Past Events

Description

The presentation is a survey of the expanding “politics of memory” in Bulgaria during three periods of the country’s recent history: the Stalinist period, the period of Communist Nationalism the Post-Communist period. The older cultural symbols reveal the ideological agenda of the time — they represent the infamous style of the monumental propaganda known as “socialistic realism”. The more recent, totally different in spirit and style Post-Communist memorials have been created in order to keep the memory of people who were victims during communism – yet, they are almost invisible.

Evelina Kelbcheva is a historian at the American University in Bulgaria. She received her PhD from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Description

How can Southeast Asian cities build resilience of the most vulnerable to climate change? The Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia Partnership (UCRSEA) helps address this challenge by researching how to make urban climate governance more inclusive & equitable. We invite you to join an afternoon of presentations from four graduate students who will share their findings from recent fieldwork in the region.

Presenters:

Dual challenges of migration & climate change: Experiences of Myanmar labour migrants in Phuket, Thailand
Angelica de Jesus, PhD student, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Leaving the coast: the interplay of wellbeing and resilience for coastal fishing communities in Cambodia
Furqan Asif, PhD student, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa

Deconstructing Perceptions of Vulnerability and Risk in Khon Kaen’s Informal Spaces
Nathan Stewart, MA student, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

Role of Public Partcipation in Sustainable Development: Building Light Rail Transit in Khon Kaen
Anshul Bhatnagar, MA student, Sustainability Management Program, University of Toronto

Chair: Amrita Daniere, Co‐Director, UCRSEA; Vice‐Principal, Academic and Dean at University of Toronto Mississauga

The event is presented as part of UCRSEA at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, and funded by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Description

Fresh from their Guinness World Record breaking tough ride around China, adventure motorcyclists Ryan and Colin Pyle are gearing up for a completely new challenge – an epic 14,000 kilometer, 54 day circumnavigation around India. Tough Rides: India takes the biker brothers from the crowded capital city of New Delhi to the isolated northern Himalayan regions, back down to the rain forests of the southeast and up the tiger infested jungles of Bengal. Colin and Ryan Pyle will travel around a country full of contrasts, one minute India is colorful and vibrant, the next crowded and chaotic. Their biggest challenge will be taking on some of the planet’s most dangerous roads.

Ryan Pyle, born in Toronto, Canada, spent his early years close to home. After obtaining a degree in International Politics from the University of Toronto in 2001, Ryan realized a lifelong dream and travelled to China on an exploratory mission. In 2002 Ryan moved to China permanently and in 2004 he became a regular contributor to the New York Times. In 2009 Ryan was listed by PDN Magazine as one of the 30 emerging photographers in the world. In 2010 Ryan began working full time on television and documentary film production and has produced and presented several large multi-episode television series for major broadcasters in the USA, Canada, UK, Asia, China and continental Europe.

Twitter @ryanpyle

Note: The screening and discussion will take place from 4 PM – 6 PM and is followed by a reception.

Description

Human rights are firmly entrenched in international law, however, the protection of these rights remains a serious challenge. While the right to health can be upheld through the state provision of public goods and services, states vary in their willingness to prioritize health on the national agenda. What role can international actors play in eliciting national policy change? The influence of international agreements has long been the subject of a lively discussion amongst scholars and policymakers alike. Conventional scholarship has focused on investigating international treaties and formal, legally binding agreements. The United Nations (UN), however, has increasingly turned to the use of more informal approaches. For this reason, my dissertation examines a non-binding agreement, the UN-led Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) initiative. SUN requires country signatories to improve maternal and child nutrition policies, but the agreement has no legal charter, provides no direct financial incentive, and uses no formal mechanism for punishing non-compliance. Does SUN contribute to national policy change? If so, under what conditions? Since SUN emerged in 2009, country signatories have travelled down dramatically different paths. Certain countries pushed through rapid national policy change, while others remained stagnant. What explains these diverging trajectories? And what do these outcomes reveal about the UN’s ability to influence policy change? Drawing upon original fieldwork carried out in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, and Thailand, I show how the same agreement can drive policy change in certain countries, while constraining improvements in others. My dissertation introduces a theoretical framework to elaborate on the causal mechanisms explaining these outcomes.

Carmen Jacqueline Ho is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science. At the Munk School of Global Affairs, she is the Health and Human Rights Senior Doctoral Fellow with the Comparative Program on Health and Society and a Doctoral Fellow with the Asian Institute. At the Hospital for Sick Children, she is affiliated with the Centre for Global Child Health. Her research interests include global governance, the political economy of development, comparative social policy, and health politics. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, International Development Research Centre, Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Vivienne Poy Chancellor’s Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr. Onil Bhattacharyya is a family physician and the Frigon-Blau Chair in Family Medicine Research at Women’s College Hospital. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and an assistant professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto. He received his medical degree at McGill University. He has a PhD in health services research from the University of Toronto and was a Takemi Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Description

Speculative property bubble has become a lived experience of many urbanites in the global South and in particular, East Asia that experienced condensed urbanisation under strong states. East Asian economies have been paying a committed attention to property development, aiming to maximise rent extraction through commodification of space and yet resulting in gentrification, domicide and dispossession. Mega-projects are launched to produce brand new towns sometimes labelled as eco- or smart cities, despite the reality that these projects usually turn out to be nothing more than real estate speculation. The urbanisation experience is negatively shared by indigenous populations whose dwellings and farmlands for survival are destructed to make ways for new real estate investments. Given the substantial impact on the built environment and especially the existing residential landscape, the contemporary speculative urbanisation in East Asia or the global East, and to a large extent in other economies increasingly subject to planetary urbanisation, witnesses harmful concentration of resources in fixed assets, especially the real estate sector, creating housing poverty of affluence.

Keynote Speech by Hyun Bang Shin, Associate Professor, Geography and Urban Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science
“The Political Economy of Speculative Urbanisation in East Asia”

Hyun Bang Shin is Associate Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at London School of Economics and Political Science. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economic dynamics of speculative urbanisation, the politics of redevelopment and displacement, gentrification, housing, the right to the city, and mega-events as urban spectacles, with particular attention to Asian cities. His publications include an edited volume Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015) and a monograph Planetary Gentrification (Polity Press, 2016). His on-going book projects include a monograph Making China Urban (Routledge), and a co-edited volume Contesting Urban Space in East Asia (Palgrave Macmillan).

Panelists:
Laam Hae, Associate Professor, Political Science, York University
The “Construction State” Unbounded: Variegated Neoliberal Urbanization and Struggles over Greenbelt Deregulation in the Seoul Metropolitan Region
Jesook Song, Professor, Anthropology, Interim Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea, University of Toronto
Dialogue of “Asia as Method” and Urban Studies: Hyunjang (Core-Location) and Social Humanities
Hae Yeon Choo, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Toronto
Speculative Self-making: Class Mobility, Homeownership, and Real Estate Investment in South Korea

Description

While there have been many normative advances in mass atrocities response, practice has failed to keep up, with people left to die while the international community looks on. Kurt Mills will analyze four areas – norms, institutions, authority, and will – which serve as impediments to effective action to stop atrocities.

Dr. Kurt Mills is Senior Lecturer in International Human Rights at the University of Glasgow, where he is the Director of the Glasgow Human Rights Network. He previously taught at the American University in Cairo, Mount Holyoke College, James Madison University, and Gettysburg College, and served as the Assistant Director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College. He is the author of numerous publications on human rights, humanitarianism, humanitarian intervention, international criminal justice, and international organizations, including, most recently, International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa: Responsibility to Protect, Prosecute, and Palliate (University of Pennsylvania Press). He is the founder of the International Studies Association (ISA) Human Rights section, past Vice-President of ISA, and current Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Academic Council on the United Nations System.

Dr. Maria L. Banda is an international lawyer based in Toronto. She has previously practiced international law in Washington, D.C., and worked with several international organizations, including the ILO, the OHCHR, the WTO, and the UN Special Representative’s team on Business and Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, and clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada. She is a graduate of Trinity College at the University of Toronto (Hon. BA), Harvard Law School J.D.), and Oxford University (D.Phil.), where she studied as a Rhodes and a Trudeau Scholar. She has written on international law, R2P, global governance, and climate change. She is currently a Graham Fellow at the University of Faculty of Law, a member of the World Commission on Environmental Law, a Visiting Attorney at the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, D.C., and an Advisor to the Canadian Center for the Responsibility to Protect (CCR2P).

Description

Big Ideas in Taiwan located at the Munk School of Global Affairs aims to inspire students to develop social entrepreneurial, innovative projects that apply their academic knowledge to a real world challenge in Taiwan, to solve a problem, or make a difference. Students will learn through a series of expert-led workshop videos on how to generate ideas, write a successful proposal, the art of the pitch, and idea execution through effective project management. In April, individuals and teams will pitch their ideas before a jury of faculty members and industry experts, competing for project awards.

Big Ideas in Taiwan is based on the Richard Charles Lee Big Ideas Competition (2015-16) created by Professor Joseph Wong. This initiative is made possible with funding from the Taiwan Department of Education and the Taipei Economic and Trade Office in Toronto, with support from the Munk School of Global Affairs.

ELIGIBILITY: Graduate and undergraduate students in the Munk School of Global Affairs and members of student group, Taiwan Now

AWARDS: $10,000 total

Description

The explosion at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 26, 1986 continues to have serious economic, social, and biological consequences for the inhabitants of the affected territories and beyond. The problems caused by the disaster in Ukraine and policies developed to address them have been further complicated by geopolitical conflict and the economic and humanitarian crisis this conflict has precipitated. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the disaster, this panel brings together scholars to discuss issues such as the future nuclear energy in Ukraine, the impact of radiation on wildlife in Chornobyl’s exclusion zone, and the management of displaced people. In situating their research, panelists will draw comparisons between the Chornobyl and Fukushima accidents, and between the Chornobyl accident and Ukraine’s Anti-Terrorist Operation.

