Social Science and Medicine. She is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario.

Description

The aim of the NATO Summit Outcomes Conference is to address key events, ideas, and issues that took place during the July 2018 NATO Summit. The intent is to bring together multiple panel discussions to create a wealth of knowledge for Canadians to understand the importance of NATO domestically and internationally.

Speaking at this event will be former NATO Ambassador David Wright, Director General of Military Strategic Communications Jay Janzen and Jack Cunningham from the Bill Graham Centre.

To RSVP, please email rsvp@natoassociation.ca

Description

Biography:

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of ten books of contemporary history and political writing is which have explored many facets of the history of Europe over the last half-century. They include The Polish Revolution: Solidarity The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague, The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent and Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name. He also writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, amongst other journals.

From 2001 to 2006, he was Director of the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he now directs the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom. Its Free Speech Debate research project, built around the 13 language website freespeechdebate.com, contributed greatly to the writing of his most recent book Free Speech: Ten Principles For a Connected World.

Prizes he has received for his writing include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Prix Européen de l’Essai, the Theodor Heuss Prize and the George Orwell Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from St Andrew’s University, Sheffield Hallam University and the Catholic University of Leuven, the Order of Merit from Germany, Poland and Czech Republic, and the British CMG. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, The Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts. In 2017, he was awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen, for services to European unity.

Description

Since the end of authoritarian regimes in the late 80s, migration and refugee law took a new and more liberal direction in all different countries of Latin America. The new Immigration Politics consolidated in the last two decades explain in part the growing number of migrants and refugees to the region. How different Latin America is from nationalistic and restrictive countries on display in other parts of the world? The Global South, contrary to mainstream migration studies, is the region that receives more migrants in the world and urges us to reorient our debate and understanding on how the south hemisphere in general can cope with the challenges of massive migration flows and how the Americas in particular can work together on sharing the burden of migration crisis in the region. To answer these questions the presentation will take two major receiving countries in the region, Brazil and Argentina, and will explain how these liberal policies were implemented under their leadership and how resilient they can be in face of new conservative governments in power in the last few years. Are supranational institutions and liberal refugee and migration regimes strong enough to face these challenges? How effective are national and supra national courts in balancing anti migrants social and political movements in the region? Is the freedom of residence and work agreements for nationals in the region under attack? How Venezuela can be a parameter to test the resilience of our region in preserving our liberal tradition in migration and refugee politics.

Charles P. Gomes is senior researcher at Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa and director of the CEPRI, a pro bono legal clinic for Refugees and Migrants in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has a PhD in Political Science (2001) from the former IUPERJ (University of Rio de Janeiro Research Institute) current IESP. During his doctorate, he was a visiting researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, France. He was a visiting professor at the Université Paris I in the years 2006 and 2007 and the Center for Forced Migration Studies at North Western University in Chicago in the year of 2012. His studies focus on constitutional and supranational courts, international law, immigration and refugee policies. He is now leading a comparative study in Immigration policies and politics in major countries of Latin America. He has several books, articles and reports on the topic of Refuge and International Migration.

Description

The mural poster that Abel Faivre created in late 1916 for the second national French war loan, showing a young soldier exhorting soldiers and civilians to join him under the caption “On les aura!” (We’ll Get Them!), is one of the most iconic images of the First World War, yet it has never been fully studied in its own right. Based on archival research that reconstructs the poster’s production, distribution, and reception, this paper suggests broader conclusions about the ideological function of illustrated wartime posters: namely, that they were a contested field of cultural production with multiple, contradictory, and evolving meanings that often diverged from those intended by the artists who created them and their commissioning agencies.

By reconstructing the geographic and numerical scope of the poster’s dissemination in its original form as well as through related media such as postcards, newspapers, and photography, the paper juxtaposes Faivre’s iconic design to very different early draft of the poster; identifies the contemporary and historical models that inspired the artist; and surveys the ways in which various groups (soldiers in the trenches, civilians on the home front, antagonistic political parties) appropriated the image and the caption to express their divergent points of view on the war.

Brett Bowles is Associate Professor of French Studies and Director of the Institute for European Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a media historian, he has published widely on visual propaganda in France during the World Wars. This paper is taken from a developing book project on comparative history of wartime posters in France, German, Great Britain, and the United States.

