Past Events

Description

During the Interwar period (1918-1939), Czechoslovak-Yugoslav relations were influenced by a complex web of political, economic, and ideological factors within the broader European context. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia emerged as new nation-states after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their interactions reflected the challenges and opportunities faced by many European countries in the aftermath of World War I. During this period, they had rich political, economic, and cultural relations and were among the main pillars of the post-war French security system in Central and South-East Europe.

About the Speaker

Milan Balaban is a historian, he completed his bachelor’s studies at the University of Banja Luka and pursued master’s and doctoral studies at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. His doctoral dissertation focused on "Yugoslav-Czechoslovak Economic Relations between 1918-1938." Notably, Milan Balaban received recognition for his dissertation work when he was awarded the best work on the economic history of the Balkans in 2016. His academic career has included positions at the Department of History in Banja Luka, and since 2015, he has been employed as a scientific researcher and historian at the Bata Information Centre at Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic.

Balaban’s primary research areas encompass the history of the Bata Company and Czechoslovak-Yugoslav economic relations. He has contributed to academic scholarship by publishing numerous articles in Czech and foreign scientific journals. Additionally, he has authored and co-authored books, including "The Bata Company in Yugoslavia" (published in 2018) and "Bata Across Continents" (published in 2022).

His research and expertise have taken him to various academic institutions worldwide, including the Czech Republic, France, Greece, the Netherlands, India, Canada, and former Yugoslavia. His work has contributed significantly to understanding economic and historical relations between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the history of the Bata Company.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

This talk takes up the early-COVID figure of the bat to consider human continuities with nonhuman, near-human, and becoming-human capacities, in order to think through how Asian Canadian Studies as a discipline emerges in the present moment. I consider the wet market as site at which two medicines collide, then turn specifically to the bat’s capacity for self location through echolocation, and its attentiveness to many sounds including the echoes of its own voice in order to navigate a precise flight path from moment to moment. Extending my earlier work in Slanting I, Imagining We, I address both historical and contemporary emergences (and emergencies) of Asian Canadian formation, and then consider how echolocation might give us a measure of agency (or, as Roy Miki would have it, asiancy) in emergence. In relation to formations seemingly (though not necessarily practically) exterior to Asian Canadian, including Blackness and Indigeneity, as well as formations that obviously overlap with it (queernes and disability, for example), I propose a fluctuating and imaginative approach to disciplinarity that takes up a complex "poethics" of relation and production; one that listens for voices, echoes and other sounds that might help us make sense of where we are at any given moment on a long journey. Remaining critical of the "echo chamber" as a site of confirmation bias, I consider how else such a concept and the spaces it gestures towards might be rethought.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Larissa Lai is the author of nine books including Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, and most recently The Lost Century. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist’s Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book and twice finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award, she has also been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Sunburst Award , the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism and the Governor General’s Award. She has held a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, and a Maria Zambrano Fellowship at the University of Huelva. She is currently the Richard Charles Lee Chair of Chinese Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto.

The Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies was established in November 2012 with a generous endowment from an anonymous donor. The objective of the Chair is to support research and teaching on topics relating to Chinese Canadian and Asian Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto.

Description

The story of the Bata Company is a remarkable tale of entrepreneurial vision, global expansion, and the establishment of a unique social and economic system. Founded by Tomáš Baťa in Zlín, Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic) in 1894, the company embarked on a transformative journey that turned it into the world’s largest shoemaking producer in the second half of the 20th century.

About the Speaker

Milan Balaban is a historian, he completed his bachelor’s studies at the University of Banja Luka and pursued master’s and doctoral studies at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. His doctoral dissertation focused on "Yugoslav-Czechoslovak Economic Relations between 1918-1938." Notably, Milan Balaban received recognition for his dissertation work when he was awarded the best work on the economic history of the Balkans in 2016. His academic career has included positions at the Department of History in Banja Luka, and since 2015, he has been employed as a scientific researcher and historian at the Bata Information Centre at Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic.

Balaban’s primary research areas encompass the history of the Bata Company and Czechoslovak-Yugoslav economic relations. He has contributed to academic scholarship by publishing numerous articles in Czech and foreign scientific journals. Additionally, he has authored and co-authored books, including "The Bata Company in Yugoslavia" (published in 2018) and "Bata Across Continents" (published in 2022).

His research and expertise have taken him to various academic institutions worldwide, including the Czech Republic, France, Greece, the Netherlands, India, Canada, and former Yugoslavia. His work has contributed significantly to understanding economic and historical relations between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the history of the Bata Company.

Description

The international order confronts significant challenges, including intensifying geopolitical tensions in Asia and Europe, new forms of geoeconomic competition and weaponized interdependence, and globalized problems necessitating unprecedented societal transformations. In this symposium, a distinguished group of speakers will offer their insights about global challenges and potential solutions in the domains of international security, economic relations, and societal transformation. The symposium will consider the role that Japan, Canada, and the United States can play along with other G7 partners in confronting global challenges, building on the progress of the Hiroshima G7 meeting in May 2023.

The event will be jointly hosted by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan, G7 Research Group, and Bill Graham Centre at the University of Toronto with generous support from the Consulate-General of Japan in Toronto.

Program:

1:00-1:15 Welcome and Opening Remarks

Phillip Lipscy, Director, Centre for the Study of Global Japan

Takuya Sasayama, Consul-General of Japan in Toronto

1:15-2:30 Session 1: Security

Nobumasa Akiyama, Professor, School of International and Public Policy and the Graduate School of Law, Hitotsubashi University

Ayumi Teraoka, Postdoctoral research scholar, Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Daisaku Higashi, Professor, Center for Global Education and Discovery, Sophia University

Dani Nedal, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

2:30 – 2:45 – Break with Refreshments

2:45-4:00 Session 2: Economy

Glen S. Fukushima, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Deanna Horton, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for the Study of Global Japan, Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada

Louis Pauly, J. Stefan Distinguished Professor of Political Economy, University of Toronto

John Kirton, Director of the G7 Research Group, University of Toronto

4:00 – 4:15 – Break with Refreshments

4:15-5:30 Session 3: Societal Transformation

Jim Raymo, Professor of Sociology and the Henry Wendt III Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University

