Past Events

Description

This talk presented a critical analysis of the social finance industry, a marketplace for profitable investments that are also branded as ways of using finance “ethically” to solve social problems. As social finance gains influence in American public policy and with high net worth financial investors, the talk used case studies in Michigan and California to illustrate how it is shifting the governance of welfare and poverty in poor neighbourhoods and communities.

Description

The end of the Cold War was the greatest shock to international affairs since World War II. In that perilous moment, Saddam Hussein chose to invade Kuwait, China cracked down on its own pro-democracy protesters, and regimes throughout Eastern Europe teetered between democratic change and new authoritarians. Not since FDR in 1945 had a U.S. president faced such opportunities and challenges.

As presidential historian Jeffrey Engel reveals in this page-turning history, behind closed doors from the Oval Office to the Kremlin, George H. W. Bush rose to the occasion brilliantly. Distrusted by key allies and dismissed as too cautious by the press, Bush employed personal diplomacy to rally a coalition to push Iraq out of Kuwait, to help unify Germany and save NATO, and ultimately to safely navigate the tumultuous end of the Soviet empire. Based on unprecedented access to previously classified documents and interviews with all of the principals, When the World Seemed New is a riveting, fly-on-the-wall account of a president with his hand on the tiller, guiding the United States through a pivotal time and setting the stage for the twenty-first century. Books available for purchase. Refreshments to follow.

About the speaker:
Jeffrey A. Engel is the Founding Director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Author or editor of ten books on American foreign policy and the American presidency, his latest is When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War.

Description

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
Early in the twenty-first century, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets, like design, branding, R&D, and software, than in tangible assets, like machinery, buildings, and computers. For all sorts of businesses, from tech firms and pharma companies to coffee shops and gyms, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success. But this is not just a familiar story of the so-called new economy. Drawing from his new book (with Jonathan Haskel), Capitalism without Capital, Stian Westlake will show how the growing importance of intangible assets has also played a role in some of the big economic changes of the last decade. The rise of intangible investment is an underappreciated cause of phenomena from economic inequality to stagnating productivity. Stian Westlake will present three possible scenarios for what the future of an intangible world might be like, and outline how managers, investors, and policymakers can exploit the characteristics of an intangible age to grow their businesses, portfolios, and economies.

Description

One year and almost 3,000 presidential tweets after President Trump’s election, it was time for the Centre for the Study of the United States to assess the State of the Union. Panellists joined us for a wide-ranging discussion about the state of voting rights, the electorate, foreign policy, and culture.  

Panellists included:  Randy Boyagoda (Principal, St. Michael’s College; Dep’t of English) Yasmin Dawood (Faculty of Law), Ron Pruessen (Dep’t of History) Andrew Stark (UTSC/Rotman).

Description

The United States lost almost one-third of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. As higher-paying manufacturing jobs are replaced by lower-paying service jobs, income inequality has increased. Between 1990 and 2013, the median income of men without high school diplomas fell by an astonishing 20%, and that of men with high school diplomas or some college by 13%. Innovation has been left largely to software and IT startups, and increasingly U.S. firms operate on a system of “innovate here/produce there,” leaving the manufacturing sector behind. In this talk, Dr. Bonvillian will share insights from his new book (co-authored with Peter Singer) about how to rethink innovation and revitalize America’s declining manufacturing sector. He will discuss how advanced manufacturing—particularly, new production paradigms that can increase efficiency and reduce costs, the new process and business models that must accompany them, and alternative funding models for start-up manufacturers—will be key to revitalization. And he will highlight the importance of new models for training workers and the role of manufacturing in addressing secular stagnation in innovation, growth, productivity and middle class prosperity. As recent political turmoil shows, the stakes could not be higher.

About the Speaker

William B. Bonvillian is Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Science Technology and Society and Political Science Departments, and advises on research projects at MIT’s Industrial Performance Center. From 2006-17, he was Director of MIT’s Washington, D.C. Office, supporting MIT’s strong and historic relations with federal R&D agencies, and its role on national science policy. He has assisted with major MIT technology policy initiatives, on energy technology, the “convergence” of life, engineering and physical sciences, advanced manufacturing, online higher education and its “innovation orchard” project on startup scale-up. Prior to that, he served for seventeen years as a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Senate. His legislative efforts included science and technology policy and innovation issues. He worked extensively on legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security, on Intelligence Reform, on climate change, on defense and life science R&D, and on national competitiveness and innovation legislation leading to the America Competes Act in 2007.

Description

Join the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies for an in depth discussion of the current situation in Burma/Myanmar, featuring three panelists and a discussion. This is the second event in the series, Rohingya in Peril, co-sponsored by the Asian Institute. This workshop features three 20-minute presentations by our panelists, followed by a discussion among the panelists, followed by a Q&A period with the audience. Register for this workshop on Eventbrite by clicking here

John Holt will discuss what contemporary Rohingya political leaders in Yangon and Sittwe are saying about the current crisis, and what progressive monks in Mandalay see to be a way forward. He may also consider a comparative perspective on Buddhist/Muslim tensions in Sri Lanka and/or Thailand.

Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière will consider the re-definition of monastic roles in the transitional Burma/Myanmar. She will focus on a new claim by a range of monks for responsibility in preserving Buddhist national identity in this context, and the rise of an extreme nationalist Buddhism.

Juliane Schober will contextualize the anti-Rohingya violence historically in terms of an extended anti-Muslim sentiment in Myanmar, and show how anti-Muslim sentiments have informed the project of the state for the past century. Specifically, her presentation will look at various registers (ethnicity, gender and law) through which prejudice have been established. She will also discuss why, in their current configuration, these social developments threaten an emerging vision of belonging to a new future for Myanmar that is multi-ethnic and multi-religious.

Panelists’ Biographies
Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière a researcher with the National Center of Scientific Research and is the current Director of the Center of Southeast Asia Studies in Paris.

John Holt has taught at Bowdoin College in Maine since 1978. He teaches courses about Asian religious traditions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as courses on theoretical approaches to the study of religion. He has received numerous research awards, including four fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, two senior fellowships from the Fulbright Program, as well as other national research awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Asian Cultural Council. He has been an editor of Religious Studies Review and was elected as a fellow to the American Society for the Study of Religion in 1995. He is the author of many influential works, including Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press (2017); Buddhist Extremists and Muslim Minorities: Religious Conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka (NY: Oxford U. Press, 2016); Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture (HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2009).

Juliane Schober is Director of the Center for Asian Research and Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University where she also directed the graduate program in Religious Studies (2009–2012) and developed a doctoral track in the Anthropology of Religion. She is an anthropologist of religion who works on Theravada Buddhist practice in Southeast Asia, especially Burma/Myanmar. In 2013, Juliane participated in the first IAPP delegation of U.S. universities to Myanmar, organized by the International Institute of Education. She has held leadership positions in the Association for Asian Studies, the American Academy of Religion, the American Anthropological Association, and serves on various editorial boards. Also in 2013, Juliane founded the Theravada Studies Group, an academic organization affiliated with the Association for Asian Studies. The group promotes comparative and scholarly exchanges among social scientists and humanists who work on aspects of Theravada Buddhism in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Southwest China and globally though pilgrimage and diaspora networks. Her most recent book, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies and Civil Society, was published in 2011 (University of Hawai’i Press).

Description

Between 2014 and 2016, the EU has been confronted with one of the greatest crises in its history, the European refugee crisis. Not only did the crisis challenge pillars of the European project such as the doctrine of free movement, it might have also influenced individuals’ assessments of immigration and European Integration, as well as the relationship between anti-immigrant sentiment and Euroscepticism. Using data from three waves of the European Social Survey (ESS) – the wave before the crisis in 2012, the wave at the beginning of the crisis in 2014 and the wave at the (perceived) height of the crisis in 2016 – I test the degree to which these conjectures hold. For one, my results indicate that there is a consistent and solid relationship between more critical attitudes toward immigration and increased Euroscepticism. Even more importantly and more relevant for my research question, however, I find that the crisis neither increased anti-immigration sentiments nor critical attitudes toward the EU nor did it reinforce the link between rejection of immigrants and rejection of the EU.

Daniel Stockemer is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Ottawa. His research interests include electoral politics, social movements, political representation, and European Politics. Daniel has published two books, one edited volume, and more than eighty articles in peer-reviewed journals, in among others Electoral Studies, Party Politics and European Union Politics. He is editor of the ECPR Journal European Political Science (EPS).

Description

As the ongoing crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program starkly illustrates, coordinating effective international responses to serious regional challenges can be extremely difficult. Part of the difficulty rests with the fact that in every major geopolitical flashpoint in the region, important countries either stand on opposite sides of the issue or have at best partially overlapping interests.  The United States, of course, has been a key player in every major security issue in East Asia since 1945. It has relied heavily both on its network of bilateral alliances and on its forward presence, primarily in Japan. Its two most important allies in the region are Japan and South Korea, which are not formal allies, but which share a broad range of values and interests. Arguably, there is considerable scope for enhancing security cooperation both bilaterally and trilaterally.  The purpose of the symposium was to explore the possibilities and limits of enhanced security cooperation in East Asia, primarily between these three countries, and in the first instance specifically with respect to North Korea, but also more broadly.  

"The American Approach to Security in Asia" by Professor Peter D. Feaver  Since the end of the Cold War, a bipartisan consensus, more or less, has guided U.S. grand strategy globally, and specifically in the Asian region.  As a candidate, Donald Trump campaigned on themes that indicated he would take U.S. foreign policy in dramatically different directions.  He has made some significant departures in policy, in particular dropping the TPP and withdrawing from the Paris Accords.  And he has made many more departures in rhetoric, in particular in the way he talks about the value of traditional alliances, the goals of international trade, and the way he wishes to confront the North Korean nuclear threat.  Yet overall, have Trump’s policies been more discontinuous or continuous?  I discussed the bidding, how we got here and where American foreign policy appears to be heading, paying special attention to the faultlines within the Trump Administration.  

Peter D. FEAVER (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1990), Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. Dr. Feaver is Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) and also Director of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy (AGS). Feaver is author of “Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations” (Harvard Press, 2003) and “Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States” (Cornell University Press, 1992). He is co-author: with Christopher Gelpi and Jason Reifler, of “Paying the Human Costs of War” (Princeton Press, 2009); with Susan Wasiolek and Anne Crossman, of “Getting the Best Out of College” (Ten Speed Press, 2008, 2nd edition 2012); and with Christopher Gelpi, of “Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force” (Princeton Press, 2004).  He has also authored a variety of monographs, scholarly articles, book chapters, and policy pieces on American foreign policy, public opinion, nuclear proliferation, civil-military relations, information warfare, and U.S. national security.  He is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and co-curator of the Elephants in the Room blog on ForeignPolicy.com. From June 2005 to July 2007, he served as Special Advisor for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council Staff at the White House where his responsibilities included the national security strategy, regional strategy reviews, and other political-military issues. In 1993-94, he served as Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control on the National Security Council at the White House where his responsibilities included the national security strategy review, counterproliferation policy, regional nuclear arms control, and other defense policy issues.  "History or Security?  Politics and Diplomacy over the Issue of Comfort Women among Japan, South Korea, and the United States" by Professor Naoko Kumagai   This presentation demonstrates how matters of geopolitical security have been able to override the historical issue of comfort women in the Japan-South Korea relationship.  The presentation explores the vicious circle wherein Korean and international criticism of Japan, partly fueled by Korean and international activists, stirred the “revisionist” backlash from Japan and worsened the overall Japan-South Korean diplomatic relationship. The presentation highlighted two distinctive problems in the vicious circle: the balance between reconciliation and factual accuracy and the neglect of moral or legal responsibilities. Japan’s hardliner conservatives havedenied the importance of moral responsibility, while anti-Japanese critics have overemphasized Japan’s legal responsibility. The presentation then examined how and to what extent America’s encouragement of reconciliation between Japan and South Korea, out of security concerns in the face of the North Korean nuclear and missile crisis and the rise of China, has served to ameliorate the problems and facilitate reconciliation.

 Naoko KUMAGAI (Ph.D., Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2009), Associate Professor and Director of the International Relations Program, International University of Japan, Minamiuonuma, Niigata Prefecture. Dr. Kumagai is the author of Jūgun Ianfu Mondai (Chikuma Shinsho, 2014), which was translated into English, "The Comfort Women: Historical, Political, Legal, and Moral Perspectives (English version of Jūgun Ianfu Mondai. Translated by David Noble)” (I-House Press, July 2016), selected for the 2014 LTCB (Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan) International Library for English translation. She published various papers and articles on Japan-Korea relations, forgiveness and reconciliation, international security, humanitarian law, and Japan-India relations. Among her articles are “The Absence of Consensus in Japan over the Issue of Comfort Women–With the Case of the Asian Women’s Fund from the Approach of Ontological Security” (Social Science Japan Journal, July 2015) and “Asian Women’s Fund Revisited” (Asia-Pacific Review, Vol.2, Issue 2, 2014). She is a recipient of the Nakasone Yasuhiro Award Incentive Award in July 2016. Her current research interests include disarmament and international security, weapons research and development, humanitarianism, the protection of civilians in armed conflict, and state sovereignty and transnational civil society.  

"Incompatible National Historical Narratives as an Obstacle to Security Cooperation" by Dr. Seung Hyok Lee.  In the current South Korea-Japan relations, incompatible ‘national historical narratives’ concerning certain past events at the citizen level are an influential factor binding governmental interactions in publicized bilateral issues. However, while the two societies increasingly disagree on the ‘contents’ of their respective narratives, the underlying patterns of how they permeate in each society are similar. The first pattern is a belief in ‘national exceptionalism’, and the second is a belief that their unique historical accomplishments are now being subjected to their neighbour’s distortion. Most citizens in each country, at present, are unaware that the two same ideational patterns are equally at work on the other side.  By promoting Japanese and South Korean public to recognize this fact, rather than focusing on the incompatible contents of the diverging national historical narratives, the two countries could attain a genuine ‘maturation’ in the bilateral relations. This presentation argued that in the long run, this mutual recognition at the citizen level is what will sustain a stable and lasting bilateral cooperation, including in the regional security issues.  Seung Hyok LEE (Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2011), Lecturer in Political Science, University of Toronto-Scarborough, and Associate at the Centre for the Study of Global Japan, Munk School of Global Affairs. Dr. Lee has served as Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Law, Hokkaido University, as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace and at the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also been Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Renison University College, University of Waterloo, and Visiting Scholar at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs. His main research interest is domestic society’s influence on publicized foreign policy issues, with a specific focus on Japan and the Korean Peninsula. He is the author of Japanese Society and the Politics of the North Korean Threat (University of Toronto Press, 2016), “North Korea in South Korea-Japan Relations as a Source of Mutual Security Anxiety among Democratic Societies,” (The International Relations of the Asia-Pacific), and “Be Mature and Distinguish the ‘Forest’ from the ‘Trees’: Overcoming Korea-Japan Disputes Based on Incompatible National Historical Narratives” (Asteion).  Chair:  David A. WELCH (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1990), Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Endowed Chair Program in Japanese Politics and Global Affairs, University of Toronto; CIGI Chair of Global Security, Balsillie School of International Affairs; Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo; and Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation. Dr. Welch is author of Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change (Princeton University Press, 2005), Justice and the Genesis of War (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and co-editor of Japan as a ‘Normal Country’? A Nation in Search of Its Place in the World (University of Toronto Press, 2011). He has recently been researching and writing on Asia-Pacific Security, with a particular focus on confidence, trust, empathy, threat perception, misperception, North Korea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea.

Description

How can we understand the Pacific, Asia, and the broader world from indigenous perspectives–from the perspective of the people that Westerners claimed to “discover”? This paper turns the tables on stories of exploration by tracing the travels of two Native Hawaiians who traveled the Pacific in the late eighteenth century. Ka Wahine (a commoner and lady’s maid) and Kaʻiana (a male high chief who took an English captain as his lover) traveled to Macao, the Philippines, Pelau, the Aleutians, and Vancouver Island. Their motives, their experiences, and the ways they put their knowledge to use shed light on how knowledge and power were at play in the age of exploration. Placing indigenous exploration at the center of study opens up a much more sophisticated understanding of the forces at play in shaping the modern world and colonial spaces—especially if we use sources in indigenous languages by indigenous people.

Description

All Joint French History Seminar events are held in English unless otherwise noted.

Pierre de Coubertin’s revival of the ancient Olympics was part of his larger program to reform the French educational system in imitation of the English model, i.e., to include physical education and sport as part of the curriculum. His initiative fell on deaf ears and for many decades thereafter French schools—and French people generally—continued to regard participation in sport as foreign to their mission and to their train de vie. This reluctance was, however, at odds with a tradition that had lasted for several centuries. In the Middle Ages and up to about 1650 the French both regarded themselves and were regarded by others as being among the best athletes in Europe. They were credited with having devised the knightly tournament; they were avid jousters; playing tennis was their obsession; they seem to have invented golf and perfected pall mall. The earliest biographies of the great French knights, from Guillaume le Maréchal to Bayard, all insert a section relating their subjects’ youthful sports achievements (Du Guesclin is taken here as emblematic of French feudal chivalry). From Charlemagne to Louis XIII most of the kings were keen athletes, but during the 16th and early 17th centuries sport on the personal level began to be removed from the French agenda.

The focus of this talk will be to elucidate and understand the manifestations, disappearance, and reappearance of sport in France, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, why it fell into disfavour in the 16th and 17th centuries, to be replaced by other forms, not simply of leisure activity but of purposeful pursuits. I will be drawing on a variety of sources: biographies, essays, rule books, polemical treatises, and purely “literary,” imaginative texts.