Presentations:

Chernobyl and the Future of Nuclear Power in Ukraine
David Marples, Professor, Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta

Do Nuclear Accidents Generate a “Garden of Eden” for Wildlife? Lessons from the Chernobyl and Fukushima Disasters
Tim Mousseau, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina.

A Humanitarian Crisis after the Chernobyl Disaster and the Anti-terrorist Operation (ATO) in Ukraine: What do They Have in Common?
Alexander Belyakov, Ph.D., Certified Sustainability Professional. The Roots Collaborative, Founding Member

Description

What is Asian Studies today, and where is it going? Join us for an open dialogue among faculty members affiliated with the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs as they discuss their visions for Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Representing disciplines from across the humanities and social sciences, panelists — who are the current leaders of specific programs within the Asian Institute — will reflect on the ways they understand the legacies of area studies in their own research, how they read contemporary re-articulations of state and non-state power, and what they anticipate to be key issues in the present and future of Asian Studies. They will also put this discussion into the context of their programming agendas at the Asian Institute.

Introductory Remarks: Ritu Birla, Former Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute; Associate Professor, Department of History

Reception to follow, please register.

Description

A focus on the autonomous individual as the primary unit of concern has characterized both philosophy and social and life science. Feminists, on the other hand, have rejected the traditional focus on the autonomous individual as an expression of the neglect of gender in understanding all forms of social life. This lecture explores ways of moving beyond the binaries of independence/dependence and autonomous/ heteronomous to an analytic stance that recognizes both individuals and the social and physical relations in which they find themselves.

Professor Helen Longino is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The author of several books, including Studying Human Behavior, she is particularly interested in the relations between scientific inquiry and its social, cultural, and economic contexts and is known for her arguments in defense of a social account of objectivity, a position she called critical contextual empiricism.

The purpose of the Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture is to facilitate the encounter and advance the dialogue between science and the non-rational in the modern world as understood by, but not limited to, intuition, the spiritual dimension in life, poetry, art, literature, music, symbols, belief and faith.

Description

The word “culture” in English today gestures toward two distinct ideas: one of a universal hierarchy of values, embodied in canons of art and literature; and the other of a plurality of systems of value associated with different societies. In what was called the “culture life,” cosmopolitan intellectuals in Japan between the two world wars conceived a third sort of culture in an attempt to bridge Eurocentric hierarchy and local particularism. The idea also gained currency in colonial Korea. Although the “culture life” in Japan collapsed in the 1930s under the weight of its own idealism, it had a long life in Korea and saw a revival in Japan after the war. The unresolved dialectic between universal Culture and particular cultures was later absorbed into heritage protection policy under UNESCO, where Japan played an important role as one of the most powerful non-European participants. This lecture will show how a hybrid conception of culture was enabled by Japan’s position among the imperial powers, and how the fall of the Japanese empire and the dismantling of European colonial empires redefined what could be imagined under the rubric of culture.

Jordan Sand is Professor of Japanese History and Culture at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He holds a masters degree in architecture history from the University of Tokyo and a doctorate in history from Columbia University. His research focuses on material culture and the history of everyday life. He is the author of House and Home in Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2004), Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (University of California Press, 2013) and 帝国日本の生活空間 (Living Spaces of Imperial Japan; Iwanami shoten, 2015). He has also published on historical memory, museums and cultural heritage policy, and the history of food. He has served as visiting professor at Sophia University, the University of Tokyo, University of Michigan, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He is presently a visiting researcher at Waseda University working on a study of the history of slums in Tokyo and other Asian cities.

Description

Lyuba Yakimchuk, a Ukrainian poet, screenwriter and journalist, was born in Eastern Ukraine, in Pervomaisk, Luhansk oblast. She is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Like FASHION and Apricots of Donbas.

Lyuba will be reading works from her most recent collection and discussing her poems as a reflection of the ongoing trauma resulting from the war in Eastern Ukraine. (In Ukrainian with simultaneous English translation.)

Description

In the summer of 1953, the United Daily News (聯合報) in Taiwan announced the sex change surgery of the “first” Chinese transsexual, Xie Jianshun (謝尖順). Xie’s story soon triggered an avalanche of media sensationalism in postwar Taiwan. Enthusiasts labeled her “the Chinese Christine,” an allusion to the American transsexual celebrity of the time, Christine Jorgensen, who had travelled to Denmark for her sex reassignment surgery and as a consequence attracted worldwide attention. Within a week, the characterization of Xie in the Taiwanese press changed from an average citizen whose ambiguous sex provoked uncertainty and anxiety throughout the nation, to a transsexual icon whose fate indisputably contributed to the global staging of Taiwan on a par with the United States. Centering on the making of Xie’s celebrity, this presentation argues that the publicity surrounding her transition worked as a pivotal fulcrum in shifting common understandings of transsexuality, the role of medical science, and their evolving relation to the popular press in mid-twentieth century Sinophone culture.

Speaker Bio:
Howard Chiang is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo. He is the editor of Transgender China (2012), Queer Sinophone Cultures (2013, with Ari Larissa Heinrich), Psychiatry and Chinese History (2014), Historical Epistemology and the Making of Modern Chinese Medicine (2015), and Perverse Taiwan (2016, with Yin Wang). He is currently completing a monograph on the history of sex change and sexological science in modern China and editing a 3-volume encyclopedia of global lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history.

Description

The Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture began in 1998 at the initiative of the Famine-Genocide Commemorative Committee of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto Branch. Past lecturers have included James Mace, Norman Naimark, Alexander Motyl, Anne Applebaum, and Tymothy Snyder.

Description

Speakers:

Dr. Tünde Juhász – Administrative Government Commissioner for Csongrad County (Hungary)

Commander Massimo Tozzi – Italy’s operation Mare Nostrum, Frontex’s Operation Triton (Italy)

Mario J. Calla – Executive Director, COSTI Immigrant Services (Canada)

Moderator:
Craig Damian Smith – PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, UofT

Please click here to register for this event.

Description

This event is available via webcast and can be viewed at the following link:

Join Jameel Jaffer, Munk School Distinguished Fellow and Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in conversation on the United States drone program, targeted assassinations, and government secrecy.

The discussion will touch on Jaffer’s new book on the “drone memos” – US government documents setting out the scope of the drone program and its justifications obtained from the Freedom of Information Act – and draw on his experience as one of America’s foremost litigators and advocates on national security and civil liberties.

November 15, 2016
12:00-12:30 p.m. light lunch
12:30-2:00 p.m. lecture & discussion

Description

Mr. Herman will give a short talk followed by a question and answer period. A reception will follow (cash bar).

BIOGRAPHY OF Daniel Herman
Daniel Herman has been Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic since 2014. Born at České Budějovice he started studies at the Teachers’ College but left after the first year. For three seasons he worked as a tourist guide at Hluboká nad Vltavou Chateau and after the intervention from the State Security Police, StB, as a helper in South Bohemian Bakeries. In 1984 he started studies at the Theological Faculty at Litoměřice and in summer 1989 he was ordained as a priest. In spring 1990, after less than a year of church service, he became a secretary to Msg. Miloslav Vlk, the Cardinal.
From 1996 to 2005, when he returned from an internship in Germany and the US, he acted as the spokesmen for the Czech Bishops’ Conference. From 2005 to 2007 he worked at the Help Line for people in critical situations operated by the Czech Police Headquarters. In 2007 he asked the Pope to be relieved from his commitment to the Church and received papal consent to leave the priesthood. He subsequently worked for the Ministry of Interior, then as Head of the Information Office at the Ministry of Culture, and subsequently managed the office of Prof. Jan Švejnar, a prominent economist. In 2010 he was elected from ten candidates for the post of the Director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, a position he left in spring 2013. He then joined the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL) where he acted as the spokesman of the Party and its Senate Club. In the 2013 October Parliamentary election he was the leading candidate of the Party in Prague and he was elected a Member of Parliament. . On 29th January, 2014 he was appointed the Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic. Mr. Herman speaks English, German and Italian, in addition to Czech as his native language.

Description

Spain has enjoyed an intense process of social modernization and development in the last three decades, following its transition to democracy and its accession to the European Union. However, the 2008 financial crisis had a strong economic, social and political impact which has profoundly altered one of the most stable party systems in Europe. The new scenario includes the arrival of new liberal and populist parties that put an end to the monopoly of power by the conservative party and the socialdemocrats, the need for coalition governments in the absence of a consensual tradition, increasing political polarization, illiberal political demands, widespread political corruption, secessionist threats, and a generalized disaffection towards the political system. The incapacity to form a government might send voters to a third parliamentary election in less than a year, while the serious problems the country is facing cannot be addressed and the European Union’s economic sanctions loom in the background. Is the Spanish social and political system imploding, or we are witnessing a fundamental change in the rules of the game?

Speakers:

Jon Allen, speaker, Former Ambassador of Canada to Spain

Pablo Ruiz-Jarabo, speaker, General Consul of Spain in Toronto

Mark Manger, speaker, Associate Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs

Francisco Beltran, speaker, Lecturer, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

Randall Hansen, moderator, Professor, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

Description

Type 2 diabetes is a major health issue in Canada, with a prevalence that continues to grow despite billions invested towards treatment and prevention. About 90% of new cases are due to a small number of lifestyle factors including poor diet and inadequate physical activity. While clinical interventions have shown a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes, little emphasis has been placed on lifestyle change including diet at the population level.

Given the growing burden of type 2 diabetes, there is an urgent need to explain the poorly understood mechanisms through which specific dietary patterns promote disease progression at the population level. Thus, my plan of study is to identify the extent to which various mediating pathways explain the association between dietary patterns and type 2 diabetes risk.

Importantly, gender and SES differences in this relationship are understudied, and corresponding prevention strategies may be ineffective by not accounting for these differential effects. Accordingly, a central focus of my project involves a systematic comparison between gender and SES groups as modifiers of the association between dietary patterns and type 2 diabetes risk.

This project will examine previously neglected comparisons between men and women as well as investigate the role of public policy as it relates to fundamental SES constructs including food security and affordable access to healthy foods which are key components of this emerging research area.

