Biographies
Panelists:
Aboubacar Dakuyo est doctorant en droit à la faculté de droit de l’Université d’Ottawa. Son domaine d’intérêt général porte sur la mise en œuvre des mécanismes de justice transitionnelle dans les contextes de violations massives des droits de la personne. Ses recherches doctorales en cours portent sur la place des normes coutumières locales dans la justice transitionnelle du Soudan du Sud. Aboubacar Dakuyo est titulaire d’une maîtrise en droit international (L.L.M) de l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) et d’une maîtrise en art (M.A) en études du développement de l’Institut des hautes études internationales et du développement de Genève. Il est, par ailleurs, membre du Centre de recherche et d’enseignement sur les droits de la personne (CREDP) de l’Université d’Ottawa. À ce titre, il participe à des recherches au sein du groupe de travail sur la prévention des crimes de masse et du génocide et est assistant d’enseignement du cours intitulé, « Droits de la personne et justice en Afrique: théorie et pratique ».
Tag Elkhazin is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University, Canada. He has a lifetime expertise in water issues in Africa. He trained and worked in Sudan, Sweden, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Eritrea, Nigeria, Chad, Nigeria, Canada and the United Kingdom in water resources, human resources, implementation of infrastructural and energy projects. He trained in Strategic Studies, Peace Building and Alternative Dispute Resolution in the United Kingdom and Canada. He has considerable expertise in Monitoring and Evaluation and worked for international organizations such as the World Bank and Shell Nigeria. Tag is a member of the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Institute of Canada and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) London UK. He is a regular commentator in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Radio Canada International, and Radio France Internationale. He lectures frequently in Canada and worldwide on issues of conflict in the Horn of Africa.
Felix Horne is the Horn of Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch, covering Ethiopia and Eritrea. Based in Ottawa, he has documented the human rights dimensions of Ethiopia’s development programs, telecom surveillance, media freedoms, misuse of the counterterrorism law and other topical issues in the Horn of Africa. Prior to working for HRW, Felix has worked on a variety of aboriginal rights issues in northern Canada and internationally. He holds a Masters in Resource and Environmental Management from Dalhousie University.
Bonny Ibhawoh is a Professor of African History and Global Human rights at McMaster University. He is also the Acting Associate Vice-President for Research at the University. His research interests include international human rights, imperial legal history, and peace and conflict studies. He has taught in universities in Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. He was previously a Human Rights Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs, New York; a Research Fellow at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, Copenhagen, Denmark and Associate Member of the Centre for African Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. His latest book is titled Imperial Justice: Africans in Empire’s Court (Oxford University Press). Dr. Ibhawoh writes a blog on human rights, social justice of peace (GIAZILO). Website: http://giazilo.blogspot.ca/
Lazare Ki-Zerbo has studied philosophy at the Husserl Archives of the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris and earned a PH.D at Poitiers University in 1994, on a Contribution to a phenomenological approach to the social ontology departing from Edmund Husserl. He then taught at Ouagadougou University in Burkina Faso where he contributed to the founding of the Movement of the intellectuals for freedom. He served as an international civil servant at the Peace, Democracy and Human Rights Division of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) in Paris, from 2004 to 2014.
His research fields are: history of Pan-Africanism, particularly : Pan-African Library concept and project; the right to development, right to health, human rights implementation related to the prevention of torture and the protection of economic, social and cultural rights. He is also a specialist of social transformation processes in Africa. Dr. Ki-Zerbo has edited African studies in geography from below (CODESRIA, Dakar, 2008); The Pan-African Movement in the 20th century: an anthology (OIF, Paris, 2013), The Pan-African ideal (forthcoming, CODESRIA, 2016), The African diaspora (translation into french of a book by patrick Manning). Dr. Ki-Zerbo is also member of the African network for global history, and is deputy chairman of the International Joseph Ki-Zerbo committee for Africa and the diaspora.
Pacifique Manirakiza is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law (Common Law Section), University of Ottawa where he teaches Canadian criminal law and international criminal law and African international law. Professor Manirakiza has just completed a 4-year term as a member of the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights. In that capacity, he was the Chairperson of the Working Group on Extractive Industries, Environment and Human Rights Violations and a member of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities in Africa.
In 2014, he was appointed member of the first African Union-led Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan. He has been a member of a Defence team before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (2000-2004) where he previously served as a legal intern. In Burundi, he served as an Assistant Professor at University of Burundi as well as a Deputy Prosecutor in Ngozi and Rutana Provinces. Dr. Manirakiza also participated, as a legal adviser, in Burundi peace negotiations held in Arusha (Tanzania) from 1998 to 2000.
