Past Events

Description

The Manipal Centre for Humanities meets the Centre for South Asian Studies

LECTURE #1

Ageing and Later Life Caregiving Arrangements in Urban India

By Jagriti Gangopadhyay

This lecture will be examining how ageing experiences, intergenerational relationships, and eldercare are shaped in a globalized India. Although, the law emphasizes on the role of the family to provide later life care, nonetheless, increasingly eldercare is becoming market (private companies providing a host of caregiving services to the older adults of urban India) oriented. Additionally, post the pandemic, virtual care has emerged as a strong option for later life care. Against this backdrop, this lecture will highlight how family care, virtual care and market-based care determines ageing experiences in urban India.

Jagriti Gangopadhyay is currently an Assistant Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities. She did her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. Recently she was awarded the Shastri Publication Grant by the Shastri Indo Canadian Institute for her monograph titled Culture, Context and Aging of Older Indians: Narratives from India and Beyond, published by Springer. This year she co-edited a book titled Eldercare Issues in China and India, published by Routledge: UK. Her work analyzes the intersections between health, cultural practices, laws, and policies among older adults.

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The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre of Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines–literature, sociology and history–and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges. A series of talks by colleagues from the Manipal Centre of Humanities will lead up to a panel discussion in which the MCH and the CSAS communities will be given the opportunity to begin an open-ended conversation.

Description

Russia’s assault on Ukraine has reminded the world about the threat it faces from Moscow. But that’s not the only war that Russia has been fighting and Ukraine is not the only target. Long before February 2022, Russia was already engaged in semi-covert campaigns around the world, using any means possible to expand its power and influence and leaving a trail of destruction along the way.  In his new book Russia’s War on Everybody, long-term Russia-watcher Keir Giles examines what this longer war means for us all.

Instead of talking only to diplomats, politicians and generals, Keir has also looked at the effect of Russia’s ambition on ordinary people around the world. Interviewing 40 eyewitnesses from a dozen countries across four continents, including Canada, he has tried to tell the stories the world doesn’t hear about the impact of Russia’s hostility on individuals and societies that may not even realize they are a target – through corruption, disinformation, cyber offensives and more.  Keir will introduce the book and its findings, and take questions on what he has learned over three decades of studying Russia and how it tries to get its way at all of our expense.

About the speaker

Keir Giles has spent decades watching and explaining Russia. Currently a fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House in London, he has also worked with more than a dozen national and international defence research agencies around the world warning of the growing threat from Moscow. He is a regular contributor and commentator on Russian affairs for international print and broadcast media.  His previous publications include Russia’s ‘New’ Tools for Confronting the West (2016), and the Handbook of Russian Information Warfare (2016). Former president of Estonia Toomas Ilves said of his last book, Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia To Confront The West (2019) that "my only regret is that I did not have this book 35 years ago".

Description

Event series: Race and Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific

Overt and subtle misogynoir (anti-Black misogyny) pervade sport and sport media, as women in the Black diaspora are rarely in control of sporting regulations or their media representations. One recourse racialized athletes have at their disposal, however, is active resistance. This presentation provides a textual analysis of the intolerable misogynoir aimed at tennis professional Naomi Osaka, and key moments in her media (mis)representations. Results of a study co-authored with Dr. Sabrina Razack revealed three main themes: (1) ongoing misogynoir and colorism of sport media and athlete sponsors; (2) racial, national and diaspora media (mis)representations; and (3) resistance to gendered racism through self representation. After Osaka’s historic win at the 2018 US Open, narratives of her Japanese nationality and Asian identity became the story that rendered her Blackness invisible, and enabled her to be read against her opponent Serena Williams. Osaka’s use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), including social media, disrupted racist dominant narratives, and provided counternarratives that reveal her, and other mixed-race sportswomen to be more that the sum of our parts. Osaka’s identities align with Blackness as a political and racial category and position her Japaneseness part of the Haitian jaspora (diaspora).

BIO:

Janelle Joseph is an assistant professor of critical studies of race and indigeneity in the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education at the University of Toronto. Joseph’s research interests include anti-racism policy, physical activity access, decoloniality, and ethics.  

An elected member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists, & Scientists, Dr. Joseph’s book, Black Atlantic: Cricket, Canada and the Caribbean Diaspora, traces how sports create transnational social fields that connect migrants in North America, England and the Caribbean.

Dr. Joseph is the founder and director of Indigeneity, Diaspora, Equity and Anti-Racism in Sport (IDEAS) Research Lab, the first research lab in Canada dedicated to issues of race and movement cultures. IDEAS Research Lab promotes knowledge, leverages political work and develops community partnerships to create anti-racism programming in sports, dance and leadership. In 2021, IDEAS Research Lab partnered with Ontario University Athletics to conduct a study that traces experiences of racism among student athletes, coaches and administrators.

Description

The Manipal Centre for Humanities meets the Centre for South Asian Studies

LECTURE #2

The Secret Pleasures of a Migrant Dictionary

By Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil

This paper will look at a tiny portion of Benyamin’s Aadujeevitham (Goat Days, trans. Joseph Koyipally) commercially the most successful of Malayalam novels and a recipient of a number of literary awards. In the said portion, the migrant protagonist who finds himself faced with a foreign language compiles a dictionary of the words that he has learnt so far in his unforeseeably strange experience in the Arabian Gulf. The paper reads into the entries of this dictionary to speak about how migration produces a rent in the public sphere and invests it with zones of discrete communitarian pleasures.

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is interested in the cultural dimensions of the migration to the Arabian Gulf from the south Indian state of Kerala. His papers on various aspects of the cultures of Gulf migration have appeared on various platforms including academic journals. Shafeeq received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.

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The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre of Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines–literature, sociology and history–and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges. A series of talks by colleagues from the Manipal Centre of Humanities will lead up to a panel discussion in which the MCH and the CSAS communities will be given the opportunity to begin an open-ended conversation.

Description

Critical raw materials are providing a crucial material infrastructure for current technological shifts. This presentation relies on some recent and ongoing research aimed at exploring the link between critical raw materials (particularly selected Rare Metals, RMs) and frontier technological innovation. By text mining USPTO patents during the period 1976-2017, our previous research confirmed that critical materials and RMs play an increasing role as the material basis for technological progress (e.g. Diemer et al., 2022), highlighting that the dependence varies significantly across RM types and technological areas (i.e. particularly high in fields such as semiconductors, nanotechnology, green energy, etc.) (Li, Ascani & Iammarino, 2022).

The presentation especially focuses on the relationship between three core sectors of renewable energy (RE) – Wind energy, Solar energy and Batteries – and the supply dynamics of RMs on which they depend, exploring the RE value chain and the spatial patterns of global RM supply. We further examine how exogenous shocks to RM availability, in terms of international price dynamics, affect RE industry development and technological innovation. The results indicate that controlling for other influencing factors (economic structure, policy, and resource endowment), product export and patent output of RE respond negatively to the RM price increase. Therefore, a stable RM supply plays a crucial role in achieving energy transition.

About our Speaker

Simona Iammarino is Professor of Applied Economics at the Department of Economics and Business of the University of Cagliari, Italy, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Geography & Environment of the LSE. She was Professor of Economic Geography at the LSE (2009-2022), where she acted as Head of Department (2014-2017) and academic member of the LSE Council (2016-2020). Simona has also been an affiliate faculty member at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) L’Aquila, Italy, since 2016, and member of the Board of the LSE-Cañada Blanch Centre since 2021.

Simona’s main research interests lie in the following areas: Multinational corporations, globalisation and local economic development; Geography of innovation and technological change; Regional systems of innovation; Regional and local economic development and policy. She has published more than 70 articles in major peer-reviewed journals, two co-authored books, around 30 book chapters, and numerous working papers, policy reports and other publications.

She was co-editor of Regional Studies (2008-2013), is currently co-editor of the Journal of Economic Geography, and a member of the RSA Board and Chair of the RSA Journal Committee. Simona has a long-term experience in externally funded international research projects, and in consultancy projects for various international organisations (e.g. EU Commission, OECD, United Nations) and numerous government agencies.

Description

The Manipal Centre for Humanities meets the Centre for South Asian Studies

LECTURE #3

The Waiting Dissolve: Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962)

By Gayathri Prabhu

Black and white Hindi cinema — from the time of independence (1947) to the emergence of colour (early 1960s) — can be studied for a distinct and fully realized aesthetic of shadows, stark contrasts, grey tonalities and spatializations of the frame. Indeed, the camera displays an autonomy from the expressed or stifled desires of characters or plot points. Such a camera has true freedom moving respectfully and attentively into secret spaces that can be playful, intimate, inviting, lingering, transgressive and melancholic by turns and often within the same movement. It innovates in the private, unhurried ardency of light and shade, as this talk demonstrates with reference to Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (Master, Mistress and Servant, 1962).

Gayathri Prabhu is Associate Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities and holds a doctoral degree in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of four novels, a memoir and a novella in prose poetry. She is also the co-author (with Nikhil Govind) of Shadow Craft: Visual Aesthetics of Black and White Hindi Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). She works with mental health advocacy and is the Coordinator of the Student Support Centre, a psychotherapy service for students in Manipal.

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The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre of Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines–literature, sociology and history–and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges. A series of talks by colleagues from the Manipal Centre of Humanities will lead up to a panel discussion in which the MCH and the CSAS communities will be given the opportunity to begin an open-ended conversation.

Description

Join us for the panel discussion featuring Nikhil Govind, Jagriti Gangopadhyay, Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil, and Gayathri Prabhu from the Manipal Centre for Humanities.

The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre for Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines–literature, sociology and history–and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited by the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges.

Panelists’ Bios:

Jagriti Gangopadhyay is currently an Assistant Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities. She did her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. Recently she was awarded the Shastri Publication Grant by the Shastri Indo Canadian Institute for her monograph titled Culture, Context and Aging of Older Indians: Narratives from India and Beyond, published by Springer. This year she co-edited a book titled Eldercare Issues in China and India, published by Routledge: UK. Her work analyzes the intersections between health, cultural practices, laws, and policies among older adults.

Nikhil Govind joined the Manipal Centre for Humanities after completing his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include modern Indian literature and film. He is the author of Between Love and Freedom: The Revolutionary in the Hindi Novel (Routledge, 2014), Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature (Oxford, 2019), (with Gayathri Prabhu), Shadow Craft: Visual Aesthetics of Black and White Hindi Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), and The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). He has been Head of the Manipal Centre of Humanities since 2015.

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is interested in the cultural dimensions of the migration to the Arabian Gulf from the south Indian state of Kerala. His papers on various aspects of the cultures of Gulf migration have appeared on various platforms including academic journals. Shafeeq received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.

Gayathri Prabhu is Associate Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities and holds a doctoral degree in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of four novels, a memoir and a novella in prose poetry. She is also the co-author (with Nikhil Govind) of Shadow Craft: Visual Aesthetics of Black and White Hindi Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). She works with mental health advocacy and is the Coordinator of the Student Support Centre, a psychotherapy service for students in Manipal.

Description

States typically have lasted 100 years at top size (rarely over 200) before shrinking. Political concentration of the world has grown exponentially over the last 5000 years, as measured by four quantities: the largest state’s share of world dry land area (A1/AW); the most populous state’s share of world population (P1/PW); area-based effective number of states (NA); population-based effective number of states (NP). Jointly, they point to a single world state 2600 years from now, if (and only if) the previous trend continues. Within 5000 years of concentration, Rein Taagepera and Miroslav Nemcok, More People, Fewer States (manuscript), distinguish three acceleration points: early state formation around -3200, leading to Runner Empires; horse-riding and authority delegation breakthroughs around -600, leading to Rider Empires; and modern technology around 1800, leading to Engineer Empires.

In the Engineer phase, population concentration seems to fall below the millennial trend. When one attempts to postdict the next 100 years in 1200, 1300 and so on, based on full knowledge of previous empire sizes, one would mostly grossly off the mark. The last 70 years have been unusually stable. This cannot be expected to last.  

Speaker bio

Professor Rein Taagepera is interested in quantitatively predictive logical models in social sciences. He has published seminal research on predicting the number and size of parties on the basis of electoral systems, and the consequences for government stability. His books include: Making Social Sciences More Scientific: The Need for Predictive Models (Oxford UP 2008); Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems (Oxford UP 2007); Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (with M. S. Shugart) (Yale University Press, 1989). Taagepera has been awarded two of the most prestigious prizes in political science: the Karl Deutsch Award (International Political Science Association, 2016) and the Johann Skytte Prize (Skytte Foundation, Sweden, 2008). This places him in the exalted company of recipients Robert Putnam, Juan Linz, Pippa Norris and Jane Mansbridge. Additionally, Taagepera contributed to the restoration of Estonia’s independence and its transition to a successful democracy, including as a presidential candidate and the founder of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Tartu. His The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1990 (Hurst & University of California Press, 1993) is the classic study of Soviet rule.

Description

Throughout the 20th century, New York was a hub of Black politics. From Garveyites to Black Communists, Civil Rights activists to Black Panthers, almost every conceivable political movement among African Americans was present in NYC. This lecture focuses on none of these movements or their notable figures. Instead, it discusses dishonored communities of Black subjects who operated in the fringes, slums, and undergrounds of post-WWII New York City. Whether they were drug-dealing grandmothers, "junkies" plaguing neighborhoods, juvenile delinquents, or outright thieves, these figures were engaged in a practice of Black deviance that has seldom been considered "political" or related to traditions of Black protest or radicalism. Drawing on a selection of primary sources, Grant will explore the complexity of Black deviant subjectivity, deviant and dishonored communal living, and the potential of unearthing a Black Deviant Tradition.  

Speaker Bio:

Khaleel Grant is a Ph.D. candidate in history with a collaborative specialization in women and gender studies (CWGS) at the Women and Gender Studies Institute. Their areas of study include gender, slavery, and racial capitalism in North America and the Caribbean and the 20th-century history of the Black radical tradition in the U.S. and African Diaspora. Their doctoral research seeks to understand how various Black social movements’ notions of class, respectability, and revolutionary potential excluded specific segments of their respective communities. Khaleel’s work examines deviant practices among Black urban poor communities as an alternative to conventional politics to understand how they escaped, contested, survived, or exploited the precarity and circumscribed freedom of liberal democracy and racial capitalism. Their work suggests that Black deviance perhaps constitutes a political or anti-political tradition on its own terms.

Description

About the Book:

The “captivating” (The New York Times), definitive biography of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, detailing the extraordinary rise and political brilliance of the most powerful—and elusive—woman in the world.