Carin Holroyd, Professor Political Studies, University of Saskatchewan

James Tiessen, Professor, Global Management Studies and Director, Master of Health Administration (Community Care), Toronto Metropolitan University

John Meehan, Director of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, University of Toronto

Description

Alex Averbuch will read, in the original Ukrainian and in English translation, from his latest book Zhydivsky korol (The Jewish King, a 2023 finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award for culture and literature), and answer questions from the audience. Averbuch’s poetry deals with interwoven Jewish-Ukrainian relations through the prism of his family history and Ukraine’s multiethnic past and present. The book features poeticized documentary materials related to the Second World War: letters by Ukrainian Ostarbeiters sent to their relatives in Ukraine, interwoven with letters by Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to devastated villages in Ukraine in search of their murdered relatives, as well as poems about the Russo-Ukrainian war currently taking place in his home region of Luhans’k. Unsettling but ultimately liberatory de-specifications of ethnos, language, and sexuality relieve trigger-points in Ukraine’s history through the confessional intimacy of family, shame, pleasure, and the reconciliation of self and other.

About the Speaker

Alex Averbuch, a poet, translator, and scholar, is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, and Russian. English translations of his poems have appeared in the Manhattan Review, Copper Nickel, Plume, Birmingham Poetry Review, Words Without Borders, Sugar House Review, Constellations, and Common Knowledge. Averbuch is active in promoting Ukrainian-Jewish relations. He has translated into Hebrew and published over thirty selections of poetry by contemporary Ukrainian poets. Currently he is compiling and editing an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew translation. Averbuch is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Davis Center, and soon to be a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He has a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto.

Media coverage, interviews:

– CBC, an interview on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and The Jewish King

– Relieving the Terrible Knots ofHistory: An Interview with Alex Averbuch

– An interview on poetry and intercultural relations between Ukrainians and Jews, Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter

– An interview with Ukrainian Hromadske radio on Ukrainian Jewry, the Russo-Ukrainian war

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Many studies have demonstrated that later and less marriage, in combination with negligibly low levels of non-marital childbearing, is the primary reason for Japan’s very low total fertility rate. One surprising omission from the large body of research on the relationship between marriage and fertility is explicit attention to the role of marital dissolution and remarriage. This is a critical limitation in light of the relatively high prevalence of both divorce and remarriage. In Japan, one-fourth to one-third of marriages end in divorce and one-fifth of all marriages involve at least one spouse who was formerly married. In this paper, we use data from the 2010 and 2015 rounds of the National Fertility Survey to quantify the contributions of marital dissolution and remarriage to period fertility rates. In the absence of non-marital fertility, we expect marital dissolution to contribute to lower fertility and remarriage to contribute to higher fertility. The relationship between remarriage and childbearing is a major research focus in Europe and the U.S., but to our knowledge, we are the first to examine this question with large nationally representative data in Japan. Preliminary analyses show that the total fertility rate in 2010-15 would have been roughly 5% higher than observed if first-married couples experienced no divorce and 5% lower if women who did exit first marriages via divorce were not exposed to the risk of fertility in the context of remarriage. In subsequent revisions, we will extend analyses to examine the contributions of divorce and remarriage to change over time in the total fertility rate. We will also supplement our simple synthetic cohort analyses with simulations of individual behavior under alternative assumptions about divorce rates, remarriage rates, and stepfamily fertility rates.

Lunch will be provided.

Speaker:

Jim Raymo is Professor of Sociology and the Henry Wendt III Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Raymo is a social demographer whose research focuses on documenting and understanding the causes and potential consequences of demographic changes associated with population aging in Japan. His published research includes analyses of marriage timing, divorce, recession and fertility, marriage and women’s health, single mothers’ well-being, living alone, family change and social inequality, employment and health at older ages, and regional differences in health at older ages. He is currently engaged in three projects: In the first, he uses newly-available survey data to examine the socioeconomic and family correlates of children’s academic performance, personal relationships, and emotional health. This is a collaborative project involving scholars addressing similar questions in China and Korea. In the second project, he is examining the social, cultural, economic, and policy factors underlying striking demographic similarities among countries in East Asia and Southern Europe, with a particular focus on the roles of gender inequality, family ties, and growing unpredictability of the life course. He is chairing a scientific panel on this subject sponsored by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. In the third project, he is working with colleagues in Japan to document the well-being of single mothers and their children and to understand the ways in which intergenerational coresidence and intrafamilial exchanges of support may (or may not) offset some of the disadvantages faced by unmarried mothers.

His research has been published in leading U.S. journals such as American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, and Journal of Marriage and Family as well as in Japanese journals. Raymo serves on the board of directors of the Population Association of America and is an associate editor of Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences and Demography. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2000.

Moderator:

Ito Peng, Director, Centre for Global Social Policy , Professor, Department of Sociology and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Ito Peng is a Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the Department of Sociology, and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is also the Director of the Centre for Global Social Policy, University of Toronto. She teaches political sociology, specializing in family, gender, and demographic issues, migration and comparative social policy. She has written extensively on family and gender policies, labour market changes, and social and political economy of care in East Asia. Professor Peng is the Principal Investigator of a SSHRC funded partnership research project called Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: International Comparisons, that examines how the reorganization of care influences the global migration of care workers, and how this migration in turn impact family and gender relations, gender equality, government policies, and global governance. Professor Peng has held a variety of senior leadership positions at the University of Toronto. Prior to being the Director of the Centre for Global Social Policy, Professor Peng was the Associate Dean, Interdisciplinary & International Affairs at the Faculty of Arts and Science. She has also served as the Chair and Director of Dr. David Chu Program in Asia Pacific Studies and the Director of Centre for the Studies of Korea, both at the Asian Institute. Professor Peng is a senior fellow of Massey College and Trinity College, University of Toronto; and a senior fellow of Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. She has been an associate researcher with the UNRISD since 1996. Dr. Peng received her Ph.D. from London School of Economics.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan and co-sponsored by the Centre for Global Social Policy, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

Join this expert discussion on current events in Asian and the broader issue of transnational repression.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra, is a Sessional Instructor for the Department of History at the University of Fraser-Valley.She earned her MA degree in 2008 from UBC’s Asian Studies department which looked at the 18th century court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Her PhD, completed in April 2022, from UBC’s Department of History looks at museums as spaces of belonging through a critical race theory lens. Sharn is the first Sikh person to graduate from UBC History’s PhD program. She is the former coordinator of the South Asian Studies Institute at UFV, having worked there for more than 12 years, and through that, co-managed and co-curated award-winning exhibits at the National Historic Site, Gur Sikh Temple and Sikh Heritage Museum. She continues to teach sessional in the Department of History at UFV.