Description

Abstract:

Recent years have witnessed an increased attention to specifying the characteristics of the colonial state, largely focused on outlining its distinctiveness. Two epistemological frames subtend most inquiries: first, replicating the Weberian view that the state is a territorially circumscribed entity, analyses of the state are also similarly circumscribed. Second, if implicitly, the normative horizon of the inquiries is the European modern state. While recognizing the value and, oftentimes, the necessity, of studies conceived in territorially delimited terms, this paper suggests we need to develop pathways to address the coproduction of the coeval formations of colonial state and the modern state. Through an assessment of state control of colonial Indian migration, it argues that important features of historical state formation are obscured when analyses assume a presentist territorial closure, that modern elements are embedded in the colonial state form, and that a colonial dimension is an integral aspect of the modern state form, globally.

Biography:

Radhika Mongia is Associate Professor of Sociology and faculty with the graduate programs in Sociology, Political Science, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, and Social and Political Thought at York University. She is the author of Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Duke University Press, 2018).

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

Why have the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), both created by emerging economies, taken different operational approaches? The NDB has adopted a borrowing country-oriented and South-South cooperation modality, and the AIIB has chosen a donor country-oriented modality similar to existing multilateral development banks. This talk will explore the differences and explain why the two financial institutions are so different, which has some implications for the ongoing process of global governance reform.

Jiejin Zhu is an associate professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University in Shanghai. His research interests include international institutions and global governance, especially the BRICS, G20 and multilateral development banks. He has published three books and over 30 papers on these topics. Currently, he is doing the research of the rising powers’ strategy for changing international institutions.

Description

Abstract:

The firebombing of Japan has been eclipsed in postwar writing by both the atomic bombings of Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the conventional bombing of Japanese cities. This is curious given (a) that the death toll – over 300,000 by conservative estimates – exceeded that of the atomic bombs and (b) the strategy relied on the same bombing techniques that caused so much controversy over Germany. The paper reviews the reasons behind the US switch from precision bombing (designed to minimize civilian casualties) to area bombing (designed to maximize them) and evaluates the effect of them on the outcome of the war. Simply put: did the killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians through conventional bombing help win the war?

Description

ADM Wheeler will discuss his personal experience as a Canadian diplomat working in international relations from both a federal and provincial context. He will provide insight into how we think about international relations from a provincial perspective and how its unique from and complementary to international relations at the federal level.

Stewart Wheeler is a career diplomat currently on leave from the Canadian Foreign Service working for the Ontario government as Assistant Deputy Minister of International Relations and Chief of Protocol. In addition to various assignments in Ottawa, he has served abroad in Washington, Bogota, London, Kabul and most recently as Ambassador to Iceland. From 1999 to 2004, he was Press Secretary to Governor General Adrienne Clarkson. He has also lived and studied in Norway and Spain.

Description

Abstract:

What kinds of representations of place and landscape did the colonial mapmaking project encounter when its great trigonometrical survey unfolded in early nineteenth century India? Exploring the sensory, affective, and epistemological aspects of place-making images, art historian Dipti Khera and historian of medieval and early modern India Samira Sheikh examine the interfaces between colonial cartography, eighteenth century courtly art, and precolonial revenue systems. The formal innovations generated at these interfaces both informed and exceeded colonial cartography, offering an intriguing historical key to understanding perceptions of landscape in India.

Description

The Centre for the Study of Global Japan hosted a unique opportunity to meet Ambassador Shotaro OSHIMA, Former Economic Minister of the Japanese Embassy in the U.S. and former Ambassador of Japan to South Korea and Saudi Arabia.  Ambassador Oshima was joined by a team of three panelists with backgrounds in business consulting, international finance and one of the top universities in Japan. The ambassador and his team engaged in a stimulating dialogue on the economic and business relationship between Japan and Canada.  

ABOUT THE PROGRAM “Walk in Canada, Talk on Japan” aimed to further develop the Japan-Canada relationship by increasing understanding about Japan in the Canada via grass-roots exchange. Supported by the Prime Minister’s Office in Japan, teams of Japanese citizens of various backgrounds, led by former, high-ranking Japanese diplomats, traveedl to Canada to share their perspectives and encourage open discussions with the local communities. For more background, visit the official website detailing the original "Walk in U.S., Talk on Japan" project here.  