Angela Merkel has always been an outsider. A pastor’s daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany, she spent her twenties working as a research chemist, entering politics only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And yet within fifteen years, she had become chancellor of Germany and, before long, the unofficial leader of the West.

In this “masterpiece of discernment and insight” (The New York Times Book Review), acclaimed biographer Kati Marton sets out to pierce the mystery of Merkel’s unlikely ascent. With unparalleled access to the chancellor’s inner circle and a trove of records only recently come to light, she teases out the unique political genius that had been the secret to Merkel’s success. No modern leader so ably confronted Russian aggression, enacted daring social policies, and calmly unified an entire continent in an era when countries are becoming more divided. Again and again, she cleverly outmaneuvered strongmen like Putin and Trump, and weathered surprisingly complicated relationships with allies like Obama and Macron.

Famously private, the woman who emerges from this “impressively researched” (The Wall Street Journal) account is a role model for anyone interested in gaining and keeping power while staying true to one’s moral convictions. At once a “riveting” (Los Angeles Review of Books) political biography, an intimate human portrait, and a revelatory look at successful leadership in action, The Chancellor brings forth one of the most extraordinary women of our time.

About the Speaker:

Kati Marton is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy and Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An award-winning former NPR correspondent and ABC News bureau chief in Germany, she was born in Hungary and lives in New York City.

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Information is not yet available.

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About the speakers:

Professor Jan Macháček – Academic staff from University of Ostrava, Czechia responsible for the subjects of public administration, the geography of tourism, demography, and geographical excursions.  

Macháček’s research interests include environmental aspects of industrial activity, artisanal mining, and its socio-economic aspects. Artisanal mining (artisanal mining) employs tens of millions of people in the world and could be one of the tools for the development of less-developed regions, especially in developing countries. Another area of interest is the development of the Czech rural areas within the current demographic trends. The development of the rural areas (and cities) is followed by the concept of SMART cities, which has come to the fore in regional planning in recent years.

Description

The Russian “demographic crisis” has been a major focal point of Putin’s political rhetoric and domestic policy for nearly two decades. This talk presents research analyzing the tools and their effects – in the political realm and in terms of population – of the Russian government’s attempts to raise the birth rate.  

About our Speaker:

Leslie Root is a postdoctoral researcher for the Colorado Fertility Project at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her PhD in demography from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2020, and holds an MA in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies from Georgetown University. Her work focuses on fertility politics and policies in low-fertility countries, including Russia and the United States.

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Description:

Horror films often depict ghosts wreaking havoc on the living. Scholars of horror have understood the genre’s specters as returns of the repressed that can, like nightmares, be decoded from the fantastical façade of the films. Ghost stories are unscrambled in this analytic process, symbolic representations read back down to the unremembered traumas that they “came from”: the psychic, cultural, and national histories reflected in the broken mirror of horror. This has been a highly influential—and redemptive—-reading strategy by which the most disdained of popular film genres has become the most written about over the last few decades. Yet, after all that reading and writing, others have argued, something is still left on the table: the sensuousness of the horror film. The fullness of bodies, objects, and spaces, of shadows, sounds and colors, helps achieve the immediate visceral impact after which the genre is named. It gives presence to the phantom worlds of horror, and affective force to our viewing of them. But where does this presence come from? In this talk, I offer one answer. I propose that horror encrypts and unleashes the material history of filmmaking in spectral forms. This history is typically described as “behind the scenes,” but the materialities of celluloid editing, location filming, props, and makeup effects (in)form the genre’s representations, becoming perceptible in stylistic and affective “excess.” Focusing on a cycle of horror films made in India between the late 1970s and early 1990s, this talk will explore the spectral materialities of Bombay horror as clues to the forgotten conditions in which horror films were once made, and as traces that still shape sensory encounters with the films.

Kartik Nair is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is currently completing his first book, Seeing Things, which focuses on low-budget horror films made in 1980s Bombay. Examining the films for spectral traces of material histories of film production, regulation, and circulation, Seeing Things explores the aesthetic and historiographic implications of spectral materialities. Kartik’s writing has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal), Film Quarterly, Discourse, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and The New Inquiry. He is a core editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and oversees the journal’s book reviews.

Description

In February 2022, the city of Toronto approved a new bylaw allowing backyard garden suites as part of an effort to address the current housing crisis. While the legalization of laneway buildings and rooming houses is today hailed as a positive measure to combat the housing shortage, these types of habitations were once widely condemned as hotbeds of crime and disease. The relationship between housing quality, housing supply, and the quality of life of residents has been a point of contention in North America since the rapid urbanization of the 1830s. Shen situates her paper at a point in history where the first minimum housing standards in the United States were enforced on a rapidly growing Manhattan, a city in which 70% of residents lived in overcrowded tenement houses.

The Tenement House Act of 1901 outlawed windowless rooms, mandated fire-proof construction materials, and required the house to provide at least one bathroom for each apartment. While such measures could be expected to improve health outcomes, they also have the potential to price low-income households out of the most transit-accessible neighborhoods. Shen’s paper evaluated the impacts of the 1901 Tenement House Act on the health and well-being of tenement residents. Results show that although tenement regulation increased life expectancy for some resident children, it disproportionately displaced foreign-born and low-income individuals. She contended that the 1901 Act had an overall negative impact on the survival rates and upward mobility of that segment of the population it was meant to protect.

Speaker Bio:

Rallye (Qingyang) Shen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation leverages historical sources of variation to answer questions related to transportation and housing infrastructure. She is particularly interested understanding migration, displacement, and the impact on disadvantaged populations. Her research is funded by a SSHRC-Doctoral Scholarship and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

Description

Abstract:

There’s a little known story of nearly 3000 Chinese Indians who were incarcerated in a prison camp in Deoli, Rajasthan in 1962 following a border war between India and China. Families, parts of families and single men were taken across India to the west to be imprisoned for up to five years in some cases. What was their experience in the Camp like? And where are they now?

“The Deoliwallahs” explores the identity of incarcerated people. The stories of the survivors are beautiful and heart-breaking: a 13-year old girl who became the head of the family, three friends who forged their bonds amid despair and the vivid memories of the Camp that haunted a mother in her nightmares. Their story is more relevant now than ever as regional wars over territory rages on and injustice against civilians is a stark reality.

Speaker Bio:

Joy Ma grew up in India and has lived in Kolkata and New Delhi. She attended Lady Shri Ram College and graduate school at the New School. She recently published the book The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Incarceration. Joy was one of a handful of children born in the Deoli internment camp in Rajasthan. Her connection to the community in the US and Canada taps into the rich narratives of the group. She is co-producer of "Voices of Deoli", a film in post-production.

Description

Most of the research on industrial clusters and agglomeration economies has assumed that the patterns forged by co-location in a metropolitan area apply uniformly within that space. Much less attention has been dedicated to intra-metropolitan dynamics despite recent studies emphasizing their importance to understand inter-organizational transfers and interactions and research in economics uncovering an important distance decay in the intensity of agglomeration externalities. Using original survey data on ‘scientific and research and development service’ firms operating in Montreal, this study examines the relationship between intra-urban spatial density and knowledge exchange. We look more specifically at four different types of collaborators (clients, suppliers, university, and competitors), various channels through which firms exchange knowledge, and how the level of spatial density with other actors may correlate with specific forms of interactions. This paper contributes to the literature by highlighting how the intra-metropolitan scale matters to understand the patterns of knowledge exchange between organizations.   

Description

This presentation explores how drinking water in the second half of the eighteenth century became fully commercialized, like any other good on the Parisian market. After the 1760s, private water companies competed with and tried to replace the municipal water system and the network of water carriers. These companies changed the norms and values that defined the previous water system to ensure their own success, which lasted from the 1760s to 1790s. Yet, in spite of their bold claims, water companies never managed to completely overhaul the municipal system nor to fully replace water carriers. To analyze the companies’ lack of success, this talk is structured around three axes. First, I will trace the companies’ tactics and strategies to commercialize water.

Constance de Font-Réaulx will show how water companies sought to create market would not be driven by credit, status, and personal relations but by abstract commercial exchanges, wealth, and consumer appetites. Second, she will analyze why water companies went bankrupt. She will show that companies did not generate enough interest among consumers, many of whom preferred to continue relying on their local water carriers. Third, she will analyze how the possibility of water becoming subject to market forces triggered a new debate about whether humans have a right to water.   

Constance de Font-Réaulx is a scholar of early modern France. She is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and holds her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the commercialization and commodification of drinking water in early modern Paris. She examines debates over the governance of the supply of water when commercial and financial capitalism had begun transforming nature into a commodity. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Power of Water: The Politics of the Parisian Waterworks (1660-1800). Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Description

Event series: Race & Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific

In recent years, many commentators have bemoaned the dissolution of the liberal capitalist world order that has been called “Pax Americana.” In this logic, the occupations of Germany and Japan have been declared triumphs that inaugurated a rules-based global order that lasted for more than seventy years. The United States has been figured as the “global good cop” that insured peace, security, and prosperity throughout the planet, so that its recent decline on the world stage and a supposed isolationist mood is now being countered by new visions calling forth another world order dependent upon the massive militarization of minor and major powers throughout the world. This panel begins with the acknowledgement that the period of Pax Americana was far from peaceful and non-violent for most of the formerly colonized, indigenous, and racialized peoples of the world. Despite national and state/provincial celebrations of inclusion, multiculturalism, and reconciliation, our three panelists with expertise across the Asia-Pacific–including on Okinawa, Hawaiʻi, and postcolonial Koreans in Japan–reflect on the limits of this discourse on Pax Americana.

Description

Part of the Theory/Praxis/Politics series, the forum "Migratory Labors of Southeast Asian Cinema" invites filmmakers and academics from Thailand, Myanmar, and the Philippines to discuss their experience and thoughts on navigating labor and migration in the course of their work.

Panelists’ Bios:

Sompot Chidgasornpongse graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Chulalongkorn university in Thailand, and an MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His short films were shown at various international film festivals such as Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Viennale, Visions du Réel, IndieLisboa, etc. He’s also a Berlinale Talents, and Talents Tokyo alumnus. His first feature documentary, Railway Sleepers (2016) was in competition at Busan IFF, had European premiere at Berlinale, and later at Sheffield, True/False, TIDF, among others. Sompot has also been working closely with Apichatpong Weerasethakul as assistant director in many films, including Tropical Malady (2004), Syndromes and a Century (2006), Cemetery of Splendour (2015), and recently, Memoria (2021). Sompot is now based in Bangkok.

Kissada Kamyoung was born in the Thai province of Hat Yai. After graduating with a Bachelor of Political Science from Thammasat University and a Master of Comparative Literature from Chulalongkorn University, he began working as a lecturer in the Department of Western Languages, Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakorn University, where he teaches literature and film courses. He has written several academic articles, magazine columns, and reviews about how space, time, and modern life are presented in Southeast Asian literature and cinema through the lenses of postcolonialism, urban space, and culture. Kissada Kamyoung also attended Busan Asian Film School. His 2009 short film BANGKOK DWELLER screened at the 13th Thai Short Film and Video Festival. He was the line producer for Jacob Von Heland’s BELOVED FLOOD (2014, TV) and line producer for Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s RAILWAYS SLEEPERS (2016, Busan and Berlinale Forum). He previously attended La Fabrique Cinema 2020, HAF Forum 2020, Nantes Produire au Sud 2020, SEAFIC 2020, and Locarno Open Doors 2021.

Carlo Francisco Manatad is a Filipino film director and editor based in Manila. He is a graduate of the University of the Philippines Film Institute. His short films have screened at numerous local and international film festivals. Junilyn Has, his first short film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival under the Pardi di Domani Section in 2015. Jodilerks Dela Cruz, Employee of the Month, his 4th short film was selected in competition at the 56th Semaine de la Critique of the Cannes International Film Festival. Baga’t Diri Tuhay Tat Pamahungpahung (The Imminent Immanent) premiered in competition at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. As one of the most prolific editors in the Philippines today, he has collaborated with numerous filmmakers on independent and studio films. Carlo is an alumnus of the Asian Film Academy, Berlinale Talents, Tokyo Talents and the Locarno Filmmakers Academy. Whether the Weather is Fine (Kun Maupay Man It Panahon) is his first feature film.

Wikanda Promkhuntong is a lecturer in Film and Cultural Studies at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University. Her research engages with East Asian cinema and different forms of border-crossing. Her works explore the discourses around and practices of screen industry agents from auteur/stars, cinephiles/fans, above/below-the-line workers, and the changing conditions that shaped their lives and works over time. Since being based in Thailand, her research also covers the areas of film cultures in relation to cinema spaces and film locations, different forms of cinematic mobilities, and historical film receptions. She completed her PhD in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, Wales.

Maung Sun is a filmmaker born in Myanmar in 1983 and is currently based in Paris. His first feature film MONEY HAS FOUR LEGS world-premiered at Busan International Film Festival 2020 in competition for the New Currents Award. It traveled to Locarno, BFI London, New York Asian, and more festivals in 2021. In the same year, he was the first filmmaker from Myanmar to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinéfondation Residence. He participated in Talents Tokyo 2022 and Berlinale Talents 2023.

Live captioning will be available during the webinar session. To request disability accommodations, please contact palitac@umn.edu The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.

This activity is supported by an Imagine Fund Special Events Grant, an initiative of the University of Minnesota Executive Vice President and Provost, established through a generous gift from the McKnight Foundation, and facilitated by the Institute for Advanced Study.

The event is co-presented by the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota and the Southeast Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto.

Description

South Korea and Japan had shared many similarities in labor law and employment practices and the two governments tried to introduce the same reform at the same time since the Asian financial crisis in 1997. However, the outcomes in employment policy reform were surprisingly different in Japan and Korea, which resulted in more benefits to unstable workers in Korea than in Japan.  This talk focuses on labor union strategies which influence the differences between Japan and Korea. Labor union strategies are crucial in the transition of labor relation and employment practices, because labor unions need to change the range of membership and the ways to protect their members. As the gig economy grows worldwide, a new form of labor such as uber drivers and food delivery riders who are not employees, but self-employed is spreading. This talk about labor union strategies can be helpful to understand how the gig economy is progressing.   

About the Speakers:
Juyoung An is a Visiting Professor with the Centre for the Study of Global Japan at the University of Toronto. He is also a professor of Policy Science at Ryukoku University in Japan. He has been studying employment policy changes in Korea and Japan and policy Processes of the two countries. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Law from Kyoto University, Japan and his B.A. from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South of Korea. His major book is Divergence of Company-based Employment Policies in Korea and Japan, Minerva Shobo (in Japanese), and he has co-authored several other books.  

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan and co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Korea, University of Toronto. Lunch will be served.