Noura Al-Jizawi, is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab at Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is also and activist and spokesperson. Her work takes an in-depth look at digital transnational repression, digital authoritarianism and human rights, and digital surveillance more broadly.

Description

This event is part of "The Newars and Their Neighbours" series

ABOUT THE TALK

Beginning with Sylvain Lévi, most scholars for the past century who have assessed the state of Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley have described the tradition as "decadent, "corrupted by Hinduism," and so in serious decline. What has emerged over the last decade, however, is a hitherto unimagined revival among traditional Newar Buddhists and their venerable tradition centered on Mahayana-Vajrayana teachings and practices. Led by younger Buddhist vajracaryas and scholars, leaders have introduced a welter of new spiritual initiatives, institutional innovations, along with gender and caste reforms. The talk will sketch this confluence of reconfigurations and revivals, with special focus on how these factors converged in the nearly-completed construction of a Newar Vajrayana monastery in Lumbini.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Todd Lewis is a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Religion at the College of the Holy Cross. His primary research since 1979 has been on Newar Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley and the social history of Buddhism. Lewis has authored many articles on the Buddhist traditions of Nepal and a book titled Popular Buddhist Texts from Nepal: Narratives and Rituals of Newar Buddhism (SUNY Press, 2000). His translation, Sugata Saurabha: A Poem on the Life of the Buddha by Chittadhar Hridaya of Nepal (Oxford 2010), received awards from the Khyentse Foundation and the Numata Foundation as the best book on Buddhism in 2011. He is currently engaged in his next project, a edited volume, Buddhism through Objects.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Join us on Monday, November 6 at 4:30pm for an exclusive conversation with The Rt. Hon. Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand. Ms. Clark with discuss the lessons she has learned as a prime minister and head of the UN development agency, her views on where she sees the greatest change happening in the future, and the role she sees for young people and especially young women in advancing democracy.

This is an exclusive event for Munk School students and space is limited. Registration is required in order to attend.

About the speaker

Helen Clark is a respected global leader in sustainable development, gender equality and international co-operation. She served three successive terms as Prime Minister of New Zealand between 1999 and 2008. While in government, she led policy debate on a wide range of economic, social, environmental and cultural issues, including sustainability and climate change.

She then became the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator for two terms from 2009 to 2017, the first woman to lead the organisation. She was also the Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the Heads of all UN funds, programmes and departments working on development issues.

In 2019 Helen Clark became patron of The Helen Clark Foundation. She is an active member of various international organisations.

Description

Join us on Monday, November 6 at 4:30pm for an exclusive conversation with The Rt. Hon. Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand. Ms. Clark with discuss the lessons she has learned as a prime minister and head of the UN development agency, her views on where she sees the greatest change happening in the future, and the role she sees for young people and especially young women in advancing democracy.

This is an exclusive event for Munk School students and space is limited. Registration is required in order to attend.

About the speaker

Helen Clark is a respected global leader in sustainable development, gender equality and international co-operation. She served three successive terms as Prime Minister of New Zealand between 1999 and 2008. While in government, she led policy debate on a wide range of economic, social, environmental and cultural issues, including sustainability and climate change.

She then became the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator for two terms from 2009 to 2017, the first woman to lead the organisation. She was also the Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the Heads of all UN funds, programmes and departments working on development issues.

In 2019 Helen Clark became patron of The Helen Clark Foundation. She is an active member of various international organisations.  

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

The lecture will focus on cyber risks and international response strategies. In an era of unprecedented technological transformation, AI, cloud computing, IoT, 5G, and ever-evolving digitization, we face a landscape that has brought a wave of cyber threats that demand our immediate attention.

This talk will begin with a discussion of the Western collective response strategy to counter malicious cyber activity, highlighting the importance of global cooperation and collaboration in mitigating these threats. We will explore the Estonian government’s proposal for an international cyber coalition to help Ukraine address digital threats, and offer insights into how we can collectively address both current and next-generation cyber challenges that transcend borders.

In addition, we will examine strategies to increase our agility in responding to adversaries who exploit vulnerabilities in cyberspace. In a world where the cyber battlefield knows no boundaries, it is imperative that we understand and adapt to emerging threats. Drawing on lessons learned from cyber activities in Ukraine, this presentation will provide valuable real-world context and insight into the evolving landscape of cyber warfare and how nations can best protect their interests in an interconnected world.

About the Speaker:

Heli Tiirmaa-Klaar is Director of Digital Society Institute at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin since January 2022. She was serving as Ambassador for Cyber Diplomacy and Director General for the Cyber Diplomacy Department at the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2018-2021, where she led the Estonian efforts to promote norms of responsible state behavior in cyberspace at the United Nations Security Council. Up to Fall 2018, she was working as a Head of Cyber Policy Coordination at the European External Action Service where she steered and coordinated EU external relations on cyber issues and co-led preparations of European Cyber Security Strategies since 2012. She set up EU strategic cyber dialogues with the US, India, Brazil, Japan, South Korea as well as other international organisations. She also kicked off EU global cyber capacity building programs and steered the development of the EU Cyber Diplomacy Toolbox to bolster EU response to malicious cyber activities. In 2011, she was assigned to the NATO International Staff to prepare the NATO Cyber Defence Policy.

She has been working on cyber security since 2007 when she led the development of the Estonian Cyber Security Strategy. In 2008-2010 she coordinated the implementation of the Estonian strategy, managed the National Cyber Security Council and led the establishment of Estonia’s national cyber resilience structures as well as building public-private partnerships for cyber security. In her earlier career, she held various managerial positions at the Estonian Ministry of Defence and the Tallinn University since 1995. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the George Washington University and has published in several academic journals throughout her career.

