Lansdowne Lectures
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Item A grate acation': The environments of Fort Victoria in 1847 according to "Bushway" Paul Kane (aka Paolo Canoe, Red Porcupine) and unknown others(2018-12-03) MacLaren, I. S.Paul Kane has been rusticating in his fame for some time, a fame that Toronto, Montréal, and London fashioned after his return from travels across the continent to Vancouver Island and Fort Victoria. Who was this “Father of Canadian Art” while he was staying at Victoria and its environs in April and May 1847, and what cultural and other environments did he encounter when Fort Victoria was only four years old? Aiming for an environmental history of the artist’s travels, one must weigh the published and celebrated Paul Kane with Paolo Canoe, Red Porcupine, and Bushway, identities he gave himself or that others gave while he travelled. This effort emphasizes Kane in the field over Kane in the studio. Thereby, a fresh view of Victoria and its Indigenous peoples emerges. When he is pried away from the polished colonial agent of book and studio, more emerges about the man, people, and places known as Paul Kane.Item A new science to meet the challenges of environmental problems(2019-04-02) Kramer, Jonathan G.Almost all environmental problems are human problems at some fundamental level. The clash of human and natural systems often results in complex, seemingly intractable predicaments that challenge scientists seeking to understand them and inform decision-making. The expanding threat of wildfires, managing for resilient watersheds, and the restoration of impacted ecosystems are examples of such problems. In each of these cases and many others, society will be asked to make difficult tradeoffs and choose from families of possible solutions. If science is to be useful in the decision-making process, it must transcend boundaries to integrate multiple disciplines, forms of knowledge, and ways of knowing, thus creating new approaches and even new kinds of science on a case-by-case basis. This inherently synthetic science requires new analytical tools and a commitment to inter- and transdisciplinary teamwork. By building capacity for shared exploration and learning, we can catalyze research that will help us in our pursuit of solutions for the pressing environmental issues we face now, and those that will emerge in the years to come.Item Abolishing corporate crime: The Trump chapter(2019-04-02) Snider, LaureenCorporate Crime, unlike corporate harm, is inherently political. It must be “named”, “shamed”, “blamed”, and most importantly counted, measured, reported and disciplined by state institutions. By the same token, it can be eliminated by political fiat. From the 1980s on, as governments bought into neoliberal doctrines, regulatory agencies in most capitalist democracies have been variously downsized, privatized, and starved of resources and staff. With the election of Donald Trump, however, this agenda in the United States has exploded. Federal laws protecting workers, the environment and the economy are all threatened – not just with downsizing but with outright elimination. This lecture documents the Trump agenda as it has been practiced thus far in these three areas, then attempts to understand, through critical theory, how and why this has happened.Item Academic ableism and its alternatives(2022-10-12) Dolmage, JayIn this interactive talk, we will collaborate to address the ableist attitudes, policies, and practices that are built into higher education. We will also interrogate the minimal and temporary means we have been given to address inequities, and the cost such an approach has for disabled students and faculty. We will then work together to share and develop strategies and tools for a much more accessible classroom and campus. Jay Dolmage is committed to disability rights in his scholarship, service, and teaching. He is the author of Disability Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press, 2014), Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (Michigan University Press, 2017), and Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2018).Item Ancient anger(2003-10-23) Konstan, DavidLecture given at the University of Victoria, October 23, 2003.Item Ancient medicine, modern science: Doing the history of medicine(2002-02-12) King, HelenLecture given at the University of Victoria, February 12, 2002.Item Antisemitism and divisions over Israel in diaspora Jewish communities: The exploitation of Jewish difference(2017-10-04) Kahn-Harris, KeithDivisions over Israel have become an increasingly significant feature of Diaspora Jewish communities in recent years, leading at times to serious conflicts and difficulties in communal cooperation. These divisions have begun to be recognized outside Jewish communities as well, and in some cases have been appropriated by those accused of antisemitism to provide ‘alibis’ for their words and deeds. All but the most extreme antisemites can find sections of Jewish opinion that they can use to shield themselves. In this talk Keith will give some examples of this emerging phenomenon before offering some thoughts on how Jewish communities can respond to it.Item Archaeology of intangibility monumentality in