Prof. John McClelland

Professor Emeritus, Department of French, and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies

1993-2003, Associated Professor, Faculty of Physical Education and Health (now Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education)

Visiting Professor, Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Université de Tours, France; University of California at Santa Barbara; Université de Rennes II (France), chaire de littérature du XVIe siècle; Institut für Sportwissenschaften, Georg-August Universität, Göttingen (Germany).

Co-General Editor for the 6-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Sport (forthcoming 2016), with special responsibility for vols. 1, 2, and 3 (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance).

Author/co-editor of four books on French literature and sport, including Body and Mind: Sport in Europe from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance (2007) and Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe/Le sport dans la civilisation de l’Europe pré-moderne (2009).

Author of over 60 articles and book chapters on French literature, music, rhetoric, and sport, most recently (since 2014) ” Manuscrit et imprimé : survivances, interférences 1470-2007 : Les deux textes de Montaigne,” “Redefining the Limits: Sport in the Age of Galileo and the Scientific Revolution,” “Sport and Scientific Thinking in the Sixteenth Century: Ruling Out Playfulness,” “Early Modern Athletic Contests: Sport or not Sport,” and “Pantagruel et Gargantua, essais d’autofiction.”

Description

The 1618 trial of Leonora Galigaï, along with her husband’s memory, was accompanied by fantastical political defamation. This talk on damnatio memoriae and the blurred borders of the witch trials investigates performing arts archives alongside literary defamation and the destruction of monuments. Combining allegations of witchcraft, Judaism, and defamations of female political leadership, this talk offers analyses of a hybrid trial in baroque Paris disclosing performative uses of print deployed in the destruction of political legacies and influence.

VK Preston is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and University College at the University of Toronto. She works at intersections of performance theory and history with a focus on seventeenth-century French and trans-Atlantic baroques. As an early-career research fellow with the History of the Emotions Project in Melbourne, Australia, VK’s work on intersections of performativity and witch studies grapples with historiography, authority, and judicial abuse as well as histories of dance, theatre, and defamation. She is a research affiliate of Early Modern Conversions Project and participant in a number of international research communities, including, most recently, as a fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence.

Description

This pathbreaking study provides the first comprehensive examination of India-China interactions in the broader contexts of Asian and world history. By focusing on material exchanges, transmissions of knowledge and technologies, networks of exchange during the colonial period, and little-known facets of interactions between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China, Tansen Sen argues convincingly that the analysis of India-China connections must extend beyond the traditional frameworks of nation-states or bilateralism. Instead, he demonstrates that a wide canvas of space, people, objects, and timeframe is needed to fully comprehend the interactions between India and China in the past and during the contemporary period. [...] The author’s formidable array of sources, pulled from archives and libraries around the world, range from Chinese travel accounts to Indian intelligence reports. Examining the connected histories of the two regions, Sen fills a striking gap in the study of India and China in a global setting” (quoted from the blurb). Stewart Beck, former Canadian High Commissioner to India and President and CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, and Professor Anup Grewal, Assistant Professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, UofT, will join the author Tansen Sen in a discussion of his book. The book will be available for sale at the venue.

Description

Description:

This presentation examines the spread of Chinese temples associated with the veneration of Ruan and Liang buddhas from Sihui County in Guangdong Province, China, through Southeast Asia to the Chinatown in Kolkata, India. Ruan Ziyu and Liang Cineng were followers of the sixth Chan patriarch Huineng (638–713) and are believed to have attained enlightenment and become buddhas during the Song dynasty (960-1279). In the thirteenth century temples dedicated to these two Chinese buddhas were established in the Sihui County. With the migration of people from the region in the nineteenth century, the belief in the two buddhas and the temples associated with them spread to present-day Malaysia and India. These Ruan-Liang temples in foreign settings functioned as religious sites as well as community spaces and heritage markers. By tracing the spread (and evolution) of the Ruan-Liang belief and examining the communal function of the temples through the use of photographs, this paper analyzes the relationship between migration and the diffusion of Chinese religious traditions, the role of temples in the preservation of sub-dialect identity, the mixing of Chinese and local ideas and histories, and the intimate maritime connections between China, Southeast Asia, and India in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Biography:

Tansen Sen is Professor of history and the Director of the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai. He received his MA from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Asian history and religions and has special scholarly interests in India-China interactions, Indian Ocean connections, and Buddhism. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400 (2003; 2016) and India, China, and the World: A Connected History (2017). He has co-authored (with Victor H. Mair) Traditional China in Asian and World History (2012) and edited Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Cultural and Intellectual Exchange (2014). He is currently working on a book about Zheng He’s maritime expeditions in the early fifteenth century and co-editing (with Engseng Ho) the Cambridge History of the Indian Ocean, volume 1. He has done extensive research in India, China, Japan, and Singapore with grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Japan Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore). He was the founding head of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Center in Singapore and served on the Governing Board of the Nalanda University.

Description

Urban regeneration initiatives can help cities improve derelict built environments and increase their tax revenues. However, these efforts can also produce negative outcomes (e.g. displacement). This talk explored how gentrification occurs in a shrinking cities context and examines how gentrification and disinvestment affect the housing opportunities of low-income residents in Detroit.

Description

BRICS is an association of the world’s five largest emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. It is also an increasingly important international summit institution. Since 2009, BRICS members have met annually at leader summits to promote the interests and role of developing states in global governance. The most recent BRICS Summit in 2017 was hosted in Xiamen, China.

In an increasingly fractured world marked by rising protectionist sentiments, looming trade wars and global threats such as climate change, global health, security challenges, – what unique opportunities and potential does BRICS offer? More broadly, what role do rising powers have in addressing global challenges? What leadership potential does BRICS offer in global governance today? This panel aims to address these questions as BRICS group prepares for its tenth annual summit in July 2018, which will hosted and presided over by South Africa in Johannesburg.

At this event hosted by the BRICS Research Group and Contemporary Asian Studies Student Union, we are honored to be joined by the Consul Generals of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa to Toronto. Five (TBC) BRICS Consul Generals will be addressing the U of T community on their vision and contributions to BRICS. Please join us on February 26th, 4-6pm at the Combination Room of Trinity College for this panel event. Please kindly note that only guests who have registered via the Munk School event listing will be admitted to the event.

Description

The Contemporary Asian Studies Student Union (CASSU) warmly invites you to the second event of our Research Seminar Series – “The Director’s Cut: A Historian Examines the Asia-Pacific Through the Lens of Cinema” with Professor Takashi Fujitani.

This research seminar series is brought to you by CASSU, and aims to provide a forum for students who share similar interests in Asian social, cultural, and political affairs to engage in dialogue with faculty members. We hope to provide our peers with the opportunity to better understand the practice of academic inquiry through learning about faculty-level research. In this seminar, Professor Fujitani will speak about his experience researching the history of the Asia-Pacific region, with a particular focus on his interest in cinema and his inter-disciplinary approach to history and film in the context of Asian Studies. Please join us in Room 208N of the Munk School North House on February 28th, from 3-5pm. We hope to see you there!

Speaker Biography

Takashi Fujitani is the Dr. David Chu Professor and Director in Asia-Pacific Studies. His research focuses especially on modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, Asian American history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia Pacific). A graduate of UC Berkeley, Professor Takashi Fujitani came to the University of Toronto from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a professor of modern Japanese history for two decades. He has held numerous grants and fellowships, including from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Stanford Humanities Center, and Social Science Research Council. He is also editor of the series Asia Pacific Modern (UC Press). Much of his past and current research has centered on the intersections of nationalism, colonialism, war, memory, racism, ethnicity, gender and cultural production in the Asia-Pacific, as well as the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that have figured our ways of studying these issues.

Description

Sometimes outrageous, often funny and always insightful, poet/pedagogue Marusya Bociurkiw’s films and books create an alternative diaspora archive, built on hybridity, intersectionality and the desire to speak to that which has been unspoken.Her body of work – 10 films and 6 books unique to the fields of Slavic Studies and Slavic literature – rewrite the Ukrainian settler narrative and create new queer and intersectional feminist imaginaries that cross ethnic, transnational, and identitarian boundaries. Bociurkiw will show clips from her films and will share footage from her current project, “Post-Revolution.”

Marusya Bociurkiw is associate professor of media theory and co-director of The Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought , which promotes research-creation and graduate study in the areas of media studies, critical theory, Aboriginal, feminist, and queer studies, and media activism. She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia, an M.A.in Social and Political Thought from York University, and a B.F.A from NSCAD University. Dr. Bociurkiw’s academic research is broadly concerned with the intersections of affect, nation and technology, and their gendered, queered and racialized ramifications. She is also a media artist, writer, blogger and scholar whose media works and books about the sexuality, ethnicity , food, and culture have been screened and read all over the world. Her films and videos are in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, The National Archives, and various universities and libraries. A longtime media activist, she founded Emma Productions, a feminist media collective in the 1980’s and is currently engaged in documenting that history. She is the writer/director of nine films and videos, including “Unspoken Territory”, a history of racial profiling in Canada, and “What’s the Ukrainian Word For Sex: A Sexual Journey through Eastern Europe.”

Description

In 1946, Mary Pickford and her husband Charles “Buddy” Rogers released a film based on the popular newspaper comic strip Little Iodine through their B-film production company, Comet Productions. A failed attempt at establishing a popular film series, the production of Little Iodine nonetheless served as a useful case study in this talk examining the process of Hollywood serial filmmaking and the American cinema’s intersection with disparate media forms in the 1930s and 1940s.

Description

The Founders of the University of Central Asia (UCA), His Highness the Aga Khan, and the Presidents of the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan established UCA at the Roof of the World, an area which spans the Pamir, Himalaya, Tien Shan, Karakorum, Kunlun and Hindu Kush mountain ranges, to address issues faced by mountain societies.

Dr. Kassim-Lakha will discuss how this innovative regional university with campuses in the mountains of the Founding States and the first anywhere to specialize in addressing educational needs of mountain societies, is responding to the myriad challenges that surfaced in the Central Asian region after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The talk will also highlight how UCA’s research institutes and programmes are catalyzing sustainable development of the mountain communities of the Founding States and Afghanistan.

Join us to discover how this visionary project is facilitating transformative change in Central Asia and creating new opportunities for its mountainous communities.

Chair: Dr. Edward Schatz, Associate Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs
Discussant: Dr. Glen Jones, Dean and Higher Education Professor, OISE

Description

Dr. Rowen will present key findings from her recently published book, Searching for Truth in the Transitional Justice Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which examines the campaigns for a truth commission to redress human rights abuses committed in the course of the war during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the decades-long armed conflict in Colombia, and US detention policies in the War on Terror. Drawing on twelve years of fieldwork, over 200 interviews, archival and survey research, Rowen’s book considers how transitional justice developed as an idea around which a loosely structured movement emerged and then became professionalized, eventually making truth commissions a standard response to mass violence. By exploring how this movement developed, as well as efforts to establish truth commissions in the Balkans, Colombia, and the US, this talk will address the different processes through which political actors translate new legal ideas such as transitional justice into political action. As will be argued, the malleability of legal ideas and policy interventions such as transitional justice and truth commissions, is both an asset and a liability for those striving to ensure accountability, improve survivor well-being, and prevent future violence.

Description

In global economic governance, political consensus reached by the G20 members plays an important role in defining governance ideas and governance directions as well as steering and boosting collective actions.

Political opportunities are essential for G20 members’ successful efforts to place their preferences into a political consensus. This talk will analyze how G20 members achieve consensus through the lens of political opportunity, and examine China’s practice of proposing policy initiatives and placing its preferences into the political consensus of the G20.

About the speaker:

Hongsong Liu is a professor of international relations at Shanghai International Studies University. His research interests include international organizations, global governance and Chinese foreign policy.

He has published widely in Chinese IR journals and some international peer-reviewed journals. He was a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Regionalization at University of Warwick. Recent and forthcoming publications include “Shaping the Agenda Jointly? China and the EU in the G20” (co-authored with Shaun Breslin, in Jianwei Wang and Weiqing Song, eds., China, the European Union and the International Politics of Global Governance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and “China’s New Role in Global Governance: Shaping the Rules” (Routledge, forthcoming).

Description

ABSTRACT
About 45% of foreign residents in South Korea are women, and the majority of them come to South Korea on kinship-related legal status. This talk investigates gendered bordering practices in “temporary ethno-kinship visa programs” which requires migrants to provide proof and justification to immigration authorities when extending their visas. Using extensive ethnographic data, this talk will demonstrate how migrants experience and contest such bordering practices in courts, immigration offices and other government agencies, as well as in their daily lives. Through an in-depth focus on marriage migrants from Vietnam and co-ethnic migrants from China, this talk will discuss how two groups of migrant women make contested kinship claims to the South Korean state:. Using Balibar’s notion of “being a border” and Zelizer’s ideas about the intimate economy, this talk conceptualises the border as a dynamic site where notions of membership, family and speculative capital are contested. Focusing on the technical aspect of defining and adjudicating family through immigration measures will allow us to see the performative account of “governmentality” and procedural contradictions in the grey areas of the law. It will also enable us to analyse state actions and migrant responses to them organically as each traverses justifications of family, immigration and economy.

BIOGRAPHY
Sohoon Lee is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. Her postdoctoral research project explores the ‘informal’ politics between the migrant care workers and their employers in the liminal space of immigration, social protection and labour. Building upon her PhD thesis, she is currently working on a book manuscript on the temporality of ethno-kinship migration in South Korea through a combination of ethnography, in-depth personal and group interviews and analysis of laws and policies. Her research interests also include multicultural (damunhwa) policies in South Korea, return migrants and bottom-up development in Indonesia, and NGO-Trade Union relationship in migrant movement in South Korea. Prior to her PhD studies, she worked at Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) in areas of ASEAN human rights mechanisms, indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, and documentation of human rights violation. She has also undertaken consultancies with UN Women, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), and other NGOs to write on topics of migrant domestic workers, intersectionality and discrimination and labour rights protections in South Korea.

Description

Ever wonder why housing prices in Toronto have increased dramatically in recent times? Will housing be affordable in the future? In recent years, many foreign Chinese investors have been purchasing real estate in Canadian cities, namely Toronto and Vancouver. In 2010, Chinese investors spent about $5 billion on foreign real estate investments; in 2016, this figure grew to over $101 billion. Chinese investors around the world are expected to spend up to $1 trillion on real estate in the next decade, in which a large portion will pour into Canada. Although a common explanation for this trend is that Chinese investors are seeking to purchase luxury properties, the CBC has also found that most Chinese buyers are looking for homes under $655,050.

Furthermore, it is commonly believed that much of this real estate sits empty, while these investors are making city housing unaffordable, driving out locals, and harming the Canadian economy. As the Chinese foreign investors in Canada are believed to be reshaping the market, this panel discussion will explore what are the effects of increased foreign investment in Canadian real estate, on the economy and on other Canadians? What laws are in place to protect domestic buyers, if any? Are foreign investors driving up housing prices, or is this a racist explanation that masks other causes of increasingly expensive real estate in Canadian cities? This event will evaluate the truth in common narratives regarding increased Chinese investment in Canadian real estate, and explore what this phenomenon means for domestic buyers and renters.

Panelists:
● James McKellar, Schulich School of Business, York University
Professor James McKellar is the Director of the Brookfield Centre in Real Estate and Infrastructure Schulich School of Business at York University. He was the first Director of the Center for Real Estate at MIT and has held faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Calgary, and as an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Professor McKellar has consulted businesses and governments worldwide on real estate matters covering housing, development, finance and investment, asset management, and market performance.

● Lynette Ong, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Professor Lynette Ong is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and Director of Munk China Initiatives. Professor Ong researches authoritarian politics and the political economy of development. She is a published author on issues such as local government debt, contentious politics, protest and land reform, state-led urbanization and more.

Synergy Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/168722653772356/.

Description

Registration is not required for this event. Seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Reception at 3 p.m.
Panel discussion at 4 p.m.

Marcel Nadjary was a Greek Jewish member of the Sonderkommando, a squad of prisoners who worked in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Nadjary was one of the Sonderkommando men who wrote accounts of their experiences and buried them in the ashes. Many of these accounts, known as the “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” were never found or were so damaged by water and time they were practically illegible. Now a historian and an IT expert have restored 90% of the legibility of Nadjary’s text.

Description

There have been a number of dynamics impacting the geopolitical landscape in East Asia over the past few years. The most acute – and recent –  examples of this have been the intensifying provocations from North Korea, which continues to look at enhancing its nuclear and missile program. But, there are also a number of other critical changes in the region – from new leadership in South Korea to leadership consolidation in China. The region also continues to adapt to a new administration in the US and its changing views on trade and – perhaps – alliances. All of these factors have made Japan’s geo-strategic environment more complex. How is Japan adapting to this change and what are the tripwires to watch for?  