Description

Everyone knows who won Brexit. But not everyone knows how. Behind the Rasputin-like manoeuvring of Boris Johnson’s master strategist Dominic Cummings, lies an entire strata of respectable British political science which has all too readily conceptualised, mapped, measured and confirmed the new political alignment and its consequences that Cummings (and others) carried to victory in the UK in June 2016 and December 2019. Presenting a Bourdieusian spin on the mainstream public opinion scholarship that constitutes the field of "Brexitology" and its powerful doxa, I offer an alternative explanation of Brexit and after that may have significant parallels elsewhere where "populist" insurgence has shaken the foundations of "liberal democracy".

Description

Start in Paris, France, finish in Toronto and earn a Master of Public Policy from Sciences Po and a Master of Global Affairs from the Munk School’s MGA program.

Join us on November 9 at 9am EST and learn more about our MPP/MGA dual-degree program, a collaboration between the renowned Munk School at the University of Toronto and Sciences Po in Paris France.

Admissions representatives from both schools will answer your questions about the programme’s curriculum, give you insights into student services in both cities and explain how the dual-degree programme works. Don’t miss this opportunity to shape your future on the global stage!

Register today!

Description

Information is not yet available.

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Information is not yet available.

Description

Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges (BBBB) is the capstone knowledge-sharing conference of the Engendering Success in STEM (ESS) Research Consortium. ESS brings together leaders from academia, industry, and government to generate new ideas and deepen existing collaborations for evidence-based interventions to promote gender inclusion in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).

As part of the conference, the Initiative for Education Policy and Innovation, Centre for the Study of Global Japan, is pleased to co-sponsor the "Engendering Success in STEM: International Perspectives" panel.

Time : 11:15 am -12:30 pm

Panel Title: Engendering Success in STEM: International Perspectives

Speakers: Glenn Adams, University of Kansas, Takako Hashimoto, Chiba University of Commerce, Japan, Toni Schmader, University of British Columbia

Moderator: Dr. Steven Spencer, Ohio State University

About the Speakers:

Glenn Adams is a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Kansas and currently acting as Interim Director of the Kansas African Studies Center. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone before completing his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Stanford University. His graduate training included two years of field research in Ghana, which provided the empirical foundation for his research on cultural-psychological foundations of relationship. His current work builds on this foundation to investigate the coloniality of knowledge in psychological science and to articulate models of human development and ways of living that promote sustainable well-being for broader humanity.

Dr. Takako Hashimoto is a Professor at the Chiba University of Commerce (CUC). Her research uses advanced data mining techniques for large-scale social media analysis, such as investigating a dataset of over 200 million tweets sent during the 21 days following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Tsukuba and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Hashimoto has also worked as the technical lead for over 24 years at the Research & Development Center of the multinational imaging and electronics company Ricoh Co. Ltd. She has also held numerous influential leadership positions including Board Member of The Database Society of Japan and Chair of IEEE Women in Engineering, a global organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

Dr. Toni Schmader, is the Director of Engendering Success in STEM, and the Social Identity Laboratory at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She has over 25 years of experience and over 100 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, and published books. Her research examines how stereotypes and bias constrain people’s performance, preferences, and self-views, with a particular focus on gender stereotypes and implicit bias. Dr. Schmader has given frequent public lectures on the topic of implicit gender bias including talks to the National Academies of Science in the United States, as part of Harvard’s Women in Work Series, and at the International Gender Summit. She was the recipient of a Killam Research Prize in 2013, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize in 2018, as well as the European Association of Social Psychology Theory-Innovation Award for 2020-2021. She held a Canada Research Chair position from 2010-2020 and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2022-2023.

Moderator:

Dr. Steven Spencer is a Professor and the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Chair in Social Psychology at Ohio State University. His research focuses on motivation and the self, particularly on how these factors affect stereotyping and prejudice. Along with how implicit processes that are outside of people’s awareness affect people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, he studies how threats to the self-concept can lead to stereotyping and prejudice. In addition to publishing in top academic journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Science, he has served as an associate editor for the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, as the chair of the executive committee of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and won the Gordon Allport Prize for his paper with Greg Walton on Latent Ability. He is also a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Organized by Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Description

A brown-bag lunchtime workshop on turning historical research into creative and narrative non-fiction. All members of the department are welcome, but the event will be aimed at graduate students. Our guest, Linda Kinstler, is a journalist and scholar whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is also the editor of the online magazine The Dial and the author of the book Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (Public Affairs/Hachette, 2022). In 2023, she received a Ph.D. from the Rhetoric Department at University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on the genealogy of legal oblivion. Kinstler will draw on her experience as a journalist, editor, and scholar to address how to write and publish research-based work for a general audience. This will include discussion of craft and form, as well as publishing strategies and how to most effectively pitch stories to editors.

This event is designed for university faculty, staff, and graduate students.

Attendance is limited to registered participants only.  

Description

Zoltán Kodály’s most important compositions have their roots not only in the Hungarian folksongs, but also in the music of Palestrina and the great literary works of his homeland. Delivered on the occasion of the centenary of the monumental oratorio Psalmus Hungaricus, this talk presents the chief sources of Kodály’s inspiration and reflects on the significance of his unique creative attitude.

Gabor Csepregi is currently a visiting scholar at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, and at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, Hungary. He is past president of Université de Saint-Boniface (Winnipeg) and of Dominican University College (Ottawa). His scholarly works focuses on the central questions of philosophical anthropology, especially on the phenomenological analysis of the body, time, music, play, and education. His latest book, Attitudes of Play, has been published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022.

Sponsored by CERES, Hungarian Studies Program, and Hungarian Research Institute of Canada  

Description

In the Soviet Union official humor was a propaganda tool for instituting communist ideology and governing society. This talk will focus on the founding and institutionalization of the satire and humor magazine “Broom” that was at the center of the official humor culture in Soviet Lithuania. It will argue that Soviet Lithuanian laughter was multidirectional, ideologically correct and oppositional. Paradoxically, while official humor institutions involved people in co-governance through the intimacy of laughter, they also created critical publics who shared dystopian visions of Soviet modernity via authoritarian state sponsored venues. The “Broom” itself became a forum for criticism that was mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

About the speaker

Neringa Klumbytė is Professor of Anthropology and Russian and Post-Soviet Studies and Director of the Lithuania Program at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University. She is the author of Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania (2022, Cornell University Press); a co-author of Social and Historical Justice in Multiethnic Lithuania (2018, Vilnius) and co-editor of Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–85 (2012, with Gulnaz Sharafutdinova). Her current projects focus on the Holocaust, sovereignty, and historical justice in Lithuania.