Cameroon(2012-02-07) David, NicholasItem Art and anti-racism in Latin American racial formations(2023-04-24) Wade, PeterThis paper reflects on possibilities for anti-racism in artistic practice. Drawing on the work of the diverse artists we have collaborated with in the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA), I focus on two types of affective intervention that I think help to think about various ways of doing anti-racism through art. The two types are challenging stereotypes and working with communities and I explore how various artworks engage with these modes of artistic action and how they create affective traction. The aim of the exercise is to be productive and helpful in the struggle against racism by providing some tools that artists and organisations can use to think strategically about anti-racism as a practice and reflect on the opportunities and risks that attach to different interventions and images are, she argues, more compelling.Item Art of David Burliuk, father of futurism(2005-03-03) Shkandrij, MyroslavLansdowne Lecture given at the University of Victoria, March 3, 2005.Item Beyond conservation: Facing the reality of biodiversity in a human-dominated world(2017-05-15) Thompson, RossThe majority of the world’s ecosystems have been profoundly altered by human activities in ways that are essentially irreversible. Global population growth will place ever greater demands on ecosystems and the services that they provide. Using examples from waterway management in Australia, Dr. Thompson will discuss the issue of how we manage ecosystems within the bounds of what society demands from them, and in the context of regional factors such as climate change, habitat fragmentation and species invasions. He will argue that restoration is most often an unrealistic goal, and that rebuilding and managing ecosystems for a range of values is the challenge that ecologists truly face. Using data from major environmental management interventions including landscape-scale revegetation, invasive animal control and environmental flow provision he will describe the challenges in restoring, remediating and re-engineering natural ecosystems.Item Beyond imperial aporia: Taiwan and the Inter-Asia work in global transformations(2025-01-28) Wang, Andy Chih-MingIf colonialism is what made modernity, the American empire is the infrastructure of the present, the conditions of possibility that frame and organize the world and our knowledge of it. However, with the re-election of Donald Trump as the next American president who pledges to expel undocumented migrants, to erect a “tariff wall,” and to demand “protection money” from its allies, the American empire is now facing the possibility of its dismantling, a situation that while intellectually willing and jubilantly welcomed by some (the Arab World for instance), may sound like a bad news to others (such as Taiwan), given their worry about the other empire—China. The possibility of a dismantled American empire, and the threat of another emerging empire, creates an intellectual aporia, a political conundrum and a state of puzzlement, that constrains our understanding of the present and imagination of the future. How should critical humanities help us deal with this futurity by envisioning global transformation beyond the age of empire? Or is there room to reconfigure the meaning of empire for survival in the present? This lecture will address this weighty question by first offering a critical reflection on the political and intellectual conditions in Taiwan, as the island nation is gaslighted by both the threat of Chinese invasion and the worry of US abandonment so much so that the discussion of peace becomes unutterable. This “imperial aporia,” the inability to think beyond the terms of empire, particularly about and beyond China, is a serious problem in East Asia, but one not as heeded in the Asian studies of North America. The Inter-Asia cultural studies (IACS), a translocal intellectual movement and network that emerged since the 1990s, is an effort to address this problem. Reflecting on the work of the IACS collective in the last two decades, the lecture intends to explicate how it envisions global transformations through inter-referential methodology as a form of relational thinking and connective history, and how its translocal, translational alliance may generate solidarity and a new subjectivity against empire. Andy Chih-ming WANG currently holds the position of Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica (Taiwan). Additionally, he serves as the Chair of the Inter-Asian Cultural Studies Society. He is a prominent thinker in the Inter-Asian tradition, which spearheads placed-based collaborative research on interconnected questions of knowledge production, decolonization, the Cold War, and political movements in Asia. His articles have been published in renowned journals such as Contemporary Literature, Geopolitics, boundary 2, Amerasia, and positions, as well as in edited volumes, and translations. Currently, he is engaged in writing his second book titled Multiple Returning: Asian American Literature and Post/Cold War Entanglements.Item Black decolonial praxis: A liberation story(2019-10-28) Truesdell, NicoleA Black Decolonial Praxis is a pathway to liberatory world