Christopher Tait is a third year PhD candidate in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He received a BSc in Human Biology, Health and Society from Cornell University and an MPH in Epidemiology from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He is broadly interested in chronic disease epidemiology and more specifically on factors that underpin sociodemographic and racial disparities in chronic disease risk factors and related outcomes. He has also spent time abroad in Sub-Saharan Africa studying regional differences in chronic diseases in vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries. His dissertation will explore social and biological mechanisms by which diet influences type 2 diabetes risk in the Canadian population.

Description

This roundtable discussion will feature speakers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Uganda who work with survivors of conflict-related violence. They are all collaborators on the SSHRC-funded project “Conjugal Slavery in War: Partnerships for the study of enslavement, marriage, and masculinities” directed by Dr. Annie Bunting. The Partnership team is made up of historians of slavery, interdisciplinary scholars, international lawyers, frontline service providers and graduate students, and has been working together since 2010. These activist researchers have documented cases of forced marriage in each country’s war through more than 250 interviews and have spoken with survivors about their ongoing needs for reparations. They will discuss the findings of their research with survivors of wartime abduction; how they are using this work in their advocacy efforts for redress; and new work on masculinities and forced marriage, and with children born in conflict situations. The CSiW Partnership will also launch their country reports on conjugal slavery in conflict situations.

Description

Toronto and other Ontario municipalities face considerable challenges to make the capital investments they need to keep up with aging infrastructure and to meet the growing demand for public services. Their traditional fiscal model, dependent on federal and provincial transfers, the revenue from property taxes, and other own-source revenues, is barely sufficient to fund operational costs. Given this reality, which new financial instruments and strategies could municipalities rely on to take advantage of today’s low interest rates? What can we learn from municipal lending markets elsewhere? IMFG Post-Doctoral Fellow Gustavo Carvalho will analyze financial instruments and strategies that have been successfully implemented elsewhere, with a focus on green bonds, credit enhancements, and pooled issuance entities.

Description

In this roundtable discussion, the Ambassador of Kazakhstan to Canada, as well as Canada’s former Ambassador to Kazakhstan, reflect on the twenty-five years that have elapsed since Kazakhstan became an independent state.

Description

Numbers came to define Chinese politics, until they did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Following Mao’s death and the Cultural Revolution’s ideological apotheosis, the Chinese Communist Party-led regime transformed an ideological organization into a pragmatic growth-promoting machine by limiting its vision of localities to just a few numbers, producing excellent performance on these measures and negative externalities elsewhere. This limited vision—GDP, fiscal revenue, investment—did not see important problems coming to plague Chinese society: most notably, pollution, corruption, and debt. The numbers failed to measure up in two ways. With increasing regularity, cases of officials juking the stats came to light, undermining internal and external faith in the reality of Chinese economic growth, but perhaps even more worryingly, the numbers were moving in the wrong direction—growth was slowing. China’s recent efforts on anti-corruption, centralization, and official calls for governing according to moral and national traditions are again reshaping the country’s politics and economy. As the costs of technocratic rule mounted, the center altered course, increasing monitoring of locals and promoting official morality among the officers of the party-state.

Jeremy Wallace is an associate professor of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on Chinese and authoritarian politics. His first book, Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China, examines the ways that China has managed its growing cities to maintain order. His current book project, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarian Rule in China, explores how and why authoritarian regimes rule as they do. The book argues that numbers defined Chinese politics, until they failed to count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. He continues to work on the environmental, political, economic, and social issues of urbanization through Cornell’s Institute for Social Sciences project, China’s Cities: Divisions and Plans. His research website is http://www.jeremywallace.org.

Description

We still do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for in the Second World War. Despite decades of intense research on Nazi Germany, till now historians have not placed Germans’ views of the war centre stage. In his recent book, The German War, Oxford historian Nicholas Stargardt argues that the war became the principal focus of society’s hopes and fears. The war was only popular in the brief periods when victory appeared imminent and yet its basic legitimacy was called far less into question than that of the Nazi regime. In this lecture, he will address a number of questions: How did Germans see the outbreak of the war through the prism of the First? How did the changing course of the conflict—the victories of the Blitzkrieg, the first defeats in the east, the bombing of German cities—change their views and expectations? When did Germans first realize that they were fighting a genocidal war and how did they this knowledge alter their view of their own war effort? How did private life— the relationships which led people to write love letters between home and the front—sustain the German war effort? What difference does it make to draw on personal sources such as diaries and family letters, to how we write the social history of this period?

Nicholas Stargardt is Professor of Modern European history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of many articles and three books. The first, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866-1914 (1994), dealt with the hopes for a peaceful, democratic and demilitarised Europe, which were destroyed when the First World War broke out in 1914. For the next twenty years, he has tried to understand the experience of those who lived in Germany and under German occupation during the Second World War. This has resulted in two major books. Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (2005) was the first work to show how children experienced the Second World War under the Nazis, exploring the widely divergent experiences of German and Jewish, Polish and Czech, Sinti and the disabled children. The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-45 (2015) answers the key question without which we cannot understand how Germans were able to continue the war till the bitter end: What did they think they were fighting for? Drawing on family letters and diaries, he explores how ordinary people experienced and understood the war, including the moral choices and possible futures they imagined they had at the time.

Description

Language in Motion seeks to explore problems of translation, multilingualism and cultural identity, issues that are at the heart of critical theory, literary studies and comparative literature. It takes an expansive view of premodern literary cultures, with papers ranging from medieval Latin Europe, medieval Arabic and Hebrew writing on language, twelfth-century Japan, early modern South Asian Persian-Urdu interface, and medieval Romance vernacularity.

See the Language in Motion website for the full workshop schedule.

Sponsors: the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies; the Centre for South Asian Studies and the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs; the Conference on Editorial Problems, St. Michael’s College; the Department of French; the Centre for Medieval Studies; the Northrop Frye Centre; the Centre for Comparative Literature; the Institute of Islamic Studies, University of Toronto; the Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World; the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations; the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies; and the Department of East Asian Studies.

Description

The unprecedented social, demographic and political changes in East Asia since the 1990s have had profound impacts on families, economies, and social policies in the region. This panel brings together East Asian experts to discuss impacts of the changes, policy responses, and future research agenda, focusing on Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The panel is designed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue on social, economic and policy issues in East Asia. We welcome all who have an interest to attend.

Speaker bios:

Yoonkyung Lee is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Toronto, St. George. She is a political sociologist studying labor politics, social movements, and political representation. She is the author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press 2011) and numerous journal articles on labor, class, social movements, and inequality in East Asia.

Ito Peng is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy at the Department of Sociology, and the School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Toronto. She is also the Director of the Centre for Global Social Policy at the University of Toronto. She teaches political sociology and comparative social policy, specializing in family, gender, demographic issues, and migration, and she has written extensively on family, gender and social policies in East Asia. She is currently leading a large SSHRC funded international partnership research project entitled Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care that brings together over 50 researchers and non-academic partners to examine how the reorganization of care influences the global migration of care workers, and how this migration in turn impacts family and gender relations, gender equality, government policies, and global governance.

Wei-hsin Yu is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research generally focuses on how macrolevel forces affect individuals, paying special attention to their labor market trajectories, economic outcomes, family behaviors and psychological health. She is currently pursuing projects examining relationship formation, marriage and demographic changes in Japan and Taiwan.

Description

A memorial to the six million murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in Paris in 1956. It is now known as the Mémorial de la Shoah, but then it was called the Tombeau du Martyr juif inconnu. This memorial was one of the first of its kind, and its construction was completed in the mid-1950s, when, according to received wisdom, a general silence about the fate of European Jewry in the Second World War was said to prevail. How and why was the memorial constructed; how is it to be interpreted; and why was the memorial built in France?

Philip Nord is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1981. He is the author of several books on the history of modern France, including: The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (1995), Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (2000); France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (2010); and France 1940: Defending the Republic (2015).

Description

The panel examines the life and work of the distinguished Israeli historian, Gilad Margalit (1959-2014). Margalit pioneered the study of Jews and Turks, Sinti and Roma in twentieth-century German history as a story of entanglement, conflicts, and elective affinities. His work was a history of difference and diversity in a century in which fantasies of national and racial purity triumphed. Beyond that, his work explored how Germans and other Europeans came to terms with such traumatic memories of violence and suffering as the developed forms of redemptive commemoration that contemporaries labelled Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The panel will reflect on the major themes and the on-going reception, the contemporary relevance and the lasting legacy of Gilad Margalit’s work.

Organized by Randall Hansen and Till van Rahden in collaboration with Joint Initiative in German and European Studies at the University of Toronto and the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes, the Canada Research Chair in German and European Studies, and IRTG Diversity at the Université de Montréal.

Description

Even in modern-day Taipei, women feel the societal pressure to get married and have children before the clock runs out. Thankfully, there is a solution: freeze your eggs and prolong your fertility until the right one comes along! A comical tale on freezing time for the sake of prolonging the pursuit of love, this Taiwanese comedy showcases the “smallest” actors on the big screen: frozen spermatozoa and eggs.

Evoking both smiles and tears from audience members, My Egg Boy is also a subtle social commentary. The protagonist’s experience provides a glimpse of what millions of working women struggle with: finding the balance between pursuing a career and marriage.

No one could have better portrayed the quintessential Taiwanese modern woman than Ariel Lin, a homegrown talent who earned Golden Bell Best Lead Actress awards for her impressive performance in popular Taiwanese TV series, including In Time With You (2011). Featuring Lin alongside the helplessly charismatic star Rhydian Vaughan, My Egg Boy is one of the most anticipated films from Taiwan this year.

Director’s Bio:

Fu Tien-Yu 傅天余 obtained an MA in Media Ecology & Film from NYU. Her directorial feature debut, Somewhere I Have Never Travelled (2009), was invited to Hong Kong, Taipei, Karlovy Vary, San Francisco, and Okinawa film festivals. She has written scripts for Taiwanese directors and made several television films, documentaries and music videos.