Description

Is “Race” a modern Western construction? This talk aims to introduce a new understanding of race beyond the transatlantic paradigm. While transatlantic racialization often entailed encounters of peoples with pronouncedly different physical features, in parts of Continental Europe and Asia racialization initially took place mostly between groups who had no or nearly no identifiable phenotypical distinctions. I present what I call the three dimensions of “race”—“race”, “Race”, and “race as a Resistance”— to provide a more encompassing, global understanding of race. I present examples of each dimension of race and discuss how the three interconnect, coalescing to produce and reinforce an overarching idea of “Race.”

About the Speaker

Yasuko Takezawa Yasuko Takezawa is Professor at the Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University. She is currently the Paul I. Terasaki Endowed Chair of the International Institute of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her fields of interest are Anthropology, Sociology, and American Studies. 

Professor Takezawa has been leading a series of large international collaborative research projects over the past two decades. As visiting professor, she has taught at various universities outside of Japan as well, including MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Heidelberg University, and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a member of Science Council of Japan (SCJ), the representative organization of Japanese scientist community. She has published two monographs, a dozen of edited or co-edited volumes in Japanese as well as several journal special issues.

Her publications in English include:

Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Race and Migration in the Transpacific (co-edited with Akio Tanabe). London: Routledge, 2023.
Transpacific Japanese American Studies: Dialogues on Race and Racializations (co-edited with Gary Okihiro). Honolulu: U of Hawai’i Press, 2016.
Racial Representations in Asia (ed. ). Kyoto/ Melbourne: Kyoto University Press/ Trans Pacific Press, 2011.
Visibilities and Invisibilities of Race and Racism (co-edited with Faye V. Harrison and Akio Tanabe). London: Routledge, in press.

Sponsors: the Harney Program in Ethnic, Immigration, and Pluralism Studies, the Asian Institute, and the Centre for the Study of Global Japan.

Description

The Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) paradigm is quickly gaining momentum and recent contributions highlight several potential avenues for reimagining traditional approaches to regional innovation policymaking.  Moving away from simple benchmarking exercises, which only continue to re-establishing already known static rankings with increasingly complex indicators, the aim of advanced EEG-based concepts and analysis should be to: a) establish development alternatives that rest on regional potential as indicated in the configuration of present capabilities, and b) to link those alternatives to forward-thinking strategies that consider regional innovation systems in the context of the global framework of knowledge production and diffusion.  Here particular attention needs to be given to regional branching opportunities that derive from knowledge diversification processes driven by the collaboration patterns and location choices of individuals and firms.

About the Speaker

Dieter F. Kogler is an Associate Prof. in Economic Geography at University College Dublin.  His research focus is on the geography of innovation and evolutionary economic geography, with particular emphasis on knowledge production and diffusion, and processes related to technological change, innovation, and economic growth. He is currently an ERC Starter Grant Holder with the following project title: Technology Evolution in Regional Economies (TechEvo).  Dieter also serves as an Associate Editor of Regional Studies and is an Editorial Board member of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. His career path combines professional, education and research experience acquired in Europe, the United States, and Canada within a variety of areas pertaining to the spatial analysis of socio-economic phenomena.  For further information regarding ongoing projects, collaborations, and an overview of publications, refer to: https://people.ucd.ie/dieter.kogler.

Description

The Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) paradigm is quickly gaining momentum and recent contributions highlight several potential avenues for reimagining traditional approaches to regional innovation policymaking. Moving away from simple benchmarking exercises, which only continue to re-establishing already known static rankings with increasingly complex indicators, the aim of advanced EEG-based concepts and analysis should be to: a) establish development alternatives that rest on regional potential as indicated in the configuration of present capabilities, and b) to link those alternatives to forward-thinking strategies that consider regional innovation systems in the context of the global framework of knowledge production and diffusion. Here particular attention needs to be given to regional branching opportunities that derive from knowledge diversification processes driven by the collaboration patterns and location choices of individuals and firms.

About the Speaker

Dieter F. Kogler is an Associate Prof. in Economic Geography at University College Dublin.  His research focus is on the geography of innovation and evolutionary economic geography, with particular emphasis on knowledge production and diffusion, and processes related to technological change, innovation, and economic growth. He is currently an ERC Starter Grant Holder with the following project title: Technology Evolution in Regional Economies (TechEvo).  Dieter also serves as an Associate Editor of Regional Studies and is an Editorial Board member of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. His career path combines professional, education and research experience acquired in Europe, the United States, and Canada within a variety of areas pertaining to the spatial analysis of socio-economic phenomena.  For further information regarding ongoing projects, collaborations, and an overview of publications, refer to: https://people.ucd.ie/dieter.kogler.

Description

Can history help us to understand the disastrous state of Russia’s relations with the West in 2023?  Leigh Sarty suggests that it can, drawing on his experience as a student, a scholar, and a diplomat over more than four decades to describe some of the key turning points and deeper structural forces that make contemporary Putinism more intelligible.

About the Speaker

Leigh Sarty is a former diplomat who spent the better part of his career dealing with Russia, including two postings at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow (1996-1999; 2012-2016).  A Russian speaker who holds an M.A. from Carleton’s Institute of Soviet and East European Studies (1985) and a PhD from Columbia University (1991), Sarty is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, and a Senior Fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History.

Description

Please join us for the 2nd Annual CensureUofT Lecture on November 16, 2023, which will be given by Kenneth Roth, Former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch and Visiting Professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. 

Academic freedom is an endangered concept. There have always been external antagonists from among governments, corporations, or donors, but today many threats also come from within universities. Having himself experienced academic retaliation for his criticism of the Israeli government, Kenneth Roth, the former long-time director of Human Rights Watch, will describe some of the steps needed to reinforce academic freedom.  
 