Speaker Biography:  Jonathan Berkshire Miller is an international affairs professional with expertise on security, defense and intelligence issues in Northeast Asia. He is currently a senior visiting fellow with the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) based in Tokyo and a Distinguished Fellow with the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada. Additionally, he is the Director and co-founder of the Council on International Policy and a Senior Fellow on East Asia for the Asian Forum Japan.  Previously, he was an international affairs fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, and held a senior fellowship (2014 – 2017) with the EastWest Institute and a fellowship on Japan with the Pacific Forum CSIS from 2013 – 2016. In addition, Miller previously spent nearly a decade working on economic and security issues related to Asia with the Canadian federal government.  Miller is a regular contributor to The Economist Intelligence Unit, Foreign Affairs, Forbes and Newsweek Japan. He has also published widely in Foreign Policy, the World Affairs Journal, the Nikkei Asian Review, the Japan Times, the Mainichi Shimbun, the ASAN Forum, Jane’s Intelligence Review and Global Asia and been interviewed extensively by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, CNN, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, the Japan Times, Asahi Shimbun, the Voice of America and ABC News.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Abstract:

In recent years, the task of “restorying” has been identified as an important strategy in making space for the counternarratives of the nation-state from the perspective of Indigenous histories. Here, I use four stories to start to tell a different history of Indigenous Ainu life in Japan. The stories recount Ainu experiences of migration to Tokyo and other cities since the early 1900s. Beyond their narrative content, I explain how these stories are part of a broader political project that urban Ainu leaders have used for over forty years to contest and resist the ‘regionalization’ of Indigenous Ainu affairs to Hokkaido. Using the Ainu situation as my reference point, I develop a comparative conversation about the transformation of Indigenous geographies across the Pacific and elaborate on the fraught politics but also moral value of thinking with urban mobilities. I end with reflections on an exchange between Tokyo Ainu and Montreal Inuit in Osaka in 2003 and its relevance for my current project.

Biography:

Mark Watson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. His main area of research concerns the comparative analysis of urban Indigenous collectivity, self-organization and mobility. This focus informs broader, on-going interest in practices and theories of action-oriented and collaborative research.

Description

The Empowerment of Women through Inclusive and Sustainable Industrial Development

International Women’s Day on March 8 provides an important opportunity to focus on the global dialogue around empowering at-risk women and girls, particularly in the developing world, through innovative methods of industrial development. Governments around the world – including Canada’s – have ensured that the betterment of the lives of women and girls is a key priority, and that this is fully integrated into broader approaches to building a sustainable economic future for all.

Join a gathering of leading international experts and thought-leaders who will come together to discuss this fascinating and important issue. Hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs and moderated by leading Canadian journalist Allison Smith, this event will feature:

Dr. Kai Bethke, Director, External Affairs, United Nations Industrial Development Organization
Dr. Tanjina Mirza, Chief Programs Officer, Plan International Canada
Dr. Rachel Silvey, Richard Charles Lee Director, Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto
Ms. Kathryn White, President & CEO, United Nations Association In Canada

Description

In 2018, Japan celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration.  Canada’s own sesquicentennial year ended in 2017.  And 2018 marked the 90th anniversary of the formal establishment of Canada-Japan diplomatic relations. The questions that motivated this symposium reflected on those seminal moments.  What can we learn from Japan’s early global engagement and its embrace of modernity? What are the implications for Japan’s current leadership and diplomacy in regional and global settings? What needs to be done to strengthen relationships between Canada and Japan and to deepen their cooperation in pursuit of shared interests?  A distinguished group of speakers from Japan and Canada addressed such questions and opened an important, future-oriented conversation.

Program:  12:00-1:00  Registration and light lunch  1:00-2:15  Welcome Professor Randall Hansen Interim Director, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto  Ms Takako Ito, Consul General of Japan, Toronto  Professor David Welch, Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Endowed Chair Program in Japanese Politics and Global Affairs, University of Toronto; Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo  Opening Keynote Ms Koko Kato, Special Advisor to the Cabinet Office, Government of Japan "Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution in Heavy Industry"  2:15-3:45  Panel 1: Japan’s Entry into International Society  Featured speaker: Professor Tomoko Okagaki, Dokkyo University Commentators:  Professor Robert Vipond, Department of Political Science Ms Deanna Horton, Distinguished Fellow, Asia Pacific Foundation  3:45-4:00  Break  4:00-5:30  Panel 2: Japan’s Future Challenges: Lessons from the Meiji Era  Featured speaker: Professor Yuichi Hosoya, Keio University Commentator:   Professor David Welch  5:30-6:30  Closing Roundtable Discussion  Dr. Sarah Taylor, Director General for North Asia and Oceania, Global Affairs Canada Professor Yuichi Hosoya Professor Tomoko Okagaki Ms Koko Kato  6:30-7:30  Reception   Panel 1: Japan’s Entry into International Society with feature speaker ProfessorTomoko Okagaki  What did the Meiji Restoration in 1868 entail for Japanese society, for its external relations, and for international society as a whole? The Meiji Restoration represented not only the official return to imperial rule from the Shogunate system, but also Japan’s modern nation-building and entry into international society. How did Japan embrace international constraints placed by the Euro-dominant international society of the late 19th century?  How did Japan embark on reforms and restructuring of feudal society?  What explains the rapidity and seeming facility of Japan in accepting international norms of the era? With particular focus on Japan’s conformity with international law, the talk will cover the nature of Japan’s encounter with the West and discuss universal themes involving nation-building and accession to international society by latecomer states. Meiji Japan’s experience may also share a common motif of foreign policy with Canada, which gradually achieved its diplomatic independence from Britain since Confederation, searching for its place in the changing distribution of power in the international system.  Panel 2: Japan’s Future Challenges: Lessons from the Meiji Era with featured speaker Professor Yuichi Hosoya  Japan’s experience in the last 150 years is extraordinary one.  150 years of modern Japanese history can be divided into two opposing periods. The first one lasted for 77 years since 1868 until 1945, and the second one lasted for 73 years since 1945 until today. Japan had become the first non-Western modernized nation-state that equaled to major Western powers.  Meanwhile Japan had presented the vision of a “rich nation and strong army” since the Meiji Era.  Japan had lost its “strong army” at the end of the Second World War.  In the second period, Japan had pursued the path of a peace-loving country based on its second largest economy in the world. But Japan has been losing certain features of a “rich nation” in the “lost decades” since the end of the Cold War.  Today, Japan is trying to present a new international identity to the world, reflecting its own historical lessons of the last 150 years.      Speaker Bios:  Deanna Horton, Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs served for over 30 years in Canada’s foreign service, including 12 years at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, most recently as Minister and Deputy Head of Mission.  She spent two years at the U.S. State Department Foreign Service Institute in Yokohama studying Japan’s language, history, and culture.  Her most recent writing on Japan can be found at: http://www.asiapacific.ca/op-eds/cultivating-cool-branding-lessons-canada-japan  HOSOYA Yuichi is Professor of International Politics at Keio University, Tokyo. He is also Senior Researcher at the Institute for International Policy Studies (IIPS), Senior Fellow at The Tokyo Foundation (TKFD), and also Adjunct Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA). Professor Hosoya was a member of the Advisory Board at Japan’s National Security Council (NSC) (2014-2016). He was also a member of Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel on Reconstruction of the Legal Basis for Security (2013-14), and Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel on National Security and Defense Capabilities (2013), in which capacity he assisted to draft Japan’s first National Security Strategy. Professor Hosoya studied international politics at Rikkyo (BA), Birmingham (MIS), and Keio (Ph.D.).  He was a visiting professor and Japan Chair (2009–2010) at Sciences-Po in Paris (Institut d’Études Politiques) and a visiting fellow (Fulbright Fellow, 2008–2009) at Princeton University. His research interests include the postwar international history, British diplomatic history, Japanese foreign and security policy, and contemporary East Asian international politics. His comments appeared at New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, USA Today, Die Welt and Le Monde, as well as at major Japanese media.  Koko Kato is Special Advisor to the Cabinet Office, Government of Japan; Project Coordinator, Sakubei Yamamoto Collection inscribed in Memory of the World; Managing Director, National Congress of Industrial Heritage Foundation; Coordinator, Cabinet Secretariat Industrial History Project Team; and Coordinator, The World Heritage Council for the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution. Ms Kato graduated from Keio University, majoring in literature. She built up her career as a conference interpreter, and by working at CBS News, Tokyo branch. After completing the Master of Community and Regional Planning (MCRP) program at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, she started her own business in Tokyo. She has also devoted her energies to the research on domestic and international industrial heritages. She played the leading role in the inscription of the “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution – Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining” on the World Heritage List in 2015. Publication: “Industrial Heritage” (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc., 1998) as well as many articles in magazines such as “Gakutou” and “Chiri.” Ms Kato also scripted and total produced the Nomination file on the “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution” to be inscribed on the World Heritage List.  Tomoko T. Okagaki (Ph.D., The University of Michigan, 2005) is Professor of Political Science at Dokkyo University in Japan and author of The Logic of Conformity: Japan’s Entry in International Society (The University of Toronto Press, 2013). She was a visiting student at the University of Toronto (Sankei Scholarship) in 1986-1987 and also studied Canadian foreign policy at the University of British Columbia as a recipient of Government of Canada Award 1988-89, obtaining her master’s degree there. Her long-standing research interests in international politics include, inter alia, state socialization, comparative regionalism, and theories of international relations. She held an Abe Fellowship from 2008-2010, spending a total of two years at Harvard University, as an academic associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and as a visiting scholar at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. In 2014 she taught Asian regionalism at le Département de Géographie, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne as a professeure invitée and at le Centre d’etudes japonaises, L’institut national des langues et civilisations orientales as a chercheuse invitée.  Sarah Taylor is the Director-General for North Asia and Oceania at Global Affairs Canada. She was Deputy Head of Mission and Minister for Political-Economic Relations and Public Diplomacy at the Embassy of Canada to the People’s Republic of China from August 2011 to July 2015, and Special Advisor to the Assistant Deputy Minister for Asia Pacific at Global Affairs Canada from July 2015 to June 2016. Prior to her assignment in China, she worked from 2006 to 2011 in the Privy Council Office, the department supporting Canada’s Prime Minister. Within the Privy Council Office she served as acting Executive Director of the International Assessment Staff, and before that as its Deputy Executive Director, and as Director of its Asia Division. From 1990 to 2006 she was a foreign service officer with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. In that capacity she served abroad at Canadian missions in Jakarta (2000-2003), Beijing (1992-1995) and Hong Kong (1991-1992). At headquarters she held positions including liaison officer and speech-writer for the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Deputy Director of the Southeast Asia Division and Director of the Development Policies and Institutions Division. Dr. Taylor holds a doctorate (1990) and an M.Phil. degree (1984) from Cambridge University, both in East Asian archaeology. She spent a year at Beijing University (1982-83) under the auspices of the Canada-China Scholarly Exchange programme, and has also studied for shorter periods in Korea and Japan. She holds an Honours B.A. from the University of Toronto.  Robert Vipond is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of Toronto. He has written broadly on the political development of Canada. This includes co-editorship of Roads to Confederation: The Making of Confederation, 1867 (U of T Press, 2017), a two-volume anthology of leading essays on the Confederation era.  Chair:  David A. WELCH (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1990), Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Endowed Chair Program in Japanese Politics and Global Affairs, University of Toronto; CIGI Chair of Global Security, Balsillie School of International Affairs; Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo; and Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation. Dr. Welch is author of Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change (Princeton University Press, 2005), Justice and the Genesis of War (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and co-editor of Japan as a ‘Normal Country’? A Nation in Search of Its Place in the World (University of Toronto Press, 2011). He has recently been researching and writing on Asia-Pacific Security, with a particular focus on confidence, trust, empathy, threat perception, misperception, North Korea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea.

Description

Abstract:
Attempts to explain China’s capitalist revolution all suffer from a “blind men and elephant” problem: depending on when and where one looks within China, every theory is development is correct yet none is complete. In other words, one can find snapshots of evidence for every conceivable “model” within China, from the Washington Consensus, good enough governance, to authoritarian developmental states. What then is the all-encompassing picture of China’s great economic and institutional transformation? The answer, I show, lies in the trajectory or sequence of development strategies, rather than in any particular factor or model. Across China, the first step of development was that local governments harnessed normatively weak or wrong institutions to kick-start markets, in stark defiance of textbook economic prescriptions.
The book will be available for sale at the venue.

Biography:
Yuen Yuen Ang is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Her research lies at the intersection of global development, China’s political economy, and adaptive processes of change. Her book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), won the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, and was described by the prize committee as “a field-shifting move to non-linear complex processes.” Elsewhere, Foreign Affairs named it among the “Best of Books 2017.” Yuen Yuen has received fellowships and awards from the Smith Richardson Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, American Political Science Association, and IBM Center for the Business of Government. She has spoken at many global development forums in the U.S, Europe, and China: the World Bank, United Nations, OECD Development Center, UK Department for International Development, Center for International Knowledge of Development/China’s State Council, International Finance Corporation, among others.

Description

Global Secular Stagnation: Keynes, Schumpeter, or Veblen?
What explains slow growth in the global economy? In this talk, Schwartz looks to Keynes, Schumpeter and Veblen to develop a framework for understanding the sources of slow growth, income inequality, and profit inequality in the information economy. Looking at changes in firm strategy and structure (Veblen) enables us to revise demand side (Keynes) and supply side (Schumpeter) arguments dealing with stagnation in the 1930s continuous flow production economy to fit the new circumstances of the information economy.

Bio: Herman Mark Schwartz is a professor in the Politics department of the University of Virginia and Fulbright Research Chair at Balsillie School for International Affairs, spring 2018. He is the author or co-editor of seven books on economic development, globalization, Denmark’s welfare state, employment policy, the politics of housing finance, the global financial crisis, and, most recently, the geo-politics of the subprime mortgage crisis in *Subprime Nation: American Power, Global Capital and the Housing Bubble*. He has also written over 60 articles and chapters.

Description

Hunger was a defining feature of the Second World War in the Soviet Union. While hunger was nothing new to many Soviet citizens, the war politicized hunger in new ways and generated distinct ways of conceiving of hunger’s effects. This talk will examine contemporaries’ reflections on the hungry body and the hungry mind in Leningrad and beyond, and will address the way hunger both underpinned and threatened to destabilize wartime myths of sacrifice and solidarity.

Rebecca Manley is an Associate Professor of History at Queen’s University. She is the author of To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Cornell University Press, 2009). She is currently working on a SSHRC funded book length provisionally entitled Tsar Hunger: Conceiving Hunger in Modern Russia. The project offers a fresh perspective on the place of hunger in modern Russian history by examining the way writers and revolutionaries, political economists and physiologists, government officials and philanthropists conceptualized and attempted to come to grips with hunger.

Description

As human rights appear to recede from the international agenda to be replaced by a new wave of nationalism and right-wing populism, it is important to remind the world that massive violations of human rights, including genocide, continue to threaten large numbers of people. As the nature of these threats changes from violence engineered by nation states to more dispersed forms of violence perpetrated by criminal groups and national/religious based organizations such as ISIS, confrontation with these altered forms of violence must be addressed. If we are to create an agenda to once again create consciousness of the great importance of these events and to reignite the willingness and create an initiative to confront and prevent these changing forms of genocidal violence, we must identify them and proceed to formulate policies to deal with them.

To these ends, this symposium and discussion will bring together two of the latest analyses by two of the most prominent scholars in the field. After presenting their new insights this symposium will present commentaries and analysis, including raising critical questions to be addressed and open these up for a hopefully wide-ranging discussion.

Description

The spectacular events of 2014 – the annexation of Crimea, start of the war in the Donets Basin, shooting of Malysian airliner MH17 over Eastern Ukraine, etc. – have changed German perceptions of the current Russian leadership fundamentally, as expressed in far going shifts in public discourse and opinion. Gradually, this change of position has also been noted in Ukraine. While there was in summer 2014 still an inapt Ukrainian “Mrs Ribbentropp” against Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor is today perceived, by most Ukrainian political observers, as one of the most pro-Ukrainian Western leaders. Nevertheless, an array of continuing formal and informal ties between Russia and Germany (economic, cultural, political etc.) continues to exert a largely unhealthy influence on German society and politics, as they often are used by the Kremlin to manipulate German decision and opinion making. These attempts are eased by deep-seated pathologies in post-war German foreign political thought including escapist pacifism, anti-Americanism, and mis-perceptions of the East European past and present as well as Germany’s role therein. The continuing significant German trade with Russia, and only slowly improving public knowledge about Ukraine are preventing an already disillusioned political class in Berlin to take a more resolute stance within the current Russian-Western confrontation.

ANDREAS UMLAND studied politics and Russian affairs in Leipzig, Berlin, Oxford, Stanford and Cambridge. He taught at the Urals State University, St. Antony’s College Oxford, Shevchenko University of Kyiv, Catholic University of Eichstaett and Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Since 2014, he is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv. He is also general editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” and consulting editor for the “Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society.”

Description

Abstract:

Max Weber famously characterized the state as the entity holding the monopoly on legitimate violence in the polity. What if, instead, the state is formed through the exercise of impunity, or the persistent and repeated failure to be held to account for illegitimate violence? In this paper, I develop a framework of impunity as state formation grounded in a new history of post-absolutist Thailand. Three key moments since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 – a 1958 coup that claimed to respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an investigation into state violence at the height of the Cold War that enhanced its cover-up, and the emergence of a dialectic of who can be killed with impunity and who cannot be impugned in the late reign of Rama IX – are key components of this history and invite new approaches to the study of law, human rights, and sovereignty.

Biography:

Tyrell Haberkorn is an Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and writes about state violence and dissident cultural politics in Thailand. She is the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) and In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Her essays and translations have appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, openDemocracy, and Prachatai.

