|
|
|
|
JANUARY Thursday, January 10  Amira
Mittermaier, University of Toronto,
Religion
and Near and Middle Eastern CivilizationIslamic Charity and Social Justice in Revolutionary Egypt 1-2.30pm, Mackintosh Corry Hall, Room D214 Abstract: While a revolution was unfolding in Egypt in 2011, people still went about their everyday lives. Drawing on fieldwork in different spaces of food distribution, I read the act of "feeding the poor" against the backdrop of a revolutionary Egypt in which protesters were calling for "bread, freedom, and social justice." Giving alms to the poor and needy is one of the five pillars in Islam, and charity is one of the key markers of public piety in Egypt today. At the same time, the widespread "culture of charity" in Egypt is often blamed for having delayed the revolution, and Egyptian philanthropists and international development organizations tend to dismiss handouts as "unproductive" and "inefficient." Offering an alternative reading, I suggest that my interlocutors' practices articulate and embody a complex, religiously grounded, and historically shaped ethics of distribution and hospitality. While this ethics does not sit easily with a rights-centered call for "social justice," it resonates with what protesters have described as the "spirit of Tahrir." By bringing everyday acts of giving into conversation with Tahrir-as-utopia, I critically examine what is obscured by the abstract and seemingly universalist call for "social justice." About the Speakers: Amira Mittermaier is an Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilization at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from Columbia University. Bringing together textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, her research to date has focused on modern Islam in Egypt. Her award-winning book, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination explores Muslim practices of dream interpretation, as they are inflected by Islamic reformism, Western psychology, and mass mediation. Besides providing insight into a highly central yet simultaneously marginalized religious practice, the book offers theoretical and methodological contributions to an emerging anthropology of the imagination. Professor Mittermaier's current book project, tentatively titled The Ethics of Giving: Islamic Charity in Contemporary Egypt, examines both direct and institutionalized modes of alms-giving in post-revolutionary Egypt. Thursday, January 17  Jennifer Clapp,
University of Waterloo, Environment and Resource
StudiesThe Financialization of Food: Implications for Hunger and the Environment 1-2.30pm, Mackintosh Corry Hall, Room D214 Abstract: In this talk, Jennifer Clapp unpacks the implications of financialization in the food system. She looks at the forces and actors involved in the financial investment in agriculture, how financialization manifests and with what impact for global hunger and the environment. She argues that financialization has given new actors - financial investors, including banks, financial services arms of agricultural trading firms, and large-scale institutional investors - greater influence over outcomes in the food system. There are two important implications of this development. First, a new kind of 'distancing' has emerged within the food system whereby financialization increases the number of the actors and the steps involved in global agrifood commodity chains while at the same time it abstracts food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity 'derivatives' that are largely opaque to the general public. Second, because food-related financial transactions take place largely outside of public view, the 'real world' physical implications of increased investment are not always transparent to the outside observer or even to the investors themselves. While these investments may be only 'virtual' for financial investors, they generate a number external costs that have a real influence on the world's poorest people and the natural environment. About the Speaker: Jennifer Clapp's current research focuses on the politics of the interface between environmental sustainability and global food security. She has written widely on the global governance of food security, the political economy of food aid, agricultural trade politics, global political economy and environment, and corporate actors in global environmental and food politics. Her recent books include: Hunger in the Balance: The New Politics of International Food Aid (Cornell University Press, 2012), Food (Polity, 2012), Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment, 2nd Edition (with Peter Dauvergne, MIT Press, 2011), The Global Food Crisis: Governance Challenges and Opportunities (co-edited with Marc J. Cohen, WLU Press, 2009), and Corporate Power in Global Agrifood Governance (co-edited with Doris Fuchs, MIT Press, 2009) SPECIAL EVENT Winter 2013 Robert Sutherland Visitor, Queen's University Dr. Jasbir Puar, Edward Said Chair of American Studies, American University of Beirut, Lebanon Associate Professor, Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, US Homonationalism, Sex, and Disability: Pinkwashing and Biopolitics in the Middle East January 17, 4:30 PM, Robert Sutherland Hall (formerly School of Policy Studies) Room 202 (Reception and book signing to follow) This presentation will survey recent debates on what has been termed "pinkwashing": the use of gay rights by the Israeli government to deflect attention from its occupation of Palestine. Instead of reproducing a queer exceptionalism - homonationalism - that singles out homosexuality as a particular facet of state control, Jasbir Puar argues that the practice of pinkwashing should be situated within a broader biopolitics of state control that invests in a range of bodies and bodily habits. The focus will be specifically on the use of disability as part of a biopolitical assemblage of control that instrumentalizes a spectrum of capacities and debilities for the use of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Hosted by the Department of Gender Studies and the Sexuality and Gender Diversity Certificate Program Robert Sutherland was the first person of African heritage to graduate from the University and its first major benefactor. The Robert Sutherland Visitorship was established in 1997. Thursday, January 24 Beverley Mullings, Queen's University, Geography  Caribbean Youth, Urban Governance and the Right to the City 1-2.30pm, Mackintosh Corry Hall, Room D214 Abstract: There has been a recent revival of interest in Henri Lefebvre's ideas on the right to the city- an assertion that all urban denizens should have to change how cities generate, make use of, and distribute wealth. Indeed, the right to city has become the slogan of an increasing number of groups in the global South, intent on exerting greater control over an increasingly neoliberalized urban process. I argue in this talk that much of the emerging literature, however, focuses on the achievements of organized urban social movements with an already formed understanding of their rights as urban residents and a vision of the ways that they would like the wealth of cities to be used. Few studies examine how marginalized young people outside such collectivities envisage their place in the city, or indeed, the sorts of rights that they might want to claim. Yet, without an understanding of the everyday urban experiences and political practices that marginalized youth deploy in order to survive, the call to the right to the city is likely to remain simply a romantic revolutionary ideal. Drawing on research recently conducted in Kingston, Jamaica and Montr?al, Canada, I examine how underprivileged young people of Caribbean descent perceive, experience and negotiate their cities with a view to elucidating the challenges that their experiences pose to the creation of common spaces for social and political action. About the Speaker: Beverley Mullings is an associate professor of geography at Queen's University in Canada. Her research focuses generally on questions of feminist political economy, labour geographies and social justice in the global South. She is currently engaged in two areas of research. The first includes a SSHRC-funded project on the relationship between emerging forms of neoliberal governmentality and the growth of diaspora assemblages, and the second includes a Latin America and the Caribbean Research Exchange Grant (LACREG)- funded project that interrogates questions of gender, citizenship and urban governance in Caribbean contexts. Thursday, January 31 Sarah Schulman, City University of New York, English Israel/Palestine and the Queer International 1-2.30pm, Dunning Hall, Room 12 - Please note NEW ROOM! Abstract: In this chronicle of political awakening and queer solidarity, the activist and novelist Sarah Schulman describes her dawning consciousness of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Invited to Israel to give the keynote address at an LGBT studies conference at Tel Aviv University, Schulman declines, joining other artists and academics honoring the Palestinian call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Anti-occupation activists in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Palestine come together to help organize an alternative solidarity visit for the American activist. Schulman takes us to an anarchist, vegan cafe in Tel Aviv, where she meets anti-occupation queer Israelis, and through border checkpoints into the West Bank, where queer Palestinian activists welcome her into their spaces for conversations that will change the course of her life. She describes the dusty roads through the West Bank, where Palestinians are cut off from water and subjected to endless restrictions while Israeli settler neighborhoods have full freedoms and resources. As Schulman learns more, she questions the contradiction between Israel's investment in presenting itself as gay friendly-financially sponsoring gay film festivals and parades-and its denial of the rights of Palestinians. At the same time, she talks with straight Palestinian activists about their position in relation to homosexuality and gay rights in Palestine and internationally. Back in the United States, Schulman draws on her extensive activist experience to organize a speaking tour for some of the Palestinian queer leaders whom she had met and trusted. Dubbed "Al-Tour," it takes the activists to LGBT community centers, conferences, and