Sponsored by: CAUT; The List; Anthropology, St. George; Anthropology, UTM; WGSI; Social Justice Education, OISE; Centre for the Study of the United States; Hearing Palestine; Institute of Islamic Studies; Jewish Faculty Network; Palestine Forum; Centre for Culture and Technology; Department of Geography and Planning, Scholar Strike Canada; Faculty4Palestine; Arts and Science Students Union; UTFA; Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies; History; CUPE 3902

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ABOUT THE TALK

Marriage Migration of Dalit and Muslim Women in India: Articulation of New Form of Gendered Violence

This talk focuses on marriage migration undertaken by rural bachelors in North India who seek brides from outside their customary marriage pools such as from development peripheries of India. Drawing on feminist political economy and Dalit feminism, Dr. Kukreja connects the macro-political violent process of neoliberalism to the micro-personal level of marriage and intimate gender relations to demonstrate that predatory capitalism dispossess many poor women from India’s marginalized Dalit and Muslim communities of marriage choices in their local communities. It argues that this gendered matrimonial dispossession exposes migrant brides to new forms of gendered and caste violence in conjugal communities that act as disciplining tools to efficiently extract labour from them.

The talk draws on Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India (Cornell University Press 2022).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Reena Kukreja, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies with cross appointment to Gender Studies Department and affiliation with the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research interests and filmmaking practice is focussed on migration and development, political economy, marriage migration, South Asian masculinities, and caste. Her current work examines the intersections of masculinity, sexuality, securitization of borders and political economy on the lives of undocumented South Asian men in Greece and other South European countries.

(Discussant) Sanjukta Mukherjee is an Associate Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University. Dr. Mukherjee’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of feminist political economy, critical development studies and urban geographies with a focus on neoliberal globalization, transnational service work and social transformations centered on the politics of gender, class, caste, race and age in South Asia and its diaspora. She is co-author of Low Wage in High Tech: An Ethnography of Service Workers in Global India (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her research has been published in journals like Gender, Place and Culture, The Professional Geographer, International Migration Review and several anthologies and edited volumes.

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ABOUT THE TALK

"There is a nuclear ghost in Minamisōma." This is how one resident describes a mysterious experience following the 2011 nuclear fallout in coastal Fukushima. Investigating the nuclear ghost among the graying population, Morimoto encounters radiation’s shapeshifting effects. What happens if state authorities, scientific experts, and the public disagree about the extent and nature of the harm caused by the accident? In one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of coastal Fukushima written in English, Nuclear Ghost tells the stories of a diverse group of residents who aspire to live and die well in their now irradiated homes. Their determination to recover their land, cultures, and histories for future generations provides a compelling case study for reimagining relationality and accountability in the ever-atomizing world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ryo Morimoto is a first-generation college graduate and scholar from Japan and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His scholarly work addresses the planetary impacts of our past and present engagements with nuclear things. His second book project explores the U.S-Japan transnational history of disaster robots and an ethnography of decommissioning robots in coastal Fukushima. Ryo is a facilitator of the Native undergraduate students-led project Nuclear Princeton.

Discussant: Shiho Satsuka is interested in the politics of knowledge, environment, nature, science, and capitalism. She examines how divergent understandings of nature are produced, circulated, encountered, contested, and transformed in relation to the global expansion of capitalism. She is currently working on her second book project, tentatively entitled The Charisma of Mushrooms: Undoing the Long Twentieth Century.The project explores the possibilities of mushroom science to realize interspecies entanglements, dissolve the twentieth-century style state-science-industrial complex, and explore the possibility of co-habitation of various human and nonhuman beings on the earth. In particular, the project traces interspecies encounters in satoyama forest revitalization movements inspired by the charisma of matsutake, the politics of translation between various scientific and other forms of knowledge, as well as the emergence of “new commons.” This research is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant and is a part of the collaborative, multi-sited ethnographic project, “Matsutake Worlds.” Satsuka was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Germany in 2012.

Chair: Tong Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies and the Graduate Department of History and Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute. His current book-length study employs lenses of media studies, environmentalism, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine the politics and poetics of mobilization in China’s special zones in the socialist and postsocialist eras. As a visual artist, Lam has utilized his lens-based work to uncover hidden evidence of state- and capital-precipitated violence—both fast and slow—across various contexts. At present, his research-based visual projects particularly delve into the intersection between technology and military violence, as well as the landscapes of industrial and postindustrial ruination.  

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What does it mean to live beside an eroding democracy? As this powerful and timely book argues, that question will define the next generation of Canadian politics.

As a congressional staffer in the United States, Rob Goodman watched firsthand as a rising authoritarian movement disenfranchised voters, sabotaged institutions, and brought America to the brink of a coup. Now, as a political theorist who makes his home in Canada, he has an urgent warning for his adopted country: The same forces that have upended democracy in America and around the world are on the move in Canada, too. But we can protect our democracy by drawing on a set of political, cultural, and historical resources that are distinctly of this place.

In Not Here, Goodman outlines four such resources. First, the rejection of the dangerous idea of one “real” Canadian people. Second, the refusal of political charisma and founder-worship. Third, a set of social programs—embattled but still standing—that empower neighbours to see one another as equals. And fourth, Canada’s longstanding search for an identity separate from the great power with which it shares a continent.

Today, that great power is a democracy in decline, and so defending what makes Canada distinct matters more now than ever before. Canadian difference is not a curiosity, a luxury good, or a vanity item. It is a democratic immune system.

Laying bare the historical roots of today’s politics and making an urgent case for action, Not Here is a roadmap for safeguarding a democracy under unprecedented threat.

Description

A sitting member of the German Parliament and a member of the Free Democratic Party, Coordinator Link is responsible for Germany’s relationship with Canada and the United States. The talk will examine Germany’s relationship with the two countries: the values they share and the issues that unite – and divide –  them.

About the Speaker

Michael Georg Link has been serving as the German Federal Government’s Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation at the Federal Foreign Office since March 2022.

His focus as Coordinator is on deepening political relations with the U.S. and Canada, on both the federal and the state or provincial level respectively. He also works to increase transatlantic people-to-people contact, especially by promoting exchange programs for young people from all walks of life.

Link is a Member of the German Bundestag where, now in his fourth legislative term, he represents the Free Democratic Party (FDP) for his home electoral district, Heilbronn, Baden-Württemberg. Link is Deputy Chairperson of the Parliamentary Group of the Free Democrats, where he is responsible for international affairs and defense policy.

He has extensive experience in international relations, having previously served as Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office (2012-2013) and as Director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) (2014-2017). He is also a member of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, of the party council of the European Liberals (ALDE), and of the FDP national executive board in his capacity as party treasurer.