Taiwan | 2016 | Rated 14A | 112:00 | Mandarin with English subtitles | North American Premiere Marquee
To purchase tickets: Click the link below

Description

In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the1990s to bring justice to the victims of Japanese military and colonial violence have generated what she calls a “transborder redress culture.” A product of failed post-World War II transitional justice that left many colonial legacies intact, this culture both contests and reiterates the complex transwar and transpacific entanglements that have sustained the Cold War unredressability and illegibility of certain violences. By linking justice to the effects of American geopolitical hegemony, and by deploying a conjunctive cultural critique— of “comfort women” redress efforts, state-sponsored apologies and amnesties, Asian American involvement in redress cases, the ongoing effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese atrocities in China, and battles over WWII memories—Yoneyama helps illuminate how redress culture across Asia and the Pacific has the potential to bring powerful new and challenging perspectives on American exceptionalism, militarized security, justice, sovereignty, forgiveness, and decolonization.

Yoneyama is Professor of Women and Gender Studies Institute and Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto. She is the author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (University of California Press, 1999), Violence, War, Redress: Politics of Multiculturalism (published in Japanese, Iwanami Shoten, 2003), and a co-edited volume, Perilous Memories: Asia-Pacific War(s) (Duke University Press, 2001).

Books will be available for sale. Event runs 3 PM – 5 PM, reception follows.

Description

The three "seismic" shifts in the global economy are identified as follows:  (1) There is a persistent dampening fallout from the property bubbles, busts, and the ensuing financial crises, (2) Information communication technology becomes ubiquitous and unfortunately employment-unfriendly, and (3) Many economies have shifted or are close to shift from the demographic bonus phase of young and growing population to the demographic onus phase of aging population.   Japan has been a spearhead of these changes and many economies seem to follow suit. These seismic shifts carry both short- and long-run effects, with strong policy implications. In the short run, they have generally weakened aggregate demand, and rendered it less responsive to traditional macroeconomic stimulus. In the long run, many economies are losing flexibility, such that their capacity to adjust is declining. Finally, and most importantly, the novelty of these conditions has heightened uncertainty. This heightened uncertainty poses a serious challenge to policy makers.  

Speaker Bio:  Kiyohiko G. Nishimura is Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo and National Graduate Institute for Public Policy.  He was Deputy Governor of the Bank of Japan for five years until March 19, 2013, one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the world economy and central banking. He was awarded Emperor’s Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon in 2015, for his outstanding contribution to theoretical economics. Professor Nishimura received his PhD from Yale University in 1982.

Description

This talk offers a relational analysis of distinct yet linked forms of U.S. colonial domination in Asia and the Pacific rather than a focus on one form that tends to elide the other. It demonstrates how the nexus of U.S. militarism, imperialism, and settler colonialism – a conjunction theorized as settler modernity – is largely structured through temporal and spatial exceptions. The temporal exception takes the form of debt imperialism, a process through which the U.S. is able to roll over its significant national debt indefinitely and not conform to the homogenous time of repayment. The spatial exception, a locus in which forms of sovereignty at once proliferate and negate one another, is constituted through sites such as POW camps, refugee camps, military bases and camptowns, and unincorporated as well as incorporated territories. The talk focuses on the Korean War POW camp in particular through an analysis of Ha Jin’s novel War Trash.

Jodi Kim is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and positions: asia critique.

Description

How did Brexit happen? What made young Americans feel the Bern? Why is Trump’s message resonating with so many?

Each of these seemingly unrelated phenomena were driven in part by groups who felt excluded from traditional governance structures.

In the information age citizens, customers and other stakeholders have access to more information (and misinformation) than ever before. This explosion of information and perspectives creates an expectation amongst many that they should have a voice in solving the complex problems of the day. This expectation of inclusion and participation is reinforced by the ease with which the like-minded can leverage social media to self-organize and by the proliferation of groups and organizations demanding a voice in governance.

How can political and corporate leaders leverage this new reality to the benefit of citizens, companies and communities?

Catalytic Governance offers a proven process to managing this challenge. Built on the insight that effective leadership and governance depends less on traditional top-down approaches and more on creating shared meanings and frameworks.

In their book Catalytic Governance: Leading Change in the Information Age, Patricia Meredith, Steven A. Rosell and Ged R. Davis map out a dialogue-based alternative to the old style of consultation.

Drawing on their experiences managing transformational change in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment on issues ranging from finance to climate change, health, and the digital revolution, Meredith, Rosell, and Davis demonstrate how to use dialogue to engage stakeholders, explore alternative perspectives, develop shared mental maps and a vision of the future, and co-create strategies and initiatives to realize that future.

The catalytic governance process is a powerful tool for leaders in the public and private sectors looking to lead and govern more effectively.

Description

Toronto is known for having been a prosperous and successful city in the decades after the Second World War, a period that has come to be seen as something of a Golden Age for the city. This fall, as City Council debates the future of Toronto’s long term financial direction, what lessons can we learn from the past? On November 23, historian Richard White will present findings from his upcoming IMFG study on municipal finances in the Golden Age, with observations about the history of Toronto’s revenues and expenditures, public debt, regional governance, intergovernmental finances, and more.

Description

Immediately upon winning the American election, President-elect Trump reiterated intention to aggressively ban all Muslims entering the United States, and has even suggested registering all Muslims in the country. The election has also sparked a wave of xenophobic violence in American society against minorities of all kinds, including Muslims, who have been the target of attacks by white supremacist groups. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda and Daesh have celebrated the new Trump presidency, declaring it a victory in their ideological battle.

As this state-led targeting of Muslims and other minority groups becomes a reality, human rights defenders are mobilizing to defend constitutional protections for these vulnerable populations. But what does this new era of Islamophobia mean for the future of democracy and human rights? What are the real concerns of Muslims living in the United States? What can defenders of human rights actually do? And how susceptible is Canada to the spread of these ideas?

To answer these pressing questions, the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative at the Munk School is pleased to host a panel discussion with leading scholars at the University of Toronto and from the legal community working on these critical issues.

Mohammad Fadel is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, at the University of Toronto. He specializes in Islamic law, International human rights law, and the compatibility of Islam and liberal democracy.

Naseem Mithoowani is a prominent Canadian lawyer, who served as co-counsel for Zunera Ishaq, a Muslim woman who challenged the legality of a policy requiring her to remove her facial covering at a citizenship oath ceremony. Naseem has lectured at the University of Toronto regarding the human rights of women and minorities, and helped develop a specialized seminar empowering Muslim women to identify, and report hate crimes.

Chris Cochrane is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. He works on anti-immigration sentiment and left and right wing political parties in Canada and other democracies, with a special focus on xenophobic and ethno-nationalist trends North America and Europe.

Shafique Virani is Distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies and founding Director of the Centre for South Asian Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He recently delivered a TEDx Talk on Islamophobia entitled “The Clash of Ignorance” His research focuses on Islamic history, philosophy, Sufism, Shi‘ism, Bhakti and Islamic literatures in Arabic, Persian and South Asian languages

Aisha Ahmad is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. She specializes in International Security, with expertise in the rise of militant jihadist groups in civil wars, as well as how these groups actively stoke Islamophobia to undermine and de-legitimize democracy.

This event will also be available via live webcast and can be viewed at the following link on November 25 starting at 5:30 PM EST:
https://hosting2.desire2learncapture.com/MUNK/1/live/391.aspx
No registration required for the webcast.

Description

As biology is becoming increasingly understood as a technology, as something that can be made and re-made, and technology is becoming more ‘biologized,’ what new meanings of ‘natural’ emerge? What does it mean to create a life ‘naturally’ in the context of an intensely materialist, capitalist, and (bio)technological society? How might alternative fertility treatments such as acupuncture, be (re)conceptualized in the context of a dominant framework of Western biomedicine that relies on the normalization of technological advancements like assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs)? Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area from July-August 2016, this talk will explore the ways in which biomedical knowledge surrounding reproduction is translated, mediated, and contested in the context of alternative fertility clinics. Nahal will pay close attention to the logics of healing and care that are mobilized by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) healthcare practitioners and patients, as they attempt to negotiate between two systems of knowledge – Western biomedicine and TCM – to diagnose and treat infertility.

Navreet Nahal is a Ph.D. student in Medical/Socio-cultural Anthropology, working under the supervision of Dr. Sandra Bamford. Her doctoral research examines the ways in which men and women diagnosed with infertility incorporate various forms of Traditional Chinese Medicine into their treatments (e.g. acupuncture, herbs), rather than solely relying on Western biomedical practices such as assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). While it is clear that many individuals experiencing infertility rely on treatments outside of the normative framework of Western biomedicine, in both academic and public discourse, little is known regarding people’s perceptions, attitudes, and motivations for opting for alternative treatments. Her research site is the San Francisco Bay Area, an area well known for its high concentration of alternative fertility clinics, as well as an enthusiasm to engage with alternative medicine.

Description

For months, the news has been bleak: Brexit, populism, terrorism and, an America divided. The war in Syria has continued to rage and the number of refugees and other migrants — world-wide — has continued to mount. Then, there’s economic inequality and a host of other big concerns. Now, it’s tempting to think that everything is falling apart. But is that really true? IDEAS CBC RADIO ONE in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto reflects upon the state of the world, along with a razor sharp panel.

Join Michael Blake, Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy, and Governance at the University of Washington; Randall Hansen Director of the Centre of European, Russian & Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Professor of Political Science; Janice Stein, the Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and an internationally renowned expert on international conflict and global governance; and moderator Stephen Toope, Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, as they take the global view in a time of disruption and change.

EVENT HOST: Greg Kelly. Executive Producer IDEAS, CBC RADIO ONE

PANELISTS

Professor Michael Blake
Michael Blake is a Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy, and Governance at the University of Washington. Until 2016, he was the Director of the UW’s Program on Values in Society. He received his bachelor degree in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Toronto, and a PhD from Stanford University. He obtained some legal training at Yale Law School, before running away to become a philosopher. He is jointly appointed to the Department of Philosophy and to the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs.