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES Shotaro OSHIMA (Delegation Leader). Ambassador Oshima started his career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan in 1968. Before retiring in March 2008, he served as Japan’s Permanent Representative to the WTO, and as Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Korea. Earlier in his career, he served in embassies in Thailand, the U.S., Israel, and Russia. He also served as the Economic Minister of the Japanese embassy in the U.S., as the Director-General for Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1997-2000), and as the Deputy Foreign Minister responsible for economic matters (2001-2002). He is currently the Chairman of the Institute for International Economic Studies and a Visiting Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.   

Mitsuko TAKAHASHI.  Ms. Mitsuko Takahashi worked as a communications manager at Boeing and UPS for over 20 years, and has spent more than 10 years in total living abroad in India, France, and Russia. She left Boeing in 2014 to participate in a national project to teach Japanese language and culture in Thailand. After her return to Japan in 2015, she established her own company to help Japanese small and medium-sized enterprises go global. Mitsuko will be speaking about her struggles in male-dominated Japanese society as a female business women and how Japanese society is gradually changing for the better.   

Rick LIU. Born in Taiwan, Mr. Rick Liu grew up in Canada from the age of nine and spent most of his teenage years in Vancouver. In 2011 he embarked on a study-abroad adventure in Tokyo and has stayed in the Japanese capital ever since. During his studies at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo, he became so interested in everyday Japan that he decided to help people settle in the country. He currently works at a local bank, specializing in providing mortgages for foreigners living in Japan. Rick will be speaking on how he came to Japan, the cultural differences he has encountered in Japan, and how Japan has now become his "home".   

Rie SATO.  Ms. Rie Sato is a 23-year-old university student in Tokyo majoring in business law. Last year she went on exchange to Sydney, Australia for a year. In Sydney, she volunteered at a preschool in addition to her university studies. Making the most of her experience, she currently has a part-time job at a language travel agency, where she organizes a program for students who want to study abroad.  Rie will be speaking about how "kimono", the Japanese traditional costume, is not just a traditional costume but a symbol of family.

Description

In the last three decades we have seen important changes in the area of ethnic relations in Poland. In general, ethnic minorities are becoming more and more active and better organized actors in the public scene. Additionally, the state policy has been stabilised, as the official frames of minority protection have been created.

The lecture will concentrate on two general perspectives: agency and structural one. The main aim is to present these both faces of ethnic relations. The former, an agency perspective, concerns the activities undertaken by minority groups which are focused on their identity and culture. The main argument developed in this part is that a gradual process of moving from culture to politics could be observed in Poland nowadays. The activities undertaken by minorities take a different shape and expression both on institutional and public, as well as more spontaneous and personal levels. The latter, structural perspective, underlines the aspect of power inscribed in minority-majority relations. To develop this issue, the concept of ethnic field will be introduced to show prospects and barriers imposed on these groups, especially by current legal regulations, as well as by the dominating national discourse. The presentation will touch on the problems concerning the so-called old minorities living in Poland, among them Ukrainians and Lemkos.

Katarzyna Warmińska-Zygmunt, PhD hab., is a socioligist, an associated professor at the Department of Sociology, Cracow University of Economics. Her main interest concentrates on ethnic relations in Poland, identity and politics in the context of minority groups, and anthropological practice. She has conducted fieldwork among Polish Tartars and Kashubs. The author of over fifty articles, and one book (“Polish Tartars. Religious and ethnic identity”) and the coeditor of three other books.

Description

Digital technology is changing how the global economy operates, especially in “low tech” sectors.  The Trump trade agenda did not address this transformation.  The challenges for global economic policy are: 1. How do we address products and services that do  not fit the traditional templates for trade rules? 2. How do we best balance efficient globalization of digital technologies with public interest regulation on issues such as digital privacy and cyber security?  The governance response will require an emphasis on learning and flexibility in rule making and implementation.  A prudent response will require greater emphasis on delegation of detailed rule-making to expert groups subject to government oversight and coordination of national policies through “soft law”.