Description

Please join us for a panel discussion on Canada / European Union relations. The discussion will look at particularly at trade, high-skilled labour mobility, and collaboration on migration potential against the backdrop of NAFTA, Brexit, and a growing climate of protectionism and uncertainty. Moderated by Dr. Craig Damian Smith, Associate Director, Global Migration Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, this event will feature:

Ms. Alexandra Bugailiskis, Canadian Ambassador to Italy
Mr. Dan Costello, Canadian Ambassador to the European Union
Prof. Robert Austin, Associate Professor, Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto
Prof. Dagmar Soennecken, Associate Professor, School of Public Policy & Administration and
Department of Social Science (Law & Society Program), York University
Mr. Stephen Cryne, President & CEO of the Canadian Employee Relocation Council

Description

In November 1943, shortly after the liberation of the occupied Soviet territories by the Red Army, three mass graves with the bodies of 144 children were discovered in a former colony for disabled children in Zaporizhia region. The disabled children had been shot in two mass murder actions by a German SS special unit in October 1941 and in March 1943. In the course of the NKVD investigations of the case, seven former Soviet employees of the colony, among them four women, were put on trial and convicted for complicity with the Germans in the crime. The trial documentation in many ways presents a fascinating historical resource: First, it deals with an understudied context of Nazi-crimes in the Soviet Union in WWII: the murder of disabled people. Second, it shows competing logics and possibilities of action of the Soviet defendants. Third, it is one of the few examples that show how Soviet postwar justice dealt with female collaborators. And fourth, it reveals to a certain extent problems of the Soviet treatment of disabled persons in prewar times.

Tanja Penter is professor of Eastern European History at Heidelberg University, Germany. Her research interests include: comparison of dictatorships, Soviet war crimes trials, questions of transitional justice and compensation for Nazi crimes and memory policies in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Her books include: Kohle für Stalin und Hitler. Arbeiten und Leben im Donbass 1929 bis 1953 (Essen 2010). She is a member of the German-Russian and the German-Ukrainian Commission of Historians and of the scientific board of the German Historical Institute in Moscow.

Description

Abstract:

China’s 19th Party Congress of October 2017 is a landmark in Xi Jinping’s leadership. Predictably Xi was “re-elected” as general secretary and he began his second term in a new position of strength, although he is still subjected to a number of constraints. The important personnel changes at the Party Congress will be fleshed out at the National People’s Congress in early March 2018 when Premier Li Keqiang forms his cabinet. This will provide more clues to the continuities and changes in China’s leadership changeover, decision-making specifics, and the pattern of political succession. In addition to these issues, the paper will also attempt to address the opportunities and challenges confronting the Xi Jinping leadership. As such, the paper is a third in a series of talks about the 19th Party Congress sponsored by the Asian Institute.

Biography:

Dr. Alfred L. Chan is professor of political science at Huron University College, London, Ontario. An alumnus of the University of Toronto, he has maintained his affiliation with the university (and the Asian Institute) since graduation. Current research projects include one on power and policy during the Xi Jinping era and another one on the Hu Jintao era.

Description

Stephen P. Groff, Vice President of Operations for Southeast/East Asia and the Pacific at the Asian Development Bank will discuss how regional cooperation and integration, technology, and value chains all help contribute to trade and economic growth in Asia and the Pacific.

Stephen P. Groff is responsible for the full range of ADB’s operations in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. His mandate includes establishing strategic and operational priorities in his areas of responsibility, producing investment and technical assistance operations.

In addition, Mr. Groff supports ADB’s President in managing ADB’s overall operations, represents ADB in high-level multilateral fora, and contributes to managing its relationships with its 67 member country shareholders, other multilateral financial institutions, and key government, private sector, and civil society partners.

Prior to joining ADB, Mr. Groff was Deputy Director for Development Cooperation at the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He also served as OECD’s envoy to the G20 Working Group on Development and was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council. Prior to this he was the Deputy Vice-President for Operations at the Washington-based Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), where he helped set up the agency and led MCC programs while advising the CEO on development issues, strategy, and policy.

Mr. Groff has worked across Asia, Africa, and Latin America and writes regularly on development issues. He also serves on a number of advisory boards for development-related organizations.

Mr. Groff holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Biology from Yale University.

Description

Abstract:
This talk introduces the updated Chinese edition of The G20: Evolution, Interrelationship, Documentation (original edition published by Ashgate/Routledge 2014) and the fully revised second edition being prepared for publication by Routledge). The book provides a historical overview and analysis of the evolving agenda, methods of performance evaluation, relationship with structured international organizations and other external actors (civil society, the business sector, non-member states); an analysis of G20 documentation and other sources of information; and a comprehensive bibliography. The aim is to present an updated, accurate analysis of the current state of the G20 and the challenges it faces. It is also intended as an authoritative work of reference.
The book traces the origins and predecessors of the G20; surveys the G20 finance ministers’ meetings since 1999 and the series of G20 summits since their launching in 2008; reviews the evolution of the G20 agenda; discusses the question of G20 membership; surveys the components of the G20 system (ministerial meetings, working groups and other sub-summit entities); analyses the relationship of the G20 with external actors; surveys and analyses reform proposals and reforms already achieved; looks at the relationship between the G7/G8 and the G20; examines the question of evaluating G20 performance; surveys the pattern of documentation of G20 summits and sub-summit groups; and reviews other sources of information (writings about the G20, think tanks focusing on G20 research, memoirs of prominent G20 participants, creative works, and websites and social media).

Biography:
Peter Hajnal is a Fellow of Senior College and Research Associate, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. He has been a member of the G7/G8/G20 Research Groups since 1988 and attended fourteen G7/G8/G20 summits as a media correspondent. He is also a member of the Academic Council on the United Nations System, the Union of International Associations, the Association of Former International Civil Servants and the American Library Association. Before his retirement he was Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto for 11 years. He also served as librarian for 25 years at the University of Toronto and 10 years at the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library in New York. He was consultant at the United Nations, in post-Yugoslavia Macedonia, at the Civil G8 project in 2006 in Russia, and the Graham Library, Trinity College, University of Toronto, and assessor of the 2005 G8 Stakeholder Consultation for Chatham House.
In addition to a number of articles, book chapters and conference presentations, he is author or editor of ten books, including Civil Society in the Information Age (Ashgate, 2002); Sustainability, Civil Society and International Governance: Local, North American and Global Perspectives (Ashgate, 2006; co-edited with John Kirton); and The G8 System and the G20: Evolution, Role and Documentation (Ashgate, 2007, also published in Russian and Chinese editions). His latest book is The G20: Evolution, Interrelationships, Documentation (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014); an updated Chinese edition was also published. His current research focuses on preparing a substantially updated second English-language edition of The G20 (referenced above), to be published by Routledge. He is also a participant in the Canadian National Security Archive, a project of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History. In addition, he continues to play an active role in Senior College of the University of Toronto as a member of the Program Committee, and co-chair of the refugee support group.

Description

INDePth is an award winning annual student-run conference hosted by the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

We are excited to present this year’s conference theme “ASIAN CITIES”.

In order to analyze ASIAN CITIES, we are using multidisciplinary—especially historical, anthropological, and geographical—theoretical frameworks to present our theme in a comprehensively textured manner. We challenge current narratives which present the development of Asian Cities as a standardized model by problematizing the idea that these spaces across the continent represent a similar type of growth.

Conference attendees will gain insight into how national and global discourse intersects with and shapes the standardized model of development of Asian Cities. We also focus on thinking critically about the structures and actors supporting or countering the progress of this standardized model.

We hope to disrupt these notions and offer a more holistic view of these living and breathing spaces. We do so by showcasing the transformative, evolving subjectivities and experiences of those who actively inhabit, build, and create Asian Cities.

Please join us for an invigorating day of panel speakers and workshop discussions while we explore critical perspectives of cities from the ground up!

Check out our website for more detailed information about the conference themes, conference agenda, and conference speakers.

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Speakers by topic:

INTERPRETATIONS OF MODERNITY
Shiaoshiao Chen, Undergraduate Student, Contemporary Asian Studies and Anthropology
Tori Sheldon, PhD Candidate, Anthropology
Dr. Kristin Bright, Assistant Professor, Anthropology

CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF THE CITY: URBAN VS RURAL
Deniz Yilmaz, Undergraduate Student, Diaspora and Transnational Studies, Political Science
Zixian Liu, PhD Student, Department of History
Dr. Tong Lam, Associate Professor, History; Director, Global Taiwan Studies Program

MIGRATIONS AND SOLIDARITIES
Anna Aksenovich, Undergraduate Student, Anthropology and Religion
Siddhartha Sengupta, Undergraduate Student, Political Science
Symon James-Wilson, Research Assistant, Department of Geography and OISE
Dr. Deborah Cowen, Associate Professor, Geography and Planning
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INDePth Conference 2018: ASIAN CITIES
March 16, 2018, 10:00AM-7:00PM

PROGRAM:
10:00am – 10:30am: Light Breakfast and Registration

10:35am – 10:55am: Opening Remarks
10:35am – 10:40am: Professor Rachel Silvey
10:40am – 10:50am: Co-Chairs

10:55am – 11:55am: Topic 1: Interpretations of Modernity (Student: Shiaoshiao Chen; PhD Candidate Tori Sheldon; Professor Kristin Bright)
11:55am – 12:10pm: Topic 1 Q&A

12:10pm – 1:30pm: Lunch
12:40pm: Film Screening – PUSO NG LUNGSOD, by filmmaker Ilang-Ilang Quijano; Supported by the York Centre for Asian Research as part of their Emerging Asian Urbanisms Series

1:35pm – 2:35pm: Topic 2: Conceptualizing the City: Urban vs Rural (Student Deniz Yilmaz; PhD Student Zixian Liu; Professor Tong Lam)
2:35pm – 2:50pm: Topic 2 Q&A

2:50pm – 3:05pm: Coffee Break

3:10pm – 4:10pm: Topic 3: Migration and Solidarities (Student: Anna Aksenovich; Symon James-Wilson, Research Assistant, Department of Geography and OISE; Professor Deb Cowen)
4:10pm – 4:25pm: Topic 3 Q&A

4:25pm – 4:30pm: Break out into Groups for Workshops
4:30pm – 5:30pm: Workshops: Topics 1-3

5:35pm – 5:55pm: Co-Chairs Closing Remarks

6:00pm – 7:00pm: Reception

Description

Abstract:

Who watches over the party-state? In this engaging analysis, Maria Repnikova reveals the webs of an uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. More than merely a passive mouthpiece or a dissident voice, the media in China also plays a critical oversight role, one more frequently associated with liberal democracies than with authoritarian systems. Chinese central officials cautiously endorse media supervision as a feedback mechanism, as journalists carve out space for critical reporting by positioning themselves as aiding the agenda of the central state. Drawing on rare access in the field, Media Politics in China examines the process of guarded improvisation that has defined this volatile partnership over the past decade on a routine basis and in the aftermath of major crisis events. Combined with a comparative analysis of media politics in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, the book highlights the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as the renewed pressures facing them in the Xi era.
The book will be available for sale at the venue.

Biography:

Maria Repnikova is a scholar of political communication in illiberal contexts, with a focus on Chinese media politics. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Global Communication and a Director of the Center for Global Information Studies at Georgia State University. Maria’s work examines critical journalism, political propaganda, cyber nationalism, and global media branding in China, drawing some comparisons to Russia. Her work appeared in the China Quarterly, New Media & Society, Journal of Contemporary China, as well as in Foreign Affairs andForeign Policy, amongst other venues. Her book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism, is just out with Cambridge University Press. In the past, Maria was a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication. Maria holds a PhD in Politics from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

Description

Abstract:
SINCE THE REFORMS that have taken place in Burma/Myanmar since 2011, the tempo of archaeological research has increased, and, in 2014, three Pyu cities (Sri Ksetra, Halin and Beikthano) were awarded World Heritage status. Pyu cities, dating to about the 4th century CE, present early, regionally important examples of settlements that evolved from the late Iron Age into early urbanism in a context of spatial continuity. Sri Ksetra is the prototype of the type of urbanism found at Angkor and Pagan centuries later, where water management was imbedded in extended urban space. This talk will present results from recent archaeological excavations at the Yahanda Mound, which reveal the long sequence of cultural change in the early city from ancestor worship to early Buddhism on a popular level.

Biography:
JANICE STARGARDT, Professor at the Department of Archaeology of the University of Cambridge, works on the historical geography and archaeology of South and South East Asia. The over-arching theme of her research has been the transition of societies in South East India, Burma and Thailand from Iron Age villages to complex, literate and urbanized communities. She explores a range of factors involved in this transition: the natural environments – resources and stresses; the role of ancient irrigation in mitigating the latter; the contribution of maritime trade to prosperity; and the cultural cargoes that travelled with trade.
Her publications include The Ancient Pyu of Burma. Vol. I, Early Pyu Cities in a Man-Made Landscape. Cambridge and Singapore, 1990; Tracing
Thought through Things: the Oldest Pali Texts and the Early Buddhist Archaeology of India and Burma. Amsterdam, 2000, and The Sea Unites. Essays in the maritime archaeology and remote sensing of South East Asia. Cambridge, 2008. Her latest book Relics of the Buddha, Relic Worship and Other Rituals of Veneration, in Ancient India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Burma, to be published by the British Museum, is currently in press.

Description

Description: International Relations (IR) has lagged behind popular imagination — and other academic disciplines — in thinking about possible dystopian futures and the prospect of the “end of the world” as a result of human-driven existential threats (or “global catastrophic risks”), ranging from nuclear war and climate change, to pandemics and artificial intelligence. The purpose of this talk is to articulate the pressing need for IR to reformulate “Global Security Studies” in order to problematize existential threats that could bring about the “end of the world”, whether it is understood as the survivability of modern civilization, the human species, or the planet at large. This talk aims to discuss (i) the nature and scope of human-driven existential threats; (ii) the potential contribution of Global Security Studies to the growing and interdisciplinary study of existential threats; and (iii) the meaning of existential threats for the International Relations discipline.

Speaker Bio: Nathan Alexander Sears is a PhD Student in Political Science at The University of Toronto, and Trudeau Centre Fellow in Peace, Conflict and Justice. He was previously a Professor of International Relations as the Universidad de Las Américas in Ecuador. His research primarily focuses on topics of International Relations Theory, International Security, and World History.

Description

This paper concerns the politics and aesthetics of what is known in post-Soviet Ukraine as the avtentyka singing voice (автентичний голос), which translates literally as the “authentic” voice. My focus is on the problem that this avtentyka vocal timbre creates when it appears in the context of a popular reality TV singing competition called Holos Krainy, or “Voice of the Nation,” part of the global “Voice” franchise that has aired in Ukraine since 2011. Beyond the clashes of style and genre that occur when avtentyka singers who use village timbres sing modern pop hits, I attend to a more general politics of vocal timbre to examine how the avtentyka voice, which sits within a historical trajectory of resistance to state power, challenges the conventional wisdom about how the folkloric necessarily points backwards, toward an essentialized national past. Rather, I consider avtentyka and its iconic vocal timbre as a form of late Soviet expressive culture that also has the somewhat paradoxical potential to operate in today’s Ukrainian mediasphere as a forward-looking expressive form. Rooted in ethnographic research among avtentyka practitioners, I examine how the politicized timbres of avtentyka reject logics of success according to the standards of reality TV “democratainment” and remake failure in the competition as an act of refusal—of the limited musical forms that dominate Ukrainian media and as an assertion of the ungovernable wildness of Ukrainian rural expressivity.

Maria Sonevytsky is currently Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bard College. Her first book, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine, is forthcoming on Wesleyan University Press. In the fall of 2018, she will join the ethnomusicology faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

Description

LIVE STREAM: http://hosting2.desire2learncapture.com/MUNK/1/Live/430.aspx

As the Syrian government intensifies its assault on rebel-held territories, tens of thousands of civilians are caught in the crossfire and are trapped inside targeted neighbourhoods. Air bombings, road blockages, and extreme shortages of food and aid have resulted in thousands of casualties in the past month alone. After nearly seven years of conflict, why is the Syrian civil war escalating now? And why is the humanitarian crisis worsening, despite so much international aid being sent to the region? Is there any foreseeable resolution to this brutal civil war?

The cities of Damascus, Ghouta, and Idlib have become a great power game for control of the Middle East. On one axis, Russia, Iran, and groups like Hezbollah have supported the Syrian government of Bashar Al-Assad. On the other side, the USA and its international allies, including Turkey and neighbouring Arab states, have supported a variety of anti-Assad rebel groups. Even within these alliances, betrayals and secret intrigues have turned the Syrian conflict into one of the most complicated civil wars in the history of modern warfare.

This Munk School feature event brings together a dynamic team of experts to explain the powerful interests behind the crisis. To make sense of the chaos, our internationally-renowned panelists will unpack exactly how these great power politics have affected war dynamics on the ground, and set in motion one of the most extreme humanitarian crises in the world today.

Why is the Syrian war worsening, and what hope is there for peace? Join us for a dynamic discussion to address these urgent global questions.

Panelists:

Hassan Hassan is an internationally-renowned Syrian writer and a senior fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. He is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, which was chosen as one of the Times of London Best Books of 2015 and the Wall Street Journal’s top ten books on terrorism. Hassan specializes in both Sunni and Shiite movements in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Islamist insurgencies in Iraq and Syria.

Bessma Momani is an award-winning expert on Middle Eastern politics, a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI). She is the author and co-editor of eight books and over 70 scholarly articles and book chapters. Momani specializes in the economics and geopolitics of the Middle East.

Noel Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and a specialist in great power interventions in complex civil wars. His research has been published in Political Science Research and Methods and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Anderson examines how international interventions affect civil war duration and intensity, with implications for counterinsurgency strategy.

Lama Mourad is a Research Associate at the Munk School Global Migration Lab and PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto. Mourad has published her research in Forced Migration Review, Journal of Refugee Studies, and Middle East Law and Governance. She specializes in migration and local governance in the Middle East, and has conducted extensive in-depth fieldwork on Syrian refugee populations in Lebanon.

