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DTSTART;TZID=America/Toronto:20260928T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Toronto:20260928T133000
DTSTAMP:20260909T174640Z
CREATED:20260902T165027Z
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UID:10001929-1790596800-1790602200@balsillieschool.ca
SUMMARY:On Treason: Alberta Separatism\, Foreign Interference\, and Canada’s Survival in a Revolutionary Age
DESCRIPTION:Born of fraud and the COVID-19 pandemic\, the Alberta separatist movement and its enablers in the quasi-separatist United Conservative Party are engaged in treason against the Canadian people. They wear the obscuring masks of grievance\, but behind those masks are the faces of traitors. On Treason reveals those faces to be a gaggle of hucksters\, conmen\, and megalomaniacal politicians who are enabling our enemies to loosen through disinformation\, covert and overt interference (and possibly worse) our will to self-determination as a nation. \nAbout the Speaker \nPatrick Lennox is a Canadian writer based in Edmonton\, Alberta. For over a decade he worked with Canada’s security and intelligence community in both Ottawa and in Edmonton to counter foreign interference. He first started writing about Canada-US relations twenty years ago\, and has a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. His previous works include At Home and Abroad: The Canada–US Relationship and Canada’s Place in the World\, and An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada? Challenges and Choices for the Future\, co-edited with Brian Bow. \nPhoto credit: Patrick Lennox
URL:https://balsillieschool.ca/event/on-treason-alberta-separatism-foreign-interference-and-canadas-survival-in-a-revolutionary-age/
LOCATION:Room 1-42\, 67 Erb Street West\, Waterloo\, ON\, N2L 6C2\, Canada
CATEGORIES:Conflict and Security Research Cluster
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Toronto:20260930T090000
DTEND;TZID=America/Toronto:20260930T100000
DTSTAMP:20260924T164743Z
CREATED:20260924T164606Z
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UID:10001944-1790758800-1790762400@balsillieschool.ca
SUMMARY:Understanding the UK’s Digital Immigration System: Navigating eVisas and Everyday Digital Bordering
DESCRIPTION:The UK has recently completed a significant transformation of its immigration and identification system through the introduction of a digital-only immigration status system. As of 2025\, physical immigration documents have largely been replaced by what are known as ‘eVisas’ and the Home Office’s digital status verification infrastructure\, fundamentally changing how migrants access and demonstrate their immigration status in everyday life. This talk will provide an introduction to the UK’s digital immigration system\, explaining how the new platform and share-code mechanisms operate in practice. It will outline how digital immigration status is managed through interconnected digital infrastructures involving not only the Home Office\, but also employers\, landlords\, universities\, and other third parties responsible for verifying immigration status. Drawing on research conducted with Dr Marie Godin and 40 in-depth interviews with migrants across the UK\, the talk will also examine how migrants have experienced and navigated the transition to digital status. While the Home Office presents eVisas as a secure and efficient alternative to physical documents\, the findings reveal highly uneven experiences shaped by migrants’ legal status trajectories and differing levels of social\, economic\, and digital capital. \nBuilding on scholarship on digital borders\, identification\, and everyday bordering\, the talk conceptualises the UK’s eVisa system as a form of digital everyday bordering. It argues that the digitalisation of immigration status reorganises relationships between migrants\, the state\, and third-party actors\, creating new forms of dependencies. As migrants are required to actively manage and repeatedly prove their status through digital platforms\, system failures and unequal access to resources generate new forms of vulnerability and exclusion. Combining an overview of the UK’s digital immigration system with empirical insights from migrants’ lived experiences\, this session will examine how digital technologies are reshaping everyday encounters with bordering practices in the context of a hostile environment. \nAbout the Speaker \nDerya Ozkul is an Associate Professor in Sociology and a Co-Director of the Social Theory Centre at the University of Warwick. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Refugee Studies Centre\, University of Oxford. Derya has served as the Principal Investigator of the ‘Digitising Identity’ project\, which forms the basis of this talk. She has published extensively on the politics of migration and displacement\, including a comprehensive research report titled ‘Automating Immigration and Asylum’. E: derya.ozkul@warwick.ac.uk
URL:https://balsillieschool.ca/event/understanding-the-uks-digital-immigration-system-navigating-evisas-and-everyday-digital-bordering/
LOCATION:Migration and Technology Hub\, 67 Erb Street West\, Waterloo\, Ontario\, N2L 6C2\, Canada
CATEGORIES:Migration+Technology Hub
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://balsillieschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Photo-credit-Canva.png
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Toronto:20261001T163000
DTEND;TZID=America/Toronto:20261001T180000
DTSTAMP:20260925T175849Z
CREATED:20260908T153305Z
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UID:10001932-1790872200-1790877600@balsillieschool.ca
SUMMARY:Northern Defence: the Arctic and Canada's Sovereign Future
DESCRIPTION:Join the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Communitech for a screening of Northern Defence\, an independent documentary by filmmaker and BSIA graduate Dan Herman. \nAs geopolitical tensions rise\, and as melting sea ice opens northern sea routes\,  how Canada safeguards its northern frontier and the vast resources that lie nearby has become a question of immediate if not existential concern. Northern Defence explores this topic in a documentary style\, introducing its audience to the people\, places and companies who are at the forefront of keeping Canada’s sovereignty secure. The film examines Canada’s preparedness to project sovereignty in the Arctic\, and in so doing\, examines how a new generation of domestic defense companies may be at the heart of this sovereignty.  It weaves together perspectives from academic\, military and government officials\, technology companies\, and Arctic residents to reveal how Canada’s sovereignty is at risk and how it can be protected. \nFollowing the screening\, a panel discussion will explore Canada’s Arctic\, questions of sovereignty and security\, and the defence technology ecosystem required to protect Canada’s interests in the North. \nThe discussion will feature Northern Defence producer Dan Herman\, BSIA Director Ann Fitz-Gerald\, and Adam Gryfe\, COO at CSMC.