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ABOUT THE EVENT

Stephen will present on the historical and anthropological perspectives of N. Vanamamalai from 1917 to 1980.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

G. Stephen, PhD, is a scholar of Tamil studies and folklore, will discuss the contributions of N. Vanamamalai to the inter-disciplinary study of History and Anthropology. A renowned Marxist intellectual, activist and researcher, Vanamamalai’s scholarship in folk literature transformed Tamil studies through an interdisciplinary approach animated by cultural Marxism. He played a key role in Tamil literary progressive and radical movements; founded the Nellai Research Group; mentored generations of students and a research journal in Tamil, Aaraicci.

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Join us for an engaging panel featuring Black Students and Alumni from the Master of Global Affairs & Master of Public Policy programs. They will share invaluable insights into why prospective Black students should strongly consider becoming a part of these exceptional programs. Our panelists will delve into their personal motivations for choosing these degree programs, highlight the numerous benefits and merits, and illuminate how this educational journey can serve as a powerful springboard for careers in public policy and global affairs. Moreover, they will discuss the positive impact these programs can have on the Black Community. We invite you to be a part of this inclusive and supportive space, where you can gain a deeper understanding of these outstanding programs and forge meaningful connections with our Black students and alumni.

Don’t miss out—register today!

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Our JD-MPP and JD-MGA alumni and current students will engage with first-year law students from UofT Law School, shedding light on the multitude of advantages that come with pursuing the combined JD/MGA and JD/MPP degree programs.

They will illustrate how these dual degrees can significantly broaden career opportunities and enhance knowledge and expertise across various fields of study.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

Settler extractivist projects seek to unearth “resources” that can generate profit, while also hollowing land to create an “industrial sink” (Liboiron 2021) to bury waste. In Japan’s Indigenous Ainu land, two communities offered to host Japan’s most radioactive nuclear waste in a Deep Geological Repository (DGR) – the most poisonous “sink” – for perpetuity. These sites where vibrant Ainu communities thrived, were obliterated by 19th century smallpox epidemics. Today, they host fisheries, aquaculture, and windfarms – asserting new settler infrastructures and submerging ancestral Ainu care for the land. In this talk, Lewallen considers how distinct notions of time – from Indigenous futurity to settler time – intersect with what may be called ‘nuclear time-scales,’ the expanse of time required for the toxicity of nuclear waste to be halved.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ann-Elise Lewallen is an anthropologist who supports Indigenous empowerment through decolonial mapping, ecosystem health, and restoring Indigenous Land relations in East and South Asia. Her first monograph is The Fabric of Indigeneity: Contemporary Ainu Identity and Gender in Settler Colonial Japan (2016), and her book-in-progress is The Banyan Tree and the Fish with no Scales.

Discussant: Mary X. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of the Centre from Criminology & Sociolegal Studies. Mitchell’s work centers on the intersections of science and technology with law and environmental social movements in the nuclear era. Focusing on radiological risk, her research examines the production of environmental inequality in the United States and transnationally.

Chair: Tong Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies and the Graduate Department of History and Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute. His current book-length study employs lenses of media studies, environmentalism, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine the politics and poetics of mobilization in China’s special zones in the socialist and postsocialist eras. As a visual artist, Lam has utilized his lens-based work to uncover hidden evidence of state- and capital-precipitated violence—both fast and slow—across various contexts. At present, his research-based visual projects particularly delve into the intersection between technology and military violence, as well as the landscapes of industrial and postindustrial ruination.

Description

About the Book:

Biography courtesy of the University of Chicago Press

A history of global secularism and political feeling through colonial blasphemy law.

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private.

About the Author:

J. BARTON SCOTT works on the intellectual and cultural history of religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on South Asia and its global connections. He teaches courses on social and cultural theory, media and material religion, and religion in political thought.

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The Undergraduate Public Policy program presents a seminar event on Toronto’s pressing food insecurity titled, Rising Prices and Empty Baskets.

What will it take for the city and provincial governments to prioritize tackling Ontario’s food insecurity problem? With food costs rising monthly, food banks have been reaching peak client numbers since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Join this panel discussion to learn more about the relationship between food justice and poverty, and what you can do as a Torontonian to support your community.

The panel will include:

Dr. Michael Widener, Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Transportation and Health at the University of Toronto. He also serves as the Director of Health Studies at University College, and as an Associate Professor in Geography and Planning, with cross-appointment in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Outside of U of T, Dr. Widener serves on various journals’ editorial boards, is a member of CIHR’s College of Reviewers, and co-leads the Social and Health Factors Cluster of the Network of European Communication & Transportation Activity Researchers, and co-chairs the Prioritizing Populations theme of the Mobilizing Justice Partnership. Dr. Widener is a health geographer who’s research focuses on how public health affects, and is affected by, movement of transportation systems.

Tim Li, Research Coordinator of PROOF, a research program studying effective policy interventions for household food insecurity in Canada at the University of Toronto. PROOF’s work shines a spotlight on the size and seriousness of food insecurity in Canada, the inability for charitable assistance to resolve it, and how it can be remedied through public policies supporting adequate incomes. Over the past decade, PROOF has helped establish food insecurity as a serious public health problem, a marker of pervasive material deprivation, and a matter of public policy.

Talia Bronstein, Social Policy Researcher and VP Research & Advocacy at Daily Bread. Talia is an outspoken advocate for income security and affordable housing to alleviate poverty and food insecurity. Having worked in the public, private, and non-for-profit sectors, Talia brings a unique perspective to building collaborative relationships with community members, partner organizations, and government to tackle complex systems-level policy issues. Talia also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Toronto and her research has been featured in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post, and CBC.

Description

 The Centre for the Study of the United States and our event co-sponsors invite you to join us for a screening of the documentary film FROM HERE. This award-winning film interweaves the deeply personal stories of four immigrants as they navigate the challenges of identity and belonging. The screening will be followed by Q&A session with the film’s director, Cristina Antonakos-Wallace, and one of the film’s protagonists, Tania Mattos, who will join us across borders over Zoom.