Description

Pathbreakers: New Postdoctoral Research on South Asia at U of T

This talk will discuss Dr. Rachelle Saruya’s research on Myanmar Buddhist nuns’ formal and informal education. Dr. Saruya focuses on fourteen Buddhist nuns at one nunnery in Sagaing, Myanmar, their experiences with education and monastic training, and their spaces of choice or convenience that help mediate these practices. By allowing the spatial aspects of one nunnery to organize her investigation, Dr. Saruya is able to move through each building, encountering nuns at different life stages and with various aspirations, creating a much more complex picture than if she had used what might be called an “ideal” renunciant with a linear and straightforward educational path. More specifically, this approach enables her to touch on themes of secular vs. monastic education, child nuns vs. older ones, disability and minority status, reformed nunneries vs. old institutions, and lineages, among other matters. While examining this nunnery, Dr. Saruya also explores the connections this nunnery has to two seminary type nunneries and monasteries in the area that help in the nun-making process.

Rachelle Saruya is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Historical Studies at UTM where she is teaching two courses and embarking on a new research project centered on child-wishing rituals in contemporary Myanmar. She is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Description

BOOK TALK

Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions (Standford University Press)

There is a tendency to think of Korean American literature—and Asian American literature writ large—as a field of study involving only two spaces, the United States and Korea, with the same being true in Asian studies of Korean Japanese (Zainichi) literature involving only Japan and Korea. This book posits that both fields have to account for three spaces: Korean American literature has to grapple with the legacy of Japanese imperialism in the United States, and Zainichi literature must account for American interventions in Japan. Comparing Korean American authors such as Younghill Kang, Chang-rae Lee, Ronyoung Kim, and Min Jin Lee with Zainichi authors such as Kaneshiro Kazuki, Yi Yang-ji, and Kim Masumi, Minor Transpacific uncovers their hidden dialogue and imperial concordances, revealing the trajectory and impact of both bodies of work. Minor Transpacific bridges the fields of Asian studies and Asian American studies to unveil new connections between Zainichi and Korean American literatures. Working in Japanese and English, David S. Roh builds a theoretical framework for articulating those moments of contact between minority literatures in a third national space and proposes a new way of conceptualizing Asian American literature.

David S. Roh is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he specializes in Asian American literature and Digital Humanities.  He is the author of Minor Transpacific (Stanford University Press, 2021), Illegal Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and coeditor of Techno-Orientalism (Rutgers University Press, 2015). His work has appeared in Law & Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, MELUS, Verge, and Digital Humanities Quarterly.  He is currently at work on Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of English, Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, Department of East Asian Studies, the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto.

Description

NOTE: The event will now be conducted virtually on Zoom due to weather conditions. Please register to receive the Zoom link.

Pathbreakers: New Postdoctoral Research on South Asia at U of T

The saint, prophet, liberated guru, or enlightened being occupies a powerful place not only in their respective religious spheres, but in the social lives of the cultures that create and maintain them. Yet how are these social categories “created” and through what means are their parameters delimited over the last century and a half as technologies of mass comminication have transformed the epistemology of discourse?

To approach these questions, this paper focuses on the “living arahants” of early twentieth-century Burma, examining how the narratives surrounding this supposedly enlightened class are negotiated and contested in the public sphere through the mediums of photography and print. By exploring the figure of the Mingun Jetavana Sayadaw (1868-1955), a Burmese scholar-monk and pioneer of insight, or vipassanā meditation, it is argued that the application of these categories is not just a religious act, but profoundly political—determining who wields the power of definition itself.   

BIO:

Tony Scott is a PhD Candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, working under Professor Christoph Emmrich. His research focuses on the relationship between Pali commentary, insight (vipassanā) meditation, and Buddhist statecraft in twentieth-century Burma/Myanmar. Tony’s dissertation centres on the Milindapañha-aṭṭhakathā (Commentary on the Questions of King Milinda) of the Mingun Jetavan Sayadaw (1868-1954), a rare example of a modern Buddhist commentary (aṭṭhakathā) that caused controversy amongst the highest levels of the Burmese monastic community (saṅgha) and first independence government.

As a 2018-2019 Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellow in Buddhist Studies, Tony spent the year working in Myanmar, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and as a 2019-2020 Bukkyō Dendō Kyokai Foreign Scholar Fellow, he will finish his dissertation at the University of Tokyo under Professors Norihisa Baba and Ryosuke Kuramoto.

Description

Experts on Ukrainian, American, and European politics will discuss issues surrounding military and other forms of support to Ukraine.

About the speakers:

Milada Anna Vachudova is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in European politics, political change in postcommunist Europe, the European Union and the impact of international actors on domestic politics. Her recent articles explore the trajectories of European states amidst strengthening ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding – and how these changes are impacting party systems and the European Union. Professor Vachudova is part of the core team of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on the positions of political parties across Europe. She served as the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies at UNC from 2014 to 2019. Her book, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration After Communism (Oxford University Press) was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.

Volodymyr Dubovyk is an associate professor, Department of International Relations and Director, Center for International Studies, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine). V. Dubovyk has conducted research at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1997, 2006-2007), at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (2002), taught at the University of Washington (Seattle) in 2013 and at St. Edwards university/University of Texas (Austin) in 2016-17. Volodymyr has been a Fulbright Scholar twice. He is the co-author of Ukraine and European Security (Macmillan, 1999) and has published numerous articles on US-Ukraine relations, regional and international security, and Ukraine’s foreign policy. His areas of expertise are Ukraine, Transatlantic Relations, U.S., Black Sea security and security studies.  

James Goldgeier is a professor of International Relations and served as Dean of the School of International Service at American University from 2011-17. He is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center on International Security and Cooperation and a Visiting Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. He serves as the chair of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee and is a member of the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board.  

Pawel Zerka is a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is a lead ECFR analyst on European public opinion. He contributes to ECFR’s Re:shape Global Europe project, which seeks to develop new strategies for Europeans to understand and engage with the changing international order. Pawel is also engaged in discussions about Europe’s economic statecraft, and he works on Polish and European foreign policy. Based at ECFR’s Paris office, he has been part of the team since August 2017. Previously, Zerka worked as expert and head of programmes at two leading Polish think tanks, demosEUROPA-Centre for European Strategy and WiseEuropa. Zerka holds a PhD in economics and a master’s degree in international relations from the Warsaw School of Economics, having also studied at SciencesPo Bordeaux and Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Markus Kaim is a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP). He has been a DAAD Professor for German and European Studies at the University of Toronto (2007-2008), and Acting Professor for Foreign Policy and International Relations at the University of Constance (2007). He was a Visiting Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University (2005). Since 2012, he is adjunct professor at the Department for Political Science, University of Zurich and guest instructor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

Description

Keya Bayramova will discuss the traditions of Turkmen women, the culture of visual arts in Central Asia, and important cultural artifacts such as textiles, carpets, jewelry and clothing. Using specific examples of visual art and cultural objects, Dr. Bayramova presents her journey as a successful businesswoman and curator; from her beginnings in Turkmenistan, to her current work as founder of the Durdy Bayramov Art Foundation.

About the speaker:

Dr. Keya Bayramova is the founder and curator of the Durdy Bayramov Art Foundation in Toronto, Canada. Heavily influenced by her father and renowned Turkmen artist Durdy Bayramov, Bayramova is heavily invested and passionated in the preservation and presentation of Central Asian Arts and Culture.

Description

Japan conducted a series of political reform to facilitate “maturity and openness” in its democracy by modernizing party politics and promoting smooth change in government (power shift). Based on an optimistic and simple assumption that the two-party system was ideal for the sake, single-seat districts were introduced in the Lower House. To make “clean” politics, the law of public subsidies to political parties was enacted, whereas political contributions to individual politicians were strictly controlled.   

Three decades have passed since then and what we witness today is completely different from what we originally expected. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the natural governing party in Japan, is more powerful and centralized than before. No active movements towards the unification of opposition parties have taken place for the last decade since the disastrous end of the Democratic Party government. The electorate no longer seem to expect opposition parties to unify themselves as a governing party.   

The one-party predominant (“one and a half” party) system in the era of the 1955 Regime has changed, but not towards the two-party system. It is upgraded to the “one strong and many weak” party system (Ikkyo Tajaku). The LDP is now “modernized”; that is, more organized and centralized to the extent that plurality within the party is hardly seen, not to mention that power shift is unlikely to take place in the foreseeable future.  

The gap between expectation and reality is not totally accidental. It can be explained, to a considerable extent, by the effects of political institutions. It is asserted that the reformed electoral system of the Lower House prevents a convergence to the two-party system. Public subsidies to political parties encourage the proliferation of minor parties. In addition, the electoral system of the Upper House has critical effects over party reshuffling, given symmetrical cameralism in Japan. My talk ends with the conclusion that the political reform in Japan have brought about stagnancy in politics and hollowing out of democracy, instead of revitalization in politics and maturation of democracy.   Lunch and Refreshments provided.

About our Speaker

Toshimitsu Shinkawa (Professor Hosei University, Professor Emeritus of Kyoto University)   

Moderator: Ito Peng (Director, Centre for Global Social Policy, Professor, Department of Sociology, Professor Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto)

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan. Co-sponsored by the Centre for Global Social Policy, University of Toronto.

Description

In recent years, the local opposition against the construction of a new U.S. military base in Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan, has generated new attention in the field of Asian studies, Asian American studies, and American studies. Scholars and activists have sought to situate the struggles surrounding Okinawa’s base problems within comparative and relational frameworks, revealing the violent entanglements between American and Japanese settler colonial formations, militarism, and capitalism, while illuminating the ways by which decolonizing nations and peoples could have come into solidarity with each other.

This presentation aims to contribute to this scholarship by bringing in the perspective of critical infrastructure studies to examine the beginning phase of military construction in U.S.-occupied Okinawa, spanning from 1945 to 1952. Existing historiographical accounts on this phase of military construction have centered on how a shift in American policymakers’ perception of Okinawa’s strategic importance during heightened military tensions in Asia in the late 1940s and early 1950s had contributed to the construction of permanent military facilities in Okinawa. Drawing on sources from the views of military engineers surrounding the 1950 “Okinawa construction program” to survey reports on typhoon damages of U.S. military installations on Okinawa, this presentation challenges historical accounts that see Okinawa’s incorporation into the U.S. military network of bases as geopolitically inevitable.

Sabrina Teng-io Chung argue for an infrastructural reading of the U.S. militarization of Okinawa that exposes the colonial anxiety, insecurity, and instability surrounding the building of permanent military facilities. This infrastructural reading aims to demonstrate that what is considered “permanent” in the U.S. military construction programs is always already characterized by a sense of abandonment and decay, contingency and precarity. Ultimately, this reading practice calls for new ways of imagining otherwise the temporalities and relationalities made possible by American and Japanese imperial formations across the Pacific.  

Sabrina Teng-io Chung is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines the U.S. militarization of post-reversion Okinawa through the lens of infrastructure and urban redevelopment. Her research interests include transpacific studies, inter-Asia cultural studies, critical infrastructure studies, and Cold War historiography. Her publication has appeared on the online edition of Society and Space. She has also translated investigative reporting articles on the pandemic and public space, social movements, and international student migration from independent Chinese-language news outlets including The Reporter and Initium Media.  

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States.

Description

Evidence based or evidence informed decision making is the paradigm by which public decision makers leverage knowledge from a variety of sources in order to craft public policies and programs that are fair, efficient, and effective. Evidence can come in a multitude of packages and be leveraged with different calculuses about what matters most.  In this work we build on Head’s three lenses of evidence based policy where he articulates that evidence can come from science (what we traditionally think of at “evidence”), from practice (the tacit and earned knowledge of front line public servants), and from the political sphere (knowledge about political dynamics, authority, and feasibility) by examining policy documents from two consequential public policy domains in the United States: autonomous vehicles and state level opioid strategic plans.

Policy reports and plans can be used as artifacts of policy processes that capture the decisions and dynamics of complex policy activities, rather than as an end of the policy process (Freeman and Maybin 2011).  As such, a detailing of the people and sources used to create the policy document can reveal important aspects of how the policy evolves in a location. We use policy documents from the two domains mentioned above to identify important aspects of how the policy deliberations occurred and the impact it had on the outcome (report construction). We created unique datasets for this investigation.

Data and methods. All reports from the 50 states and Washington DC relative to the two substantive areas were scraped from publicly available sources on the internet. All reports from 2015 until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic started) were considered for this investigation.  Reports were then reviewed for their focus on program implementation and governance, rather than a technical focus.  A technical focus for the autonomous vehicle area would be things such as road construction and other engineering aspects of auto manufacturing. A technical focus on the opioid response issue would be the specific evidence for one intervention or another (e.g. methadone clinics). There were 68 reports on the AV side and 72 in the opioid case.

Reports were then analyzed on a number of dimensions to understand how they used evidence in their work. Our methods were centered in bibliometric techniques which catalogs and enumerates the contents of scientific documents.  We assessed images and figures, references, word/page count, topics covered using natural language processing, authors, and committee/task force membership. We also ran clustering models to find distinct patterns of reports.

Findings. We found three distinct clusters of reports within each of the two substantive areas.  While the specifics of the clusters across the two areas are slightly different, they are remarkable in that they have the hallmarks of Head’s three lenses of evidence for policy making.  In the AV side we see three clusters that are Expert- engineering (practice evidence), expert academic (scientific evidence), and convening, legislative focus (political evidence). For the opioid reports we see that reports that have alot of private organizations (rather than state agencies) participating show characteristics of emphasizing practice based knowledge, while those reports that are oriented by task forces display characteristics of political knowledge, and finally, those reports authored by groups with alot of domain expertise (representation from health and public health departments) display the scientific knowledge discussed by Head.  

Conclusion. While all three lenses of evidence in policymaking are valid, the kinds of evidence used within policymaking bodies show clear patterns related to who participates and what kind of information is synthesized. This impacts what issues are emphasized and examined in these processes and the policies and programs resulting from these processes. Therefore when constructing working bodies to analyze and develop policies and programs of public import, the construction of those working bodies is greatly important since it will determine the nature of the results yielded from that process.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

BOOK TALK

This talk is based on the book, Mediating the Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State (University of Michigan Press, 2022), edited by David Oh.