Description

In the wake of the 2014 Maidan revolution – the “revolution of dignity” – as Ukraine has begun its movement towards greater democratic rule and closer relationships with its European neighbours, it has struggled with conflicts over the Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. Part of this revolution of dignity has been a movement within the Ukrainian Orthodox churches toward the establishment of an autocephalous (self-governed) Church in Ukraine. At the same time, the Russian government has tried to maintain the Moscow Patriarch’s position in Ukraine, in part to advance its concept of the Russian World, a Russian sphere of influence. With the decision of the Constantinople Patriarchate to reassert its role as the Mother Church of the Orthodox of Ukraine that has the right to grant autocephaly, a confrontation has emerged affecting Orthodox Churches throughout the world. This roundtable brings together scholars who will address various aspects of the history leading to the process of granting of autocephaly to a new Ukrainian Orthodox Church; international inter-Orthodox relations and divisions; the conflicts with the Russian Orthodox Church’s control over a segment of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Ukraine; and what a newly established autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church might look like.

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Abstract:

In this presentation, I inquire into one of the earliest responses to the recent Philippine war on drugs: the courageous work of photojournalists. In the context of the drug war, how does photojournalism become a kind of advocacy by becoming a mode of mourning? How is trauma and witnessing braided together in the experience of photographers covering war? What is the role of the camera and what are the ambivalent effects of the technical and aesthetic imaging of the dead and their survivors? What is the fate of photographic images once they travel beyond the control of the photographers? For example, converted into commodities, what happens to them when they circulate in the global mediascape and rendered into items for the daily consumption of anonymous viewers? And among families of the victims, how are the dead remembered in ways that elude photographic capture?

Biography:

Vicente L. Rafael is the Giovani and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of several works on the cultural politics of the Philippines including Contracting Colonialism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, The Promise of the Foreign, and Motherless Tongues: the Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation (all from Duke Univ. Press). He also wrote the Introduction to a recent edition of Nick Joaquin’s stories, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropic Gothic (Penguin Classics).

Reception to follow.

Description

Come learn more about the Dual Degree MPP/MGA program with representatives from Sciences Po, Paris and the Master of Global Affairs.

This two-year dual degree program combines the strengths of the Sciences Po School of Public Affairs and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy to create a unique graduate program combining a Master in Public Policy and a Master of Global Affairs. Students gain complementary perspectives on the pressing challenges of the 21st century and benefit from the unique academic strengths of each institution. The program prepares students and future decision-makers for internationally-focused jobs, both in the private and public sectors.

Description

ABSTRACT:

Before the 2018 Platform Coop Consortium (PCC platform.ccoop/2018, Sept. 28, 29) formal conference began, Huang SunQuan organized a two-day co-ops+hackathon (coopathon 2). Preceded by a series of panel discussions held in Taipei, Kaohsiung, Hangzhou, and Hong Kong, over forty interested programmers, artists, social innovators, and international tech organizations from greater China and other countries participated. The previous coopathon 1 was held in Shanghai in 2016. The aim of these coopathons is to figure out the collaborative possibilities of coders and cooperatives, addressing fundamental issues before more deeply thinking about the platform of cooperativerism, particularly in the Chinese context.

A difference exists between coops and hacker geeks, which extends beyond the pursuit of economic equality to differences in cultural and political values. Cooperativism asks for the participation of all or nothing at all, while the hacker geek model mostly pursues individual, ‘genius’ achievement. Coops are threatened by privatization, while the latter is an updated neoliberal version of the Californian ideology of accelerationism and solutionism (1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron). The former pursues economic justice—that is, better relations of production; the latter pursues efficiently productive forces. Hackers don’t like doors that can’t be opened, but cooperatives hope the door will always open.

These two groups are more or less unaware of the commonalities they share. They both need a sustainable model, and they both rely on the results of sharing and mutual benefit. In this talk, Huang SunQuan will share some of his experiences of coopathons and some Chinese cooperatives which he deeply engaged in, discussing strategies for introducing a social aspect into coding and the design of platform coops.