Aisha Ahmad (moderator) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, the Director of the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative and a Senior Researcher at the Global Justice Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, and a Senior Fellow at Massey College. She is the author of Jihad & Co.: Black Markets & Islamist Power, the 2018 recipient of the Northrop Frye Award of Excellence in research and teaching, and the 2017 recipient of the Best Security Article Award from the International Studies Association.

Description

The Black Experience Project began with a central question “What does it mean to be Black in the GTA?” From there, the study embarked on a journey of answering this question in an authentic and respectful way.

Launched in 2010 and completed in 2017, the Black Experience Project was led by the Environics Institute for Survey Research, in partnership with the United Way of Toronto and York Region, the YMCA of the Greater Toronto Area, Ryerson’s Diversity Institute, and the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora at York University. The panel of experts and stakeholders will discuss the main findings of the study and its impact from the perspectives of academic research, community, and policy.

Description

Fifty years after the Prague Spring, can anything new be said about it? By systematically examining the experiences of ordinary Czechoslovak citizens, rather than political elites, we can uncover the innovative political ideas they articulated, from the nature and importance of human rights to a critique of systemic violence in more than just its physical forms. We can see, moreover, how these popular ideas anticipated those that prominent dissidents developed following the suppression of the Prague Spring, and how memories of 1968 shaped popular demands and forms of political engagement in the Czechoslovak revolution of 1989

Speaker: James Krapfl is a historian of modern European politics and culture, specializing geographically on east central Europe. Thematically he is interested in the cultural history of revolutionary phenomena, the experience of Communist rule in central and eastern Europe, and the transformation of Europe since 1989. These interests come together in his book Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992 (Cornell University Press, 2013), which analyzes grassroots efforts to establish a democratic political culture in Czechoslovakia following the outbreak of revolution in 1989. Based on research in forty Czech and Slovak archives, mostly at the district level, the book explains how popular attempts to reconstitute political, social, and economic institutions “from below” met with the opposition of new elites, setting in motion the chain of events which led to the break-up of the federal state in 1992.

Description

The Changing Face of Intervention is the Twelfth Annual Munk Graduate Student Conference. The conference will feature three panels and a concluding keynote address, focusing on the evolving nature of global intervention. The conference brings together a wide range of perspectives from engaged students and leading scholars, who will explore and discuss the developing concept of interventionism.

The conference will be held at the observatory building of the Munk School of Global Affairs located at the corner of Devonshire Place and Bloor St. West. Lunch will be provided and the concluding keynote panel address will be followed by a reception and networking event where conference participants will be able to connect with the panelists over food and refreshments.

The Unexpected Impact of Intervention panel will feature commentary from Dr. Valerie Percival, Dr. Qiang Zha, and Dr. Jon Lindsay who will discuss some of the unexpected positive and negative impacts of intervention within their fields.

The Conflicts in the Global South panel will discuss aspects of intervention specific to this part of the world, with insights from Dr. Catherine Bragg, Dr. Kirsten Johnson, and Mr. David Michalski.

After lunch, our Student Panel with graduate students from the Munk School of Global Affairs will explore the theme of the conference and the topic of changing global interventionism.

The conference will conclude with a Grand Panel featuring all six guest speakers who will share their thoughts on the future of international intervention and provide insight from their respective fields.

Description

The Contemporary Asian Studies Student Union (CASSU) Presents: “Leadership and Empowerment: Asian Women in the 21st Century”

In a time when dominant racial and gender-specific narratives are being challenged, the “Leadership and Empowerment: Asian Women in the 21st Century” panel event provides a unique forum for female leaders to discuss their experiences working within the intersectionality of femininity and Asian identities. The purpose of this panel is to highlight the voices of Asian female leaders, and to acknowledge the unique challenges and opportunities Asian women face in the professional workplace, in the public sphere, and in positions of leadership. This panel will feature a range of speakers from a variety of disciplines.

Opening Remarks:
Prof. Rachel Silvey, Richard Charles Lee Director, Asian Institute

Moderator:
Aparna Sundar, Instructor, Asian Institute

Panelists:
City Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, City of Toronto
Dr. Julie Nguyen, Director, Canada-Vietnam Trade Council
Justine Abigail Yu, Founder and Editor, Living Hyphen
Dani Magsumbol, Capacity Builder, Kapisanan Philippine Centre of Arts and Culture

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Paneliest Bios:

Kristyn Wong-Tam is a second-term Toronto City Councillor and Chair of the Toronto Accessibility Advisory Committee. She has an extensive career investing in the City of Toronto through both the public and private sectors. Her contributions have led to the development and support of improved homelessness policies, new affordable housing, innovative economic development programs, community art projects, and investments in diverse, family-friendly neighbourhood planning. She is a long-time advocate for gender equity at the municipal level and has successfully moved motions to incorporate a gender equity lens in the City’s Budget. Councillor Wong-Tam’s activism is reflected through her continued work of advocating for human rights and championing for sustainable living and environmental health. She was the Past Vice President of The 519 Community Centre, founder of Asian Canadians For Equal Marriage and has been a long-time supporter of numerous Toronto-based HIV/AIDS organizations. She plays a vital role in ensuring the vibrancy of our city and its economic and social development. Currently, Councillor Wong-Tam is in partnership with the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation to create Toronto’s first urban Indigenous District.

Dr. Julie Nguyen is currently a professor and program coordinator in international business at Centennial College, and a co-founder / director of the Canada Vietnam Trade Council (www.canada-vietnamtrade.org). She has a Bachelor of Commerce, Honours Economics (1995) from Concordia University, a M.A. in Economics (1996) and a Ph.D. (2004) in Interdisciplinary Studies and Asian Research both from the University of British Columbia (UBC). She was a consultant for the United Nations in Hanoi in 1997 to co-write Vietnam’s first Human Development Report, and a research associate at the Centre for Southeast Asia Research at UBC (1996-1999). Dr. Nguyen conducted her post-doctoral research funded by SSHRC at the Munk School of Global Affairs (2004-2006), and taught courses in Political Science, Asia-Pacific Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto (2005-2010). She is a board member of the Organization of Women in International Trade – Toronto Chapter, the Canada Vietnam Society and the McCormick Arena, City of Toronto.

Dr. Aparna Sundar teaches in the Contemporary Asian Studies program at the Asian Institute. She is a political scientist by training, and works in the broad areas of political economy, comparative politics, and the politics of development, with a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora in Canada. She has been active in South Asian community organizations in Toronto, and has carried out collaborative community-based research that looks at the challenges of political organizing by immigrant and racialized communities, in particular around issues of work and labour.

Justine Abigail Yu is a communications and marketing strategist for the social impact space and has worked with organizations operating in North America, Central America, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. She is currently the Communications and Marketing Director for Operation Groundswell, a non-profit organization that facilitates international service learning programs for youth. She is also the Founder and Editor of Living Hyphen, an intimate journal that explores the experiences of hyphenated Canadians and examines what it means to be part of a diaspora. Her mission is to stir the conscience and spur social change.
Social Links:
www.justineabigail.com / www.livinghyphen.ca
IG+TW: @justineabigail / @livinghyphen
FB: facebook.com/livinghyphen

Dani Magsumbol is currently in the second year of the MSc in Planning Program at the University of Toronto’s Department of Planning and Geography. Her work is guided by her mission to work with and give back to the Filipino community. Her research is centred on the ways in which female temporary foreign workers, specifically Filipino live-in caregivers, define and experience safety within urban settings. Dani is currently a Capacity Builder at Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts and Culture, a Filipino charity and non-profit that employs a led-by-youth-for-the-youth framework in their leadership and programming, an organisation with whom she has been involved in various capacities since 2014.

Description

In a region where the Cold War has not ended; in a world where liberalism seems to be losing its appeal–how and why do young people enter politics in East Asia’s dynamic societies? How do these young political activists and their huge followers engage issues of colonial legacies, contested sovereignty, and global capitalism?

In this roundtable conversation, prominent young leaders LIN Fei-Fan 林飛帆 (Taiwan), EKyeong KWAK 곽이경 (South Korea), and Jeffrey NGO 敖卓軒 (Hong Kong) will discuss their mutual concerns and shared aspirations in this generational struggle.

Moderator: Ching-Fang HSU 許菁芳 (PhD Candidate, Political Science, UofT)

Faculty discussants:

Jennifer Chun (Sociology, UofT)
Tong Lam (History, UofT)

Interpreter for EKyeong KWAK 곽이경: Ju Hui Judy HAN (Gender Studies, UCLA)

Event Details:
PANEL DISCUSSION: 2:00 – 4:00PM
RECEPTION: 4:00 – 5:00PM
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Panelist Bios:

Ekyeong KWAK
EKyeong Kwak is the Director of External Relations & Solidarity at the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). In 2016-17, Kwak served on the coordinating committee for the Emergency National People’s Action for the Dismissal of Park Geun-Hye which mobilized millions of candlelight protesters over 6 consecutive months, leading to the impeachment of South Korea’s former president. In her capacity at KCTU, Kwak has worked in solidarity with human rights and social justice movements including the bereaved families of the Sewol ferry disaster and Nam-ki Baek, a former student-activist-turned-farmer who was killed by a high-power police water cannon at a national labour rally. Kwak is a leading queer social justice activist, spearheading efforts to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and other sexual minority and gender non-conforming persons. She has previously served as the Policy Director of the National Korean Women’s Trade Union and the Chairperson of Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights of Korea.

LIN Fei-fan (林飛帆)
Lin Fei-fan is one of the leaders of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and the founding president of the Taiwan March Foundation, which mainly advocates for the rectification of the Referendum Act of Taiwan. He is also a member of the Network of Young Democratic Asians (NOYDA), formed by young activists across Asia in April 2016. He began as a student activist during the 2008 Wild-strawberry Movement, and he participated in the Anti-Media Monopoly Movement in 2012 among many other civil movements. He also contributed to several of the campaigns of the third-parties’ candidates during the election of 2016. He received his MA degree in Political Science from National Taiwan University in 2017 and is currently undertaking another graduate degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK.

Jeffrey NGO
Jeffrey Ngo is a visiting scholar jointly affiliated with the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library and the Munk School of Global Affairs who studies the history of Hong Kong’s sovereignty. He is also chief researcher for Demosisto, the Hong Kong youth pro-democracy political party. His writing has appeared in, among others, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from New York University.

Description

Dr. Lyons’ research focuses on the origins of Algerian migration to France at the height of decolonization, i.e. during the War for Algerian Independence (1954-1962). Her book, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State (SUP, 2013), examines the history of Algerian family settlement and the development of government sponsored social welfare for Algerians and other immigrant communities in France. She has just begun a research project studying the Constantine Plan for Algeria (1958), and the development of social programs at the height of the Algerian war.  In particular, she is interested in examining the Service des centres sociaux, established by antrhopologist Germaine Tillion.

Description

Kartick is the Chief of Staff and Adviser to the Vice President, Partnerships, Communication and Outreach at the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank Group). Previously he was Head of Strategy for Western Europe at IFC and was the President & Chief Operating Officer of CradleRock Capital Partners, a Private Equity fund which invests in Small and Medium-Sized (SMEs) emerging market businesses. Before joining the World Bank Group, Kartick led Global Vaccine Markets at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and headed business development at NowDiagnostics, a US biomedical technology company. He served as the Dr. David Chu Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Kartick is a graduate of the International Relations Program at Trinity College at the University of Toronto and a Catherwood Scholar, and went on to graduate studies at Cambridge University and Columbia University. He is a multilingual professional with more than a decade of experience in investment, corporate acquisitions and in building innovative multi-stakeholder partnerships in emerging markets. Kartick combines high-level positions in global corporations and business organizations with international public policy experience, having working for the World Bank and the OECD, among others.

Description

Join York University historian of science and technology Edward Jones-Imhotep for a discussion of his recent book and his current research. Books will be available for purchase. Refreshments available.

Strangelove’s Machines: Technological Theaters of the Global Cold War

This talk explores how the global history of the Cold War played out through two semi-secretive technological projects of the period. The first was the attempt, during the 1950s and 1960s, to overcome massive communications failures in the Canadian North – naturally-occurring radio blackouts that would mask incoming ICBMs and disrupt shortwave technologies. The talk traces how these failures helped define the “hostile natures” of the Cold War, as well as Canada’s cultural anxieties and geo-political vulnerabilities during the period. The talk’s second focus is the late 1960s, where it traces the “supergun” projects of Gerald Bull, the former McGill professor turned international arms dealer. Bull’s ambiguous inventions – gargantuan cannons initially designed to launch probes into space – straddled the line between scientific instruments and illicit weaponry. Conceived in Montreal, deployed in Barbados, redesigned and sold to South Africa, and eventually enlarged and destined for Saddam Hussein’s Project Babylon, they would ultimately lead to Bull’s assassination at the hands of government agents outside his Brussels apartment. Contrasting the two episodes, the talk illustrates the crucial historical and geographical connections between Canadian science and technology and the broader, global contours of the Cold War.

Description

Eleni Skourtou
Professor
Department of Primary Education
University of the Aegean

Dr. Eleni Skourtou teaches Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Education at the Department of Primary Education at the University of the Aegean, located in Rhodes/Greece. She is the director of the Language, Literature & Folks Culture Lab at the same department.

Eleni studied Education in Frankfurt / Germany (Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität) and she holds a PhD from the same university in bilingual education.
Her main research interests are language education, second language learning, bilingualism and education of minority children, literacy / orality / multiliteracies, text & meaning making.

Her recent research projects involve Roma children education and refugee (children and adults) education.

Currently, Eleni is a Visiting Research Scholar at the City University of New York (CUNY) / Graduate Center.

Description

Johann Bernhard Müller, a foreigner in Russian service in the 1710s, produced a memoir of his time in the Russian Empire focused upon the populations of Siberia. For Müller, the association of Siberians and venereal disease was at the core of the empire’s weakness. For example, Muller suggested the Ostiaks’ difficulties were the result of their lack of hygiene, poor diet, and general immorality, as seen their “irregular Desires” that led to “nothing but Licentiousness and Confusion.” In the Russian Empire, immoral habits threatened the physical well-being of imperial subjects. The future of the empire depended upon improving not only health but also customs and lifestyles. By the end of the century, Russia had made considerable progress on the treatment of venereal diseases. Heinrich Friedrich von Storch’s Gemählde von St. Petersburg included a lengthy section on the city’s facilities including its hospitals. He noted with interest its special “venereal hospital, which has thirty beds for men and just the same number for women; and all that apply are gratuitously admitted, but not discharged till they are completely cured.” It was not a surprise that Russia attempted innovative solutions for one of its longest-lasting challenges. This talk will uncover the unique role the treatment of venereal disease played in eighteenth-century governing strategies.

Professor Romaniello received his B.A. in European History from Brown University in 1995; M.A. in Russian History from Ohio State University in 1998; and Ph.D from Ohio State in 2003 with candidacy fields in Russia and Eastern Europe, Medieval Europe, and Gender and Sexuality. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at George Mason University and its Center for History and New Media from 2005 to 2007. His first monograph was a study of relationship between the Russian Empire and its Muslim subjects in the early modern era. He is currently working on two new projects. One is a study of the economic competition between Russia and Britain over Eurasian trade networks with the Middle East and Asia. The other is a study of health and illness in the Russian Empire, examining state regulation of colonial bodies.

Description

Since the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, housing has been a topic of much debate. Rising inequality and high housing prices have been the core of urban crises around the world. Skyrocketing housing prices since 2005 led to a social housing movement in Taiwan. The concept of social housing, formerly unfamiliar to most, became a buzzword and quickly gained popularity. It has become an important campaign issue and started gradually transforming Taiwanese housing policies in 2010. Under public pressure, the central and local governments announced several future housing projects and enacted housing policy reforms. In the process of policy implementation, the concept of social housing was constantly under contestation and in need of clarification. The complex process of policy reform has exposed many structural problems within Taiwan’s housing system.

Speaker Bio:
Yi-Ling Chen is the director of International Studies and an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wyoming. Her works are on city development, housing, gender, and urban movements in Taiwan. She recently expanded her research to compare East Asian cities, Amsterdam, and Denver in their implementations of social housing.

Description

Abstract:
During the February Reading Week, seven undergraduate students visited Bandung and Jakarta in Indonesia to develop a deeper understanding of Islam’s political and social expression. Led by Professor Jacques Bertrand and PhD candidate Alexandre Pelletier, this International Course Module (ICM) aimed specifically at visiting a range of Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) and Islamic organizations to understand the motivations behind their missions and the role they play in the broader Islamic community. Students will be presenting reflections and observations on various aspects of the social and political activism of these pesantren and organizations. Among others, they have found that there is a vast diversity of activity and missions associated with these “pesantren”, in part due to the vast diversity and loose structure of the Islamic religion. There are surprisingly tolerant, innovative and creative aspects to several of these “pesantren”, even within conservative Islamic organizations. The ICM group’s reflections offer an important corrective to some of the messages and images of Islam often portrayed in the media.

Description

Live streaming of this event will begin at 5pm EST, April 3, 2018.

Abstract:
French describes the foundation of a resilient Pax Sinica as “a basic proposition that was reasonably consistent: accept our superiority and we will confer upon you political legitimacy...”, a tribute system that dates back as far as the Han dynasty. Through its nine-dash- line diplomacy and beyond, is China is now “increasingly determined to brook no rivals in the region”, including the USA? Join Howard French in an insightful discussion of how, based on its history, China might exercise its growing national power in the decades ahead.
The book will be available for sale at the venue.

