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A Studies in National and International Development presentation by Dr. Barbara Perry and Dr. Shana MacDonald The stabbing of a faculty member and two students in a gender issues class at the University of Waterloo in the summer of 2023 has brought renewed urgency to anti-violence work on campus. This panel brings together experts in white supremacy and feminist media studies to situate the attack within the broader rise of the far right in Canada, emphasizing how central attacks on feminist, queer, and trans people are to this movement. This episode features an interactive session focused on understanding the context in which we find ourselves and the opportunities to mobilize for change.

Drawing from her recent book, “Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India” (Cornell University Press 2022), Dr. Kukreja examines marriage migration undertaken by rural bachelors in North India who seek brides from outside their customary marriage pools such as from development peripheries of India. She connects the macro-political violent process of neoliberalism to the micro-personal level of marriage and intimate gender relations to demonstrate that predatory capitalism dispossesses many poor women from India’s marginalized Dalit and Muslim communities of marriage choices in their local communities and exposes them to new forms of gendered and caste violence in conjugal communities. Dr Reena Kukreja is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies with cross-appointment to Gender Studies Department and affiliation with Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University. Her research interests and filmmaking practice is focused on migration and development, marriage migration, masculinities, political economy and caste.

“Revolutions” is a short documentary that asks sports enthusiasts, brands, and manufacturers to think differently about environmental sustainability by putting sporting goods at the center of the conversation. The film uses the bike as a storytelling device to ask some important questions about sustainability such as: What happens to our “toys” when we’re done with them? What happens to a bike at its end-of-life stage? What would it take to design everything with the end in mind? Dr Courtney Szto is an Assistant Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies. Her research focuses  broadly on intersectional justice in the areas of sport and physical activist. Revolutions is her first film and it was recently awarded “Best Canadian Short Doc” at the BC Environmental Film Festival.

Join us for the second panel discussion of the mini-series “Legacies of War. Imperialisms, Racisms and Transnational Feminist Solidarities”, co-organized Vanessa Thompson and Katherine Mazurok. This series aims to interrogate, from a transnational feminist perspective, articulations and politics of war, in their many forms and on a global scale. We ask how we can challenge global hierarchies in the perceptions and politics of war, imperialisms, racisms as well as move towards building transnational feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist solidarities from below. Our second roundtable entitled “Global Wars and Solidarities” engages with current and historical formations of war and their continuities, as well as puts a focus on wars that are often erased from political consciousness and debates. We also discuss how entangled forms of Empire formations, nationalisms and authoritarianisms unfold in various contexts such as in Tigray, Afghanistan, and the war against Kurdish people. Finally, we focus on resistances and possibilities of transnational and glocal (local and global) feminist solidarity in an increasingly multi-polar and neo-colonial world. This panel engages with perspectives and analyses of wars, resistances and solidarities that are often marginalized in debates and politics of global wars. Discussants: Maebel Gebremedhin is the founder and president of Tigray Action Committee, a nonprofit committed to helping end the suffering of millions of Tigrayans due to the #TigrayGenocide. Maebel is committed to bringing awareness to the ongoing genocide in Tigray and building a stronger peaceful Tigray. Mariam Rawi is a representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA is the oldest political/social organization of Afghan women struggling for peace, freedom, democracy and women’s rights in fundamentalism-blighted Afghanistan since 1977. Elif Sarican is a writer, translator and a Kurdish activist. She is a social anthropologist and worked with the late Professor David Graeber at the London School of Economics during her Postgraduate degree. She has guest lectured at a number of universities across Europe and North America on topics of feminism, radical politics and global history. Elif is Community and Partnerships Lead for the radical publisher the Left Book Club. The panel discussion will be facilitated by Margo Okazawa-Rey. Margo Okazawa-Rey is Professor Emerita at San Francisco State University and a social justice activist and educator working on issues of militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women examined intersectionally. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and its US group Women for Genuine Security. She is President of the Board of Directors of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). She has a longstanding relationship to social justice work in South Korea and with the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling in Palestine. She also was a founding member historic Black feminist Combahee River Collective.

Join us for the second panel discussion of the mini-series “Legacies of War. Imperialisms, Racisms and Transnational Feminist Solidarities”, co-organized Vanessa Thompson and Katherine Mazurok. This series aims to interrogate, from a transnational feminist perspective, articulations and politics of war, in their many forms and on a global scale. We ask how we can challenge global hierarchies in the perceptions and politics of war, imperialisms, racisms as well as move towards building transnational feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist solidarities from below. Our first roundtable entitled “War(s) in Europe. The Invasion of Ukraine, Racism and Resistance” engages with the interlocking impacts of the Russian war in Ukraine and discusses how these are tied to legacies of racism, border imperialism and neoliberalism in Europe and beyond. This panel attends to the converging and diverging Black/African, Roma and Ukrainian perspectives, critiques and impacts of the war. Discussants: Beatrice Msokwa is a Tanzanian female activist who was studying Aerospace Engineering in Ukraine before fleeing as a refugee to Germany. She is active in BIPoC Ukraine & Friends in Germany, a grassroots network that struggles for equal rights for all refugees and migrants. Isidora Randjelović is the director of the feminist Romnja* archive RomaniPhen. She is also a lecturer at the Alice-Salomon Hochschule Berlin, Germany, and is involved in IniRromnja, a network of Berlin Rom*nja and Sinti*zza. Yuliya Yurchenko is a senior lecturer and researcher in political economy at the Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability Institute and the Economics and International Business Department, University of Greenwich (UK).