Paul Mkandawire is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies (Human Rights Program) at Carleton. He holds a PhD in medical geography and his research is located with the domain of social and environmental determinants of health. He applies both qualitative and quantitative methods to the investigation of dimensions that link the environment and human health. He teaches courses in public health and human rights.
Monica Eileen Patterson is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan. She is coeditor and contributing author of two books: Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave, 2011) and Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (University of Michigan Press, 2011). As a scholar, curator, and activist, she is particularly interested in the intersections of memory, childhood, and violence in postcolonial Africa, and the ways in which they are represented and engaged in contemporary public spheres.
Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, where he has been since August 2005. He did his BA at the University of Ghana and took his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow, returning to Cambridge in Sept 1995 to become a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Prof Quayson was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar from 1991-1994 and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society.
In 2004 he held a Fellowship at the Du Bois Institute for African-American Studies at Harvard University. He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and has lectured widely in places such as Istanbul, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Cape Town, Bergen, and on many campuses in the US, the UK, and in Europe more generally. He was elected to a five-year term on the Modern Language Association’s executive committee of the Division on Postcolonial Studies and Literature in Culture in 2008 and also as a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
Professor Quayson was elected a Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada in 2013. Professor Quayson has published widely on African literature, postcolonial studies and in literary theory. His publications include: Oxford St., Accra; Urban Evolution, Street Life and Itineraries of the Transnational (Duke University Press, 2014), Blackwell Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies, ed. with Girish Daswani (New York: Blackwell, 2013), The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed., 2 volumes. (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), and Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003).
Jay Ramasubramanyam is a PhD student in the Department of Law and Legal Studies (Political Economy) in Carleton University. Jay’s areas of research interest encompass forced migration, refugee policy, statelessness, human rights and climate change. He is currently studying the human dimensions of climate change and the legal and theoretical implications on status of citizens of countries facing slow onset climate change, with specific focus on human security, migration and conflict. His other interests include questions of identity and statehood of de facto states and autonomous territories.
Meredith Terretta is currently a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is working on a book entitled Activism along the Fringe: Rogue Lawyers and African Rights Claims, 1920s-1970s. She is Associate Professor of history at the University of Ottawa. She is co-editor, with Benjamin Lawrence and Iris Berger, of African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony and Refugee Rights (Ohio University Press, 2015). Her most recent single-authored book is Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition and Statebuilding in Cameroon, 1948-1971 (Ohio University Press, 2015). She has published numerous articles in The Human Rights Quarterly, Politique africaine, The Journal of World History, The Journal of African History.
Moderators:
Olabisi Akinkugbe is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada where he teaches Contracts, International Trade Law, and Law & Development. He is completing his doctoral degree at the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa. His thesis examines how changing conceptions about law and its role as a tool for economic development projects have influenced the design and implementation of the Economic Community of West African States treaties. His research interests include Business Law, Transnational Law, International Trade Law, Law & Development, and African Regional Economic Integration.
M. Kamari Clarke is an Associate Professor at Carleton University in International and Global Studies. Over her career she has taught at Yale University (1999-2012), the University of Pennsylvania (2012-2015), and the University Toronto (2015) and was the former chair of the Council on African Studies at Yale (2007- 2010). For more than 20 years, Professor Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism and the politics of globalization. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions of culture and power and in the field of law and anthropology detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems. One of her key contributions to the various disciplines that she inhabits has been to demonstrate ethnographically the ways that religious and legal knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally.
Audra Diptee is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University. She is also cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies. Her research covers common themes in both Africa and the Caribbean and explores issues related to children and childhood, gender, historical consciousness, slavery, and race relations. She has published work in each of these areas including a monograph, edited works, and several articles. Dr. Diptee is also the Managing Director of the Canadian not-for-profit organization, the History Watch Project.
Amatoritsero Ede is a scholar whose seminal reflections on African literary and critical theory has appeared in Research in African Literatures and Journal of African Cultural Studies. He is also an internationally award-winning poet and the publisher and Managing Editor of Maple Tree Literary Supplement (www.mtls.ca). He has been an editor within the global trade book publishing industry and was the 2005-2006 PEN Canada Writer-in-Residence at Carleton University’s English Department, where he received a Doctorate in English in 2013.
He is a 2013 speaker at the prestigious Canada Seminar of Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His second Poetry collection, Globetrotter & Hitler’s Children, was longlisted for the 2013 Nigerian Literature Prize. He appears in 11 poetry and 1 creative non-fiction anthologies in Germany, Canada, Nigeria and the USA. His poetry has been translated into Romanian.