Abstract: The book talk addresses the ways in which alterity is mediated in South Korean popular culture. With Korea’s complicated postcolonial legacy with Japan and its neocolonial relationship with the United States, the Korean ethnoscape is produced through a negotiation between various ways of understanding difference: its own indigenous notions of difference, its incorporation and resistance to Japanese notions of difference, and its interpretations of U.S. and Western racial hierarchy. Although racial frames have been applied to the study of Korea and its sensemaking around difference, this book talk argues that doing so is reductive and problematically asserts Western-centrism by applying a Western framework to understand non-Western spaces. Thus, drawing on a postcolonial ethos, Dr. Oh argues that to understand alterity and its mediation in South Korea, it is important to take seriously indigenous epistemologies. To do so, Dr. Oh translates the local word for discrimination, injongchabyeol, to English as “anthrocategorism" in order to recognize that Korea’s construction of alterity is locally specific. It incorporates race and ethnocentrism but, anthrocategorism is not reducible to either. Instead, the representations of anthrocategorism in Korean mediated spaces reflects ambivalent, complex negotiations of multiple types of cultural capital in formulations of who is represented and understood as more valued and normal and who is not. The talk draws upon the various contributions to the edited book to demonstrate the complexities of anthrocategorism in Korean ethno- and mediascapes.

David Oh is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He is the author of Second-Generation Korean American Adolescent Identity and Media: Diasporic Identifications and Whitewashing the Movies: White Subjectivity and Asian Erasure in U.S. Film Culture. He has also co-written Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work (forthcoming) and edited Mediating the Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State. Dr. Oh writes about Asian/American representation in U.S. media culture, representations of alterity in Korean media culture, and transnational audience reception of Korean media. He serves on eight Editorial Boards in communication, cultural studies, and media studies, and he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to South Korea in 2018-19 at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

Description

China’s surveillance reach is global.  With police stations being set up abroad, election interference in Canada, and spy balloons, how are we to make sense of China as a surveillance state?  Join journalists and researchers for a dynamic discussion of China as a surveillance state: the benign, the malign, and the ugly implications for Canada and the democratic world.  

SPEAKERS’ BIOS:

Josh Chin is deputy bureau chief responsible for politics and general news in The Wall Street Journal’s China bureau. Prior to his current role, Josh spent six years as a politics reporter in China covering law, civil society, and government use of technology. He is a recipient of the Dan Bolles Medal and led an investigative team that won the Gerald Loeb Award for international reporting in 2018. He is the co-author, with Journal reporter Liza Lin, of "Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control" (2022, St. Martin’s Press).

Josh started reporting for the Journal in 2008 as a freelance video journalist in Beijing and also spent several years editing the newspaper’s China blog. He began his career an editorial assistant at the Park Record, in Park City, Utah.

Emile Dirks is a Research Associate at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. His research on police-led mass biometric surveillance in China has been covered by The New York Times, The Economist, and The Intercept, among other publications. He completed his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto in 2022.

Dahlia Peterson is a Research Analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). Her research work focuses on how China harnesses predictive policing algorithms and facial, voice, and gait recognition technologies for AI-powered surveillance programs within its own borders and abroad. At CSET, she also studies how China is developing its artificial intelligence education and workforce pipelines. Her work has been published by the Brookings Institution, The Diplomat, The Hill, The National Interest, and Routledge. She has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and WIRED, among others. Prior to joining CSET she worked for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the U.S. State Department’s Virtual Student Federal Service, and the Foreign Commercial Service at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Chinese Language with a minor in China Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University.

Description

Building on fieldwork from 2015 to the present, this talk by Jeffery Hou of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington addresses how Taipei’s “Open Green” Program, the latest iteration of community planning initiatives in the Taiwanese capital, transcends the established boundaries of urban communities and community design practices to turn placemaking into a vehicle for collaboration and social learning. In Hou’s view, the outcomes and processes of the program suggest directions for the ongoing evolution of civic urbanism(s) in Asia.

Jeffrey Hou, Ph.D., is Professor of Landscape Architecture and director of the Urban Commons Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on the agency of marginalized social groups in transforming the built environments. In a career that spans the Pacific, Hou has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers, fishers, and villagers in Asia and inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North American cities, on projects ranging from the conservation of wildlife habitats to bottom-up placemaking.

Organized by the Global Taiwan Studies Initiative at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in collaboration with the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto.

Description

On Wednesday, March 15 as The Right Honourable David Johnston, 28th Governor General of Canada, discusses his new book Empathy: Turning Compassion into Action with Peter Loewen, Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.  

About The Book

The 28th Governor General’s most personal and timely book to date: a passionate and practical guide for turning empathy into action.

As the world stumbles through the most severe pandemic of the last century, threatened by teetering economies, torn by political division, separated by unequal access to resources, and wrestling with issues as diverse as racism, gender, cybercrime, and climate change, the nations that best adapt and prosper are those in which empathy is fully alive and widely active. Written for a post-pandemic world, Empathy is a book about learning to be empathetic and then turning that empathy into action. Based on the personal experiences of author David Johnston, the book explores how awakening to the transformative power of listening and caring permanently changes individuals, families, communities, and nations.

A how-to manual for a world craving kindness, Empathy offers proof of the inherent goodness of people, and shows how exercising the instinct for kindness creates societies that are both smart and caring. Through poignant stories and crisp observations, David contends that, "Everyone has power over some things that other people don’t. When they learn ways to turn that power into action, they change the future dramatically.”

With clear and practical focus, Empathy looks at a host of issues that demand our attention, from education and immigration, to healthcare, the law, policing, business ethics, and criminal justice. In each of these areas, Johnston highlights the deeper understandings that have arisen during the COVID-19 crisis, with sharp emphasis on the positive and negative lessons now in crisp focus. Convinced that empathy is the fastest route to peace and progress in all their forms, David ends each short chapter with a set of practical steps the reader can take to make the world better, one deliberate action at a time.

About Our Speaker

David Johnston is Canada’s 28th Governor General and Chair of the Rideau Hall Foundation. A graduate of Harvard, Cambridge, and Queen’s universities, he was president of the University of Waterloo, principal of McGill University and dean of Law at Western University. He has authored or co-authored more than thirty books and holds honorary doctorates from thirty-six universities. His most recent book, TRUST, was a national bestseller. A Companion of the Order of Canada, he was born in Sudbury, Ontario, raised in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and now lives with his wife, Sharon Johnston, near Ottawa.

Description

Since 2000 Canada has witnessed a proliferation of Innovation Strategies, including the 2017 Innovation and Skills Plan. Yet our innovation performance continued to deteriorate throughout this period. The 2022 Federal Budget began with the admission, “Our third pillar for growth is a plan to tackle the Achilles’ heel of the Canadian economy: productivity and innovation.” What factors best explain Canada’s dismal innovation performance over the past two decades? Join us for an IPL webinar with two of the most insightful analysts of Canadian innovation policy.

Moderator:

David A. Wolfe, Professor of Political Science and Co-Director,

Innovation Policy Lab

Panelists:

Shirley Anne Scharf, Ph.D.

Shirley Anne Scharf is Visiting Researcher with the CN-Paul M. Tellier Chair on Business and Public Policy, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa and has her Ph.D. in Public Administration, School of Political Studies at U of O. Her dissertation, “Canadian Innovation Policy: The Continuing Challenge” (2022) examines the key dimensions driving the gap between policy intent and impact, and the consequences for Canada’s innovation ecosystem.

Travis Southin, Ph.D.

Travis Southin is a postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration working with the Transition Accelerator on net-zero industrial policy. He completed his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto in 2022. His dissertation, titled “Overcoming Barriers to Policy Change: The Politics of Canada’s Innovation Policy,” illuminates the political barriers constraining the Government of Canada’s ability to shift its innovation policy mix away from neutral/horizontal policy instruments towards more targeted innovation policy instruments.

Description

As part of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s government has deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens from the country into Russia. Four experts in international law and genocide will discuss the sources, extent and impact of Russia’s actions.

About the speakers:

Eugene Finkel is a professor of International Relations at John Hopkins University. He works at the intersection of political science and history. He was born in Ukraine and grew up in Israel. Finkel received a BA in Political Science and International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on how institutions and individuals respond to extreme situations: mass violence, state collapse, and rapid change.

Nataliia Hendel is a research fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. She is a board member of Support for Fundamental Research Fund (Odesa, Ukraine) and holds an LLM and a PhD in international law. She is an expert and trainer on international humanitarian law for teachers and civil servants conducted by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. She was an expert and trainer on international humanitarian law for teachers conducted by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union together with the Ukrainian Red Cross Society (2021–2022).

Kateryna Rashevska, lawyer from the Regional Centre for Human Rights. Legal expert at the Regional Center for Human Rights in Kyiv and a Ph.D. fellow at the Department of International Law, Educational and Scientific Institute of International Relations, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Oleksandra Romantsova is the executive director of the Center for Civil Liberties and a human rights activist. Since May 2014, Oleksandra has been working at the Center for Civil Liberties, where will the end of 2016 she coordinated the project of mobile observation of human rights violations and war crimes in the east of Ukraine in the Anti-Terrorist Operation Zone (ATO) and political persecution in occupied Crimea. Since 2015 and till now, she has also been responsible for international advocacy of the Center’s work. Actively engaged in advocacy of international support for Ukraine and bringing responsible for war crimes in Ukraine to justice. Laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize as Executive Director of the Center for Civil Liberties.

Lucan Way (chair) is a professor of Political Science and co-Director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, CERES.

Description

Abstract:

The emergence of the digital financial services ecosystem in India has widened the digital divide leading to the financial exclusion of marginalized populations and negatively impacting economic development. This research addresses the United Nation’s sustainable development goal of poverty reduction with the advances in information technology. Illiteracy, lack of digital literacy, and distrust of digital payment systems are widely prevalent among the marginalized in the Global South. This research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of the financial exclusion of impoverished users and find solutions to foster financial inclusion from community organizations, fintech and political institutions. The research aims to comprehend the power dynamics determined by political institutions and conglomerates for private gain vs. the public interest for digital financial platforms in India. It illuminates the gaps that lead to information asymmetries arising from economic and information policies. This research tracks digital policies to facilitate the adoption of mobile applications for monetary transactions and the experience of marginalized micro-entrepreneurs with digital financial services. Research questions include: How has the emergence of the digital financial service ecosystem in India impacted social practices around money and economic development for the marginalized? What is the role of political institutions in arranging the public and private power dynamics for digital financial platforms?

Aditi Bhatia-Kalluri is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on how digital policies shape the information practices of marginalized users in the Global South. The research tracks adaptation to mobile phones by auditing everyday user challenges and finding gaps that lead to information asymmetry. Aditi earned a Master of Digital Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and B.A. Hons in New Media Studies from the University of Toronto.

Description

Program

2:30 pm. Opening remarks and introduction

2:45 pm. Presentation by Jungmin Seo (20-25 minutes)

               "Agents and Victims of Korean Nationalism: From History to Politics"

3:10 pm. Presentation by Young Chul Cho (20-25 minutes)

               “Decolonizing International Relations Studies through Korean Literature”

3:35 pm. Presentation by Hye Min Ryu (20-25 minutes)

                "Korean Feminism and Backlash politics in South Korea"

4:00 pm. Discussion by Jesook Song

4:10 pm. Discussion by Yoonkyung Lee

4:20 pm. Authors’ response

4: 40 pm. General Q&A

Presenters’ Abstracts & Bios:

Agents and Victims of Korean Nationalism: From History to Politics

By Jungmin Seo

Abstract: The existing literature on Korean nationalism predominantly on the birth and history of nationalism, not on the politics of nationalism. The lack of political analysis of Korean nationalism stems from a rather simple reality: Korean nationalism has been studied by historians as well as anthologists and sociologists but not political scientists who have neglected the dynamic nature of nationalistic discourses in the Korean society. The political studies on Korea have been indifferent to this issue based on a vague assumption that Korean nationalism is an unchanging and fixed element of Korean culture and history while unconsciously accepting the primordialist theories of nationalism. By analyzing the development of Korean nationalism as a discursive field of political struggle, I suggest that modern nationalism, with its requisite reification of the nation as the ultimate object of political loyalty, should be understood as a process of hegemonizing and de-hegemonizing through competition among various political and social agents. It should not be understood as a uni-linear project toward an independent nation state. In other words, even a successful nation state is always subject to re-interpretation of nation-ness through which challenging social forces can de-legitimize the state’s claim as a guardian of the nation. With this theoretical framework, I briefly discuss various social forces such as the Korean state, Korean women, student dissidents, oversea Koreans and migrant workers as agents and victims of Korean nationalism who shaped the forms of political struggles in modern Korean history, and at the same time, whose identities were formed by the discursive struggles of Korean nationalism. In sum, this research is a tentative attempt to construct a theoretical framework to understand the life of nationalism in a well-constructed nationhood.

Jungmin Seo (PhD)is Professor of political science and international studies at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. He taught at the University of Oregon and University of Hawaii before joining Yonsei University in 2010. His teaching and research areas are nationalism, Korean politics, Chinese politics, critical approaches to political science and International Relation theories. He recently published “Nationalism” in Oxford Handbook of Korean Politics (2023), “Koera-Japan relations through thick description: revisiting the national identity formation processes,” Third World Quarterly (forthcoming), “The Emergence and Evolution of Internatioanl Relations Studies in South Korea,” Review of International Studies (2021), and “Introduction: Political Dynamics of Korean Femiism-From #MeToo to Womad,” Journal of Asian Sociology (2020).

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Decolonizing International Relations Studies through Korean Literature

By Young Chul Cho

Abstract: This paper aims to un-suture Westphalian IR common sense from a non-essentialist and situated perspective in South Korea, in the context of decolonising IR. Toward this end, the paper methodologically looks at a South Korean novel, A Grey Man, published in 1963, the time when it was the early postcolonial period of South Korea and at the height of the Cold War. In doing a contrapuntal reading of Westphalian IR via the non-Western novel, the paper also attempts to do a different worlding and conceptualising of the international from the below. This paper mainly addresses the following set of questions. How do yellow negroes (subject race) make sense of themselves, their roles and life-modes in the world defined for them by the white West (master race)? How do yellow negroes understand and reply to the white West who has been hegemonic in world politics and history? What are A Grey Man’s ways of resisting, engaging with, or relating to the hegemonic West who is already internal to himself?

Young Chul Cho (Ph.D. in International Relations) is Professor in the School of International Studies at Jeonbuk National University in Jeonju, South Korea. Before taking up the current position, he taught at O.P. Jindal Global University (India), Leiden University (the Netherlands). He was a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University and National Chengchi University in Taiwan (ROC). His teaching and research interests include International Relations theory, critical geopolitics, non-traditional security studies, East Asian studies, knowledge production and travel, and philosophy. His articles can be found in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Review of International Studies, International Journal, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Asian Perspective, Korean Observer, and so on.