Biography:
Howard French reported from Africa for The Washington Post and at The New York Times was bureau chief in Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa; Japan; and China. He has also written for The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Rolling Stone, among other U.S. publications. His work has earned him two Overseas Press Club awards and two Pulitzer Prize nominations. He is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa and China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. Mr. French is on the faculty of the Columbia University School of Journalism and lives in New York City.

Description

Abstract:
In 1995, at a UN meeting on indigenous rights, China and Japan each declared that there were no indigenous people in Asia because indigeneity was a product of European colonialism. Yet, their statements belied China’s past and Japan’s future. In the past, China had been a consistent and ardent supporter of global indigenous rights, inviting more indigenous groups than any other country. Thirteen years in the future, the Japanese government reversed its position and declared that its Ainu citizens were indigenous peoples. This talk explores the hidden history of China’s role in mobilizing indigenous groups throughout the Asia Pacific. We focus on how China’s repeated invitations to Ainu led them to transform their own identity, as well as radically challenge Japanese society itself. China was perhaps the Ainu’s most important catalyst for becoming important players in global indigenous dynamics.

Biographies:
Michael Hathaway is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His first book, Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (California, 2013), explores the intersections between China’s emergence on the stage of global conservation and the rise of questions of indigeneity within China itself.

Scott Harrison is Program Manager at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, a not-for-profit organization focused on Canada-Asia relations. His research examines global Indigenous peoples and Cold War history, Canada-Asia business and policy issues, and building Asia-related competencies for Canadians. He obtained a PhD in History from the University of Waterloo.

Description

Conflicts over turf are geo-coded by grievance, particularly in Europe’s tumultuous borderland pasts of German-Polish, Polish-Ukrainian, Polish-Jewish, Ukrainian-Russian, Hungarian-Romanian, and Hungarian-Jewish relations. In tales of flawed “great men” and their selves, historians too conveniently reify categories of nationality, rationality, or modernity to psychologize group behavior by language and religion, instead of delving into the eccentric worlds of individuals and social contexts for generating maps. This lecture re-grounds maps as intersubjective human artefacts, colored in by relational patterns of everyday frustration and status-conscious anxiety, petty jealousy and human pride.

Where explanations fail, maps offer forensic clues: the obsessive passion for maps in matters of life and death, friendship and war, across borders and oceans from the 1870s to the 1950s. Looking at the mobile worlds of five “transnational Germans” who were also multilingual, Anglophile, and national-scientific geographers—Albrecht Penck (1858-1945) of Germany, Eugeniusz Romer (1871-1954) of Poland, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi (1877-1937) of Ukraine, Isaiah Bowman (1878-1950) of North America, Count Pál Teleki (1879-1941) of Hungary, he recreates the relationships of a generation of aspiring bourgeois experts. By retelling their lives and deaths, he looks at the history of borderland conflict and digs into the personal lives of men whose prejudices helped to shape the emergence of geography and cartography as modern sciences out of pre-1914 Ostmitteleuropa.

The lecture finally illustrates the ways in which today’s clickbait and functional grids depicted budding graphic projects on surreal and subjective terms. As maps are shipped around ever more dangerously as weapons, Seegel argues that they continue to define tensions of empire that are common to émigré trusteeships for mediating territorial conflict, as well as positions of privilege for a global technical intelligentsia’s multigenerational advancement.

Steven Seegel is professor of Russian and European history at the University of Northern Colorado. He is the author of Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Ukraine under Western Eyes: The Bohdan and Neonila Krawciw Ucrainica Map Collection (Harvard University Press, 2013). He has been a contributor to the fourth and fifth volumes of Chicago’s international history of cartography series, and has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by Indiana University Press. He is also a former director at Harvard of the Ukrainian Research Institute’s summer exchange program. His most recent book, Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe, is published by University of Chicago Press in April 2018.

Description

In this lecture, historian Marc Stein examined the litigation that occurred in the 1970s after more than a dozen public colleges and universities in the United States denied official recognition to LGBT student groups. Stein, a specialist in the history of sexuality, social movements, and constitutional law, focused on the ways in which these educational institutions used state sodomy laws and the criminalization of sex to justify their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to suppress LGBT student organizing.  

About the speaker:   Dr. MARC STEIN, the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University and a faculty member at York University from 1998 to 2014, is the author of City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), and Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (Routledge, 2012). He also served as the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of LGBT History in America (Scribners, 2003) and the guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality titled “U.S. Homophile Internationalism” (2017). His next book, Documenting the Stonewall Riots: A Primary Source Reader, will be published by NYU Press in 2019.

Description

Guillaume Lachenal is associate Professor in history of science at the Université Paris Diderot. He is working on the history and anthropology of biomedicine in Africa. He has recently published The Lomidine Files. The untold story of a medical disaster (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) and Le médecin qui voulut être roi. Sur les traces d’une utopie coloniale (Seuil, 2017).

During World War II, a French colonial doctor named Doctor David received full and exclusive authority on the entire region of the Upper-Nyong, in the forests of East-Cameroon. His aim was to conduit a real-life “experiment” to transform and reinvent native society through a radical form of social medicine. My lecture will retrace the story of this strange biopolitical experiment, weaved with the biography of its main actor, Dr David, who became known as King David on the polynesian island of Wallis, before he became « Emperor » of East Cameroon. This utopian/dystopian attempt at social reform left many traces in Cameroon and in Wallis – songs and memories, ruined buildings and abandonned plantations. Bridging Africa and the Pacific, the imperial past and the neoliberal present, this history can be read as a fable – on utopia and megalomania in colonial governance, on power and powerlessness, on medical hubris, and on the writing of history among remains of Empires and development.

Description

Please join us to celebrate the exhibit of Durdy Bayramov’s photography from 1960s-1980s Turkmenistan, which is in the cloisters at the Munk School (1 Devonshire Place) through April 11:

4 p.m.: lecture on Turkmen culture and society
5 p.m.: light refreshments (including traditional Turkmen pilaw)

Description

Abstract:
The growing “diversity-turn” in the social scientific study of migrant-led urban change is an exciting opportunity for geographers. While much has been said about encounters with difference and diversity in public spaces, there has been a silence on the very nature of incorporation within these spatial negotiations and transformations. While Stuart Hall is right in pointing out how the “capacity to live with difference” is one of the key questions of the 21st Century (1993: 361), many Asian urban contexts demonstrate that co-existing and managing difference have always been a fundamental dimension of historical reality. Urban diversification in this part of the world is led largely by carefully calibrated labour migration. Drawing upon ethnographic data collected through mixed methodology in Singapore, this paper both reflects and questions existing literature on urban diversity and coexistence. I examine the spatial and political implications of migrant incorporation by identifying two key strands of geographical imaginations in these two growing fields. The paper, thus, has two objectives. First, to retain critical analytical purchase on what living with difference in shared spaces specifically through “incorporation” means at both the governmental and everyday levels. Measures of inclusion can carry out the political work of management that can structure what form belonging takes and, consequently, stratify who belongs and who does not. Rather than being intriniscally open or opposed to exclusion, the aggregate processes of “incorporation” alluded to above render people subject to particular imaginaries of diversity. The second objective of this paper is to outline the agenda for future research. There needs to be the prompt address of the impact of structural differentiation on the spatial practices of migrants in diversifying contexts and the nature of diversifying spaces themselves. What, indeed, is the migrant sense of place?

Bio:
Dr Junjia Ye is an Assistant Professor in Human Geography at Nanyang Technological University who completed her PhD in Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests lie at the intersections of cultural diversity, critical cosmopolitanism, class, gender studies and the political-economic development of urban Southeast Asia. Alongside extensive ethnographic research methods, she also uses techniques of film and photography to create visual narratives through her work. The fundamental question that underlies her research is what accounts for how social and economic differences are constituted through people’s mobilities to, through and from diversifying cities? Her recent work has been published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Her first monograph entitled Class inequality in the global city: migrants, workers and cosmopolitanism in Singapore (2016, Palgrave Macmillan) won Labour History’s annual book prize.

Description

 In February 2018, fourteen University of Toronto students participated in the Kakehashi Project.  Promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan and organized by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan in association with the Canadian administrator of the project, Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, the program aimed to develop a network of exchanges that will lead to deepening mutual understanding and friendship between Japan and Canada.  This workshop, with support from the Consul-General of Japan Takako Ito, provided a forum for the participating students to present their reflections and discuss how the experience helped shape their academic and cultural perceptions of Japan. Students addressed topics ranging from Japanese security policy to the implications of an aging population.  A light lunch was provided.

Description

At the heart of American nuclear power lies a paradox: Although the United States participated in and propelled a nuclear arms race, no other country has expended more resources in seeking to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Why did the United States pour energy into arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation agreements, in an effort to limit the very weapons it relied upon so heavily? Why does it continue this pattern today?

Timothy Andrews Sayle, the CSUS Bissell-Heyd Research Faculty Fellow, has convened a symposium to discuss and explore the past, present, and future of U.S. nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation policy. Historians, political scientists, and practitioners will explore American policy over time and place, including discussion of U.S. nonproliferation policy in NATO, the United Nations, and in key regional areas: the Middle East, South Asia, and the Korean Peninsula.

There are two separate registration lists for this event. For the morning symposium, please register here. For the afternoon keynote presentation by Prof. Francis J. Gavin, please register for the event titled “Rethinking the Nuclear Revolution and American Grand Strategy.”

MORNING SYMPOSIUM AGENDA:

8:30am-9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am-10:45am Panel 1: Institutions

Katie Davis, UofT, “How Does it All Add Up?: Nuclear Proliferation and the United Nations, 1946-1949.”
Susie Colbourn, UofT, “Nuclear Sharing, Non-Proliferation, and the Dilemmas of NATO’s Nuclear Guarantee.”
Amb. Paul Meyer, Simons Foundation, “The Canadian Government’s Reaction to the Nuclear Weapon Prohibition Treaty.”
Prof. Tom Nichols, Naval War College, “Back to the USSR?: America’s Bilateral Dilemmas.”

10:45am-11:15am Coffee Break

11:15am-12:45pm Panel 2: Regions

Prof. Jayita Sarkar, Boston University, “Nuclear Dominoes in Asia: Tarapur, the Chinese Explosion, and India’s Plutonium Plant, 1961-1964.”
Dr. John S. Park, Harvard University, “The North Korean Nuclear Crisis – Are We Headed Toward a Second Korean War?”
Dr. Farzan Sabet, Graduate Institute Geneva, “The Other Iran Nuclear Negotiations: U.S.- Iran Nuclear Negotiations under Jimmy Carter, 1977-78.”

About the speakers:

SUSAN COLBOURN, University of Toronto:
Susan Colbourn is completing her Ph.D. in history at the University of Toronto, where she is a fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History. Her current research focuses on NATO’s internal debates about détente and their impact on allied nuclear policy in the 1970s and 1980s. In September, she will take up a Henry Chauncey Jr. ‘57 postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University.

KATIE DAVIS, University of Toronto:
Katie Davis is a PhD Candidate in History and a Connaught International Scholar at the University of Toronto. Her research examines the transatlantic relations in the early Cold War, the popular culture of the atomic age, and the relationship between public opinion and foreign policymaking. She holds an MSc in Theory and History of International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

PROFESSOR TOM NICHOLS, U.S. Naval War College:
Tom Nichols is a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. He also taught at Dartmouth College, Georgetown University (where he also received his PhD), and other schools and lecture programs. He is currently a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, and a Fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University. He has also been a Fellow of the International Security Program and the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In his Washington days, Tom was a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a consultant to the U.S. government, and a research analyst for private industry. Later, he served as personal staff for foreign and defense affairs to the late U.S. Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania. He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, and as one of the all-time top players of the game, he was invited back to play in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions. (He was crushed immediately, so apparently, his ranking among the top 100 players was #100.) A native of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he recently moved from the gorgeous harbor in Newport, Rhode Island, where he found a cat named Carla, to his country estate a few miles away, with a yard where he can smoke a cigar now and then.

AMBASSADOR (ret.) PAUL MEYER, The Simons Foundation:
Paul Meyer is Senior Fellow in Space Security at The Simons Foundation, as well as Adjunct Professor, School for International Studies, and Fellow in International Security, Centre for Dialogue, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Chair of the Canadian Pugwash Group. He joined the then Department of External Affairs in 1975 as a Foreign Service Officer and served abroad in Oslo (1976-1978), Moscow (1982-1984) and Brussels (1988-1992) where he was Political Counsellor in Canada’s delegation to NATO. From 1992-1997, he served at the Embassy in Washington D.C. as Minister-Counsellor (Political) and from 2001-2003 as Minister and Deputy Head of Mission at the Embassy in Tokyo.

In Ottawa, Mr. Meyer has held a variety of positions at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, primarily in the field of international security policy. He was Director-General of the International Security Bureau from 1998-2001. From 2003 to 2007, Mr. Meyer served as Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Office of the United Nations and the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. His responsibilities spanned a variety of issues and organisations including human rights, humanitarian affairs, global health and disarmament. From 2007 to his retirement from the Foreign Service in September 2010, Mr. Meyer served as Director General of the Security and Intelligence Bureau at DFAIT.

Professor JAYITA SARKAR, Boston University:
Jayita Sarkar, an historian by training, is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Her expertise is in the global Cold War in South Asia, nuclear proliferation, and U.S. foreign policy. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Cold War History, International History Review, and elsewhere. Prof. Sarkar has held fellowships at MIT, Harvard and Yale universities, and obtained a doctorate in International History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland. At Boston University, Dr. Sarkar teaches courses on U.S. policies in South Asia after 1947, history of international relations after 1945, and international nuclear politics.

Dr. JOHN S. PARK, Harvard University:
Dr. John Park is an Asia security analyst at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he serves as Director of the Korea Working Group and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy. He was the 2012–2013 Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow at MIT’s Security Studies Program. He previously directed Northeast Asia Track 1.5 projects at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, DC. Prior to that he worked at Goldman Sachs and The Boston Consulting Group. He regularly provides commentary on CNN, CNBC, BBC, and Bloomberg. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Financial Times. His recent publication is a co-authored study titled “Stopping North Korea, Inc.: Sanctions Effectiveness and Unintended Consequences.” He recently testified on North Korea sanctions before the Senate Banking Committee, as well as the House Financial Services Committee. Dr. Park received his M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He completed his pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. He received his B.A. from Trinity College at the University of Toronto.

Dr. FARZAN SABET, The Graduate Institute, Geneva:
Farzan Sabet is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Global Governance Centre at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. His postdoctoral project is entitled “Bombs, Banks and Sanctions: A Sociology of the Transnational Legal Field of Nuclear Nonproliferation.” He previously held a Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and holds a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Doctoral Mobility Fellowship. His research focuses on the Iranian nuclear program, its evolving relationship with the global nonproliferation regime, and U.S.-Iran relations. Farzan is also a co-founder and managing editor at IranPolitik, a website on key issues in Iranian foreign policy and domestic politics. His work on Iranian politics has also appeared in The Washington Post “Monkey Cage,” The Atlantic, and War on the Rocks, among other outlets.

Description

This keynote presentation, by Professor Francis J. Gavin, concluded the morning symposium ‘Going Nuclear: A Symposium on American Nuclear Politics.’   

About the speaker:  Professor FRANCIS J. GAVIN  is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the Inaugural Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. In 2013, Gavin was appointed the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies and Professor of Political Science at MIT. Before joining MIT, he was the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. From 2005 until 2010, he directed The American Assembly’s multiyear, national initiative, The Next Generation Project: U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions. Gavin’s writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Cornell University Press, 2012).  He received a PhD and MA in History from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Studies in Modern European History from Oxford University, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Gavin is an Associate of the Managing the Atom Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, Senior Fellow of the Clements Program in History, Strategy, and Statecraft, a Distinguished Scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center, a Senior Advisor to the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and a life-member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Description

An annual event, this conference examines the state of the union in Germany—Europe’s most consequential country—as well as the relationship between Germany and Canada.

The conference features expert panels that this year will examine the role of Canada and Germany in the United Nations, the future of NATO, and the risks posed to democracy and media by hacking, foreign influence, and fake news.

Date: April 14, 2018

Chair: Randall Hansen, University of Toronto

09:00 – 09:15
Welcome
Randall Hansen, Munk School of Global Affairs
Peter Fahrenholtz, Consul General of Germany in Toronto
Michael Meier, Friedrich Ebert Foundation

09:15 – 10:00
The Future of Multilateralism in the Age of Trump and Putin
Keynote Address
Metin Hakverdi, Member of German Bundestag

10:00 – 11:30
Panel 1
Quo Vadis UN? Peacekeeping, Nuclear Disarmament, and Arms Trade

Stephen Saideman, Carleton University
Peggy Mason, Rideau Institute
Volker Lehmann, Friedrich Ebert Foundation
Moderator: Andreas Ross, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

11:30 – 11:45
Coffee break

11:45 – 13:15
Panel 2
NATO 70 Years after the Marshall Plan

Metin Hakverdi, Member of German Bundestag
Barbara J. Falk, Canadian Forces College
Ronja Kempin, German Institute for International and Security Affairs
Moderator: Michael Bröning, Friedrich Ebert Foundation

13:15 – 14:00
Lunch break

14:00 – 15:30
Panel 3
Hacking, Foreign Meddling, and Fake News:
Are Democracy and Media at Risk?