Professor Randell Hansen
Randall Hansen is Director of the Centre of European, Russian & Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Professor of Political Science. He has a doctorate from Oxford, and taught at the Universities of London and Oxford before taking up a Chair at the University of Toronto. The author of 4 books,
4 edited books, and dozens of articles, he works on immigration and refugees, eugenics and population policy, and the effect of war on civilian populations.

Professor Janice Gross Stein
Professor Janice Gross Stein, the Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, is an internationally renowned expert on international conflict and global governance. Her analysis is regularly featured across Canadian media covering breaking developments around the globe, from military action in Eastern Europe to escalating conflict in the Middle East. Professor Stein’s expertise is sought after by governments and foreign affairs specialists seeking council on negotiation, international security, and public education. As an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Professor Stein has been recognized for her outstanding contribution to public debate. She is member of the Order of Canada, the Order of Ontario, and holds Honorary Doctorate of Laws from four universities.

MODERATOR

Stephen Toope
Professor Stephen J. Toope is Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs. Before joining the Munk School in January 2015, Professor Toope was President of the University of British Columbia from 2006 to 2014. He represented Western Europe and North America on the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances from 2002-2007. He continues to conduct research on many aspects of international law and is currently working on issues of continuity and change in international law, and the origins of international obligation in international society. Before joining UBC, Toope was President of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, and Dean of Law at McGill. A Canadian citizen, Professor Toope earned his PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge, his degrees in common law (LLB) and civil law (BCL) with honours from McGill University, and graduated magna cum laude with his AB in History and Literature from Harvard University.

EVENT HOST

Greg Kelly
Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer of the CBC Radio One program IDEAS. After completing his doctorate in literature at Oxford University, Greg Kelly left the academy to begin working at the CBC Radio — in fact, his first foray into broadcasting was at IDEAS. His work in both radio and television has won international awards. In 2006, Greg left the CBC to create and oversee a daily NPR current affairs program, The Story, which was carried by over 100 affiliates. He then went to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, where he became Editor of the internationally-acclaimed program The State We’re In, which won numerous awards and was carried nationally in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland as well as select markets in India and Africa. He returned to Canada in the autumn of 2013, and is now an Associate Senior Fellow of Massey College.

Description

Despite four major mine waste spills across Canada in just over a decade, there is little indication from public or private sectors that meaningful steps are being taken to mitigate the risk of future spills. Employing a critical lens that seeks a clearer understanding of ongoing systems of colonialism, my doctoral research examines recent spills in the Central Interior of British Columbia to better understand how for-profit mineral resource extraction is interwoven with concerns for health, human rights, environmental justice, and cultural preservation.

Neil Nunn is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning. His work engages political ecology, anti-colonial, posthuman, and affective thought to gain insight into the relationships between industrial waste and ongoing systems of colonialism. Neil has worked in non-profit and public sectors, and has spent over a decade and a half in the reforestation sector, which informs his current research. Outside his professional and academic life, Neil is a dad and enjoys surfing whenever time and proximity to the ocean permits.

Description

Cocoa is the main source of income for millions of farmers in certain rural areas in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, the two West African Countries that account for 58% of the World’s Cocoa production. Cocoa is a labor intensive crop that is produced on small farms averaging 2-3 hectares per farmer. Child trafficking, hazardous child labour as well as extreme poverty of farmers are some realities present at the root of the cocoa supply chain. With the chocolate industry far removed from these realities, it is difficult for chocolate consumers to imagine the existence of these bitter roots. Join James Madhier to learn more about the disconnect between the cocoa industry and the chocolate industry and what the future looks like for chocolate industry.

James Madhier is a 3rd year student at the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs. James went to Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire after winning the Global Challenge on Leadership and Sustainability organized by Nudge Global Impact in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Three winners of this challenge were sponsored by Tony’s Chocolonely, a social impact chocolate company based in Netherlands, to go on a mission of investigating Child Labour on cocoa farms in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. His work is sponsored in part by the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice.

Description

This presentation challenges the dominant approach to examining flooding through a case study of the 2011 Bangkok, Thailand floods, the fourth‐costliest disaster ever globally and which led to over 800 deaths. The alternative approach developed here views floods not only as outcomes of biophysical processes but also as products of political decisions, economic interests, and power relations. This approach illustrates how vulnerability to floods in Bangkok, which is a combination of exposure to floods and capacity to cope with them, and the extent to which floods are a disaster, are uneven at multiple scales across geographical and social landscapes. While the Chao Phraya River Basin received heavy rainfall in 2011, a number of human activities interacted with that rainfall to create the floods. This talk discusses how state actors together with unequal socioeconomic processes caused vulnerability to be unevenly distributed before, during, and after the event.

The event is presented as part of the Urban Climate Resilience Partnership in Southeast Asia (UCRSEA) at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Lunch will be provided.

Description

Please join us for a talk and book launch of Prof. Lee’s new publication, Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Dr. Dre. Snoop Dogg. Ice Cube. Some of the biggest stars in hip hop made their careers in Los Angeles. Today, there is a new generation of young, mostly black, men busting out rhymes and hoping to one day find themselves “blowin’ up”—getting signed to a record label and becoming famous. Many of these aspiring rappers get their start in Leimart Park, home to the legendary hip hop open-mic workshop Project Blowed. In Blowin’ Up, Jooyoung Lee takes us deep inside Project Blowed and the surrounding music industry, offering an unparalleled look at hip hop in the making. While most books on rap are written from the perspective of listeners and the market, Blowin’ Up looks specifically at the creative side of rappers. As Lee shows, learning how to rap involves a great deal of discipline, and it takes practice to acquire the necessary skills to put on a good show. Along For the men at Project Blowed, hip hop offers a creative alternative to the gang lifestyle, substituting verbal competition for physical violence, and provides an outlet for setting goals and working toward them. Engagingly descriptive and chock-full of entertaining personalities and real-life vignettes, Blowin’ Up not only delivers a behind-the-scenes view of the underground world of hip hop, but also makes a strong case for supporting the creative aspirations of young, urban, black men, who are often growing up in the shadow of gang violence and dead-end jobs.

Jooyoung Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He is also a Senior Fellow in the Yale University Urban Ethnography Project, and was formerly a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently the Centre for the Study of the United States’ 2016-17 Bissell-Heyd Research Associate.

There will be a reception following the talk to welcome the 2016-17 CSUS Bissell-Heyd Lecturer Alexandra Rahr, and our two CSUS Bissell-Heyd Research Associates, Profs. Sara Hughes and Jooyoung Lee. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Registration is Required for this event.

Description

Kafka’s stories allude to his culture with a fullness that is astonishing when one considers their economy of form. This work of allusion, a sort of movement through the cultural vehicles or media of his time, conforms to several logics. One such logic—the logic of risk insurance–comes from Kafka’s daytime preoccupation with accident insurance. Between 1908 and 1922, Kafka, a Doctor of Laws, rose to a high-ranking position at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Royal Imperial Kingdom of Austria-Hungary in Prague. Though ensconced in a semi-opaque bureaucracy, Kafka struggled to enforce compulsory universal accident insurance in the areas of construction, toy and textile manufacture, farms, and automobiles. Images from his work world, such as mutilation by machine, the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk, and the disappearance of the personal accident, penetrate such stories as “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial, and “In the Penal Colony.” This illustrated talk will discuss Kafka’s life and literature, emphasizing Kafka’s work world and his forms of thinking about risk.

Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. In 2009, with Benno Wagner and Jack Greenberg, he edited, with commentary, Franz Kafka: the Office Writings. In 2010, he published, with Benno Wagner, Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine and edited, with Ruth V. Gross, a collection of essays titled Kafka for the Twenty-first Century. Since then he has edited, with his translation, a Modern Library edition of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, translated Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther, and completed an intellectual biography of the philosopher Walter Kaufmann. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Description

This paper traces the rise of environmental consciousness and movements in Korea after 1945. In particular, it locates the origins of environmentalism in rural Korea with agricultural farming communities and cooperatives, such as Hansalim, leading the way. In laying out their philosophies and practices, this paper shows how these agricultural-based movements embodied and materialized a form of anarchism. It concludes with a discussion on how their forms of an environmental-based anarchism has influenced contemporary drives for creating an alternative economy for social renewal.

Albert L. Park is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. As a historian of modern Korea and East Asia, his current research interest is centered on the relationship between culture and political economy and alternative forms of modernity. He is the author of Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea and is the co-editor of Encountering Modernity: Christianity and East Asia. His next research project examines the origins of environmental movements in modern Korea and their relationship to anarchism and democracy. Dr. Park is Co-Principal Investigator of EnviroLab Asia—a Henry Luce Foundation-funded initiative at the Claremont Colleges that studies environmental issues in Asia through an interdisciplinary lens. He is the recipient of three Fulbright Fellowships and fellowships from the Korea Foundation and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. A native of Chicago, he received his B.A. with honors from Northwestern University, an M.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.

Description

Ukrainian nationalism has been a hot-button issue during Maidan protests and the conflict with Putin’s Russia. This presentation looks at how the term is interpreted, whether contemporary nationalism can be linked to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) of the Second World War, and how cultural memory is reshaping attitudes toward the 1930s and 1940s.

Myroslav Shkandrij is Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba.He is author of Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology and Literature, 1929-1956 (Yale University Press, 2015), which has been awarded the Canadian Association of Slavists Book Prize for 2016. His other books include Jews in Ukrainian Literature: Representation and Identity (Yale University Press, 2009), and Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire (McGill-Queens University Press, 2001). He has published numerous articles on literature, art of the avant-garde in the 1920s, and nationalism, and has curated three art exhibitions: Propaganda and Slogans: The Political Poster in Soviet Ukraine, 1919-1921 (New York: The Ukrainian Museum, 2013), Futurism and After: David Burliuk, 1882-1967 (Winnipeg and Hamilton Art Galleries, 2008-9), and The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, 1910-35 (Winnipeg and Hamilton Art Galleries, 2001-2). His translations include Serhiy Zhadan’s Depeche Mode (Glagoslav Publications, 2013) and Mykola Khvylovy’s Cultural Renaissance in UkraineL Polemical Pamphlets, 1925-26 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1986).

