Past Event

About the lecture: From Russia’s war in Chechnya to the consolidation of President Putin’s “managed democracy”, from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution to, more recently, the “swerving front line” in the Donbass region – for many years, Mark MacKinnon has kept Canadians informed on major developments in Russia and Ukraine. Join him in conversation with Journalism Professor Allan Thompson, as he talks about the region’s evolving situation, the challenges of reporting in that part of the world, and the importance of bearing witness.

Biographies: Mark MacKinnon is currently based in London, where he is The Globe and Mail’s Senior International Correspondent. In that posting he has reported on the Syrian refugee crisis, the rise of Islamic State, the war in eastern Ukraine and Scotland’s independence referendum. Mark recently spent five years as the newspaper’s Beijing correspondent. There he won accolades for his investigations into the garment industry in Asia – as well as the Canadian-listed companies Sino-Forest and Silvercorp – and for his reporting from the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. Mark has also been posted to the Middle East and Moscow for The Globe and Mail. He has covered the arrival of Canada’s troops in Afghanistan, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Russia’s war in Chechnya, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict. He has interviewed many world leaders, including former Israeli president Shimon Peres, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi. A six-time National Newspaper Award winner, Mark was also named the NNA’s Print Journalist of the Year for 2016. He is the author of The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics – which was published in 2007 by Random House – and The China Diaries, an e-book of his train travels through the Middle Kingdom along with photographer John Lehmann. Mark is a proud graduate of Carleton’s Bachelor of Journalism program.

Allan Thompson is an Associate Professor at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication. He joined the faculty at Carleton in 2003 after spending 17 years as a reporter with the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper. He worked for ten years as a correspondent for The Star on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, reporting on foreign affairs, defence and immigration issues. In early 2006 he launched the Rwanda Initiative, a five-year partnership between Carleton’s journalism school and its counterpart in Rwanda. The project sent more than 175 Canadians to Rwanda as teachers, trainers and media interns and also brought Rwandan journalists to Canada to study. He is the editor of The Media and the Rwanda Genocide and co-author of The Canadian Reporter, the standard journalism text for Canadian journalism students. He is also the founding director of Carleton’s Centre for Media and Transitional Societies (CMTS). In 2015 he was the federal Liberal candidate in the southwestern Ontario riding of Huron-Bruce.

This event is co-sponsored by the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (EURUS), the School of Journalism and Communication and the Department of University Advancement. This event is part of a series of events celebrating the 75th anniversary of Carleton University.