URL:https://balsillieschool.ca/event/northern-defence-the-arctic-and-canadas-sovereign-future/
LOCATION:CIGI Auditorium\, 67 Erb Street West\, Waterloo\, ON\, N2L 6C2\, Canada
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://balsillieschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/NorthernDefence1.png
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Toronto:20261008T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Toronto:20261008T133000
DTSTAMP:20260909T160335Z
CREATED:20260908T141827Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260909T160335Z
UID:10001935-1791460800-1791466200@balsillieschool.ca
SUMMARY:Transpolitical Spanish-Sahrawi Relations: Migration\, Solidarity & Intimate Aid
DESCRIPTION:The recent humanitarian tragedy in Ceuta has plunged Spain into a political crisis that renders visible the afterlives of its colonial presence in Africa. Indeed\, the sudden arrival of close to 70.000 people to the shores of Ceuta this summer was preceded by another 8000 who had arrived on May 17\, 2021\, following a diplomatic dispute between Spain and Morocco over the pending decolonisation of Western Sahara; a territory currently under Moroccan occupation and listed as one of 17 remaining non-self-governing territories by the United Nations. Although the conflict over the Western Sahara is most often described as “stalled” into a zero-sum game between Morocco and the Sahrawi National Liberation Movement\, known as the Polisario Front\, from an anthropological perspective\, the conflict is far from paralyzed since the Polisario has been able to sustain its resistance\, socially reproducing its project of Sahrawi nationalism to this day. \nCircular migration between Spain and Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria constitute an increasingly important terrain for the Polisario’s social reproduction. This talk describes how a growing Sahrawi diaspora is intimately connected to the existence of a large network of solidarity with the Polisario Front that has created significant kinship-like ties between Spanish [Castilian\, Catalan\, Andalucian\, Galician\, Basque\, Canarian] and Sahrawi families through humanitarian projects that have fostered hundreds of thousands of Sahrawi children in Spain since 1979\, supported the migration and higher education of thousands of these refugees once they become adults\, and preserved some visibility for the Sahrawi cause within Spain’s public sphere. It describes how the range of citizenship practices currently pursued by Sahrawi migrants overlaps with a highly diverse range of Spanish political agendas that have little in common other than their shared dissatisfaction with a post Francoist establishment. In this way\, the talk explores how Spanish-Sahrawi relations are implicated in the production and reproduction of political imaginaries that aspire to see contemporary European and Northwest African cartographies radically reconfigured. \nAbout the Speaker \nVivian Solana is an Associate Professor at Carleton University’s Department of Sociology & Anthropology in Ottawa\, Canada. Her long-term ethnographic research in Sahrawi refugee camps focused on the forms of female political labor that socially reproduce a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism in exile. At present\, she continues examining the reproduction of Sahrawi nationalism but this time through the lens of intimate Spanish-Sahrawi relations that support a growing Sahrawi diaspora in Spain. Her work can be found published in: American Ethnologist\, LÓuest Saharien\, History & Anthropology\, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review\, The Comparative Studies of South Asia\, Africa and the Middle East & MERIP.
URL:https://balsillieschool.ca/event/transpolitical-spanish-sahrawi-relations-migration-solidarity-intimate-aid/
LOCATION:Hybrid – Zoom and room 142\, 67 Erb Street West\, Waterloo\, ON\, N2L 6C2\, Canada
CATEGORIES:Migration, Mobilities, and Social Politics Research Cluster
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://balsillieschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Sahrawi-Khayma-in-Cataluna-2019.-Vivian-Solana.png
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