Description

In attempting to understand early modern science and medicine from Chinese natural history to Manchu translations of bodily gesture and sensation, my work has placed the history and translation of metamorphic stories at its center. For our gathering – intended more as a conversation about craft than a formal talk – I will introduce recent work in which I have been expanding my practice to integrate short fiction and prose poetry as modes of reading and analyzing historical documents. The focus of my attention will be a new project called Metamorphoses that is loosely inspired by the work of Ovid and is devoted to creating stories of material transformation through creative readings and misreadings of primary source documents that derive from (or are oriented toward) early modern China.

Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair of Early Modern Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her first book, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard, 2009) was a study of belief-making in early modern Chinese natural history through the lens of the Bencao gangmu (1596), a compendium of materia medica. Her current research explores practices and contexts of translation in the Ming and Qing periods.

Description

The roots of Hong Kong’s political crisis are deep. “One country-two systems” is in trouble. Alienated youth, identity politics, a strong absence of mutual understanding, unmet expectations on both sides, and Beijing’s fear of secessionism and foreign interference all intensify the dilemma, which the recent Legco elections have only deepened. Professor Zweig will provide an update on events in Hong Kong and discuss the road forward.

David Zweig is Chair Professor, Division of Social Science, and Director, Center on China’s Transnational Relations (www.cctr.ust.hk), The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a Senior Research Fellow, Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada; Adjunct Professor, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan; and Vice-President of the Center on China’s Globalization (Beijing). He lived in the Mainland for 4 years (1974-76, 1980-81, 1986 and 1991-92), and in Hong Kong since 1996. In 1984-85, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. His Ph.D. is from The University of Michigan (Political Science, 1983).

He is the author of four books, including Internationalizing China: domestic interests and global linkages (Cornell Univ. Press, 2002) and a new edited book, Sino-U.S. Energy Triangles: Resource Diplomacy under Hegemony, with Hao Yufan (Routledge: 2015). In 2013, he received The Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship, Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, 2013-14, and in 2015 received a grant from the RGC for a project entitled, “Coming Home: Reverse Migration of Entrepreneurs and Academics in India and Turkey in Light of the Chinese Experience.”

Recent consultancies include reports for the Central Policy Unit (Government of Hong Kong), the Guangdong Provincial Government, Goldman Sachs, Handelsbank Capital Markets, Deutsche Bank and Shenzhen University.

Description

This event is available via webcast and can be viewed at the following link on Friday December 16, 2016 at 5:00 pm EST:
https://hosting2.desire2learncapture.com/MUNK/1/live/392.aspx

In 2014, notorious Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi announced himself the “caliph” of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the sole legitimate ruler of the entire Muslim world. Baghdadi’s radical declaration created shockwaves, and threatened Al-Qaeda’s longstanding position as the leader of the global jihad. The successor to bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, immediately rejected the so-called Daesh caliphate and asked jihadists around the world to rally behind the Al-Qaeda brand. After a failed attempt at reconciliation, this standoff turned bloody. Daesh and Al-Qaeda militants turned their guns on each other in the war-ravaged battlefields of Syria.

The impact was global. Daesh quickly emerged as a powerful ideological competitor, with groups in Nigeria, Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan pledging fealty to Baghdadi. As jihadists around the world bent the knee to the so-called caliph, Daesh declared these groups “provinces” of their radical state. Al-Qaeda franchises around the world saw this expansion as a threat to their global brand, and pushed back against Daesh forcefully in a violent bid for power and authority.

Understanding this conflict between Al-Qaeda and Daesh is essential to mapping the front lines of the global jihad. What are the ideological and political differences between Al-Qaeda and Daesh? Are these groups irreconcilable, or is a future merger a possibility? What exactly are these regional provinces and franchises, and do they truly represent a global movement? Which of these groups is more competitive, and how can we expect these networks to transform in the coming years?

To address these critical questions, the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs, in collaboration with the University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus, is pleased to host a panel discussion with world-leading experts on these pressing issues.

Panelists:

Renad Mansour is an Academy Fellow at Chatham House in London and a Research Fellow at the Cambridge Security Initiative at Cambridge University. He specializes in the challenges of political transition and state building, and has done extensive fieldwork in both Iraq and Syria on the ethnic and sectarian factions involved in the fight. Having recently travelled through Iraq to track the Mosul offensive, Renad brings fresh insights from the field to the Munk School.

Barak Mendelsohn is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Haverford College, and a leading expert on Middle Eastern politics, terrorism, and international security. Barak’s forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, “The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences” explores the proliferation of Al-Qaeda regional affiliate groups around the world, and its implications of global security.

Aisha Ahmad is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, co-director of the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative and a senior researcher at the Global Justice Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs. She has conducted research in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Kenya, Lebanon, and Mali. Aisha’s forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, “Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power” examines the economic foundations of jihadists groups across the Muslim world.

Amarnath Amarasingam is a Fellow at The George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, and Co-Directs a study of Western foreign fighters based at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of “Pain, Pride, and Politics: Sri Lankan Tamil Activism in Canada” (2015). Amarnath is considered a leading authority on online foreign fighter radicalization, and has research interests are in terrorism, diaspora politics, post-war reconstruction, and the sociology of religion.

Description

This talk will look at future prospects and challenges of rebuilding the Iraqi state after coalition forces take back Mosul, the second largest city, from the so-called Islamic State. It will question whether the forthcoming military victory can be complemented with the political victory needed to prevent the salafi-jihadist group from returning (in its present or other form) in years ahead. This necessarily requires analysing inter- and intra-ethnic or sectarian problems of representation. The session will discuss whether the Iraqi leadership, Shia, Sunni, and Kurd, have done enough to address the root causes that led to the emergence of the Islamic State. With two important elections coming up in 2018 (provincial and parliamentary), the session will also look at alliance building between the different factions and the potential for the central government to resume political control in liberated areas and military control over the many paramilitaries that currently enjoy autonomy.

Description

“Mega-FTAs” dominated the global trade agenda in the first half of the second decade of the 21st Century. Even before the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency, it seemed that the era of Mega-FTAs would be short-lived—with both the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) encountering significant opposition. The Chinese and ASEAN-backed alternative to the TPP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), is the last of the Mega-FTAs standing. Until the demise of the TPP was confirmed, RCEP had received relatively little attention in the press or in the academic world. This presentation will focus on the factors shaping RCEP. In particular, through a comparison with the other Mega-FTAs, it examines how the structure of regional economic interdependence determines the content of mega trade agreements.

John Ravenhill is Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. He was previously Head of the School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He is an editor of the Review of International Political Economy.

Description

REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED FOR THIS EVENT. PLEASE REGISTER AT: http://engage.samaracanada.com/2016_us_election_event

This event will also be available via live webcast and can be viewed at the following link on January 11, 2017 at 6:00pm EST:
https://hosting2.desire2learncapture.com/MUNK/1/live/393.aspx

Samara Canada and the School of Public Policy and Governance present:

The 2016 U.S. Election: Polarization, Partisanship, and Populism

You’re invited to an evening event with two leading American experts, in conversation with Andrew Coyne, who will discuss the results of the recent U.S. election and the prospects for democracy. Here you’ll hear get answers to these pressing questions:
• What deep and long-term trends were at play in the election, including polarization of public opinion and role of identities like class, race and gender?
• What do Americans expect from the Trump presidency? What should they expect?
• What does this election tell us about deeper problems with American democracy?

Speakers:

Jocelyn Kiley, Associate Director of Research, Pew Research Center
Chris Achen, Professor at Princeton, and co-author of Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Governments.
In conversation with Andrew Coyne

This event is generously supported by the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

Speakers:

JOCELYN KILEY is associate director of research at Pew Research Center, where she primarily works on U.S. public opinion about politics. She is involved in all stages of the research process at the Center, and is a principal investigator on the Center’s work on political polarization in the American public, as well as its regular election polling. Prior to joining Pew Research Center in 2008, Kiley worked in research and evaluation for several media and governmental organizations. She has a master’s degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her graduate work primarily concerned issues of racial and ethnic political identity in the U.S., as well as the role of the media in shaping public opinion. She received her bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Harvard University. Kiley discusses the Center’s findings with the news media and regularly presents to outside audiences and at the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s annual conference.

CHRIS ACHEN’s research interest is Political Methodology, particularly in its application to empirical democratic theory, American Politics, and International Relations. He is the author Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Governments. Professor Achen was the first president of the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. He received the first career achievement award from The Political Methodology Section of The American Political Science Association in 2007. He is also the recipient of an award from the University of Michigan for lifetime achievement in training graduate students. Recent academic placements of graduate students for whom he was the principal dissertation advisor include Stanford, Duke, and the London School of Economics.

Our moderator

A columnist at the National Post, and the former National Editor ofMaclean’s, ANDREW COYNE is thoughtful, intrepid, and never afraid to speak his mind. Coyne is highly sought after by audiences looking for unvarnished insights on Canada’s increasingly interconnected political and economic future. Coyne has been an editorial writer, columnist and contributor for The Globe and Mail, The Financial Post, Saturday Night, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. Coyne is no stranger to national accolades: he is the winner of two National Newspaper Awards and the Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism. He is also a member of the “At Issue” Panel on CBC’s The National, appears on TVO’s The Agenda, and once co-hosted Face-Off on CBC. He is a Fellow of the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto, and holds a Master’s in Economics from the London School of Economics.

About the Partners

SAMARA CANADA is dedicated to reconnecting citizens to politics. Established as a charity in 2009, we have become Canada’s most trusted, non-partisan champion of increased civic engagement and a more positive public life. Samara Canada’s research and educational programming shines new light on Canada’s democratic system and encourages greater political participation across the country to build better politics, and a better Canada, for everyone.