BIOGRAPHY:

Huang SunQuan (PhD, Building and Planning from National Taiwan University) is Professor at the China Academy of Art and Director of the Institute of Network Society, School of Inter-Media Art, CAA. He is an artivist engaging in architecture, media, social movements, and art, known for his long-term research and intervention in media, internet culture, and social activism.

Huang SunQuan was the editor-in-chief of POTS Weekly (established in 1994) and the director of Cultural Express from 2007 to 2009. He organized the first anti-gentrification movement in Taiwan under the slogan “Against City Government’s Bulldozers” (1997) and made the documentary film Green Bulldozer: the Rise of Your New Homeland. In 2004, he created one of the most influential blogs in Taiwan (twblog.net) and the Taiwan Independent Media Center (tw.indymedia.org) as part of the network of Global Independent Media Center (indymedia.org).

In recent years, he has undertaken a curatorial and artistic practice, running Monkey-Wrenching Art Center in the southern Taiwan. He has participated in the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (2007, 2013), “Memoscape” at Cube Project Space, “Juke Box of Kaohsiung” at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, and mounted a solo show, “U-topophilia”, at the Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, among other projects. Curatorial projects include “Treasure Hill GAPP (Global Artivist Participation Plan)” (2003, 2004), “Lulu Shur-tzy Hou Solo Exhibition—Look toward the other side-Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan” at the Kaohsiung Museum of Arts (2010), and a migrant workers exhibition at Kaohsiung Labor Museum (2011-2012), etc.

Description

To mark the launch of his new book, Social Closure and International Society, Dr Tristen Naylor will present his theory of “international social closure,” improving the ability of international relations to analyze hierarchy and status seeking in international politics. In a wide-ranging historical survey drawing on the “family of civilized nations” and the great powers’ clubs of the past to the G7 and G20 today, Naylor demonstrates how a stratified international order is reproduced via competition for seats at the top global governance tables.

Dr Tristen Naylor is a Fellow in International Relations at the London School of Economics and the Deputy Director of the G20 Research Group, London. He was previously the University of Oxford’s Lecturer in Diplomatic Studies, where he was named “Most Acclaimed Lecturer” in 2016. Prior to his academic career Dr Naylor was a foreign policy advisor to the Government of Canada. He is a recipient of the Canadian Public Service Award of Excellence.

Description

ABSTRACT:

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, has the largest collection of Indian artefacts outside India, which was mostly acquired during colonial times. The V&A’s Indian collections can be used to track a history of the impulses and opportunities underlying colonial collecting: artefacts entered the collection as loot, as gifts, and as documentation of resources available in the colony.

Alongside a history of collecting, however, there is a history of uncollecting, where collections are trimmed and refined through the removal of artefacts that are considered unimportant or irrelevant to the museum’s changing aims. The process of “de-accessioning” is one that museums seldom discuss in public, but the museum’s records keep traces of this less visible process.

This talk will track the fate of four grand, architectural-scale Indian artefacts that were collected by the V&A in the 19th century but are no longer available to view. Each of these four artefacts was collected in response to different impulses; each was hailed in its time as an important acquisition and was prominently displayed; each fell out of favour and was removed from the galleries for a different reason and in a different way. By tracking the histories of these objects the talk will open the door to a hidden history of the museum.

BIOGRAPHY:

Kavita Singh is Professor of Art History and is currently serving as the Dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she teaches courses on the history of Indian painting and the history and politics of museums. She has published essays on issues of colonial history, repatriation, secularism and religiosity, fraught national identities, and the memorialisation of difficult histories as they relate to museums in India and beyond. She has also published essays on aspects of Mughal painting.

Description

The lecture will explore some of the conceptual problems that are involved in writing a world history of genocide. The question posed is really a rhetorical one: genocide has occured in every period of human history and in a wide variety of geographical and cultural circumstances. This seems to be increasingly accepted by genocide scholars, if not necessarily by scholars who are focused on temporal and spatial boundaries of their discipline. The second part of the lecture examines some of the recurring themes that occur in the history of genocide: genocide and war; dehumanization; “cumulative radicalization;” issues of gender, among others.