universities throughout the United States. Its success solidifies her commitment to working to end Israel's occupation of Palestine, and it kindles her larger hope that a new "queer international" will emerge and join other movements demanding human rights across the globe. About the Speaker: Sarah Schulman is the author of seventeen books, most recently the novel The Mere Future and a trilogy of nonfiction books on Supremacy Ideolgy - Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination and Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. She is co-founder of MIX: NY Queer Experimental Film and Video Festival, The Act Up Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory.org) and co-producer of the feature documentary United in Anger: A History of Act Up (Hot Docs, 2012). She is co-author with Cheryl Dunye of two films: The Owls (Berlin Film Festival, 2010) and Mommy Is Coming (Berlin Film Festival, 2012), and the author of three plays: Carson McCullers, Manic Flight Reaction, and the theatrical adaptation of Isaac Singer's Enemies, A Love Story. She is Guggenheim Fellow in Playwrighting, a Fulbright Fellow in Judaic Studies and currently a Fellow at The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and the Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Sarah is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island FEBRUARY Thursday, February 7 Dina Georgis, University of Toronto, Women and Gender Studies Institute Palestinian/Israeli Conflict and its Queer Affects 1-2.30pm, Mackintosh Corry Hall, Room D214 Abstract: This paper conceptualizes queer beyond historical identities. Under my definition, "queer" is not simply sexual orientation but the affects of hard to name experiences, which exceed social sense and meaning. Queer affect is the remainder of desire that has passed through the social and returns in ways that are troubled and disturbing. When queer affect finds expression in the social world, it might be censored, cast out, and rendered strange, wrong or monstrous. Queer could be understood as the parts of us that resist the domestication of the sexual for social recognition, the parts of us that refuse to be colonized into affable, upright subjects. Though my rendition of queer is not culturally defined, it also does not exist outside it. As affective psychic trace, the queerly sexual interacts with culture when it returns in our collective symbolizations and our identity formations. This is an important distinction. Queer affect is what makes sexualities and love encounters deemed culturally wrong possible. An examination of Eytan Fox's The Bubble (2006), a film about a gay love story between Ashraf, a Palestinian boy from Nablus, and Noam and a Jewish boy from Tel Aviv, will demonstrate the painful results when queer desire interacts with the limits of political narrative and cultures of belonging and exclusion. To understand their love relationship beyond a simple analysis of Israeli/Palestinian cooperation, I will suggest that we must consider how we live our lives within political realities but also in excess of them. We must attend to "the hidden face of our identity" (Kristeva 1991, 1) beyond the logic of identity and group bonding. In Bubble it is not only their gay and raced identities that are being negotiated but also their queer affects. . About the Speaker: Situated in the fields of postcolonial, diaspora and queer studies, Dina Georgis's work draws on theories of trauma, affect and mourning to think through how political cultures are responses to historic loss. She is particularly interested in how narrative and art articulate the affective topographies of memory and provide the conditions for working through the past. Her book, The better story: queer affects from the Middle East (SUNY, forthcoming March 2013), is a conversation among postcolonial studies, queer theory and psychoanalysis. Georgis consider the dynamics of political conflict, the histories and subjectivities they produce, and what it means to make an ethical relationship to the terrorized and terrorizing bodies that conflict produces. In 2010, No language is neutral: Writing on Dionne Brand, a co-edited collection with Katherine McKittrick & Rinaldo Walcott, will come out with Wilfrid Laurier Press. Thursday, February 14 Mary Caesar, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Queen's University How Did South Africans Use Public Health to Fix Problems of Race During the Twentieth Century? 