A samara is the winged “helicopter” seed that falls from the maple tree. A symbol of Canada, it is also a reminder that from small seeds, big ideas can grow.

The SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY AND GOVERNANCE is a vibrant centre for scholarly investigation and an important hub for cross-community collaboration and creative problem solving within the broader policy community. Our School understands and responds to the need in Canada for an innovative form of education to build the professional and academic capacity necessary to address the public policy challenges of the 21st century. The School is a hub for policy discourse, bringing researchers, practitioners, and community members together in order to contribute to policy debates, development, and discussion across many areas of expertise, both nationally and internationally. It offers a rigorous two-year Master of Public Policy (MPP) program, an undergraduate major, and executive education.

Description

Lecture Abstract: Japan has been engaged in development cooperation throughout the world since the 1950s. The initial efforts of development cooperation were made to augment and reinforce the postwar settlements with the countries invaded by Japan.  Japan’s development cooperation expanded quantitatively and geographically in the 1970s and 1980s.  Some of the projects conducted in this period illustrate Japan’s approach to international development cooperation, an approach that emphasizes both human capacity development and infrastructure building.  Reviewing the history of Japan’s activities globally, I discussed challenges Japan faces in the 21st century as a civilian power.

Speaker Biography: Akihiko Tanaka is Professor of International Politics at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University Tokyo.  He served as President of Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) from April, 2012 to September, 2015.  He obtained his bachelor’s degree in International Relations at the University of Tokyo and Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has numerous books and articles on world politics and security issues in Japanese and English including The New Middle Ages: The World System in the 21st Century (Tokyo: The International House of Japan, 2002).  He received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2012 for his academic achievements.

Description

During two terrifying days and nights in early September 1941, the lives of nearly two thousand men, women, and children were taken savagely by their neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, a small rural community straddling today’s border between northwest Bosnia and Croatia. This frenzy—in which victims were butchered with farm tools, drowned in rivers, and thrown into deep vertical caves—was the culmination of a chain of local massacres that began earlier in the summer. In Violence as a Generative Force, Max Bergholz tells the story of the sudden and perplexing descent of this once peaceful multiethnic community into extreme violence. This deeply researched microhistory provides provocative insights to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence? How does such violence between neighbors affect their identities and relations?

Max Bergholz is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Balkans since 2003 on the dynamics of intercommunal violence, nationalism, and memory. His research has won support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and his articles have been published in journals such as American Historical Review. In November 2016, Cornell University Press published his first book, Violence as a Generative Force.

Copies of Prof. Bergholz’s book will be available for purchase at the event.

Description

A live, video-conference roundtable discussion among experts from the University of Toronto and Sciences Po/Paris – sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States.

The 2016 contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump may have been one of the most unusual elections in U.S. history. How else to describe the first woman nominated by a major political party running against a businessman/reality television star with no office-holding experience, for instance – or another conclusion which saw the contender who lost the popular vote winning in the Electoral College? There have already been many attempts to decipher the election results, but surveying the terrain during the week of Trump’s inauguration seems appropriate. Experts based in Paris and Toronto will also share thoughts about what can be expected from the new U.S. president.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

All countries, large or small, rich or poor, suffer waste problems to various degrees. If not properly dealt with, waste issues could impose heavy environmental burdens which not only hinder economic growth but also lead to social discomfort. A sound strategic approach for effective waste management therefore is critical to finding an economically viable and environmentally sound solution.

Recently, a zero-waste concept has emerged worldwide as a new initiative to curtail the worsening waste problem. Realization of such a concept, however, necessitates the prevention and/or making the best use of the waste via workable mechanisms. Plausible measures include: waste minimization, waste reduction, reuse, recycle and recovery, cleaner production, eco-industrial networking, sustainable consumption and production, etc. The application of these measures, on the other hand, is case and location specific, requiring a careful consideration of many inter-related technical, regulatory, economic and social factors.

This presentation will review the background and challenges of the waste problem, ways and means of planning and implementing a zero-waste society, paradigm shift from waste to resource management, innovation and partnership, and key elements of success or failure with discussion on the exemplary case of Taiwan.

Zero waste: is it a fictional or achievable goal? This is an open question that we must address, to help build a sound foundation for pursuance of sustainability.

Professor Chih C. Chao is a former Vice President of Tunghai University, Taiwan and received his PhD from the University of Montreal. Trained as a chemical and environmental engineer, Dr. Chao has a grave concern over the social and environmental impacts that are caused by un-thoughtful economic activities. Recently, he has worked extensively with natural and social scientists to search for and implement feasible approaches that will lead to establishment of sustainable low-carbon circular economic systems. Dr. Chao has over 40 years’ experience in North America, EU and Asia, covering a wide spectrum of sustainability driven issues. His most recent focal interest is in facilitating the development of value-added zero-waste systems, with a goal of maximizing material and energy use efficiency and minimizing the natural resource exploitation, towards a low-carbon society.

Description

To both critics and defenders, Canadian foreign policy under Stephen Harper was seen as representing a sharp break with what had gone before. Was this true, and why or why not? The Harper Era in Canadian Foreign Policy, edited by Adam Chapnick and Christopher J. Kukucha, brings together an outstanding roster of analysts to assess the conduct of Canadian foreign policy under Stephen Harper in a variety of its aspects. The Graham Centre is pleased to sponsor a launch of this provocative volume, at which coeditor Adam Chapnick and contributors John English, Kim Richard Nossal, and Hugh Segal will speak.
Books will be available for purchase.

Description

Joshua Sanborn is Professor and Head of the Department of History at Lafayette College (Pennsylvania, USA). He is a historian of violence, society, and politics in modern Russia. His most recent monograph is Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2014), which argues that the process of state failure, social collapse, violent transformation, and imperial disintegration experienced by Russia between 1914 and 1918 is analogous to processes of decolonization in Africa and Asia in the period after World War II. His most recent co-authored work is Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day (with co-author Annette Timm) which just came out in a revised and expanded second edition from Bloomsbury in 2016 (the first edition was published in 2007). He is also one of the charter contributing members of the Russian History Blog, which just celebrated its fifth anniversary of existence.

Description

For years, the mainstream liberal opinion, shared by many social scientists, was that nationalism is a transient phenomenon that will either disappear or become marginal in the course of general development. However, what we see everywhere, including the most developed parts of the world, is the rise of nationalism. This often causes shock and bewilderment. But what we need is to analyze what were the theoretical premises on which the expectations of the coming decline of nationalism were based, and what was wrong about them.

Ghia Nodia is professor of politics and director of the International School of Caucasus Studies in Ilia Chavchavadze State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. He is also a founder of the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development (CIPDD), an independent public policy think tank in Tbilisi, Georgia and member of the Forum’s NDRI think tank network, which he has led since August 2009 and in 1992-2008. In February–December 2008, he served as the minister for education and science of Georgia.
Prof. Nodia has published extensively on democratization; state-building, security, and conflicts in Georgia and the Caucasus; theories of nationalism; and democratic transition in the post-cold-War context. He has been involved in pro-democracy advocacy efforts in Georgia and internationally and has been a frequent participant of international congresses and conferences on related topics.

Description

Access to essential medicines is part of the right to health and a cornerstone of an equitable health system. Enshrined in the ICESCR, the right to health offers a set of standards, principles and duties to guide its realisation. Global health and development initiatives increasingly embrace a right to health approach, particularly for the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for health.

Authoritative entities such as the WHO and the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health maintain that national governments should give legal recognition in domestic law to essential medicines as part of the right to health. Legal recognition offers a framework for national policy makers and health workers to implement these rights while providing a foothold for their enforcement. In particular, universal health coverage (UHC) enshrined in domestic law can advance health rights by making essential medicines affordable and available to all.

Currently, it is unclear to what degree domestic legal rules providing for essential medicines mirror right to health principles and how such legal approaches are framed. This research maps the domestic legal terrain governing access to essential medicines in middle income countries. Through comparative legal analysis, this multidisciplinary study determines how domestic legal texts articulate the public health dimensions of access to medicines (i.e. Who are the beneficiaries? Which medicines are provided? What are the direct costs to patients?) through a human rights lens that considers provisions for non-discrimination and vulnerable groups. This research reflects on how national policy makers have made explicit use of the norms and standards in the right to health when forming pharmaceutical benefits in national UHC schemes. It will outline potential ‘best practice’ legal approaches to express rights- sensitive provisions for universal access, offering tools for prospective domestic policy learning to advance the SDG for health.

Katrina Perehudoff M.Sc. LL.M. is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen where she studies model domestic law for universal access to medicines through a human rights lens under the supervision of prof. Hans V. Hogerzeil (Faculty of Medical Sciences) and prof. Brigit Toebes (Faculty of Law). As a Research Fellow at the Global Health Law Groningen Research Centre, Katrina coordinates the Essential Laws for Medicines Access project and the Centre’s 2016 Summer School. Katrina has 5 years of experience advocating for access to medicines and their rational use at the NGOs Health Action International and The European Consumer Organization. She will join the CPHS as a Temporary Health & Human Rights Fellow in 2017.

Description

10th Annual Graduate Research Conference in Ethnic and Pluralism Studies will be held on January 26 and 27, 2017 at the Munk School of Global Affairs (Observatory Site, 315 Bloor Street West).

All sessions as well as the keynote lecture will take place in the boardroom (first floor). Open to the public.

