Toward More Productive Policy-oriented Research
2023-10-26 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Toronto) | Room 1-42, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
Most academic research in the social sciences is motivated by a desire to understand the world in order to improve it. There are many ways to improve the world, of course, and one of them is through the development of better public policy. In this presentation Dr. Hiebert explores the question of how academic researchers can best construct and situate their work if they wish to influence public policy. He believes that knowing more about the different approaches to research by academics and those in policy settings is essential in order to build more productive relationships across the research-policy gap. Dr. Hiebert concludes by noting some of the potentials and limitations involved in collaboration between academia and the policy system.
About the speaker
Daniel Hiebert is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He conducts research on migration/immigration policy and the impact of immigration on Canadian cities. This includes an effort to understand Canadian immigration policy within the wider global context. He also plays an active role in the Canadian policy process. He has collaborated with the non-profit sector that supports the settlement and integration of immigrants, and with municipal, provincial and federal authorities responsible for immigration. In 2021 he was appointed Academic in Residence at IRCC, and is currently Special Advisor to the Senior Assistant Deputy Minister responsible for Strategic and Program Policy. He is also currently visiting Toronto Metropolitan University in the CERC Scholars of Excellence program.
This event is co-hosted by the Migration, Mobilities and Social Politics Research Cluster and the International Migration Research Centre (IMRC).

How Should We Think About 'Security'?
2023-11-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Hybrid – Zoom and room 142, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
“Security” is a word that we all use every day in a variety of contexts – so much so that it rarely occurs to us to reflect on what we think it means (or on what it ought to mean). The academic study of International Relations is something of an exception: scholars from a variety of schools of thought embrace unconventional, idiosyncratic, and sometimes downright weird definitions. Accordingly, most IR scholars would describe security as an “essentially contested concept.” I argue that it is not, or at least it should not be so considered: there is one, and only one, useful definition of security. But more than this, if we are to wield the word effectively – for example, if we are to have confidence in our ability to allocate resources wisely to various security problems – we need to think deeply about what is worth securing, and why. For this, we need a clear axiology, or theory of value, as well as a solid understanding of why it is often so difficult to gauge security threats properly. I make the case that if we are bold enough to go down this rabbit hole, we will discover that we grossly misallocate resources to security problems and that there is a clear hierarchy as between ecospheric security, state security, cultural security, and human security.
About the speaker
David A. Welch is University Research Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. He teaches at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and is co-editor (with Toni Erskine and Stefano Guzzini) of International Theory. His 2005 book Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change (Princeton University Press) is the inaugural winner of the International Studies Association ISSS Book Award for the best book published in 2005 or 2006, and his 1993 book Justice and the Genesis of War (Cambridge University Press) is the winner of the 1994 Edgar S. Furniss Award for an Outstanding Contribution to National Security Studies. He is the author most recently of Security: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and is also co-author of Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation (Pearson Education, 2020); Vietnam if Kennedy had Lived: Virtual JFK (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Concise History (Oxford University Press, 2011); On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (Noonday, 1990); and Cuba on the Brink: Castro, The Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). He is co-editor of Japan as a ‘Normal Country’? (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Frank Cass, 1998), and his articles have appeared in Asian Perspective, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Ethics and International Affairs, Foreign Affairs, The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Intelligence and National Security, Group Decision and Negotiation, International Journal, International Negotiation, International Security, International Journal, International Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, The Mershon International Studies Review, The Review of International Studies, and Security Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1990.