Joan Crockatt, former Member of Canadian Parliament
Tim Harper, Toronto Star
Annegret Bendiek, German Institute for International and Security Affairs
Moderator: Kai Arzheimer, Munk School of Global Affairs

15:30 – 15:45
Closing remarks
Randall Hansen, University of Toronto

This event is co-sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation; the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; the Munk School for Global Affairs; the Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Toronto; and the German Academic Exchange Service.

Use #germanTO on Twitter to follow this event

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung @FES_DC

Munk School @CERESMunk @munkschool

German Embassy @GermanyInCanada

German Consulate in Toronto @GermanyinTO

Description

Munk Annual Lecture in European Affairs

Denial, a British movie directed by Mick Jackson from a screenplay by David Hare, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2016. Starring Timothy Spall, Rachel Weisz and Tom Wilkinson, it tells the story of a celebrated libel action brought before the High Court in London by writer David Irving over accusations of Holocaust denial levelled against him by American academic Deborah Lipstadt. In this lecture, Richard Evans (the principal expert witness in the trial, played in the movie by John Sessions), reflects on the screen adaptation and the trial, and their relationship to one another.
Richard J. Evans is a historian of modern Germany and Europe.
Among his many books is a three-volume history of Nazi Germany, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War, published by Penguin books (2003–2008), and translated into sixteen languages. His most recent book is The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (volume 7 in The Penguin History of Europe). He has written extensively on historiography, with books including In Defence of History (1997) and Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (2014). His collected essays have been published in The Third Reich in History and Memory (2015).
He has held chairs at the University of East Anglia, Birkbeck (University of London) and Cambridge, where he was Professor of Modern History from 1998 to 2008 and Regius Professor of History from 2008 to 2014. From January to May 2018, he is Douglas Southall Freeman Visiting Professor of History at the University of Richmond, Virginia. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.
Professor Evans has served as Chair of the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, and (from 2010 to 2017) President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has been Provost of Gresham College in the City of London since 2014. He has been a member of the Spoliation Advisory Panel at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport since its inception, advising the British Government on claims for the return of artworks looted in the Nazi era.
He has been awarded the British Academy Leverhulme Prize and Medal for services to German history, the Civic Medal for Arts and Sciences of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the Medlicott Medal of the Historical Association for outstanding services to history, and the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine. He holds honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford and London.
In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.
Professor Evans is a frequent broadcaster on radio and television and a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines, including the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
He was portrayed by the actor John Sessions in the Hollywood film Denial (2016) , which depicts the David Irving Holocaust denial libel case (2000), in which Professor Evans served as the principal expert witness.
This event is co-sponsored by
Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs
Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs
Department of History, Faculty of Arts And Science
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Faculty of Arts and Science
Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto
German Academic Exchange Service

Description

Interdisciplinary research is discussed more often than it is practiced. Research is becoming increasingly specialized and fragmented across the vast array of disciplines and subfields, and scholars studying similar phenomena rarely speak with one another. This workshop aims to break down such barriers among scholars, bringing together graduate students from various disciplines who work on the dynamics of micro-level political violence in Ukraine, other areas of Eastern Europe, and East Asia. In addition to sharing their research in progress, participants will have the opportunity to compare approaches to studying micro-level political violence, as well as learn from a collection of case studies. What can Ukrainian studies learn from scholars who examine political violence in different contexts? What can others learn from Ukrainian studies? What are the benefits and pitfalls of interdisciplinary engagement, and how can we engage in it constructively moving forward? This gathering, in a working group setting, will provide a rare opportunity for discussion of the benefits, challenges, pitfalls, and avenues for future collaborative research.

Session I
10:00am-12:30pm

Moderator: Daniel Fedorowycz, Jacyk Program, CERES

Seeing is Believing: Public Display and the Threat of Micro-sized Groups in Indonesia
Jessica Soedigo, University of Toronto

Crimean Tatar Non-Violent National Movement in the Age of Collapse
Mariia Shynkarenko, The New School University

Dynamics of politicide in Central Java and Yogyakarta during the 1965-66 Indonesian Anti-communist campaign
Mark Winward, University of Toronto

Secrets and Silences in the Archives. Narratives of Violence in Holodomor, the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33
Karolina Koziura, The New School University

Remembering Violence: Survivor Interpretations of the 1932-33 Famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine
John Vsetecka, Michigan State University

Session II
1:30pm-4:00pm

Moderator: Daniel Fedorowycz, Jacyk Program, CERES

Occupation as an Enabler of Local Conflict: Belarusian-Polish Relations in Belarus, 1941-1944
Aleksandra Pomiecko, University of Toronto

‘Repatriation’: The Resettlement, Exchange and Expulsion of the Polish Civilian Population from the Soviet Drohobycz Region of Ukraine to Poland, 1944 – 1946
Michal Mlynarz, University of Toronto

Fifty Shades of Blue: The Polinische Polizei and the Holocaust in the Subcarpathian Region of District Krakow
Tomasz Frydel, University of Toronto

Crimes of Retreat: The Final Days of Occupation in Rostov-on-Don (22 January-7 February 1943)
Maris Rowe-McCulloch, University of Toronto

The Political Economy of Famine: the Ukrainian Famine of 1933
Natalya Naumenko, Northwestern University

Description

How do Canadians as individuals relate to the broader world? What do they see as their country’s current place in a global affairs, and how might this be realized?

Canada is a country with strong international connections. Most of the population is comprised of people with roots in other countries. Today Canada welcomes roughly 300,000 immigrants each year from across the globe, most of whom settle in and become citizens while simultaneously maintaining strong connections with their originating communities. The country’s prosperity depends in large part on trade with other countries and maintaining a positive trade balance. Canadians are ever mindful of their much bigger neighbour to the south, with which they share much in common, but also see as distinctly different.

In 2008, the Canada’s World Survey posed the question, “How do Canadians as individuals relate to the broader world?”. It was the first ever survey to ask Canadians how they saw their place in the world, and that of their country. A decade later, we conducted a second Canada’s World Survey to engage Canadians and determine how public attitudes, priorities and actions have evolved over time while addressing emerging global issues.

Please join us for a public launch of the Canada’s World Survey 2018. The evening will feature an overview of the study findings, followed by a moderated discussion among a panel of experts.

Full program to follow.
Seating is limited. Cash bar will be available after the panel.

This study was conducted by the Environics Institute, in partnership with SFU Public Square at Simon Fraser University, the Canadian International Council, and the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History.

Description

In the course of the Wolodymyr Dylynsky Memorial Lecture, Professor Shore will present her new book, the Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.

“This is a civilization that needs metaphysics,” Adam Michnik told Václav Havel in 2003. A decade later, on 21 November 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych unexpectedly reversed the course of his own stated foreign policy and declined to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Around 8 p.m. that day a thirty-two year-old Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, Mustafa Nayem, posted a note on his Facebook page: “Come on, let’s get serious. Who is ready to go out to the Maidan”—Kiev’s central square—“by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count.” No one then knew that “likes don’t count”—a sentence that would have made no sense before Facebook—would bring about the return to metaphysics to Eastern Europe. While the world watched (or did not watch) the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Kiev during the winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices.

The book will be available for purchase at the event.

Marci Shore teaches European cultural and intellectual history. She received her M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1996 and her PhD from Stanford University in 2001. Before joining Yale’s history department, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University‘s Harriman Institute; an assistant professor of history and Jewish studies at Indiana University; and Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Yale. She is the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (Crown, 2013), Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (Yale University Press, 2006) and the translator of Michal Glowinski‘s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons (Northwestern University Press, 2005).

Description

Burma, or Myanmar as it was renamed in 1989, is largely ignored within the discipline of South Asian studies despite its cultural, religious, economic, and strategic significance for the wider worlds of Asia. Colonial scholarship on Burma, like nineteenth and early twentieth century European interest in Southeast Asia more broadly, with its strong Indological orientation, included Burma within the larger picture of India. With the demise of orientalist India, Burma found its new home in Cold War Southeast Asia, and Burma’s historical and contemporary affiliations with the South Asia that replaced British India seem to have been largely lost in the transfer. The re-reading of both South and Southeast Asia within a globalized, Indian Ocean vision of Asia should allow for a critical assessment of what was lost in a creation of a South Asia that is still largely without Burma and what could be gained by questioning the premises for such locations and relocations.

This roundtable brought together specialists working on a range of issues in Burmese studies from the premodern period up to the present day, with a focus on Burma’s relationship to the discipline of South Asian studies. The goal of this roundtable was not to ‘reclaim’ Burma from the field of Southeast Asian studies, nor to essentialize South Asia as a unitary umbrella into which Burma can be neatly slotted, but rather to discuss how a Burma-sited scholarly approach can problematize the neat compartmentalization of Asia into predetermined geographical categories and how a projected mobility of Burma-related research, which such a problematization may facilitate, may open new perspectives of inquiry.  

Panelists:  Professor Christoph Emmrich (University of Toronto): Christoph Emmrich (PhD Heidelberg 2004) is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Asian Institute. He works on Nepalese and Burmese Buddhist and South Indian Jain ritual and literature, engages with Newar, Burman, Mon, and Tamil ritual specialists, literati, and girl children, and is interested in questions of childhood, gender, time, and memory.  

Dr. Joseph McQuade (University of Toronto): Joseph McQuade (PhD Cambridge, 2017) is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Centre for South Asian Studies and an Affiliate Researcher at the Canadian Network for Terrorism, Security and Society. His research focuses on genealogies of political violence and counter-terrorism legislation in twentieth century India and Burma.  

Professor Sana Aiyar (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Sana Aiyar is a historian of modern South Asia. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2009 and held an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in 2009-10.  From 2010 to 2013 she was Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her broad research and teaching interests lie in the regional and transnational history of South Asia and South Asian diasporas, with a particular focus on colonial and postcolonial politics and society in the Indian Ocean. Her first book, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015), explores the interracial and extraterritorial diasporic political consciousness of South Asians in Kenya from c. 1895 to 1968 who mediated constructions of racial and national identity across the Indian Ocean. Her research has appeared in several journals including the American Historical Review, AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute, and Modern Asian Studies. Professor Aiyar is currently working on two projects. One is a study of the everyday encounters of African soldiers and South Asian civilians during the Second World War when over a hundred thousand military recruits from East and West Africa were stationed in India and Burma. The second, "India’s First Partition", is an examination of migration, religious and ethnic politics, nationalism, and anticolonial activism across India and Burma in the 1930s.  

Professor Thibaut D’Hubert (University of Chicago): Thibaut d’Hubert is assistant professor in the department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC) at the University of Chicago. He published several articles in various periodicals and collective volumes, and contributed entries on Bengal for Brill’s Encyclopedia of Islam, THREE. In his recently published book titled In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), d’Hubert studies the encounter of Persian, Sanskrit, and vernacular poetics in the courtly milieu of the kingdom of Arakan (Bangladesh/Myanmar).  

Professor Patrick Pranke (University of Louisville): Patrick Pranke is associate professor of Religion in Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville. His area of specialization is Theravada Buddhism with a focus on Burmese monastic history and Burmese popular religion. He has also conducted research in North India on vernacular Hinduism and Buddhism in the Indian imagination.

Description

POLICY DAY – AGENDA
Wednesday, April 25, 2018

08:30 – 09:00 Coffee and Registration – Atrium

09:00 – 09:20 Introduction and Welcome
Call to order – Adam Holbrook, Simon Fraser University
Invocation – Elder Margaret George, Skawahlook First Nation
Welcome – Dr. Aoife Mac Namara, Dean, FCAT, SFU

09:20 – 11:00 Policy Session One – Policy Implications of CDO Research
“Prepare to be Disrupted: Key Insights from the CDO Research Project and Policy Implications”

Facilitator: David Wolfe, University of Toronto

Participants:
Pierre Therrien – Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada
Damian Dupuy – Ministry of Economic Development and Growth – Ontario
Michael Turner, Vice-President, Systems Strategies – Wesley Clover
Adam Froman, President – Delvinia and Council of Canadian Innovators

11:00 – 11:15 Refreshment Break – Atrium

11:15 – 12:30 Policy Session Two – Current State of R, D, & I in Canada: Recent Reports from the CCA and Federal Supercluster Initiative

Facilitator: Peter Warrian, University of Toronto

Participants:
Tijs Creutzberg – Council of Canadian Academies
Catherine Beaudry – École Polytechnique
Janet Halliwell – JEH Associates
Ray Gosine, Ocean’s Cluster in Atlantic Canada – Memorial University

12:30 – 13:30 Group Lunch and Networking
Hosted by: Dr. Aoife Mac Namara
Dean of Communication, Art and Technology, SFU

13:30 – 14:45 Policy Session 3 – Creating Digital Opportunity on the Pacific Rim: Trade Patterns and Resource Flows

Facilitator: Brian Wixted – University of Saskatchewan

Participants:
Kevin Butterworth, Executive Director, Technology & Innovation – B.C. Ministry of Jobs, Trade and Technology
Atsushi Sunami, Vice President, Professor – National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) and Special Advisor, Cabinet Office, Government of Japan
Martin Sutherland, Director, Policy – Western Economic Diversification (B.C.)
Presentation – B.C. Digital Technology Supercluster

14:45 – 15:00 Refreshment Break – Atrium

15:00 – 16:15 Policy Session 4 – Vancouver: Digital Industries, Transitions and Smart Cities

Facilitator: Adam Holbrook, SFU

Participants:
Marina van Geenhuisen, Professor- Delft University of Technology
Bryan Buggey – Vancouver Economic Commission
Richard Smith, Director – Centre for Digital Media
Jessie Adcock, Chief Technology Officer – City of Vancouver

17:00– 19:00 POLICY DAY RECEPTION to follow

Description

A G E N D A – DAY 2
Thursday, April 26, 2017

08:30 – 09:00 Coffee – Atrium

09:00 – 09:05 Welcome

09:05 – 10:20 Session 1 – Does Canada Have a Role in East Asian GPNs?

Joe Wong /w Doug Fuller, George Poulakidas, “Canadian ICT Firms in East Asia”
Dan Breznitz, “Alfred Marshall, Alive and Well? The evolution of innovative integrated industrial districts in a global economy”
Deanna Horton /w Chadwick Meyers “Answering the Siren’s Call: Canadian micro-multinational tech companies in the USA and Asia”
Catherine Beaudry /w Georges Hage and Pierre Therrien, “The Local Context of Advanced and Digital Technology, and the Impact of its use on Firm Performance”

10:20 – 10:40 Refreshment Break – Atrium

10:40 – 11:55 Session 2 – The Evolving Local Context for Digital Firms (15” each/15” questions)

Shiri Breznitz /w Doug Noonan, “Does Crowdfunding Flatten Regional Advantages?”
Darius Ornston, “When Flagships Fail: Comparing Finland and Waterloo.”
Steven Denney /w David Wolfe, “Birth of a Startup Ecosystem: The gradual transformation of Toronto’s ICT cluster”
Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay, /w Hamed Motaghi “The Transformation of the Taxi Industry: The case of Teo Taxi, Montreal-based taxi service”

11:55 – 13:00 Group Lunch – Concourse

13:00 – 14:00 Session 3 – Digital Mining and Oil and Gas (15” each/15” questions)

Ray Gosine, “Digitalizing Extractive Industries: The state-of-the art to the art-of-the-possible”
Peter Warrian, “Digitization of Ore Bodies and the Inversion of Industry 4.0”
Peter Phillips /w Brian Wixted, “Ripples On The Pond: Beyond the mere roboticisation of ag and mining”

14:00 – 15:15 Session 4 – Can Canadian Cities be Smart and Inclusive? (15” each/15” questions)

Shauna Brail, “The Urban Economic Geography of Ridehailing: Global Prospects? Canadian Prospects?”
Allison Bramwell, “Expanding Digital Opportunity? Inclusive innovation in the ‘ordinary’ city”
Betsy Donald, “Sharing Economies: Moving beyond binaries in a digital age”
Nicole Goodman /w Zac Spicer, “The Administrative Gap in Smart City Design”

15:15 – 15:45 Refreshment Break – Atrium

15:45 – 18:00 Session 5 – Student Research Presentations (15” each max)

15:45 Anthony Frigon – University of California Los Angeles – “Client Interactions and the Use of Information and Communication Technologies as Drivers of Innovation in Knowledge-Intensive Business services”
16:00 Graeme Jobe – University of Saskatchewan – “Governing Off-Farm Disruption: Does endowment affect data valuation?”

16:15 Discussant – Catherine Beaudry, Polytechnique Montréal

16:30 Stéphane Dauphin-Pierre – Polytechnique Montréal – “A look at the impact of the research intermediary operating in the ICT industry of the province of Quebec”
16:45 Susan Flavelle – Ryerson University – “DUI (Doing-Using-Interacting) Innovation and Actionable Knowledge: Exploring the competencies that individuals use and develop when they learn to use 3D printing digital fabrication technologies”
17:00 Jon Woodside – University of Waterloo – “Planning for Inclusive Platforms: Lessons from Uber workers”

17:15 Discussant – Shauna Brail, University of Toronto

                   

CDO Partnership Annual Group Dinner – Time: 19:00

Description

Abstract:
Each talk is expected to take an hour or a bit more. The presentations are divided into three sessions each in order to allow communication at an early moment. Interruptions are welcome.

1. Domestic Space (Thursday, April 26 10am – 12pm)
An introduction into the anthropology of habitation (German “Wohnen”, “Behausung”) or dwelling which in a western context has to do with changing demands and aspirations, with taste and life style. The 20th century turned the obvious into a question of education.
The presentation reflects the recent experience in the western world (1), in contrast to the way the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley use domestic space, inside and outside (2) and how much this changed within the present generation (3).