1-2.30pm, Mackintosh Corry Hall, Room D214 Abstract: During the 1940s a few South African public health bureaucrats and liberal minded politicians attempted to re-imagine the construction and practice of public health. They called for a complete re-organization of the health care system based on a 'modern concept of health'. The radical nature of these ideas about health and welfare was twofold: firstly; that health services should be available to all people irrespective of race and class and therefore access should be based on need as opposed to ability to pay. Secondly, preventive and not curative health services should be prioritized alternatively, these two services should be considered as equally important in theory and in practice. This would have meant that during a time of racial segregation, all Black people would have access to basic health care paid for by the state at a time when they had no political rights and their health and welfare needs were largely unmet. The two developments that embodied this vision were the social medicine experiment (1940 - 55) and the National Health Services Commission (1942-44). I argue in my research that the Natal Local Health Commission (1941-1975) should be added as a third example. My talk addresses three issues: I argue that the LHC should be considered as part of those 1940s 'radical' public health developments. Secondly; I investigate the claim that that the state's use of public health during the 1940s was 'modern' and benevolent. Finally, I reflect on the pitfalls emerging for South Africa scholars who are writing a history of segregation and apartheid during this post-apartheid moment. . About the Speaker: Mary Caesar is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Queen's University. Thursday, February 28 Eric Haythorne, Former Lead Counsel, The World Bank, Washington, DC Changing Development Perspectives and the Future of the World Bank 1-2.30pm, Mackintosh Corry Hall, Room D214 Abstract: The World Bank remains one of world's largest multilateral institutions providing financial and technical assistance to reduce poverty in middle income and credit-worthy poorer countries, as well as in the world's poorest countries. The approaches it has taken to financing and development have, however, changed over recent decades. In addition, important factors external to the World Bank are at play in the field of development. With the advent of Jim Kim's Presidency last July, the World Bank is now at a crossroads. What key changes within and outside the Bank have occurred and are occurring? And, based on these elements, what possible paths exist for the World Bank going forward?. About the Speaker: Eric Haythorne is an advisor to governments on legal and institutional reforms to support financial, private sector and infrastructure development in middle and low income countries. He has had 20 years of experience with the Finance, Private Sector and Infrastructure Advisory Group of the Legal Vice-Presidency of the World Bank. He has served under 5 World Bank Presidents and has had field assignments in over 50 countries. MARCH Thursday, March 7 Gareth Haysom, AFSUN, University of Cape Town and Visiting PhD candidate Department of Global Development Studies, Queen's University The Urban Food Question: Absent from Southern Africa's Developmental Agenda 1-2.30pm, Mackintosh Corry Hall, Room D214 Abstract: Increasing food insecurity has engendered divergent views on the appropriate solutions required to mitigate these challenges. In Africa, the dominant view calls for the modernisation and industrialisation of agricultural production, a view that currently attracts disproportionate funding, research and technical support. Focussing on South Africa specifically, this paper questions if such a response to food insecurity is not precipitating more complex, mutually reinforcing, urban challenges. The industrialisation and technification of South African agriculture, while offering some benefits, has resulted in a consolidation of agriculture and significant changes in the agricultural economy, supply chains, food system actors and, as a result, the nature of food access. This increasingly industrialised production system serves two dominant urban food streams, the industrialised food retail system (supermarkets) and the diversion of food into animal feed (for urban consumption). Neither system appropriately serves the urban poor. The net effect is increased urban food insecurity. Responses to escalating urban food insecurity remained locked in productionist approaches, approaches that precipitate further agricultural consolidation. Through an analysis of core global reports, a review and existing South African agricultural and emerging urban food insecurity data, this paper reviews the impacts of South Africa's agricultural development approach. This paper concludes by arguing that for rapidly urbanising African countries, a shift in food governance is required, one where the urban is able to determine how it engages in the regional and global food system, rather than being subjected to the consequences of that system. Click the icon to download the paper on which this talk is based >  About the Speaker: Gareth Haysom is a PhD candidate associated with the African Food Security Urban Network, a SADC-focused 9 country urban food network, at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa. His core research focus is on Africa's urban transition and subsequent challenge of urban scale food security and food governance in African cities. Between 2006 an 2010 Gareth was appointed as a Research Fellow at the Sustainability Institute to initiate and lead the Sustainable Agriculture specialisation within the Sustainable Development post- graduate degree at Stellenbosch University. Thursday, March 14 Treena Orchard,
University of Western Ontario, School of Health
Studies Thursday, March 21
Thursday, March 28 Robbie Millington,
Queen's University, School of Kinesiology and Health
Studies |
Nikolas Barry-Shaw