Migration Storytelling: The UnRedacted
2023-11-08 19:00 - 21:30 | CIGI Auditorium, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
Join the BSIA and Wilfrid Laurier’s Department of English and Film Studies on Wednesday, November 8th at 7:00 pm EST for the next event in our Migration Storytelling Series.
The UnRedacted is a film about a group of men trained by al-Qaeda who, after being captured, and following a sentence in Guantanamo, are transferred to the world’s first rehabilitation center for “terrorists,” located in Saudi Arabia. Filmed over three years, with unprecedented access, this film is a complex and nuanced exploration of the inner lives of the men we have heard so much about but never heard from.
A conversation with the filmmaker will follow the screening.
Watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/PrkSKCSXYh8
About the filmmaker
Before becoming a filmmaker, Meg Smaker served as a firefighter for over a half decade. She spent almost 10 years living and working in the Middle East, five of them in Yemen, where she learned Arabic and studied Islamic culture while teaching firefighting to Yemeni men.
As a filmmaker, Meg likes to explore controversial subjects from unorthodox viewpoints. Her films have won numerous awards, including Best Short Documentary at SXSW (South By Southwest) and a Student Academy Award. Her film, Boxeadora, received critical acclaim as “one of the best boxing films of all time” by Paste Magazine. Meg was also featured in the Hollywood Reporter’s “Next Gen” issue as one of the film industries most promising new nonfiction filmmakers, and just this year Filmmaker Magazine named her one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film”. Meg’s most recent film, The UnRedacted (Jihad Rehab)-her début feature length documentary, premiered at this year’s Sundance to rave reviews from film critics. Meg received an MFA in Documentary Film from Stanford University, Graduate Certificate from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a BA with honors in Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis (PLEA) from Mills College.

Bridge Fuel Feuds: The Competing Interpretive Politics of Natural Gas in Canada
2023-11-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Fossil fuel proponents and governments have framed natural gas as a “bridge fuel” necessary for a smooth global energy transition. However, environmental and climate justice groups warn that natural gas will lock in high carbon pathways, in addition to creating significant environmental harms and health risks for affected communities. This contestation around the framing of natural gas reflects a process of interpretive politics, namely the struggle of different actors to define policy problems and present potential solutions to influence policy outcomes. In this talk, the authors explore the interpretive politics of natural gas in Canada by analyzing government climate plans and press releases produced by industry associations and other relevant, primarily non-governmental, organizations in the post-Paris era. They identify three distinct variations of the bridge fuel narrative around the purported clean energy benefits of natural gas driven by industry associations and provincial governments. Though the language of clean energy benefits is spreading, the meaning varies significantly by regional context. The malleable position of natural gas as a source of interpretive contestation has important implications for future coalition-building and decarbonization.
About the speakers
Amy Janzwood is jointly appointed in the Department of Political Science and the Bieler School of the Environment at McGill University. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto in 2020. Previously, she held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores the comparative politics of energy and the environment, including the political economy of energy transitions, the contested politics of fossil fuel production, and the policy pathways that move us towards more just and sustainable energy systems. Professor Janzwood is on the Steering Committee of the Women & Inclusivity in Sustainable Energy Research (WISER) network and a member of the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN). She is also affiliated with the Cascade Institute and the Earth System Governance Project.
Heather Millar is a political scientist specializing in Canadian public policy. Her research interests include provincial energy and climate politics; risk perception; policy learning and feedback; and social acceptance of new technologies. Her research explores the role of ideas, particularly uncertainty, in shaping policy variation. She examines causal processes of policy change, investigating factors that influence policy durability and legitimacy in comparative perspective. Her current book project explores the politics of provincial hydraulic fracturing regulation in Canada. Dr. Millar has published research articles in Canadian Public Administration, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Environmental Politics, Public Policy and Administration, Policy Sciences and Review of Policy Research.