Norman M. Naimark received his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D (1972) from Stanford University. He spent fifteen years as Professor at Boston University and Research Fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard before returning to Stanford in 1988. He is presently Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies in the History Department at Stanford University, and is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute. He also served as Sakurako and William Fisher Director of Stanford’s Global Studies Division. Earlier he was Chair of the Department of History and Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program. He also directed the International Relations and International Policy Studies Programs. A selection of his books include Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (Harvard 1981); The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Germany (Harvard 1995); Fires of Hatred; Ethnic Cleansing in 20 th Century Europe (Harvard 2001); Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton 2010); and Genocide: A World History (Oxford 2017).

He is presently finishing a book project, “Stalin and Europe: The Struggle for Sovereignty, 1944-1949.” Naimark has been awarded the Officer’s Cross First Class of the German Federal Republic. He twice received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching at Stanford. He won the Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies from ASEEES (the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). He was recently elected as a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Description

Liudmyla Hrynevych is the Director of the Holodomor Research and Education Centre in Kyiv (HREC in Ukraine), and Senior Scholar at the Institute of the History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture began in 1998 at the initiative of the Famine-Genocide Commemorative Committee of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto Branch. Past lecturers have included James Mace, Norman Naimark (Stanford University), Anne Applebaum (Washington Post), Timothy Snyder (Yale University), Serhii Plokhy (Harvard University), and Jars Balan (University of Alberta).

Description

 
Like the Baltic states, Icelanders are now celebrating their 100th anniversary of restored independence. Initially, they were among the poorest of the poor in Europe. By the twenty-first century, they were among the top ten globally. A decade ago, Iceland was on the verge of national bankruptcy as a consequence of the international financial crisis. Having to rebuild its society from financial ruin, Icelanders faced a fateful choice: should they adopt the small government, low-tax model – the American way? Or should they try to reconstruct their original Nordic state? That is the question the speaker will discuss.

Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson was the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Iceland (1984-96) and served as foreign minister from 1988 to 1995. During his tenure, Iceland joined the European Economic Area and became the first country to recognize the independence of the Baltic states. Subsequently, he served as ambassador to the USA, Canada, Finland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine. Before entering politics, Mr. Hannibalson obtained an MA in Economics from the University of Edinburgh and worked as a teacher and journalist. He has lectured extensively on the role of small states in international relations. He is the author of The Baltic Road to Freedom – Iceland’s Role (2017) and the subject of the documentary film Those Who Dare (2015).

Description

Peter Alilunas presented "Closed (to the Profane) Due to Pressure from the Morality Squad: The Cinema 2000, Porn Studies, and Cultural Consecration."  The growth of Porn Studies has been accompanied by an exciting surge in research related to adult film history, which has started to fill in long-neglected gaps in traditional film histories. With this growth, however, the field has also slowly begun constructing familiar boundaries and barriers, valuing and foregrounding some objects of study as worthy of scholarly interest while dismissing or ignoring others. To explore these tensions, this presentation explores a wide variety of historical moments, spaces, and places, and foregrounds the Cinema 2000, the legendary Yonge Street adult theater originally created by Max Allen. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s formulations of “legitimate” cultural pleasures—and the ways in which they must be “closed to the profane”—this presentation ultimately argued for an open and reflexive approach to studying adult film history.  

Peter Alilunas is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video (University of California Press, 2016). His work on the history and regulation of the adult film industry has appeared in various edited collections and venues, including Porn Studies, Post Script, Television & New Media, Film History, Cinema Journal, and Creative Industries Journal. He is the creator and co-director of the Adult Film History Project, an online archive dedicated to the preservation of documents related to adult film history, and serves on the editorial board of Porn Studies. He is currently researching material for a new book on the pre-history of online pornography.  Hosted by the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Institute, Centre for the Study of the United States, and Canadian Studies Program.