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Korean Feminism and Backlash politics in South Korea

By Hye Min Ryu

Abstract: This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the current backlash against feminism in South Korea. The Korean society is currently experiencing a strong backlash against feminism. As this anti-feminist tendency has been widely shared by the young Korean men, the tendency became ‘the twenties men phenomenon’ in Korean society. Nevertheless, Korean feminism, which had been understood as an integral part of Korean democracy, looks withering amid the backlash associated with ideologies of ‘fair’ and ‘meritocracy’. Renowned feminist scholars even admitted that Korean feminists have lost the effective feminist language to combat it. In this paper, I argue that the current backlash in South Korea is not regressive to what Korean feminism seemed to achieve since the democratization in 1987 but rather presents new politics in South Korea. This paper concludes that the meaning of ‘progressiveness’ and ‘conservativeness’ in South Korean society could be discussed in the context of the backlash politics.

Hye Min Ryu is a doctoral student in political science at Yonsei University. Her research interests are in critical theory, feminism, and postcolonialism. Hye Min completed her undergraduate degree in East Asian Studies at University of Toronto and master’s degree in Political Science at Yonsei University.

Description

The event will feature the following two presentations:

Transpacific Subjectivities: Okinawan Nisei in Hawaii and Militarization of the Pacific

By Asako Masubuchi

Abstract:

This paper examines the transpacific life course of Thomas Taro Higa to explore the shifting identities of Okinawan nisei in Hawaii during and after World War II. By doing so, this paper reveals how the indeterminate status of Okinawa under the U.S. military occupation shaped the distinctive consciousness and identities of the Okinawan diaspora in Hawaii.

Higa was a so-called “kibei nisei,” born in Hawaii to Okinawan parents and returned to Hawaii after receiving his education in Okinawa and working briefly in Osaka and Tokyo. During World War II, Higa served with the all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion. Immediately after the war, Higa organized the Okinawa Relief Movement to send relief goods to war-devastated Okinawa. In many ways, Higa was at the nexus of Japanese Americans who were trying to restore their status as American citizens and Okinawan immigrants who were building up their ethnic identity through the act of saving their homeland Okinawa. Through examining Higa’s life experiences within the context of the Cold War, occupation of Okinawa, and postwar Japanese Americans’ efforts for citizenship, this paper aims to rethink postwar Okinawa from a transpacific perspective.

Dr. Asako Masubuchi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Policy Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto. She holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the questions of militarism, racism, and biopolitics in U.S.-occupied Okinawa. Her works include “Stamping Out the ‘Nation-Ruining Disease’: Anti-Tuberculosis Campaign in US-Occupied Okinawa” (Social History of Medicine, Vol. 34, Issue 4, November 2021).   

****************

Nation and Nationality as a White "Possessions" in Japan and the United States

By Michael Roellinghoff

Abstract:

In this paper, I discuss early 20th century Japanese critiques of Asian exclusion laws in Anglophone settler colonies. Intellectuals such as Mori Ōgai, Nagai Ryūtarō, and Ōkuma Shigenobu understood Asian exclusionism and European imperialism in Asia as constituting a single "white peril” which threatened all of Asia. At a time when Japan’s “Great Power” status seemed to signify Euro-American recognition of the Japanese Empire as an equal partner, Asian exclusionism marked the tangible limits of Japan’s acceptance into the international community. Arguing that this reflected a larger dynamic — well understood by Westernizing Meiji reformers — according to which Euro-Americans claimed sovereignty, civilization, and the nation-state formation itself as exclusively white "possessions," I analyze “white peril” critiques together with attempts by Japanese immigrants in the United States to "pass" as (the supposedly "Caucasian") Ainu in order to bypass exclusion laws and naturalize as US citizens.

Dr. Michael Roellinghoff (he/him) is a historian specializing in Indigeneity, colonialism, and race in modern Japan. He is currently an Associate at the University of Toronto Asian Institute and a Research Fellow at the University of Alberta.

Description

Poland in recent years has grown to become a regional leader in the area of security, energy, economy and more. Building on strong relations with its partners in the Central Eastern Europe, Poland initiated numerous effective regional formats, including the economy oriented Three Seas Initiative that binds 12 neighboring countries from Estonia to Croatia or the Bucharest 9 format that allows for the coordination of the strategic coordination of the NATO eastern flank. Recently, in the wake of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Poland’s role has become visible globally. In his talk, Poland’s Ambassador Witold Dzielski will delve into the rationale of further deepening of the Poland-Canada partnership.

About the speaker:

On April 28, 2022, Witold Dzielski took office as Poland’s Ambassador to Canada. From 2015, he was Director of the Bureau of International Policy at the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, responsible for President Andrzej Duda’s foreign activities. Earlier, he worked at the Department of Americas at the Poland’s Foreign Ministry. 2007-2012, while posted at Poland’s Embassy in Washington D.C., he was responsible for EU-US relations, as well as Polish-Jewish affairs. Prior, among other professional activities, he was a university lecturer and a high school teacher. He was active in several civic society organization dealing with topics revolving around transatlantic affairs and human rights. He is an author of a fantasy novel and policy articles. An Aikido black belt, former captain of a basketball team. Has a wife and two sons.

Description

Local Government Revenue Initiative (LoGRI), in partnership with the Addis Tax Initiative (ATI) is organising a virtual workshop series, which will bring together national and subnational policy decision-makers, representatives of governments, tax administrations, and relevant stakeholders from ATI partner countries and LoGRI experts in order to provide technical, administrative, and policy advice on core areas related to effective revenue mobilisation through property taxation. In addition, the workshops will be succeeded by policy recommendations factsheets, follow-up activities, and tailored advisory and consultancy services based on the outcomes of the discussions. Please find out more details in the launch article (see https://www.addistaxinitiative.net/news/policy-design-property-taxation-logri) available on the ATI website.    

The series, to be held between March and May 2023, will explore in four sessions approaches to tap into the property tax potential. The first workshop will be focussed on discussing strategies for cost-effective property valuation systems and the second workshop around the theme of re-thinking property identification and registration for taxation purposes. More information and the workshop programme for each day are available on the ATI event page: https://www.addistaxinitiative.net/event/ati-logri-workshop-series

Simultaneous interpretation will be provided from / into English, French, and Spanish.

Description

Join acclaimed scholars and cultural critics Professor Florence Dore (English Department, University of North Carolina) and Professor Eric Lott (American Studies, City University of New York) for a discussion of music, text and method. What constitutes a vernacular archive and how does one approach it as a historian, as a critic, and as a researcher? What is the relationship between theory, method and object and how does each inform the other in the practices of critical engagement? Please bring your projects, your questions, and your provocations to this graduate workshops. We look forward to the conversation!

You can find samples of recent work by professors Lott and Dore here:   • Read Dore’s article titled "Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore’s Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form" here: https://post45.org/2020/12/dore-good-for-nothing/  • Read Lott’s article titled "Back Door Man: Howlin’ Wolf and the Sound of Jim Crow" here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/450012

  *This workshop is open to University of Toronto graduate students.

Check out Dore’s performance on Thursday, March 23 at The Dakota Tavern, tickets are for purchase here: https://www.dakotatavern.ca/shows/march232023)

 Eric Lott teaches American Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.  Lott has published widely and lectured at dozens of universities and other institutions on the politics of U.S. cultural and performance history, and his work has appeared in a range of periodicals including The Village Voice, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, PMLA, Representations, Transition, Social Text, American Literary History, and American Quarterly.  He is the author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford UP, 1993; 20th Anniversary ed., 2013), from which Bob Dylan took the title for his 2001 album “Love and Theft”; The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Basic Books, 2006), which was widely reviled by the boomer liberals it critiqued; and Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Harvard UP, 2017), a study of race, culture, and fantasy across the long twentieth century.  Lott has appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, CBS Sunday Morning, Turner Classic Movies, C-Span Book TV, Al Jazeera TV, and various radio shows and podcasts.

 Florence Dore teaches in both the Creative Writing and Literature Programs at Carolina. She earned her doctorate at UC Berkeley in 1999 and, after stints at New York University’s Draper Program and Kent State University, finally found her permanent home as a member the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill in 2010. Several books and articles—both academic and public-facing—appear on Dore’s c.v., but she has also released three records, one of which, Highways and Rocketships, won Best Americana Album of 2022 at Lonesome Highway Magazine. She has held fellowships at New York University, the National Humanities Center, and UNC’s Institute for Arts and Humanities and has won several grants, including one from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Dore is known for her work on the Steering Committee of the national scholarly group Post45, for whom she was founding co-editor of the Pos45 Book Series at Stanford University Press. In her work as a singer and songwriter, which she is increasingly connecting with her academic pursuits, Dore has become passionate about the Public Humanities. During the pandemic, she created and acted as co- executive producer for the community fundraiser Cover Charge: NC Musicians Go Under Cover to Benefit Cat’s Cradle, a benefit compilation record that came in #1 on the Billboard charts and raised funds for the iconic local rock venue, Cat’s Cradle. She has organized two public conferences on rock and literature, in 2017 at the National Humanities Center with the Carolina Performing Arts and in 2010 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. Form these endeavors emerges Dore’s new book, The Ink in the Grooves: Conversations on Literature and Rock ‘n Roll (Cornell Univ. Press), which features essays and interviews with Richard Thompson, Dom Flemons, Lucinda Williams, and members of John Prine’s ban, among others. She sits on the advisory board for the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa’s Bob Dylan Archive, and, most recently, has launched Ink in the Grooves Live, a Traveling Public Humanities.

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States and co-sponsored by the Department of English, Department of History and the Facult of Music, University of Toronto.

Description

Local Government Revenue Initiative (LoGRI), in partnership with the Addis Tax Initiative (ATI) is organising a virtual workshop series, which will bring together national and subnational policy decision-makers, representatives of governments, tax administrations, and relevant stakeholders from ATI partner countries and LoGRI experts in order to provide technical, administrative, and policy advice on core areas related to effective revenue mobilisation through property taxation. In addition, the workshops will be succeeded by policy recommendations factsheets, follow-up activities, and tailored advisory and consultancy services based on the outcomes of the discussions. Please find out more details in the launch article (see https://www.addistaxinitiative.net/news/policy-design-property-taxation-logri) available on the ATI website.    

The series, to be held between March and May 2023, will explore in four sessions approaches to tap into the property tax potential. The first workshop will be focussed on discussing strategies for cost-effective property valuation systems and the second workshop around the theme of re-thinking property identification and registration for taxation purposes. More information and the workshop programme for each day are available on the ATI event page: https://www.addistaxinitiative.net/event/ati-logri-workshop-series

Simultaneous interpretation will be provided from / into English, French, and Spanish.

Description

About the speakers:

Maria Berlinska, Ukrainian military volunteer and women’s rights advocate.

Oksana Kis, Head of the Departmeny of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Anna Kvit is a Visiting Research Fellow at University College London. Anna’s research is focused on gender equality and women’s rights in the military sector of Ukraine. She has also worked for international and civil society organizations and contributed to the development of policies on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Ukraine."

Anna Dovgopol, Women Lead in Emergency Coordinator, CARE Ukraine.

Galyna Kotliuk, Gender and Democracy Program Coordinator at the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Chair: Ksenya Kiebuzinski, co-Director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, Head of the Petro Jacyk Central & East European Resource Centre.

Description

How can we understand Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine? Which of our pre-existing classifications of war best encapsulates the motives for armed intervention?  In this presentation, Dr. Richard Arnold argues that the invasion should be seen as an ethnic war, one in which Ukrainians are fighting for ethnicity whereas the Russians are fighting about ethnicity. One of the most prominent symbols of the shared history between the two countries is the Cossack legacy and the ideas are evaluated against event analysis of developments in each country, focus groups conducted with Ukrainian refugees in Poland, and salience graphs of the Cossack image in the Russian and Ukrainian presses.

About the speakers:

Richard Arnold is the author of Russian Nationalism and Ethnic Violence: Symbolic Violence, Lynching, Pogrom, and Massacre (2016, Routledge) and a member of the PONARS Eurasia network. His work has appeared in numerous journals and book series, including Post-Soviet Affairs, Theoretical Criminology, Problems of Post Communism, Nationalities Papers, PS: Political Science and Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies and the Oxford Handbook on the Radical Right. He was guest co-editor (with Andrew Foxall, Henry Jackson Institute [London]) on special editions of a journal on the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics and the FIFA 2018 World Cup. He teaches classes in comparative politics and international relations, including The Politics of International Sport and the Model United Nations annual trip to New York.

Ed Schatz (Chair) is the director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, director of the Belt and Road in Global Perspective, director of Eurasia Initiative and  professor for the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His latest book, Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia, was published with Stanford University Press. His previous books include Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (2017) and Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (2009). Schatz is currently working with Professor Rachel Silvey on a SSHRC-funded project about the downstream effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and directs CERES’ Eurasia Initiative.

Description

 March 27, 2023 7:00 – 8:30 PM (EDT) / March 28, 2023 8:00 – 9:30 AM (JST)  

The Canada-Japan relationship stands at a pivotal moment. Canada recently announced its much-awaited Indo-Pacific strategy, which promises a “generational Canadian response” to the rising influence of the region. For its part, Japan has emerged as a key defender of the rules-based order, and the Kishida government is overseeing a transformational shift of the country’s national security strategy. Both countries face major challenges in retooling their domestic and foreign policies to align with 21st century challenges such as economic and technological disruptions, the rise of China, climate change, and global democratic backsliding. How should we understand recent policy transformations in each country? How can the two countries cooperate to address regional and global concerns? This event assembles a panel of leading experts to address these questions on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan at the University of Toronto.   

Speakers:  

Yuichi Hosoya is professor of international politics at Keio University, Tokyo. Professor Hosoya was a member of the Advisory Board at Japan’s National Security Council (NSC) (2014-2016). He was also a member of Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel on Reconstruction of the Legal Basis for Security (2013-14), and Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel on National Security and Defense Capabilities (2013). Professor Hosoya studied international politics at Rikkyo (BA), Birmingham (MIS), and Keio (Ph.D.). He was a visiting professor and Japan Chair (2009–2010) at Sciences-Po in Paris (Institut d’Études Politiques) and a visiting fellow (Fulbright Fellow, 2008–2009) at Princeton University.   