Conference website:

Thursday January 26, 2017 (Registration starts at 8:45)
9:00-9:05am Opening remarks
9:05-10:35am Session 1 “Nationalism and Representation”
10:40am-12:00pm Session 2 “Religion and Integration”
1:00-3:00pm Keynote lecture by Senator Ratna Omidvar (see below)
3:10-4:40pm Session 3 “Temporary Workers and Precarious Labor”

Friday January 27, 2017
9:00-10:45 am Session 4 “Human Capital and Economic Integration”
10:50am-12:10pm Session 5 “Multiculturalism and Social Support”
1:00-2:00pm Session 6 “Counter-radicalization and Policy”
2:05-3:35pm Session 7 “International Crisis and Response”
3:40-5:00pm Special session “The Fire Next Door: The 1967 Detroit Uprising in the Canadian Imagination”

5:00-6:30pm Reception (Library)

Keynote speaker: The Honourable Ratna Omidvar, C.M., O. Ont. (Senator, The Senate of Canada, Distinguished Visiting Professor, Global Diversity Exchange (GDX) at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University)

Keynote Lecture Title: “Reflections on Belonging and Inclusion”

Ratna Omidvar is an internationally recognized expert on migration, diversity and inclusion. In April 2016, Prime Minister Trudeau appointed Ratna to the Senate of Canada as an independent Senator representing Ontario.

Ratna is the founding Executive Director and currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Global Diversity Exchange (GDX), Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University. GDX is a think-and-do tank on diversity, migration and inclusion that connects local experience and ideas with global networks.

Ratna is a director at the Environics Institute, and Samara. She is the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council’s Chair Emerita and was formerly the Chair of Lifeline Syria.

Ratna is co-author of Flight and Freedom: Stories of Escape to Canada (2015), an Open Book Toronto best book of 2015 and one of the Toronto Star’s top five good reads from Word on the Street.

Description

In a 1951 article series for Franc-Tireur, Jean Rouch described his fears as an ethnographic filmmaker. One must, he wrote, navigate between the detached observation of the ‘dry-eyed savant’ and the myopic immersion of a new ‘Robinson Crusoe’ bereft of his perspective-glass. If Rouch’s anxiety touched on a familiar cliché of both ethnographic fieldwork and documentary filmmaking, it would nonetheless operate idiosyncratically in Rouch’s work as a recurrent preoccupation with the possibilities of visual witnessing and the cooperation of human and camera eyes. In this talk, I explore the genealogies of Jean Rouch’s vision of témoignage, his experiments with the camera-as-witness, and the contribution of his filmmaking to a culture of visual witnessing prior to what Annette Wieviorka has called the ‘era of the witness’ in the 1960s.

Description

This talk will take place in a special session during the R.F. Harney 10th Annual Graduate Research Conference in Ethnic and Pluralism Studies (January 26-27, 2017), featuring Harney Program alumni Wendell Adjetey. The presentation aims to illuminate Canadians’ perceptions and fears of U.S. racial violence.

Speaker’s bio:
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is a doctoral candidate in the Departments of History and African American Studies at Yale University, where he holds numerous awards and prizes, including the Falk Foundation, Felix G. Evangelist, and Douglass R. Bomeisler Fellowships. He is writing a dissertation on twentieth-century black activism and freedom linkages between Canada and the United States. Wendell is a Trudeau Scholar and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Toronto.

Reception to follow in the Library.

Description

The International Relations Society is proud to announce its annual conference, this year on “Climate Change and High Politics.” This conference will focus on unpacking the multidimensional issue of climate change, bringing together some of the nation’s premier scholars to provide insight into this complex issue. Dividing the conference into three panels, our speakers will be asked to address the following topics:

1. The Global Governance of Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future
What is the plausibility of COP21 actually being implemented?
What should Canada’s role be in the next 10 years?
Are democracies at a major disadvantage when enacting policy change, whereby an election can change environment policy every 4 or 8 years?

2. Economic Growth and Sustainable Environmental Policy: Compatible or Not?
Will ecosystem services become more integrated in economic calculations?
Is sustainability achievable within an economic framework where environmental externalities remain unaccounted for?
How will climate change affect the availability and pricing of products of agriculture amidst increasing global demand?

3. Climate Change’s Threat to Human Security
What are some of the consequences for human societies in the face of climate change?
Can current international standards of aid and legal systems adequately support massive displacements of persons expected due to climate change?
How will fundamental human rights potentially be affected by climate change and the destruction of the environment?

Description

Doors open at 10:00am.

The Evidence Room
Robert Jan van Pelt (and co-authors tbc)

Join the Neuberger for the annual IHRD lecture and a book launch of this companion piece to the critically-acclaimed exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Prof. Robert Jan van Pelt, a pivotal witness at the libel trial against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, incorporates some of the compelling visuals and testimony he used at the 2000 trial. Using a multi-layered approach, he demonstrates through forensic science the reality that Auschwitz-Birkenau was purposely designed as a factory of death.

The book will be available for purchase ($30) and author signing.

Generously supported by the Esther Bem Memorial Fund and presented in partnership with the New Jewish Press and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto.

Open to the public; no registration required.

About International Holocaust Remembrance Day
January 27 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD), an annual day of commemoration to honour the victims of the Nazi era.

Description

“The More We Did, the More We Were Able To Do”: A New Look at the Legacy of Charter 77 and Václav Havel.”
The occasion is the 40th anniversary of the release of Charter 77, the manifesto of the Czechoslovak human rights initiative that blossomed into a broad-based movement that helped to undermine the totalitarian regime in that country. Two of the participants, Martin Palouš and Martin Šimsa, were signatories of the manifesto and activists in the movement. David Dušek is the grandson of one of the main instigators of Charter 77, and the event will also celebrate the publication, by the Václav Havel library in Prague, of a facsimile edition of a diary Havel kept when he was arrested and imprisoned in January 1977, just after the release of Charter 77. Dušek has also discovered a lengthy essay Havel wrote shortly after his release. Both these documents shed new light on how the regime tried to suppress the Charter movement, and indeed, all opposition.
We’re hoping the event will be more than just a look back at an important turning point in Central European history, but that it might also provide a look at Havel’s legacy in the light of what we are facing now. The title of the event comes from Havel’s characterization of another era of great change and uncertainty: “The more we did, the more we were able to do, and the more we were able to do, the more we did.

Chair: Robert C Austin, CERES

Discussant: Veronika Ambros, Slavic Languages and Literatures

Panelists

David Dusek

David Dusek is founding partner and managing director of a consultancy firm specializing in legislative process. At the same time, due to his family heritage, he became amateur archivist and publisher. He is also the grandson of one of Vaclav Havel’s closest friends, the Czech translator and writer Zdenek Urbanek. Two years ago, David discovered a lost notebook kept by Havel when he was imprisoned in 1977 for his leadership in Charter 77. He helped to organize its publication in Prague last year. In January David published the first chapter of the “lost” report on first days of Charter 77 written by Vaclav Havel and then lost.

Martin Palous
Martin Palouš studied Natural Science, Philosophy and International Law. In 1974 he received Doctorate of Natural Sciences (RNDr). In 2001 he earned Higher Doctorate in Political Science/Philosophy (Associate Professorship) at Charles University. In 2007 he got PhD in Public International Law.
Since January of 2011, Martin Palous is Senior Fellow and Director of Vaclav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy at School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University. He is also President of Vaclav Havel Library Foundation and President of International Platform for Human Rights in Cuba.
He belonged to the original signatories of Charter 77, served as its spokesperson in 1986 and participated at the creation of Civic Forum during the Velvet Revolution (November 1989). After the fall of Communism he was a member of Parlament (1990), Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs (1990-1992, 1998-2001), Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United States (2001-2005) and Permanent Representative of the Czech Republic to the United Nations (2006-2011).

Martin Simsa
Martin Šimsa teaches philosophy at Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Ústí and Labem, Czech Republic. The main topics of his research and teaching is political philosophy, deliberative theory of democracy, philosophical hermeneutics and Czech philosophy. He cooperated with conscientious objectors of compulsory military service and he signed the human rights document Charter 77 in 1978. He took part in protest activities in Brno along with other signatories of Charter 77, was active in the underground and among young Christians. He participated in seminars of professor Božena Komárková and philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek. He printed and distributed an illegal newsletter titled Information about Charter 77 (INFOCH) and as well as samizdat literature. He presented human rights topics at synods of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren as a representative of youth in 1985, 1987 and 1989, which took place during the time of the Velvet revolution 1989. On November 18 at 0:30 hours The Church Synod condemned the brutal police attack against students and young people on Národní třída and challenged the government to lead a dialogue with the human rights activists groups. He studied philosophy after Velvet Revolution (1990-1995) at Charles University and in 2001 he received a Ph.D. in philosophy there.

Paul Wilson
Paul Wilson lived and worked in Czechoslovakia for ten years, from 1967-1977, when he was expelled during the regime’s campaign against Charter 77. Since then, he has translated the work of many Czech writers, including Josef Škvorecký, Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Klíma, and Václav Havel. He co-authored Fifty-seven Hours, about the Moscow theatre siege in 2002. A collection of his essays on Czech subjects, Bohemian Rhapsodies, was published in Prague in 2011. His most recent translation is a collection of short stories by Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Takes from the Time of the Cult. (New Directions, 2015)

Sponsors

Rudolf and Rosalie Cermak Fund
CERES

Description

The technological innovation of hydraulic fracturing drilling, commonly known as ‘fracking’, has revolutionized global energy markets overnight, but it quickly became a victim of its own success as global oil prices plunged in late 2014. This industry went from boom to bust in only a few short years. Despite this, it is still the future of American energy and soon to spread throughout the entire world. This presentation serves as an introduction to fracking, answering the following questions: What is it? How it did it come about? Why is it so important? And what are the implications—economic, social, and environmental—for the local communities where it occurs?

Austin Zwick is a Ph.D. Candidate in Planning at the University of Toronto. He previously obtained a BSc in Industrial Relations and an MPA in Public Finance from Cornell University. Austin’s research interests focus on the intersection between energy and economic development, quantifying job growth generated by upstream and downstream business linkages. His dissertation research concentrates on how the natural resource boom of fracking has affected patterns of urban decline and revitalization in the American Rust Belt. His research uses quantitative methods, statistics, and measures of public finance. Zwick also works with Evergreen CityWorks in measuring the fiscal health of Ontario’s cities over time.