Nduka Otiono is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa. He obtained his PhD in English from the University of Alberta where he won numerous awards including the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, and was nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medalfor academic distinction. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University where he was also appointed a Visiting Assistant Professor and a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University. A fellow of the William Joiner Centre for War and Social Consequences, University of Massachusetts, Boston, his interdisciplinary research focuses on “street stories” or popular urban narratives in postcolonial Africa, and how they travel across multiple popular cultural platforms such as the news media, film, popular music, and social media.
Also a writer, he is the author of The Night Hides with a Knife (short stories), which won the ANA/Spectrum Prize; Voices in the Rainbow (Poems), a finalist for the ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize; Love in a Time of Nightmares (Poems) for which he was awarded the James Patrick Folinsbee Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing. He has co-edited We-Men: An Anthology of Men Writing on Women (1998), and Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (2006). In 2015 he was awarded a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship. He is currently working on his first academic monograph, Street Stories in Africa.
Aboubakar Sanogo is an Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Carleton University. His research interests include African cinema, documentary, world cinema, colonial cinema, cinephilia and the relationship between film form, history and theory. His writings have appeared in academic journals, anthologies and journalistic outlets. He is currently preparing a monograph on the cinema of Med Hondo and completing a manuscript on the history of documentary in Africa in the colonial era. He is also a film curator and has programmed work for such institutions as the Smithsonian Institution and the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO).
Recently his interest has included recovering pioneering figures in the history of African cinema, in particular in the early and silent cinema periods in view of reinserting them in the longue duree of African cinema and of cinema tout court. To that effect, he co-curated last June-July for the Cinetca di Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival a retrospective on the cinema of Albert Samama Chikly, the first Tunisian/African filmmaker. This is opening new avenues in his work involving the archival preservation and restoration of African cinema.
Conveners:
Pius Adesanmi is a Professor of English and the Director of Carleton University’s Institute of African Studies. He obtained a First Class Honours degree in French Studies from the University of Ilorin, Nigeria, a masters degree in French Studies from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and a PhD in French Studies from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He is a specialist of Francophone and Anglophone African and Black Diasporic literatures, politics, and cultures, an area in which he has published extensively.
One of Nigeria’s contemporary leading public intellectuals and celebrated columnists, Adesanmi’s portfolio of more than thirty keynote lectures in the last five years includes appearances on such prestigious platforms as the Stanford Forum for African Studies, the Africa Talks Series of the London School of Economics, the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation’s annual lecture series, the Vanderbilt History Seminar, the International Leadership Platform of the University of Johannesburg, the African Unity for Renaissance Series of the Africa Institute of South Africa, and the annual talk series of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
Professor Adesanmi was a member of the Diaspora Consultation series of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 in New York. In 2013-2014, he was a Carnegie Diaspora Visiting Professor of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, where he designed the African Thinkers’ Program of UG-Ghana’s Institute of African Studies. He has since remained an annual facilitator of seminars at the University of Ghana’s Pan-African Doctoral Academy. He is a foundation faculty member of the Abiola Irele School of Theory and Criticism at Kwara State University, Nigeria. Adesanmi is the internationally-acclaimed winner of the inaugural Penguin Prize for African Writing (2010) in the non-fiction category with his book, You’re not a Country, Africa. His latest book, Naija No Dey Carry Last: Thoughts on a Nation in Progress, a collection of essays on Nigerian politics and culture, recently featured on Channels Book Club’s best Nigerian Books of 2015.
John Packer is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre (HRREC) at the University of Ottawa. He previously held academic positions at the University of Essex and at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has held Fellowships at Cambridge and Harvard Universities and lectured at universities and professional institutions around the world. Prof. Packer is an experienced practitioner with over 20 years of experience working for intergovernmental organisations, including for the United Nations (UNHCR, ILO, OHCHR) i.a. investigating serious human rights violations in a number of situations, notably Iraq, Afghanistan, and Burma/Myanmar, as well as themes including extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detention, forced disappearances, the use of forensic sciences, the use of civil defense forces, and regarding the independence of judges and lawyers throughout the world.
From 1995 to 2004, he was Senior Legal Adviser and then the first Director of the Office of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) in The Hague working across Central and Eastern Europe and throughout the former Soviet Union. In 2012-14, Prof. Packer was a Constitutions and Process Design Expert on the United Nation’s Standby Team of Mediation Experts attached to the Department of Political Affairs (DPA), advising in numerous peace processes and political transitions around the world focusing on conflict prevention and resolution, diversity management, constitutional and legal reform, and the protection of human rights including minorities. Professor Packer has worked in some fifty countries including parts of Africa (notably Chad, Kenya, Lesotho, Libya, Mali, Nigeria and Somalia) and with the African Union and the UN Economic Commission for Africa. He is Associate Editor of the Human Rights Law Journal and a General Editor of the European Yearbook of Minority Issues, and has sat on the boards of several international human rights NGOs.