Rie Kijima is an assistant professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Her research addresses topics such as international assessments, education reforms, gender and STEAM learning. Previously, she was a Lecturer and Interim Director in the International Comparative Education/International Education Policy Analysis Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in International Comparative Education from Stanford University and her B.A. from International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. She has previously worked at the World Bank as an education consultant specializing in monitoring and evaluation and traveled frequently to Morocco, Tunisia, Vietnam, and Laos. She has been affiliated with the Stanford Program in International and Cross-Cultural Education, Keio Graduate School of Media Design, Japan International Cooperation Agency, Silicon Valley Japan Platform, and the United States Japan Council. She is the Scott M. Johnson Fellow of the United States Japan Leadership Program. In 2016, she co-founded SKY Labo, an education non-profit organization to promote inquiry-based approaches to STEAM learning. She co-authored a book on Design Thinking and STEAM Education which was published by Asahi Shinbun Press in January 2019. She was featured as one of 100 women entrepreneurs around the world by Forbes Japan in March 2019.  

David A. Welch is University Research Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. He teaches at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and is co-editor (with Toni Erskine and Stefano Guzzini) of International Theory. His 2005 book Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change (Princeton University Press) is the inaugural winner of the International Studies Association ISSS Book Award for the best book published in 2005 or 2006, and his 1993 book Justice and the Genesis of War (Cambridge University Press) is the winner of the 1994 Edgar S. Furniss Award for an Outstanding Contribution to National Security Studies. He is the author most recently of Security: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and is also co-author of Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation (Pearson Education, 2020); Vietnam if Kennedy had Lived: Virtual JFK (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Concise History (Oxford University Press, 2011);  On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (Noonday, 1990); and Cuba on the Brink: Castro, The Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). He is co-editor of Japan as a ‘Normal Country’? (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Frank Cass, 1998), and his articles have appeared in Asian Perspective, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Ethics and International Affairs, Foreign Affairs, The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Intelligence and National Security, Group Decision and Negotiation, International Journal, International Negotiation, International Security, International Journal, International Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, The Mershon International Studies Review, The Review of International Studies, and Security Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1990.  

Moderator:  

Louis W. Pauly, the J. Stefan Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, established the Centre for the Study of Global Japan in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in 2017 and directed it until June 2019. He remains an affiliated faculty member of the Centre as well as of the Innovation Policy Lab and the International Relations Program. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 2012 to 2017 and held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Governance from 2002 to 2016. He was Director of the Centre for International Studies at the U of T from 1997 to 2011. A graduate of Cornell University, the London School of Economics, New York University, and Fordham University, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Senior Fellow of Massey College, and a Fellow and Governing Board Member of Trinity College (Toronto). He has held visiting positions at the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, Oxford University, Northwestern University, Osaka City University, the University of Munich, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, and the Brookings Institution. With Emanuel Adler, from 2007 to 2012 he edited International Organization, a top-ranked journal in the fields of international relations and international political economy. He was given the Distinguished Scholar Award in International Political Economy by the International Studies Association in 2015. Before his initial appointment at the U of T in 1987, Pauly held management positions in the Royal Bank of Canada, won an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations, and served on the staff of the International Monetary Fund.

Introductory Remarks:   

Phillip Lipscy (Director, Centre for the Study of Global Japan, Munk School)  

Consul-General Takuya Sasayama (Consul-General of Japan, Toronto)  

Description

From the Red Desert to the Red Planet: Military engineers, granular materials, and how we know what we know about extreme environments

In the 1940s and 1950s U.S. military engineers fanned out across the world to construct military installations in some of the world’s most extreme and inhospitable environments. This talk charts the work of the engineers as they moved from sand dunes in the Sahara, to the ice on top of Greenland, and then to plans for building a base on the Moon. All the while, the engineers were acutely aware of the materials in question: the sand, the snow, the stardust. By exploring such materials — at field stations around the world and in laboratories closer to home – military engineers created new ways of understanding such environments. What they learned, over time, is that places such as the desert and Arctic are not discrete landscapes; they are tied to our everyday in surprising and intimate ways.

This talk is drawn from Heefner’s current manuscript, Sand, Snow, and Stardust, the history of how we know what we know about extreme environments. Places such as the desert, the Arctic, and outer space that exist out there somewhere, on the edges of our maps. These are places that have long and generally been written off – wastelands, useless, remote, lifeless. Heefner traces the relationship between U.S. military engineers and their construction projects in the extremes beginning in the 1940s, when the U.S. government realized it knew nothing about such places, through a Cold War near-obsession with mastering them, to the present day, when we find ourselves in the uncomfortable predicament that the U.S. military might be the one organization that can best help navigate a world in which more and more of our environments are becoming extreme.

Gretchen Heefner is an Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University where she is also the Associate Director of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures. Her work centers on militarization, the environment, and the surprisingly intimate relations between national security regimes and the everyday. Her first book, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2012), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. Other work has appeared in Diplomatic History, Environmental History, Modern American History, the Western Historical Quarterly, and the Pacific Historic Review. Her current book project, Sand, Snow, and Stardust: U.S. Military Engineers and the Environmental Extremes will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024.

Description

The film screening is free and open to the public. The filmmaker, Pimpaka Towira, will be present for an introduction and Q&A.

Sponsored by the Department of Visual Studies, Southeast Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, and Cinema Studies Institute and supported by Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.

THE ISLAND FUNERAL (2015)

Directed by Pimpaka Towira

Duration: 105 min | Format: DCP, color | Language: Thai with English Subtitles |

Production: Extra Virgin Co, Ltd

Won the Best Asian Future Film Award, 28th Tokyo International Film Festival
Won FIPRESCI Prize, the 40th Hong Kong International Film Festival
Won Best Cinematographer, Asian New Talent Awards, 19th Shanghai International Film Festival
Won Silver Hanoman Award, Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival 2016

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQQXuDzYJkM

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

On 19 May 2010, I was driving back from Pattani to Bangkok. Upon reaching the city, it was getting dark. A curfew was announced, with military tanks running everywhere. The situation did not seem to be very different from Pattani where I just left. But I saw the image I never thought before that I would get to see in this lifetime: that of black thick clouds of smoke rising up to cover the entire city. Even though I may have already experienced the anxious situation, of the nation being torn apart, that had been happening in the capital for several months, but this time the image of what happened that day will become forever entrenched in me and my generations’ memories for a long time.

I feel that human memory is a special thing, as each person may remember what they see in different ways or choose to remember it the way they want to. Importantly, memory can last forever or turn into a story being told from one to another. And a powerful story may also become planted in the minds and goes on to be a part of the history of a person, or a group of people, before anyone realizes it. At the same time, memory can also turn out to be a powerful weapon that makes people who strongly believe in it gets extremely violent in defending what they believe.

Over the past few years, I traveled to many places – the North, Northeast and South. I got to talk with the local people and caught a glimpse into their lives while listening to the stories told from their memories. I absorbed the power of those tales from each region, from each individual. At the same time, I also feel that all these conflicts that are occurring right now in my own country may not just be about what is happening right here at this moment, but they are tied to the memories from the past, from the old stories that may either be true or with some added elements.

I take a look at my memory and see a connection between mine and others’. These memories are also connected with those of many other people’s. The confrontation of these mental images makes me feel that I want to create a memory of the idealized world. But whether that really exists or not may not be the point. It may just be the world of hope that only cinema can create.

The Island Funeral is not a film about the conflict and violent situation of the southern Thai border, and not a story of any group of persons in particular. It is film about everybody who is looking for their ideal world amidst the conflicts of the internal clash in their past and memories.

Director’s Bio:

Pimpaka Towira is a film director, producer and programmer who is a pioneer among female film directors in the Thai independent film scene since the early 1990s. She received international acclaim for her first feature One Night Husband which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. Her second feature, The Island Funeral, won Best Asian Future Film Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival. She has also directed award-winning winning fiction, experimental and documentary short films. She has been a professional film programmer for more than 15 years. Since 2015, she has been the Programme Director for the Bangkok ASEAN Film Festival. From 2017-2018, she was the Program Director for Singapore International Film Festival. She was honoured with the national Silpathorn Award in 2009 by the Ministry of Culture of Thailand. Pimpaka has led the Deep South Young Filmmaker Project I and II with young people from the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat that are considered conflict zones.   

Description

Capital generated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects local networks, however, little is known about how it transforms these local networks. This knowledge is nevertheless important in order to assess the trickle-down effects of the BRI and, more broadly, its feasibility in specific local contexts.

Based on 16 months of ethnographic field research in one of the main Belty and Road Initiative (BRI) hubs, Verena La Mela studied how women sustain BRI capital by converting money into enduring social relationships, which secure social support in times of uncertainty. In doing so, she extends the conversation about the BRI as a transformative agent of local networks by adding a temporal dimension to the discussion.

About the speakers:

Verena La Mela, M.A., is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, supported by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. She is also a researcher in the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project “ROADWORK: An Anthropology of Infrastructure on China’s Inner Asian Borders” (https://roadworkasia.com/).

Rachel Silvey is the Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning. She is a Faculty Affiliate in CDTS, WGSI, and the Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle. Professor Silvey is best known for her research on women’s labour and migration in Indonesia. She has published widely in the fields of migration studies, cultural and political geography, gender studies, and critical development. Her major funded research projects have focused on migration, gender, social networks, and economic development in Indonesia; immigration and employment among Southeast Asian-Americans; migration and marginalization in Bangladesh and Indonesia; and religion, rights and Indonesian migrant women workers in Saudi Arabia.

Description

Professor Igor Lukes talks about the 30th anniversary of independent Czech Republic, Central Europe, Russia, both past and present.

About the speaker:

Lukes writes primarily about Central Europe. His publications deal with the interwar period, the Cold War, and contemporary developments in East Central Europe and Russia. His scholarly articles have been published in eleven countries and in such periodicals as Journal of Contemporary History, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Historie a vojenstvi, Studies in Intelligence, and Slavic Review. Lukes is the recipient of the Central Intelligence Agency 2012 Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Literature on Intelligence and the 2000 Stanley Z. Pech Prize for his article The Rudolf Slansky Affair: New Evidence.

In 2018 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. He was the 2017 Phi Beta Kappa Honorary Initiate, and had Erasmus Mundus Grant in 2015 and a Fulbright Specialist Grant in 2014. He was a 2012 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Bitton National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. In 2004-05 he was a Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His work has won the support of various other institutions, including Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, IREX, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1997, Lukes won the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching at Boston University.

Lukes is Honorary Consul General of the Czech Republic in Boston.

Description

Bai Chongxi’s life spanned the Late Qing, the founding of the Chinese Republic and its fracturing into the so-called “Warlord Era,” the Nanjing Decade, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. His displacement from the mainland to Taiwan in the late 1940s was jarring. Beyond being very far and very different from Guangxi, the move required a quick realignment of ethnopolitics and outreach to anticolonial Muslims around the world. Suddenly, the goals of retaking the mainland from the Communists subsumed the long efforts of Chinese Muslims to be included into visions for the emerging Chinese nation-state. This talk will examine some of the tensions between the ways that Bai tried to ensure that Muslim voices were heard in postwar politics and the ways that he navigated the new geopolitical realities in the Global South. By doing this, we see that Bai attempted to foreground Muslim concerns as a pressing geopolitical issue for the Nationalists.  

Speaker:

Kelly Hammond is an Associate Professor of East Asian History in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas. She is also the Associate Director of International and Global Studies. Hammond specializes in modern Chinese and Japanese history, and her work focuses on Islam and politics in 20th-century East Asia. She serves on the editorial board of Twentieth-Century China and is the Associate Editor for Modern China at the Journal of Asian Studies.  

Description

This presentation will discuss on-going work on the nature of slavery as revealed in the sharia court records of Aleppo. It will include statistical information on aspects such as regional origins, gender, prices, manumission, and runaways. It will also focus on a couple of interesting case studies and suggest some very preliminary conclusions.

Description

About the speakers:

Olha Khometa is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages at the University of Toronto, where she is working on her dissertation, entitled “The Politics of Style: Late Modernism in the Ukrainian, Jewish Russophone and Russian Literatures in the 1930s.” Olha earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees with a major in Ukrainian Language and Literature, at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, Ukraine. She completed the summer school program at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute in 2014. She is a co-organizer of the series of literary readings entitled Contemporary Ukrainian Diaspora & Emigre Literature in cooperation with the Canadian Ukrainian Art Foundation in Toronto.

Anna Rakityanskaya is the Librarian of Russian and Belarusian collections at Harvard Library. Her special professional interests include creating, describing and curating collections of ephemeral and non-traditional materials in both physical and born-digital formats. She is also actively involved in collaborative digital collecting projects. My latest article Belarusian Politics and Society Web Archive: Preserving the Belarusian Grassroots Protest will appear in the latest issue of the Journal of Belarusian Studies.

Olena Pavlova is a Professor of Ethics, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies at the Taras Schevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Maria Rohozha is a Professor of Ethics, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies at the Taras Schevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Ksenya Kiebuzinski (Chair) is the co-director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, head of the Petro Jacyk Central & East European Resource Centre, and Slavic Resources Coordinator for the University of Toronto Libraries. Her research interests include nineteenth-century French stage representations of Ukraine, its historical figures, and events, as well as bibliography, the history of the book, and Austrian Galicia. Recent publications include a forthcoming volume, The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook (Amsterdam UP, 2016), co-edited with Alexander Motyl, and Maximum Imaginativeness: An Exhibition on Modern Czech Book Design, 1900–1950: Exhibition and Catalogue (Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 2015), plus articles on Sacher-Masoch’s Galician tales in French translation, for a volume she coedited of the journal 20th-century Ukraine: Culture, Ideology, Politics (2015); another on Léo Delibes’ Galician opera ‘Kassya,’ Austrian History Yearbook (2015); and one on a Carpathian band of brigands for a festschrift in honor of Paul Robert Magocsi (2015)

Description

Joshua Pilzer’s book launch, Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of "Korea’s Hiroshima" (Oxford University Press, 2022).

*The presentation of the book will be followed by a reception*

 Book

About the book:

Based on nine years of intermittent fieldwork, Quietude recounts the stories, songs and other arts of survival of Korean atomic bomb survivors and their children in Hapcheon, Korea, offering a corrective to the enduring, multifaceted neglect and marginalization they have faced. Struck by the quiet of many atom bomb victims and their children, many of whom suffer from radiation-related illness and disability, I discuss its many sources: notions of Japanese soft-spokenness, vocal disability, the quiet contemplation of texts, the changes to the human heart as one grows older, the experience of war, social marginalization, traumatic experience, and various social movement discourses. I consider victims’ uses of voice, speech, song, and movement in the struggle for national and global recognition, in the ongoing work of negotiating the traumatic past, and in the effort to consolidate and maintain selves and relationships in the present.

About the author:

Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, and the relationships between music, everyday life, survival, memory, traumatic experience, marginalization, socialization, gendered violence, public culture, mass media, social practice and identity. He is particularly interested in the ethnography of the “everyday,” in the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression, and in the vistas of ethnomusicology beyond music. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. He is currently conducting fieldwork for an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety, authority and legitimate violence.