Description

ABSTRACT:

In the modern historiography of Dalit learning in Southern India certain names stand out: Ayothee Thass Pandithar (1845-1914) and Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956) being the most prominent. Much of the historiographical narrative of their scholarly achievements tends to be placed against the backdrop of colonial modernity and particularly tied to the emergence of “Buddhism” as the religion favoured by modernists in the colonial period. Though much recent work has been done on Ambedkarite Buddhism there is still much more that remains to be done on its local and vernacular iterations within specific Dalit regional locations and communities and how it has specifically comes to be used as a vehicle for new religious imaginaries and for an ethical and humanist approach to living. This one-day workshop plans to focus on the resonances of Ambedkarite Buddhism in its South Indian (Tamil and Maharashtrian) context to address some of these issues. It is the intention of this workshop to bring into conversation these two seemingly divergent strands of Dalit learning in showing how in their convergence on the issue of religious authority and “caste” and in their complex negotiation of these we might be able to not just perceive certain common genealogies but that these, in turn, might also to enable us to gain new perspectives on the nature of Ambedkarite Buddhism in its specifically South Indian iterations.

Program:

10am-11am: Lecture by Professor Rajangam
11am-11:15am: Coffee Break
11:15am-12:15pm: Discussion of Lecture

2pm-3pm: Lecture by Professor Keune
3pm-4pm: Discussion of Lecture

Description

ABSTRACT:  What does the future of Asian-Canadian relations hold?  Ever-deepening connections with Asia are reshaping the ways that Canadians participate in global media, transnational business, international education, and cultural and historical production. This panel reflected on the influences of Asian-Canadian dynamics in transforming the speakers’ fields of expertise, including business and media, immigration politics, historical memory, curatorial and archival work, and university education.  

Description

The liberal international order now confronts two powerful governments whose attachment to its norms and institutions are questionable: the United States and China. China’s rise and its implications for the existing world order have been a central issue for some time; the equivocal support of the United States for existing rules is a more recent development. Now that these two powers have taken economic and political steps that threaten to spiral into a deeper conflict, what is the outlook for preservation or change in an order that neither government appears committed to preserve?

Miles Kahler is Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University, and Senior Fellow for Global Governance at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D. C. Previously, he was Rohr Professor of Pacific International Relations and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He has published widely in the fields of international politics and international political economy, including articles and books on global governance, international financial institutions, and Asia-Pacific regionalism.

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

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Join us for an evening of short films and conversation.

Panel:
Eileen Boris, Professor of Feminist Studies, History, Black Studies and Global Studies, University of California
Eleonor Faur, Professor of Gender Relations and Welfare in Latin America, National University of San Martin, Argentina
Fiona Williams, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, University of Leeds
Chair: Sonya Michel, Professor Emerita of History, American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Maryland

Premiering the short film: Everywhere the Invisible Care in Crisis written & directed by Helene Klodawsky and produced by Katarina Soukup (Catbird Productions)

And screening the short film: In Safe Hands Domestic Workers in Nepal by Jennifer Fish and Eric Miller

Free admission. No registration required.

Description

Ninety-nine percent of all maternal deaths happen in developing countries, and more than 1 million children every year die on the same day they are born – mostly from preventable causes. Complications are common in the late stages of pregnancy, delivery, and the first hours after birth.
Despite grim statistics, there is light on the horizon. According to a 2014 report by the United Nations Population Fund, death is preventable in four out of five cases with the timely help of a skilled professional.

Midwives are working on the front lines to provide crucial patient-centered care to women and their families during childbirth and support families during pregnancy and after delivery. But midwives often face challenges, including limited professional training opportunities and a lack of recognition of their roles within the community and healthcare system.

With the right education and support, midwives are key to tackling the root causes of poverty and gender inequality. That’s why Wendy Wood (Canadian Association of Midwives) and Geneviève Allard (Aga Khan Foundation) are passionate about strengthening local health systems, institutions, and professional capacities – investments that will pay dividends for years to come.

Description

Over the past 25 years, research in the clinical neuroscience of music perception has shown how music and rhythm can effectively assist in brain
rehabilitation, with breakthroughs in motor recovery, speech and language training, and cognitive rehabilitation. Professor Michael Thaut, will share research data and video illustrations that summarize the latest exciting developments in this field.

Professor Michael Thaut of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music, is a global leader in neuroscience and music, and has internationally
recognized research in the applications of auditory neuroscience — specifically music and rhythm — to neurological rehabilitation. He holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Music, Neuroscience and Health, and is the Director of U of T’s Music and Health Research Collaboratory. A professional classical and folk violinist, he has recorded music and toured throughout Europe.