FROM HERE description: As the U.S. and Europe grapple with rising nationalism and movements against increasing diversity, FROM HERE offers a fresh and different perspective to the issues of immigration and belonging. The film is an intimate yet epic look at the stories of four children of immigrants Tania, Miman, Sonny, and Akim, as they move from their 20s into their 30s and face major turning points in their lives: fighting for citizenship, starting families, and finding room for creative expression.

"FROM HERE" Trailer: https://vimeo.com/109329686

Speakers:

Christina Antonakos-Wallace, Director/Producer, Camera/Editor

Christina is a filmmaker and cultural organizer. Awards include the Euromedia Award for Culture & Diversity (2011), a Media that Matters Change Maker Award (2012), and recognition from the German Alliance for Democracy and Tolerance (2015). Her short films and interactive work has been exhibited in over fifteen countries through festivals, schools, galleries, NGOs, and corporations. Commissions and grants include the New America Foundation, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and the German Ministry for Civic Education. She was a Fellow at Hedgebrook (2017) and the Port Townsend Film Festival (2015), and holds a BFA/BA from the New School & Parsons School of Design. Her work was recognized with a five-year MTV Fight For Your Rights Scholarship (2002) and a Humanity in Action Fellowship (2006), which she completed at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Berlin. FROM HERE is her first feature-length documentary.

Tania Mattos, Film Protagonist and Activist

Tania is an Aymara descendent, Bolivian-born, Queens-based organizer, and strategist. She joined Envision Freedom with 14 years of experience as an immigrant and worker rights organizer and advocate. As Legislative Coordinator for the New York State Youth Leadership Council, she helped organize the first Education Not Deportation program in New York that stopped the deportation of undocumented youth people. Tania is a co-founder of Queens Neighborhoods United, a grassroots anti-gentrification collective. Tania was a DACA recipient from 2012 to 2019.

Leah Montange (Moderator), Bissell-Heyd Lecturer, Centre for the Study of the United States

Dr. Leah Montange is the Bissell-Heyd Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Toronto.  Dr. Montange is a human geographer whose work addresses the relations between human life and state power in contexts of bordering, detention, and labor — contexts where freedom, unfreedom and mobility are at stake.   Her work is published in journals such as Citizenship Studies; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; the Annals of the American Association of Geographers; and Globalizations.  In the American Studies program at U of T, she teaches core courses as well as specialized thematic courses on borders, labour, immigration and empire. Dr. Montange received a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Toronto, where she was a recipient of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and was a Pruitt Dissertation Fellow of the Society of Women Geographers. She has also taught behind bars with the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound.

We are grateful for the support of our co-sponsors, who have made this event possible:

Centre for Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies, University of Toronto
Harney Program in Ethnic Immigration and Pluralism Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

This event is organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States.

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This year, we are pleased to recognize the contributions of David A. Wolfe, who is the recipient of this year’s Desmond Morton Research Excellence Award. A professor in the Department of Political Science at UTM and co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, Professor Wolfe is also the founder and inaugural Director of the Master of Urban Innovation Program in IMI. His research interests include the impact of digital technologies, innovation policy in Canada, and the role of governance institutions in local and regional economic development.

We invite you to join us at the Collaborative Digital Research Space for Professor Wolfe’s lecture, in which he’ll discuss the return of industrial policy, Canada’s failed innovation strategy and the role of governance relations in place-based development policy.

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The Silk Road of Science

We develop a new framework to study the development and autonomy of national scientific enterprises. Our method applies machine learning models to author information on 4.4 million scientific articles involving international collaboration to identify the project leaders (as opposed to the supporting actors) of each article. Aggregating leaders to their countries-of-residence allows us to determine the hierarchical position of power of each country in the global collaboration network. We use our framework to analyze recent changes in the hierarchical position of Chinese science. We begin by focusing on the hierarchical nature of collaborations between Chinese and U.S. scientists, and find that China substantially narrowed its gap behind the U.S. in scientific leadership between 1995 and 2021. Extending this trend, we predict that China will reach parity with the U.S. in terms of scientific leadership in 2033. Next, we show that China is achieving scientific leadership more quickly in other parts of the world. Delving into administrative documents, we uncover how China is extending the reach of its scientific enterprise beyond its territorial borders by investing in and training young scientists in regions that have been relatively neglected by Western science, particularly in Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. As a consequence, China now enjoys a strong leadership position in collaborations with scientists from these regions, and engages scholars from these regions to produce research that advances China’s own strategic interests. We conclude that the narrowing of the China-U.S. leadership gap and the strong leadership position China has established in much of Asia and Africa indicate that China’s scientific enterprise is sophisticated and territorially distributed. As a consequence, policymakers in the U.S. and other Western countries have less leverage in affecting China’s scientific development than is commonly believed.

About our speaker

Chris Esposito is a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where he is also associated with the Price Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago. His research studies how newcomers can break into and succeed in the innovative economy, despite the odds stacked against them. He studies these opportunities at multiple scales, from individual inventors and organizations, to larger and more complex units of coordination, including cities and countries. His dissertation analyzed 170 years of data to understand how new cities in U.S. grew to become centers for innovation and economic prosperity, even when they had few local advantages to spur local growth in their earliest years. His more recent research studies related processes at the individual and national levels, using causal identification methods, machine learning approaches, and long-run panel microdata.

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The Battle of Haçova/Mezőkeresztes in Memory and Myth

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

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

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

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ABOUT THE SEMINAR

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

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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

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

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

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

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ABOUT THE TALK

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

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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

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

About the Speaker

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

Description

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

About The Book:

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

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

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

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

About The Speakers:

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

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

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

Description

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

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Description

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

Do you have specific application questions?

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

Description

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

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

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

Description

This is an online event.

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

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

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

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

Description

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

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

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Description

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

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

Lunch will be provided.

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

Description

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

Description

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

ABOUT THE EVENT 

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

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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

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

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

Description

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

ABOUT THE BOOK

Courtesy of Penguin Random House Canada

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

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

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

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

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

ABOUT THE PANEL

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

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

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

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

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

Description

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

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

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

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

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

Description courtesy of the Stanford University Press

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

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Description

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

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

Description

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Description

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

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

About The Speaker

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

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

About The Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

Description

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

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

Description

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

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT 

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

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

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

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

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

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

ABOUT THE PANEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Description

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

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

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

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

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

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

Description

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

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

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

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

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

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