Description

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Description

The talk focuses on one particular set of actors within Dr. Kuby’s broader research on American Jewish activism in post-1945 France: the Paris Office staff of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

Kuby uses the case of the AJC to illuminate how France became the key setting for the American Jewish confrontation with post-Holocaust Europe. By considering how the organization’s leaders intervened in French conversations about both the recent Jewish genocide and the fate of North African Jewish populations, she demonstrates their eagerness to displace antisemitism  onto non-Western "others," elide the French state’s own participation in the Holocaust, and cast France, despite its now-diminished geopolitical role, as the epicenter of a cosmopolitan, tolerant West.

About the speakers:

Emma Kuby is an associate professor of History at Northern Illinois University. An intellectual, political, and cultural historian of modern Europe, she specializes in postwar France and its empire. Her book Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association and the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies.

William Nelson is a professor in the History department at University of Toronto at Scarborough. Nelson specializes in the history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. His research focuses on the ways that ideas about time, race, and biopolitics emerged in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic world.

Description

Policy reports on the “status of women” constitute one of the most abundant archives on the world’s women in the second half of the twentieth century. This talk offers an account of and a reckoning with the promises and limits of the social scientific report through an analysis of archives of early “status of women” reports, focusing on reports produced in South Asia from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Speaker:

Durba Mitra is the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Acting Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University. She is the author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Description

BOOK TALK

Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature (Columbia University Press, 2022).

Abstract:

No scholar of modern Chinese literary studies in its globalizing mode will miss the recent spotlight on Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature. Previously untapped, works from or about the Southeast Asian country are now read for bracing ideas on language, ethnicity, and diaspora. In Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature, Chan shows how the minor literary formation’s grasp of its own marginality in the world-Chinese literary space constitutes the threshold—instead of a hurdle—to creating signature aesthetic imprints that foster global outlooks.

In the book, Chan describes the strategic “worlding” of modern Chinese literature that involves authorial navigation of inter-connected literary spaces. Foregrounding the inter-Asian linkages between Malaysia and other Sinitic-speaking locales (such as China, Taiwan and Singapore) in the writing practices of Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, Chan analyzes narrative representations of multilingual social realities, and authorial reflections about colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia as valid literary terrain. Both sets of creative discourse underlie the literary worlds built out of the physical journeys, the interactions among social groups, and the mindset shifts entailed in creating distinctive literary languages for the place. Historicizing such “crossings” from the 1930s to the 2000s, Chan contends that new perspectives from the periphery are essential to understanding the globalization of modern Chinese literature. By emphasizing the inner diversities and connected histories in the margins, Malaysian Crossings offers a powerful argument for remapping global Chinese literature and world literature.

Author’s Bio:

CHAN CHEOW THIA is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include modern Chinese-Sinophone literature, Southeast Asian studies, and diaspora studies. His book, Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature, is published by Columbia University Press as part of the “Global Chinese Culture” series. His articles have appeared in disciplinary and regionally focused venues such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, as well as PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature. He co-edited the special issue of PRISM on “The Worlds of Southeast Asian Chinese Literature” (September 2022). As a literary translator and editor, he has worked with Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine.

Description

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Description

Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University College and the University of Toronto Libraries Proudly Co-Present:

A panel discussion about teaching through film in the context of #stopthehate and transnational anti-racist activism. Speakers will reflect on the distinct pedagogical possibilities of film for the future of teaching against racism in all its forms with specific attention to Asian Canadian Studies. Drawing on examples from their own work, panelists will discuss the politics of race and the potential of emerging visions of anti-racist solidarity enabled through visual studies.

Followed by reception

Description

After the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russian-backed separatist movement in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Western and Russian observers alike assumed that Dnipropetrovsk would be the next front in Russia’s hybrid war on Ukraine. However, Dnipro underwent an unexpected transformation from the “Rocket City” clinging to its Soviet laurels into “The Outpost of Ukraine” (forpost Ukraїny), a metaphor which reflects its strategic role in both defending and protecting the state.

This presentation chronicles and analyzes the public discourses of civic nationalism that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the war in Donbas and crystallized in the years since. Drawing upon representations of Dnipro’s role in the war in the local and national media, memory institutions, and new urban spaces, journalist Olena Andriushchenko and the cultural historian Nick Kupensky show how the metaphor that Dnipro was the “outpost of Ukraine” proved to be a particularly effective new myth, one with the power to signify both strength and compassion and synthesize a wide array of civic activity: volunteering to fight, caring for IDPs, healing the wounded, and facilitating new social relations.

About the Speakers:

Nick Kupensky is an associate professor at the United States Air Force Academy, where he teaches Russian and Foreign Area Studies. He is completing a book manuscript The Soviet Industrial Sublime: The Awe and Fear of DniproHES, 1928-1945. His research on Carpatho-Rusyn, Russian, and Ukrainian modernism has appeared in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, H-Ukraine, Muzeinyi visnyk, Nationalities Papers, Richnyk Ruskoi Bursy, Ukraina Moderna, and the edited collection Ukraine’s Outpost: Dnipropetrovsk and the Russian-Ukrainian War.

Olena Andriushchenko is a journalist from Dnipro, Ukraine, where she has worked as a correspondent for the newspaper Dnepr vechernii, the director of the press center at Open TV Media, and a freelancer for Voice of America, Ukrainian People, and other American media outlets. Her research on the war in Donbas has appeared in the edited collection Ukraine’s Outpost: Dnipropetrovsk and the Russian-Ukrainian War. Her book manuscript Changed by War: A Reporter’s Notebook collects the stories of IDPs, soldiers, and volunteers.

Description

Abstract:

Many have referred to an unfolding "Asian Century." Yet, the place of historical difference, sometimes the problem of “race,” in the making of Asia, with Japan as a key example, has not acquired consideration commensurate with its implication. Matters African American as in the historical vision of W. E. B. Du Bois, namely his sense of a modern global “problem of the color line” may be of assistance. Asia, to take Japan as a complex example, was for Du Bois an utterly persuasive historical example; yet, two continuing twin privileges—the idea of the utterly singular exemplar of the human, or natality, and the persistent retention of the idea of sovereignty as also rooted in a singular exemplar (e.g. the monarch, the ethnic group, the party)—together articulate the fundamental contemporary conundrum of modern collective inhabitation. A strong sense of the African American example and the conception that lead to Du Bois’s acute recognition of this problematic before its cataclysmic eruption during the Second World War and ongoing aftermath may be useful for a world-wide community of and thinkers and practitioners within the present recrudescence that has reimagined Asia, including Japan, on a global scale.

Speaker Bio:

Nahum Dimitri Chandler serves as a professor in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. His teaching and research are in the fields of African American studies, literature, philosophy, and modern intellectual history. He is the author of X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (2014), as well as the editor of W. E. B. Du Bois, The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays (2015), both from Fordham University Press. An enlarged edition of his 2013 book Toward an African Future – Of the Limit of World was issued in July 2021 by SUNY Press. His study “Beyond This Narrow Now:” Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois was released in February 2022 by Duke University Press. Also, forthcoming in the May of 2023 from Duke Press is Annotations: On the Early Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. He is Associate Editor of the journal CR: The New Centennial Review; as well, he has served since its founding on the editorial team of The A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought.

Description

In this talk, Choi Chatterjee will share highlights from her recent book, Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach that compares British and Russian imperial history. She will speak about the concept of imperial nationalism found in the works of Vasily Klyuchevsky and George Trevelyan. These historians had a dream that to some may seem an impossible one—to rescue the good nation from the hideous coils of imperialism. Chatterjee will consider the role of the historian in writing the nation and empire.

About the speaker:

Choi Chatterjee is Professor and Chair of History at California State University, Los Angeles. She has published two monographs, co-authored two textbooks, and co-edited four volumes of original scholarly essays. Chatterjee’s most recent monograph, Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach was published in 2022 by Bloomsbury Press.  She is a passionate advocate of everyday environmentalism and is a co-founder of the research project: Historical Database of Climate Adapted Agriculture in Los Angeles.

Description

This talk presents the doctrine of the seven levels or places along the path to liberation that is outlined by the sage Vasiṣṭha in the Mokṣopāya (c. 950 CE), a philosophical literary text from Kashmir that is better known in its later Advaita Vedānta affiliated recension as the Yogaavāsiṣṭha. The Yogavāsiṣṭha is an important text of nondual Vedānta that has been transmitted, translated, and commented upon over the centuries. However, when compared with the Mokṣopāya, it is clear that the Yogavāsiṣṭha contains significant corruptions that alter the doctrine of the text. With the near completion of the critical edition of the Mokṣopāya by scholars in Halle, Marburg and Mainz, passages that have never been printed before are available to be studied by scholars. In this talk, I present the rich material from the sixteen sarga-long yogabhūmi passage from the Nirvāṇaprakaraṇa—the sixth book of the Mokṣopāya—that has not been studied before. The Path of Yoga is an everyday path in the human developmental cycle that will ultimately be embarked upon by any inconspicuous person when they become dissasfied with worldly life and devoted to going beyond saṃsāra. At some point in a human life—which extends across lifetimes—a person will inevitably enter the Path of Yoga as the natural culmination of the average life, and the seven bhūmikās are stages of growth, markers of progress or levels of attainment along the way.

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Description

On the occasion of his first visit to Canada as Secretary General of the European External Action Service, Mr. Stefano Sannino (deputy minister of foreign affairs in the EU system) comes to the Munk School of Global Affairs for an open discussion on how the European Union is adapting, together with its allies, to face and shape an increasingly challenging geopolitical context.

About the speaker:

Stefano Sannino is the Secretary-General of the European External Action Service (EEAS) of the European Union since 1 January 2021. He held the post of the Deputy Secretary General for Economic and Global Issues at the EEAS from April 2020 to December 2021.

From March 2016 to April 2020 he was Ambassador of Italy to Spain and Andorra. From July 2013 until March 2016 he held the position of Permanent Representative of Italy to the EU in Brussels.

After a period at the Cabinet of the President of the Commission (from 2002 to 2004) he joined the Directorate General for External Relations as Director for Crisis Management and Representative at PSC (2004-2006), then Director for Latin America (2008-2009) and finally as Deputy Director General for Asia and Latin America (2009-2010). In 2010 he moved to the Directorate General for Enlargement as Deputy Director General and later as Director General, a position he held until June 2013.

From 2006 to 2008 he was the Diplomatic Advisor to the Italian Prime Minister and his Personal Representative to G8 summits.

He has also held the position of Ambassador and Head of the OSCE Mission in Belgrade from 2001 to 2002 and within the Italian Diplomatic Service: Deputy Head of Mission of the Italian Embassy in Belgrade (1994-1996), Head of the Secretariat of the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1996-1998), Diplomatic Advisor and Head of the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Trade (1998-2001). Sannino is fluent in Spanish, English and French beyond his native Italian.

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Description

When international development organization’s began working in post-Soviet Central Asia in the 1990s, they encountered newly independent countries that did not fit the hierarchies of development familiar from previous decades. They relied on local experts, activists, and interpreters to make sense of the places they encountered, design assistance programs, and carry out interventions. This talk will explore how international development workers and their counterparts in the region made sense of each other, and how their interactions shaped mutual perceptions that would continue to affect the way donors approached the region and how locals viewed the development enterprise.  

About the speakers:

Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University. He earned his BA from the George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics, after which he spent a decade teaching at the University of Amsterdam. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.

Ed Schatz (Chair), Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Director of the Belt and Road in Global Perspective, Director of Eurasia Initiative, Professor for the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His latest book, Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia, was published with Stanford University Press. His previous books include Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (2017) and Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (2009). Professor Schatz is currently working with Professor Rachel Silvey on a SSHRC-funded project about the downstream effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and directs CERES’ Eurasia Initiative.

Description

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Description

Estonia is a small frontline NATO member which is playing an oversized role in the Western response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Estonia has provided more aid per capita to Ukraine than any other country, devoting 1% of its entire GDP to help resist aggression. For more than a year Estonia has been particularly busy assisting Ukraine and working to bolster European security and maintain alliance unity. Mr Roger will give a short overview of what and why has been done so far and needs to be done in the future.

About the speakers:

Martin Roger is the Director General for NATO and Transatlantic Relations at the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Previously, Roger served as Estonia’s Ambassador to Poland, Deputy Head of Mission in France and Director for Eastern Europe in the Estonian MFA. He holds an LLM in International Law from the University of Amsterdam.

Andres Kasekamp is a professor at the Department of History and the Elmar Tampold Chair of Estonian Studies at the University of Toronto. Kasekamp’s research interests include populist radical right parties, memory politics, European foreign and security policy, and cooperation and conflict in the Baltic Sea region. He has served as the editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies, and is currently the President-Elect of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies.

Description

This one-day international conference explores the question of “plants and empires” from multiple vantage points: circulation and networks, labour, plant uses (medicinal, perfume, culinary). A host of spaces are considered, including botanical gardens, perfumeries, sites of contact. Plants considered include breadfruit, ylang-ylang and vanilla, amongst many others.

Panel I, 9 AM, Jackman Building, Room 100

Andreas Motsch, University of Toronto, “The discovery of panax quinquefolius (Canadian ginseng): botany, theology and the history of pharmacology.”

Prof. Bertie Mandelblatt, John Carter Brown Library, Rhode Island "Breadfruit between Two Global Empires: Slavery, Subsistence and Imperial Competition from New Guinea to Martinique."

Dr. Oana Baboi, University of Toronto. “Experiences with oriental plants: 16th-century Portuguese surveys of Indian materia medical.”

Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library Visit, 11 AM

Panel II, 2 PM, Jackman Building Room 100

Prof. Owen White, University of Delaware, "A Different Kind of Colonist: Phylloxera in Algeria."

Mathilde Cocoual, Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine, "Colonisation et nouvelle géographie des plantes à parfum (19e-20e siècle)". Prof. Eric Jennings, University of Toronto, “The French empire’s near vanilla monopoly, 1870-1960.”

Prof. Gillian McGillivray, Glendon College/ York University, "Empire’s Orphan: Cane-sugar and Capitalism in Brazil, 1889-1959."

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

China’s economy is rebounding. Beijing let Alibaba’s Jack Ma out in public again, sending good vibes to private businesses.  Meanwhile, the United States is leading the charge on banning Chinese products like TikTok.  What does this all mean for the world’s second largest economy and for consumers at home?  How are we to assess political risk in Chinese markets given the state of current affairs?  Join us for a panel with leading figures in business and academia for a timely analysis.