making within the university. La paperson (2017) argues universities are colonial projects that have within them a decolonial education. For me that decolonial education looks to the ways ancestral knowledge, right relationship with land and people, and the intersections of abolitionist and decolonial projects conjoin to create what I call a Black Decolonial Praxis. I situate this concept in two liberation stories: the Decolonizing Pedagogies Project (DPP) I co-led at Beloit College and the Institute for Transformative Practice I now lead at Brown University.Item Black internationale: Notes on the Chinese Jazz age(2019-10-28) Jones, Andrew F.Lecture given at the University of Victoria, February 24, 2005.Item Bridging the gap with reality: Molecular-level computer simulations for water harvesting and purification technologies(2020-03-02) Paesani, FrancescoDr. Franceso Paesani is an enthusiastic theoretical and computational chemist who firmly believes in basic science with real-world applications, and the central role played by education in our society. In this lecture, Dr. Paesani will show how he and his research group integrate chemistry, physics, and data science to develop realistic computer simulations of phenomena that take place at the molecular level. With water scarcity becoming an urgent global issue, Dr. Paesani’s group focuses on developing realistic computer simulations of water in different environments. Their work informs and guides the design of novel porous materials for applications that range from the harvesting of water from air to water desalination.Item Canada's north: Learning from the past, understanding the present, navigating the future(2019-10-22) Lackenbauer, WhitneyIn his Lansdowne Lecture, Professor Lackenbauer examines the recent political history of the Canadian North through a focus on cooperative and conflictual relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples. He outlines the most significant contemporary challenges and opportunities in the region, and offers expert thoughts on the future of northern Canada in a context characterized by rapidly changing dynamics related to economic globalization, political devolution, and climate change. Professor P. Whitney Lackenbauer is one of the leading global experts on Arctic history and politics, specializing in Arctic security, sovereignty and governance issues; modern Canadian military and diplomatic history; and Aboriginal-state relations. He is Professor of History and Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in the Study of the Canadian North at Trent University. His recent books include China’s Arctic Aspirations and What They Mean for Canada (co-authored 2017), One Arctic: The Arctic Council and Circumpolar Governance (co-edited 2017), and Whole of Government through an Arctic Lens (co-edited 2017)Item Challenges and opportunities facing the faculty over the next 5 years(2004-10-27) Rippin, AndrewItem Chernobyl and the contemporary nuclear imagination(2017-05-11) Hundorova, T. I."Chernobyl" today is not only an actual event, but also a symbolic one. As such, it is similar to other traumatic events in twentieth century history - the Holocaust, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. After Chernobyl the image of the world has changed, and the history of the new era of nuclear culture has begun. How one can talk about the trauma of Chernobyl? Who are the witnesses of Chernobyl? How the nuclear imagination is connected with the experience of Chernobyl?Item China's mass internment of Uyghurs: The urgent need for a global response(2020-02-27) Turkel, NuryThe spectacular leaks of sensitive Chinese government documents are “game over” for the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign denying its massive repression of the Uyghur people. China has not denied the authenticity of the documents. What does this tell us about the nature of the Chinese state, the ambitions of the Party, and the vision of Party General Secretary Xi Jinping? What are the ramifications for other countries’ political, trade, and scholarly relations with China? Nury Turkel is a lawyer and Uyghur rights advocate who was born in a re-education camp in Kashgar at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Turkel holds a Master of Arts in International Relations and a Juris Doctor degree, both from the American University in Washington, DC. He is the first US-educated Uyghur lawyer. Turkel practices law in D.C., specializing in regulatory compliance, federal investigation and enforcement, aviation, and immigration.Item Christian human rights(2017-05-09) Moyn, SamuelMost people today associate human rights with the secular progressive cause. This talk looks at how, in European history in the middle of the twentieth century, the Christian right made a critical contribution. Based on a new book of the same name, the talk argues that human rights were valuable as the European right moved beyond authoritarian reaction as World War II was won by the Allies, and the threat of a secular socialist left arose in postwar party politics. Human rights rhetoric emerged from the top of ecclesiastical hierarchies, and new kinds of center right Christian political parties rose championing ideas like human dignity and human rights.