When viewed through the optic of transregional legalist activism, what historians commonly refer to as “decolonization” figures as a struggle to universalize Law in order to balance international relationships that colonialism had rendered asymmetrical. Had this legal project succeeded, post independence Africa—often viewed through today’s human rights lens as a crisis zone—may have had no need for human rights, at least not for the sort of human rights movement that emerged in the 1970s propelled by institutional NGOs based in the Anglo-Scandinavian “global North.” Yet instead of universalizing during the transition from colonialism to independence, the law constricted the political futures of independent African states, their leaders and their inhabitants, eventually normalizing single-party state rule and bilateral alliances privileging former imperial centres of power.

This event is in association with FPA Research Month

Carleton University’s Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis (CTCA) is delighted to welcome Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke to Ottawa for two special public events on Wednesday March 8^th and Thursday March 9^th.

On Wednesday March 8^th at 7:30PM Clarke will offer a poetry reading and performance in the studio theatre of Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC). GCTC is committed to sharing Canadian stories that speak to the diversity of our nation, and Artistic Director Eric Coates and Managing Director Hugh Neilson are pleased to host one of Canada’s most accomplished and innovative writers.

On Thursday March 9^th, Clarke will offer a Guest Lecture at Carleton University on the themes of “Afro-CanLit” in his own writing. The Department of English partners with CTCA to host this unique lecture for Prof. Susan Birkwood’s ENGL 2802: Canadian Literatures. Entitled “From “Coloured” and “Negro” and “Black” to “Africadian” and “Afro-Metis”: The Black-Ink Odyssey of George Elliott Clarke,” this informal lecture is open to all members of the Carleton campus community and will be held from 2:30-4:00PM in Dunton Tower 2017.

Currently Canada’s 7^th Parliamentary Poet Laureate, Clarke was the 4^th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-2015) and is a noted dramatist, fiction writer, librettist, and essayist as well as poet. His literature considers the intersections of migration, diaspora, and indigeneity in the history and culture of the Black Canadian communities of Atlantic Canada, known as Africadia.

For more information, please contact CTCA via sarah.waisvisz@gmail.com

Featuring: Raysso Aden, Samiha Rayeda and Rana Hamadeh

When: Wednesday March 8, 7-9 pm

Where: Bronson Centre (211 Bronson Ave.), Room 103

A surge in white nationalism across Canada and the world demands a conscious public reckoning with one of this movement’s animating ideas: Islamophobia.

This community teach-in will address a question that has become all the more urgent to engage and address in our everyday lives: what is Islamophobia and how do we stop it?

Free and open to the public

Everyone welcome!

Tea, cookies, solidarity, and inspiring ideas included!

A project of No One Is Illegal-Ottawa

With support from the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa

More info here: https://www.facebook.com/events/663696827147101/663848577131926/?notif_t=like&notif_id=1487938831142128

Let’s come and celebrate our cultural diversity, share our traditional food and cultural music!

Where?            Montgomery Legion, 330 Kent Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 0A6.

When?             Saturday, April 1, 5:00pm to 11:00 pm
Admission:            $ 20.00 (E-Ticket)   or  $22.00 at the door

All proceeds will be used to support the TiBaKalanga/We Are Kalanga Cultural Festival to be held on 22 – 23 July, 2017 at the TG Silundika Cultural Community Centre in Ward 6, Bulilima District- Zimbabwe.

For more details about the festival please browse our site at: www.tgsilundikaculturalcommunitycentre.org .

If you’d like to attend the festival and need additional information feel free to email us at: tgsculturalcommunitycentre@gmail.com

The CIC National Capital Branch, in cooperation with the SecDev Foundation, present a special panel

WOMEN, VIOLENT EXTREMISM AND THE INTERNET: EMPOWERING PREVENTION; DEALING WITH RISK
Monday, March 6th, 2017

Women can help prevent violent extremism. Women also commit violent extremist acts. Women can be cheerleaders, and women are often victims. These truths are made more complex as more and more women across the globe leapfrog onto the internet. Now more than ever, there is great potential for women to amplify their outreach and impact in preventing violent extremism. But with this empowerment comes increased risk.

Join us for a discussion on the complex role of women in the prevention of violent extremism, with a special focus on the role of the internet in amplifying this impact, and also in channeling the risks.

This special panel is organized in cooperation with the United Nations Counterterrorism Executive Directorate (UNCTED), the ICT for Peace Foundation, the SecDev Foundation and supported by Public Safety Canada. For further information about violent extremism and the Internet, visit: http://preventviolentextremism.info

DATE AND TIME:
Monday, March 6, 2017
5:00 pm: Registration, reception and cash bar
6:00 pm: Presentation, discussion
7:30 pm: Dinner (optional)

LOCATION: Rideau room, Sheraton Hotel, 150 Albert Street, Ottawa

The Senior Researcher is expected to join our rapidly growing team to undertake, design, and manage applied research projects collaboratively with client organisations, with ultimate impact always in mind. The role will include managing relationships with clients; managing a team of junior researchers in African countries and the UK; contributing to developing innovative methodologies and research approaches; communicating research insights to stakeholders; and producing research reports and academic publications.

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About the workshop

Over the past decade, scholars, and especially young scholars, have been engaged in truly multi-sited and sometimes even transregional fieldworks focusing on the everyday life experiences of Chinese individuals, families and other groups living in African countries. We would like to critically engage with, and thoroughly reflect on ethnographic research that focuses on the (re)construction of social identities, class (re)making and issues of race/ethnicity and gender, small-scale entrepreneurship, labor relations, livelihood, or the multiple meanings of migration. Studying a field where the transnational is almost tangible, poses not only organizational, but also multiple methodological and theoretical challenges, about which there is surprisingly little discussion.

Believing that these methodological and theoretical challenges are too important to be relegated to the ‘methods’ section of dissertations and other publications, this workshop will bring together PhD students and early stage post-docs who have conducted ethnographic field research on Chinese communities in African countries. In order to address these challenges, this workshop would like to probe with the following questions: 1. How do we get access to the field? 2. How do we formulate the field? 3. How do we contextualize our findings in a local as well as in transnational contexts? 4. What are the challenges of multi-sited ethnography? 5. Where are the limits of transregional comparison?

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Call for Papers: Africa and the New Networks of Cultural Mobility University of Toronto, 6-7 October 2017
https://networks.h-net.org/node/15766/discussions/169573/call-papers-university-toronto

The ultimate goal of the colloquium is to provide a satisfactory answer as to whether globalization can engender a truly “brave new world” or if it is condemned to merely reproduce deceptive and delusional mirror images. More concretely, it is important not only to consider the relevance of “rediscovering the infra-ordinary” in African literatures, as a counter to normativizing metadiscourses, but also, and above all, to rethink the arts and literatures of Africa in terms of their relationship to both “globalization” and “the worlding of the world,” to borrow Jean-Luc Nancy’s distinction in /La/ /Création du monde, ou la mondialisation/ (2002).