2. Urban Space and Ritual of Bhaktapur (Thursday, April 26 2pm – 4pm)
The Mesocosm of the city, a term used by Robert Levy to describe an “organized meaningful world intermediate to the microcosmic worlds of individuals and the culturally conceived macrocosm, the universe, at whose center the city lies”. The presentation focusses on the Navadurga and Astamatrka in their manifold manifestations: the definition of urban space by the aniconic seats (pitha) of the Eight Mother Goddesses (1), the Nine Durgas as human actors, their rebirth on the Victorious Tenth Day (in October) (2), and their representation as a group (gana) of Virgin deities, Kumaris (3).

3. Earthquake and Rebuilding (Friday, April 27 4pm – 6pm)
Earthquakes causes renewal in regular intervals. The last earthquakes in 1833, 1934 and the most recent one in 2015 resulted in loss of domestic structures, temples and human life (380 in Bhaktapur 2015). In historic times, new temples replaced the lost ones at the same place, fragments were discarded. At present the philosophy (or ideology) of architectural conservation demands the rescue of the smallest fragments in order to ensure the material authenticity. Repairs and replacement are mandatory. The presentation recalls earlier projects of conservation in 1971 and 1990 (1), and focusses on the craftsmen (whose ancestors once shaped the originals) as the embodiment of “authentic, living heritage” (2), and the act of recreating lost iconographical details (3), considered in the west as the fall in conservation practice.

Biography:
Niels Gutschow, born in 1941 in Hamburg, Germany, studied architecture in Darmstadt and completed his PhD in 1973 about the early 17th century urban history of Japan (The Castle Town – Jokamachi). He visited Nepal first in 1962 and since 1970 he keeps working there as a conservation architect and architectural historian focusing of urban space and ritual (publications in 1974, 1975, 1882 and 2017) and architecture (The Nepalese Caitya, 1997 and The Architecture of the Newars, 2011). At present he is associated with the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust, aiming at the rebuilding of ten buildings at Patan’s Darbar Square, of which four totally collapsed in the 2015 earthquake. As Honorary Professor he is associated with the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University.

Description

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower explores the history, culture, and politics of Texas, while holding the stereotypes up for rigorous scrutiny.

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and the author of nine books. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 won the Lionel Gelber Award for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prise for General Nonfiction. His most recent book, Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David, was named by Publisher’s Weekly one of the top ten books of the year.

This event is part of the “Books that Matter” series, sponsored by the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History.

Description

This conference proposes to look anew at issues concerning migration and Southeast Asia. Migrations have characterized Southeast Asian lives and livelihoods in different ways in different eras; they have affected work, settlement patterns, resource use, small and large investments, religion, and culture. Migrations have formed and changed the composition of Southeast Asian societies and given rise to complex cultural, social, environmental, and political problems and opportunities. Past and present, migrations have been both forced and voluntary: forced to make way for certain kinds of development; triggered by violence and war; but also intentional and, at times, pioneering: to change lives, secure new livelihoods, or explore new ecologies. Contributors to this conference will discuss continuities and changes in migration practices, patterns, and personnel, addressing a wide range of historical periods, disciplines, and themes.

(Schedule)

FRIDAY, APRIL 27
180 Doe Library

Registration

Welcome & Opening Remarks

Pheng Cheah, Professor of Rhetoric; Chair, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, UC Berkeley

Nancy Lee Peluso, Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor of Forest Policy, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, College of Natural Resources; core faculty, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, UC Berkeley

Rachel Silvey, Professor of Geography; Richard Charles Lee Director, Asian Institute, University of Toronto

PANEL 1: Migrant Labor and the Law

Democracy and Indonesian Migrant Workers: Rising Political Salience and Contestation at Home and Abroad
Ann Marie Murphy, Seton Hall University

Development and Nation: The Evolution of Malaysian Immigration Laws
Oanh Nguyen, University of Minnesota

Absurd Journeys: The Costs of Becoming Legal
Maryann Bylander, Lewis & Clark College

Citizen, Refugee, Muslim?: A Preliminary Typology of Rohingya Migration and Membership Politics across Polities
Nabila Islam, McGill University

Break

PANEL 2: Repressive Labor and Forced Mobilities

Deportable Refugees, Transnationalism and Cambodian-Americans
Jennifer Zelnick, UC Irvine

From Sea to City: Migration and Social Wellbeing in Coastal Cambodia
Furqan Asif, University of Ottawa

Blood Bricks: Debt-bondage, Carceral Geographies and the (Im)mobile Lives of Brick-kiln Laborers in Cambodia
Katherine Brickell, Royal Holloway, University of London

Migration and Refuge in Central and East Java during the Violence of 1965-66
Siddharth Chandra, Michigan State University

Chair & Discussant: George Dutton, UCLA

Lunch Break

PANEL 3: Place-making and Networks

The Things They Carried (and Kept): Socialist Mobilities and Vietnamese Remittances from East Germany
Christina Schwenkel, UC Riverside

Urban Footprints: Migration, Place-making and the Politics of Presence in Hanoi, Vietnam
Timothy Karis, Western Oregon University

Tracing Mining Migration through Indonesia’s National Gold Networks
Matt Libassi, UC Berkeley

Labor Migration and Agrarian Change in Indonesia’s Industrial Rural Landscapes
Lisa Kelley, University of Hawaii-Manoa (co-authored with Nancy Peluso, UC Berkeley; Kim Carlson, University of Hawaii-Manoa; and Suraya Afiff, University of Indonesia)

Chair & Discussant: Emily Hertzman, Asian Institute, University of Toronto

Break

PANEL 4: Imaginaries and Transformations of Home

Flexible Filipinas: Global Economic Restructuring, Gendered Labor Migration and the Feminization of Overseas Work in Contemporary Philippine Anglophone Literature
Alden Sajor Wood, UC Irvine

Art and the Rantau: Tracking Minangkabau Migration
Katherine Bruhn, UC Berkeley

Migration and Da’wa: Exploring the Nexus in the Pen Circle Forum
Monika Arnez, University of Passau

‘Kisah Sukses’: Stories of Indonesian Migrant Worker Returnees Living in Greater Jakarta
Kilim Park, University of British Columbia

Chair & Discussant: Sylvia Tiwon, UC Berkeley

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Migrant Worker Protection in ASEAN [tentative title]
Anis Hidayah, Migrant Care (Indonesia)

SATURDAY, APRIL 28
Morning session
180 Doe Library

Registration

PANEL 5: Brokering, Labor and Bodily Controls

The Policing of Female Marriage Migrants: Case Studies from Southeast Asia
Gwenola Ricordeau, CSU Chico

Unbound and Bound Spheres of Globalization: The Regional Pocket of Free Travel in Asia and Asymmetries in Global Mobility
Maria Cecilia Hwang, Rice University

Manufacturing Global Care Workers: Regimes of Labor Control in Indonesia’s Transnational Migrant Industry
Andy Chang, UC Berkeley

The Ethnic H-Rê Experiences: Labor Migration from Vietnam to Malaysia and Return
Angie Ngoc Tran, CSU Monterey Bay

Chair & Discussant: Catherine Ceniza Choy, UC Berkeley

Lunch Break

Afternoon session
Geballe Room
220 Stephens Hall, Townsend Center for the Humanities

Plenary Panel 1
Migration in Southeast Asia – Structural Shifts, Patterns and Continuities

Michele Ford (University of Sydney), Johan Lindquist (Stockholm University),
Aihwa Ong (UC Berkeley), Brenda Yeoh (National University of Singapore)

Moderator: Rachel Silvey, University of Toronto

Break
Plenary Panel 2
Political Ecology and Migration in Southeast Asia

Nicole Constable (University of Pittsburgh), Rebecca Elmhirst (University of Brighton),
Deirdre McKay (Keele University), Christine Padoch (NY Botanical Garden)

Moderator: Nancy Peluso, UC Berkeley

Description

A G E N D A – DAY 3
Friday, April 27, 2017

08:30 – 09:00 Coffee – Atrium

09:00 – 09:05 Welcome

09:05 – 10:20 Session 6 – How the Platform Economy is Disrupting Everything (15” each/15” questions)

Ken Coates, “The Global Digital Economy: Government policy and Canadian opportunities”
Charles Davis /w Emilia Zboralska, “Cultural Policy and the Digital Disruption: the case of Creative Canada”
Carin Holroyd, “Digital Content Development and Promotion in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan”
Meredith Williams, U of Edinburgh /w Jennifer Jeffs: “Fintech in Canada: An opportunity beyond finance”

10:20 – 10:40 Refreshment Break – Atrium

10:40 – 12:00 Session 7 – SYNTHESIS SESSIONS – PART ONE

7.1 THEME ONE – Global Production Networks – Leaders: Joe Wong/Doug Fuller

1. What is the ICT/digital ecosystem like in specific geography/sector? How GPN are ultimately refracted through national / sectoral context.
2. What are the opportunities and challenges for Canadian firms with respect to plugging into these networks?

7.2 THEME TWO – Local Context for Global Networks – Leaders: Tijs Creutzberg/Tara Vinodrai

1. What are the defining variables of our digital case studies? Opportunities for comparisons: sector, city size, geography, innovation networks, digital technology, institutions etc.
2. To what extent do, or how important are, global variables (e.g. dynamics, networks, global firms) in your case studies?
3. What are the main findings / argument / narrative arising from our case studies?
What is the most interesting /compelling finding or insight to date?
4. What main digital challenges and opportunities have you been able to identify?
5. What local institutions,if any, are showing to be important to shaping digital sector outcomes/ performance?

7.3 THEME THREE – Diffusion of IT Across the Economy
Leaders: Peter Philips/Peter Warrian

1. Given that the Theme 3 Diffusion of ICT across Economic Sectors needs to be contextualized in specific economic sectors, what are the main features/characteristics of the case you’re working on – i.e. agriculture, manufacturing, media ...?
2. What are the points of disruption and of opportunity emerging in these industries? Give a few examples.
3. What are the challenges and opportunities for SMEs independently or within supply chains?
4. What is unique / generalizable about the particular industry you’re working on?

7.4 THEME FOUR – Digital Inclusion and Intelligent Communities
Leaders: Neil Bradford/Allison Bramwell

1. How do we analytically capture the range of existing and emerging forms of the ‘digital divide’?
2. What is ‘inclusive innovation’? What are ‘intelligent communities’? Are definitions inherently context-specific or can we generalize? Are there overlaps between the two constructs?
3. What are the challenges and opportunities for each agenda in your area? Which aspects are most amenable to intervention?
4. What is the range of existing policies and programs that offer the prospect for expanding ‘inclusive innovation’ and ‘smart city’ practices to a greater number of people and places? What are the key drivers of policy &/or program innovation and at what scale do they operate?

DAY THREE – CONTINUED

12:00 – 13:00 Group Lunch – Concourse

13:00 – 14:30 SYNTHESIS SESSIONS – PART TWO

Return to breakout rooms or join another group

14:30 – 15:30 GROUP SYNTHESIS SESSION SUMMARIES (15” EACH)

15:30 – 16:00 WRAP UP

 Progress for CDO going into Year 6 and critical objectives going forward

 Next and Final CDO Conference – Please note in your calendar: Location: Toronto Dates: April 29-May 1, 2019

Meeting Adjourned – Enjoy Your Evening in Vancouver

Description

Please note that registration for this event is full. As a free event, seating is provided on a first-come, first-served basis.

Why did Britain vote to leave the European Union? What did this vote tell us about British politics and society, as well as the nature of contemporary Euroscepticism? And where next for the relationship between Britain and the European Union? Drawing on findings from his book, Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (Cambridge University Press), Professor Matthew Goodwin will explore the cause and consequence of this historic moment in British politics. He will draw on multiple sources of data and established theories to explain what motivated the decision to exit the European Union and reflect on where that leaves Britain today.

Matthew J. Goodwin is an academic, writer and speaker known mainly for his work on British and European politics, volatility, populism, Brexit and elections. He is Professor of Politics at Rutherford College, University of Kent, and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. He’s the author of five books, numerous peer-reviewed studies, research reports and briefings. He lives in London and tweets @GoodwinMJ

Description

This keynote speech is presented as part of the CSEAS conference Migrations and New Mobilities in Southeast Asia, co-sponsored by UCLA’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. See the CSEAS conference page for the program.

Originally from East Java, Indonesia, Anis Hidayah began advocating for migrant workers in 1995 while studying at Jember University. She founded Migrant Care, a non-profit organization for Indonesians working abroad, in 2004, with an advocacy emphasis on policy change at the national and regional level and on redressing human rights abuses of overseas workers. She has been a particular advocate for Indonesian overseas workers on death row in Saudi Arabia. Her work in this area was also instrumental in supporting Mary Jane Veloso, a domestic worker from the Philippines who was sentenced to death in Indonesia for drug smuggling, but who received a last-minute stay of execution in 2015. Veloso’s case, extensively covered in the press in Indonesia and the Philippines, highlighted the vulnerability of overseas domestic workers to pressures from recruiters linked to criminal syndicates. Anis Hidayah received an Alison Des Forges Award from Human Rights Watch in 2011 and Indonesia’s prestigious Yap Thiam Hien Award for her human rights work in 2014. She is currently head of Migrant Care’s Migration Study Center (Pusat Studi Migrasi) based in Jakarta.

Description

Pathways Magazine presents collections of diverse stories of peoples’ mobilities and identities from, between, and within Asia and Canada, produced by undergraduate students working in the Asian Pathways Research Lab. In the Spring 2018 volume of Pathways, we delve into the stories of thirteen pairs of Chinese-Canadian mothers and daughters, exploring their relationships, their mobilities, and their process of negotiating specifically gendered Chinese-Canadian identities across generations and geographies. This research is inspired by the work of Harriet Evans, whose research about the transformation of mother-daughter relationships in the context of post-Cultural Revolution urban China taught us about the connections between political change, social restructuring, and changing family dynamics and intimate relationships. To this body of knowledge, we contribute these thirteen stories, all of which add to the aforementioned context the additional experience of transnational family immigration to Canada. In this session, our undergraduate researchers will present their findings and experiences working at the Asian Pathways Research Lab.

PRESENTERS:
EMILY HERTZMAN, Manager, Asian Pathways Research Lab, Asian Institute
AILIN LI, Research Assistant, Asian Pathways Research Lab, Asian Institute
ANGELAH LIU, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
JAMIE CHEN, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
JEEBY SUN, Mandarin Translator, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
KATE CHEN, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
KELLY LEUNG, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
MIRAGE WU, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
NANCY QIN, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
NATALIE BELL, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
XIAOHAN XU, Mandarin Translator, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
YIRAN LI, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
ERIN LI, Mandarin Translator, undergraduate student, University of Toronto
CYNTHIA JUTRAS, undergraduate student, University of Toronto

Description

As the Canadian International Council (CIC) celebrates its 90th anniversary year, we invite you to join us for the first ever Big Issue Lecture featuring the Rt. Hon. Douglas Alexander and a discussion moderated by David Common of the CBC.

The CIC convenes the Big Issue Lecture series to explore topical international issues with special guest speakers.

Douglas Alexander will draw on his experience as a former UK Europe Minister, Trade Investment and Foreign Affairs Minister, and U.K. Governor of the World Bank to share with students the complexities which surround the Brexit vote in the UK, the rise of populism across the West, and the impact of the changing nature of politics on the transatlantic relationship. Alexander will explain key influencers of voter attitudes such as the Global Financial Crisis, economic instability, immigration, and the rise of social media, to explain the advance of populist movements in Britain, across Europe and in the USA. After almost two decades at the highest level of UK politics, Alexander will discuss how the rise of populism will ultimately have an impact on how allies across the Atlantic interact, shifting policy priorities in an altered political environment, and what this means for geo-politics. Alexander will draw conclusions on what this changed political landscape means for politics of the center ground, and encourage students to think about whether we can counter the rise of populism or whether we are destined to a decade of populist politics until it runs its course.

5:30 PM – Registration
5:45 – 7:00 PM – Lecture Presentation & Discussion
7:00 – 8:00 PM – Reception

Light snacks and a cash bar will be available. Space is limited.

About the speakers:

The Right Honourable Douglas Alexander is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a visiting Professor at King’s College, London. He is a member of the UK Privy Council and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and a Trustee of the Royal United Services Institute. Mr Alexander previously served in various Ministerial positions in the U.K. Government for nine years, and as a Member of the UK Parliament for eighteen years. Mr Alexander served as Minister of State for Trade, Investment and Foreign Affairs, and Minister of State for Europe, Secretary of State for Scotland and for Transport. He also served as the UK Secretary of State for International Development leading over 2500 staff based in 39 countries with a budget of $10.6 billion. As the UK’s Governor to the World Bank, he negotiated successfully for reforms including additional representation for developing countries and decentralisation of bank operations.

David Common is a Correspondent and Host of World Report, CBC’s flagship national morning radio newscast. The program has the largest audience of any CBC News program. David is also part of the team of investigative journalists for Marketplace. David has reported from more than fifty countries, previously holding roles as New York Correspondent and Europe Correspondent based in Paris. He’s covered the Boston Bombing, Hurricane Sandy, flown on military aircraft in the air war against Libya, spent more than a year total covering the Afghan conflict, worked on ships combating pirates off Somalia, plying Arctic waters in the Arctic and been at the site of Titanic’s sinking a hundred years later. David was born in Winnipeg, grew up in Toronto and has lived across Canada. David attended York University in Toronto and Stockholm University in Sweden. He has received several awards, nominated for a Gemini twice – winning once under the Best Reportage category.