David P Thomas, Veldon Coburn, Rebecca Hall  This talk features a discussion of the new book Capitalism & Dispossession: Corporate Canada at Home and Abroad. Both co-editors and one contributing author will talk about the book and their unique contributions.  The book brings together a broad range of case studies to highlight the role of Canadian corporations in producing, deepening and exacerbating conditions of dispossession both at home and abroad. You can find the book at Novel Idea!

José Marcelo Zacchi / September 22, 2022 In this talk, José Marcelo Zacchi reflects on his years as a lawyer and public manager dedicated to the strengthening of civic space and democratic construction in Brazil. He is currently committed to the creation of Núcleo Sumaúma, a new space for the elaboration and dissemination of civil society agendas for public and political action in favour of equity and towards fair and sustainable development in Brazil. These agendas are supporting various political parties in the lead-up to the 2022 federal election. 

March 31st 2022 Equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives are often characterized as a “hallmark of the neoliberal university,” and a “non-critical, anti-theoretical and ahistorical answer to managing difference” (“Equity, Diversity, Inclusion: A Dialogue with Human Rights and Decolonization,” a roundtable hosted by Wilfred Laurier University on November 13, 2020). In this contribution to the SNID seminar series, Professors Vanessa E. Thompson and Daniel McNeil reflect on the diasporic and multi-directional articulations of Black struggles and abolitionist world-making that have informed their approaches to Black studies, interdisciplinary studies of liberation and decolonial praxis. Their wide-ranging conversation will cultivate space for critical reflection and collaborative action about the limitations and shortcomings as well as the practical benefits of an EDI framework in a higher education context where it is increasingly (if unevenly) embraced. It will also speak to the limits of top-down, national dialogues about race relations, the performativity and non-performativity of anti-racism in institutional life, and the distinctive mix of entrepreneurial fantasy and managerial technique, identity politics and market-driven policies, and mystique of meritocracy and technocratic expertise that have proliferated in the grafting of EDI initiatives onto existing multicultural policies and programs in academic, corporate, political and other institutions. Daniel McNeil is a Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University and the Queen’s National Scholar Chair in Black Studies. His teaching and scholarship in Black Atlantic Studies explore how movement, travel and relocation have transformed and boosted creative development, the writing of cultural history and the calculation of political choices. Thinking While Black, his book about the political, intellectual, artistic and activist work of soul rebels, Black Atlantic intellectuals and planetary humanists over the past fifty years, will be published by Rutgers University Press and Between the Lines in the fall of 2022. Vanessa E. Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her work focuses on black studies, abolition, critical racism and migration studies, and activist ethnographies. She has published on blackness and black movements in France and Europe more broadly, and black abolitionist struggles and world-making. Vanessa is a member of the International Independent Commission on the Death of Oury Jalloh and organizes with abolitionist feminist collectives in Europe and globally.

Panelists will draw from their studies both in Canada and internationally to highlight the lives and livelihoods reproduced, sustained and compromised by the circulations and politics of waste. Dr Kesha Fevrier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University. Her research unfolds broadly at the intersection of race and space, through the systematic study of waste making and unmaking strategies. She is particularly interested in how this relationship informs the everyday lived experiences of marginalized groups in the global South. Dr Mohammed Rafi Arefin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He researches and teaches urban environmental politics with a specific focus on waste, sanitation, and inequality. His research on Cairo’s solid waste and sewage systems has appeared in the journals Antipode, Progress in Human Geography, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. His new project examines how the relationship between waste, health, and urban governance is shifting in light of developments in fields of wastewater-based epidemiology. Dr. Josie Wittmer is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography & Planning at Queen’s University. She is a feminist urban researcher and educator exploring processes of urban development and change, particularly as urban imaginaries and governance mechanisms intersect with gender, caste, class, religion, and politics in South Asian cities.

Canada’s waste crisis is the product of two inter-related issues: the problems of amplification and ongoing settler colonialism. In this presentation, Dr Myra Hird draws on decades of empirical waste studies research to argue that resolving our waste crisis requires an orientation away from techno-fixes and individual responsibility and towards upstream social justice issues.

On February 17, 2022, Dr. Shobhana Xavier delivered a SNID lecture entitled “Between Violence and Piety: The Case of Sufi Shrines in Sri Lanka”. The religious topography of Sri Lanka remains delicate in its post-war context, especially for ethno-linguistic and religious minority communities, such as Muslims. Amidst this precarity Sufis, Muslims with esoteric orientation towards Islam, resist their social and political marginalization through sacred spaces, such as Sufi shrines. However, these spaces oscillate between contestation and accommodation in the present climate of Islamophobia and Buddhist hegemony.  

The panel featured in this episode brings together a group of Kingston/Katarokwi/Queen’s, Toronto and Calgary artists for a discussion of activism and the arts. In this conversation, we will discuss how social justice concerns shape their art and what forms activism takes in their practice. Panelists will share insights from their own projects, which engage in issues and themes including gender and resource extraction; prison abolitionism; the legacies of the G20. Also check http://shespreads.com/ Panelists: Clare Preuss, Kemi King, Darwin Lyons, Zoe Sweet, Michael Wheeler, Mariah (Mo) Horner. Facilitation: Rebecca Hall