Panelists’ Bios:

Craig Allen is the president of the US-China Business Council (USCBC), a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization representing over 260 American companies doing business with China. Prior to joining USCBC, Craig had a long, distinguished career in US public service.

Craig began his government career in 1985 at the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA). He entered government as a Presidential Management Intern, rotating through the four branches of ITA. From 1986 to 1988, he was an international economist in ITA’s China Office. In 1988, Craig transferred to the American Institute in Taiwan, where he served as Director of the American Trade Center in Taipei. He held this position until 1992, when he returned to the Department of Commerce for a three-year posting at the US Embassy in Beijing as Commercial Attaché. In 1995, Craig was assigned to the US Embassy in Tokyo, where he served as a Commercial Attaché. In 1998, he was promoted to Deputy Senior Commercial Officer. In 1999, Craig became a member of the Senior Foreign Service.

After a four-year tour in South Africa, Craig became Deputy Assistant Secretary for Asia at the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. He later became Deputy Assistant Secretary for China. Craig was sworn in as the United States ambassador to Brunei Darussalam on December 19, 2014. He served there until July 2018, when he transitioned to President of the US-China Business Council.

Kristen Hopewell is Canada Research Chair in Global Policy in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues, and Co-Director of the Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia. Her research specializes in international trade, global governance, industrial policy and development, with a focus on emerging powers. She is a Wilson China Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

Dr. Hopewell is the author of Clash of Powers: US-China Rivalry in Global Trade Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Breaking the WTO: How Emerging Powers Disrupted the Neoliberal Project (Stanford University Press, 2016).

Kyle Jaros is Associate Professor of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. He is also a faculty fellow of the Keough School’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. Jaros’s research explores the politics of regional development, central-local relations, and metropolitan governance with a focus on China. His first book, China’s Urban Champions: The Politics of Spatial Development (Princeton University Press, 2019) examines the policy logics and political factors driving uneven development in China’s provinces.

He is currently at work on a second book project that examines changes in the structure and workings of China’s big-city governments to understand the evolution of the party-state system under Xi Jinping.

Description

The India-Canada Association Lecture

Abstract:

This talk presents ongoing research on the Tantric traditions of Kashmir in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is based on a newly prepared critical edition and translation (with Prof. Ben Williams, Naropa University) of Sanskrit hymns composed by the followers of the prolific and influential Kashmirian author, Sābib Kaula. Many of the hymns are about their guru and their lineage, but others reframe earlier Śaiva and Śākta traditions popular in Kashmir. This talk focuses on three hymns: the Bhairavīśaktistotra (modelled on Abhinavagupta’s Bhairavastotra) and Tripurasundarīstotra of Gaṇeśa Bhaṭṭāraka and the Svacchandamaheśvarāṣṭaka of Govinda Kaula. Based on this analysis, it argues for new perspectives on the history and evolution of religious and literary traditions in Kashmir.

Speaker Bio:

Hamsa Stainton is an Associate Professor in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University. His recent research focuses on a popular genre of Sanskrit devotional poetry in north India, the hymn of praise (stotra). Recent publications include Tantrapuṣpāñjali: Tantric Traditions and Philosophy of Kashmir; Studies in Memory of Pandit H.N. Chakravarty (co-edited with Bettina Bäumer) and Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (Oxford University Press, 2019).

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This seminar is intended for graduate students and faculty.

The technologies of artificial intelligence are rapidly advancing, and many experts anticipate the emergence of a machine with powers vastly dwarfing humanity, and capable of extinguishing humanity.  Human survival may depend on the design and implementation of restraints on AI, but can this be done?  This paper explores how the seemingly novel ASI control problem is in many ways an extension of the republican constitutional project of restraining centralized state power to protect popular liberty and security, and of designing machines and infrastructures artifacts for public safety.

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Accurate mental maps are vital for all practical activity, but humanity’s maps are now profoundly outdated, and urgently need replacing. The explosive expansion of human activity empowered by advancing technology and new scientific knowledge have produced — and revealed — a New Earth, marked by multiple perils to civilization and human survival, from nuclear war and climate change to artificial superintelligence. Over the last half century, at least nine boldly new macro-mappings of the overall human situation have been proposed. Each encapsulates important new realities, but each also dangerously hides. And all fail to reflect the uneven historical pathways generating global and planetary Earth and our fractured world order.

About The Speaker

Daniel H. Deudney teaches political science, international relations and political theory at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a BA in political science and philosophy from Yale University, a MPA in science, technology, and public policy from George Washington University, and a PhD in political science from Princeton University.

During the late 1970s he served as senior legislative assistant for energy and environment, and legislative director, to Senator John Durkin (D-NH). During the early 1980s he was a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington D.C. During 2010-11 he was senior research fellow at the TransAtlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund in Washington D.C. His areas of research are general international relations theory, international political theory and republicanism, and contemporary global issues (nuclear, outer space, environment, and energy).

His publications include RENEWABLE ENERGY (Norton, 1983), co-author; and CONTESTED GROUNDS: Conflict and Security in the New Global Environmental Politics (SUNY, 1998), co-editor. He has also published extensively, often with John Ikenberry, on the end of the Cold War and on the Liberal International Order. His book BOUNDING POWER: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton University Press, 2007) was co-winner of the Jervis-Schroeder Prize for the best book in international politics and history by the American Political Science Association, and was co-winner of the Book of the Decade award from the International Studies Association. His most recent book is DARK SKIES: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2020). His current book projects are PAX ATOMICA: Geopolitics, Arms Control and Limited Government; and HOME RULES: Planetary Geopolitics and Terrapolitan Republicanism.

In over twenty years of teaching he has received four major teaching awards, most recently the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award at Johns Hopkins University.

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A conversation with Jack Austin and Bernie Frolic on the foundation and evolution of Canada’s complex relationship with China, moderated by Dr. Emile Dirks.

PARTICIPANTS’ BIOS:

Jack Austin is the co-author of Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa. He was a member of the Senate of Canada for 32 years, representing British Columbia and has championed stronger relations between Canada and Asia. In 1971, as the Serving Deputy Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources, he was part of the first Canadian trade mission to China. He later served as President of the Canada China Business Council and Co-Chair of the Canada China Legislative Association. Senator Austin was awarded the Order of Canada for his contribution in Canada-China relations, and was also instrumental in establishing the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. Austin has been involved in politics and public policy at the highest levels for more than fifty years. He lives in Vancouver.

B. Michael Frolic is the Executive Director of the Asian Business and Management Program and Professor Emeritus of Politics at York University. He first visited China in 1965 and was First Secretary in the Canadian Embassy Beijing in the 1970s. Later he taught at Peking University and Beijing Foreign Studies University and was a visiting professor at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous chapters, monographs and books, including Mao’s People: Sixteen Portraits of Life in Revolutionary China (Harvard University, 1981); Civil Society in China (w/ Timothy Brook, Routledge, 1997), and his latest Canada and China: A Fifty-Year Journey (University of Toronto Press, 2022).

Emile Dirks is a Research Associate at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. His research on police-led mass biometric surveillance in China has been covered by The New York Times, The Economist, and The Intercept, among other publications. He completed his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto in 2022.

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From research-based examples to the resilience of local communities and various sociological polls, Tymofii Brik discusses a year of resilience in Ukraine.

About the Speaker:

Tymofii Brik is serving at Northwestern University as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Department of Sociology during the Spring 2023 quarter.

Brik is rector at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine. His research interests focus on religious markets, long-term social mobility and social network analysis. Since 2021, Brik has served as the national coordinator of the European Social Survey (ESS) in Ukraine, an international comparative study conducted in the majority of European countries since 2002. Brik also serves as the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the CEDOS think tank, as a member of the advisory board of the Texty.org “Rating Sellers” project, and as a member of the advisory board of Gradus Research.

Brik is also one of the co-founders of the public restaurant Urban Space 500 in Kyiv.

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This event is a keynote presentation as part of the Centre for South Asian Studies Graduate Symposium 2023 and is open to public.

Keynote speaker:

Professor Nayanika Mathur (Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford)

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This talk weaves together beastly tales of big cats that make prey of humans in India to ask what they may be telling us about a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists. This talk explores the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. It deploys ethnographic storytelling to explain the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement with the climate crisis.  

Image credit: Nayan Khanolkar

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The Harris Centre and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) invite you to the launch of a new report exploring the relationship between Memorial University and the ocean innovation sector in Newfoundland and Labrador. Join Dr. Rob Greenwood, AVP (Public Engagement and External Relations) and Director of the Harris Centre, for a discussion with the report’s authors and local ocean innovation leaders about the opportunities and challenges highlighted in the report, and a conversation about where we need to go, collectively, in the future.

This event features Rafaele Trapasso (OECD), Maria Sobron Bernal (OECD), Michelle Simms (Genesis Centre), Shiri Breznitz (Munk School), and Kendra MacDonald (Ocean Supercluster).

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The event includes two talks by Bernardo Bolanos Guerra and Camelia Tigau, Visiting Professors at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Global Migration Lab. The titles included are: Three-Step Climate Mobility: Disasters, Economic Migration and Forced Displacement by Bernardo Bolanos Guerra and Underemployment as a Violation of the Responsibility to Protect: Objective Representations of Exiled Professionals in Canada by Camelia Tigau.

Three-Step Climate Mobility: Disasters, Economic Migration and Forced Displacement By Bernardo Bolanos Guerra

· Human mobility in Mexico and Central America is linked to climate change, and it can be tracked through environmental degradation, violence and harshening economic conditions.

· Women, children, and the elderly who stay behind after the migration of men are more vulnerable to internal forced displacement caused by organized crime.

· The environmental conditions leading to international migration and forced internal moves are not fundamentally different.

Underemployment as a Violation of the Responsibility to Protect: Objective Representations of Exiled Professionals in Canada by Camelia Tigau

· Labour integration in conditions that contradicts a person`s previous experience (underemployment) provokes emotional and physical damage.

· Recertification should be part of a more encompassing approach to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in countries of destination.

· Intellectual exiles have an extraordinary capacity to rationalize and even conceptualize conflicts based on their displacement experience, and therefore propose solutions to international conflicts.

About the speakers:

Bernardo Bolanos-Guerra has taught environmental law and political philosophy at the Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico City. His recent work is a proposal for the international regulation of environmental migration. He also reflects on the legal implications of the connection between hydrometeorological processes and forced displacement.

Camelia Tigau is an Associate Researcher at the Center for Research on North America, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and regional vice-president of the Global Research Forum on Diasporas and Transnationalism (GRFDT, India). Her present research aims to outline the differences between voluntary and forced skilled migration.

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While scholars have filled rooms with books about the eastern German border:  where it was, where it should have been, how it moved, how its role in people’s lives shifted and changed across our clearly periodized political histories, the southern German border has received relatively little attention. In part, that is because of the hegemonic position of nation-states and the historians who study and promote them. For them, the eastern border was a perennial problem, one demanding solutions, which led to a great deal of violence. In contrast, the southern German border has not appeared to be much of a problem at all, which might seem to make it less important, less worthy of inquiry.  

In this talk, Glenn Penny argues that the opposite may be true: that this neglected region can tell us more about the contours of a globalized German history than those regions that were animated for so long by a series of titillating and often violent ruptures.

This event is funded by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA). 

About the Speakers:

Glenn Penny studies histories of belonging, knowledge, and migration from the middle of the eighteenth century until the present by pursuing German speakers and German communities all over the world. He is also deeply engaged in the workings of ethnological museums.

James Retallack teaches courses and supervises PhD field preparation in European history from 1770 to 1945. His research interests (1830-1918) include German regional history, nationalism, anti-Semitism, elections, and historiography. He is General Editor of “Oxford Studies in Modern European History” and was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2011.

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Abstract:

How did statistics become a public good in modern India? In this presentation, I trace the institutional history of statistics in 20th century India. Nationalist statisticians, on the one hand, advocated using disciplinary statistics to constitute a scientifically conscious, statistical-minded public. On the other, their work demonstrated how only a certain pedagogical training could result in using and understanding statistical reasoning and data. How did this dilemma between statistics as public knowledge and as a domain of expertise shape the kind of postcolonial public that nationalist statisticians envisioned? What notions of community and nationalism came to be envisioned following the dissemination of statistical thinking as a public form of reasoning? Historicizing the rise of statistical reasoning in colonial modernity will enable us to reflect on how statistical data came to be seen as objective and at the same time can be mobilized to exclude and discriminate against communities.

Bio:

Sayori Ghoshal completed her PhD at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS), Columbia University, New York. At present, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science & Technology (IHPST), University of Toronto. She is working on her first monograph, “Calculated Identities: How Difference became Minority in Modern India”. Her work on contemporary politics of Hindu nationalism, and the intersection of religious, caste and racial differences have been published as journal articles in the ‘Economic and Political Weekly’ and ‘History Compass’ as well as an essay in an edited volume, ‘Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere’. Her current research is funded by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science & Technology (IHPST) and by the International Network for Research in Science and Belief in Society (INSBS), University of Birmingham.

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The 1923 compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey has been used as an important precedent in the discourse concerning conflict resolution in the post-WWII context; it has been singled out as an important causal factor for the development of the two national states; and, it has spurred a critical debate in the social sciences about the adverse humanitarian consequences and traumatic effects of such policies. But what effect did the exchange have on the Greek constitutive story? In this presentation, I intend to put the events into a larger historical context of the spread of nationalist ideology through mass schooling, the consequent aversion to alien rule, and the homogenizing imperative capturing the imagination of most leaders of existing and aspiring national states. Within such a context, the population exchange was one of the many policies that governing elites could use to render the borders of the state congruent with those of the nation, the most critical element of nationalist ideology. Thus, modernity in Southeast Europe took the form of ethnic separation, not integration or multiculturalism.

About the speaker:

Harris Mylonas is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and editor-in-chief of Nationalities Papers. His research contributes to our understanding of states’ management of diversity that may originate from national minorities, immigrants, diasporas, or refugees. He is the author of The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities (Cambridge University Press, 2012), for which he won the European Studies Book Award as well as The Peter Katzenstein Book Prize. He has co-edited two volumes, Enemies Within: The Global Politics of Fifth Columns (Oxford University Press, 2022; w/ Scott Radnitz) and The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics (Routledge, 2022; w/ Alexandra Délano Alonso). His forthcoming book, co-authored with Maya Tudor, is entitled Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (Cambridge University Press). Mylonas’ work has also been published in the Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Security Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Territory, Politics, Governance, Nations and Nationalism, Social Science Quarterly, Nationalities Papers, Ethnopolitics, and various edited volumes. Mylonas received his Ph.D. from Yale University, and continued his post-doctoral work at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies as an Academy Scholar.