Reframing Equity-centered Partnerships Between Families with Refugee and Immigrant Experiences, Communities, and Schools Through a Lens of Kapwa
2023-11-14 12:00 - 13:30 | Hybrid – Zoom and room 123, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
This talk will begin at 12:30pm EST following a light lunch served to in person attendees at 12pm.
Stakeholders who provide services and support to families with immigrant and refugee backgrounds are rightly concerned with improving their partnerships with families. The quality of these partnerships depends on an array of stakeholder practices and perspectives; therefore, understanding what stakeholders believe to be practices rooted in equity for working with these families is important to consider. To gain deeper understanding of the ways that stakeholder groups – children’s teachers, parents/caregivers, social service providers, and multicultural liaisons – support newcomer families with integration in their host country, this presentation examines reciprocity as a relational aspiration for these partnerships. Studies that have been informed by an ecological lens tend to reflect systems-wide health and educational endeavors aimed at benefiting the educational, physical, and emotional health of children and their families. Because these relationships tend to be constitutive of asymmetrical power dynamics based on normative knowledge and expertise, examining how reciprocity may position families, students, and stakeholders in different and sometimes competing ways can be useful methodologically and pedagogically in the field of education. Based on a three-year qualitative embedded case study of children, families, and their children’s teachers, this presentation will re-examine the role of reciprocity in emerging work that examines the perspectives of stakeholder groups. Drawing upon post-colonial and Indigenous theories, reciprocity is highlighted to imagine just positioning of the experiences of children and families with refugee backgrounds in their schools and educational research.
About the speaker
Dr. Cynthia Reyes is a Professor in the College of Education and Social Services at the University of Vermont. She currently serves as the Associate Dean of Academic & Faculty Affairs. She received her Ph.D. in Literacy, Language, & Culture from the University of Illinois at Chicago, IL. Her research interests include school integration of students and families with refugee backgrounds, global and racial literacy pedagogy, and qualitative research methods. She co-authored Humanizing Methodologies in Educational Research from Teachers College Press, co-edited Reclaiming the Public in Dialogue in Education: Putting the ‘Public’ in Public Intellectual from Peter Lang Publishers and has published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Journal of Educational Foundations, Research in the Teaching of English, and the International Journal of Teaching and Teacher Education. She is also engaged in community work and co-authored the Vermont Ethnic Studies Framework while serving on the Act 1 Ethnic Studies Advisory Working Group to promote ethnic & social equity standards in public schools. She is a Fulbright Research Chair at the University of Waterloo, ON and the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Quasilegality, Migration, and Borderwork in Niger
2023-11-20 11:30 - 13:00 | Hybrid – room 143 and Zoom, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
Niger’s status as a ‘hub’ for West African migration is now cemented in the imaginaries of interveners and global observers. Even as the number of migrants transiting the country falls sharply from a peak in 2015, the policies and practices on the part of the Nigerien government and its local partners continue to coalesce around irregular migration as a major security priority. This paper argues that, once we consider the voices of market insiders in the smuggling economy as well as those in the security and intervention sector, these narratives point to the fundamentally ambiguous status of the migration economy between the licit and illicit, the legal and the illegal. To capture this ambiguity, the paper draws on the concept of ‘quasilegality’, which captures the in-between status of the flows in question, and in particular the conceptual space between the licit/illicit and legal/illegal binaries. The term quasilegality is particularly useful to point to three factors in particular: the difference between the social sanction of a particular activity and the state legal frameworks that regulate and potentially repress it; the ambiguity of the state legal framework itself, particularly in its application; and smugglers’ / law enforcement actors’ own understandings of their activities. The paper upon which this talk is based contributes to debates on the externalization of EU borders, the political economy of migration, and the nature of organized crime in Africa.
About the speaker
Philippe M. Frowd is an Associate Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His research draws on critical security studies and focuses on emerging transnational forms of governance of security in the Sahel region of West Africa. His research has primarily focused on irregular migration and border control in the region and has been the focus of his latest book Security at the Borders: Transnational Practices and Technologies in West Africa (2018, Cambridge University Press). Philippe also works on the politics of non-state security provision and dynamics of militarization and intervention in the Sahel more broadly. His work has most recently appeared in Third World Quarterly, Geopolitics, and African Affairs. He is an associate editor of Security Dialogue.
This event is co-hosted by the Migration, Mobilities and Social Politics Research Cluster and the International Migration Research Centre (IMRC).

Engaging with Mediation and Peacebuilding in the Age of Division: The War in Ukraine, South Sudan, and Afghanistan
2023-11-21 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Prof. Daisaku Higashi is a leading scholar on mediation during armed conflict and post-conflict peacebuilding in Japan. He will talk about his direct engagement with the government of Japan and UN agencies in addressing three global challenges in the last three years: 1) How can we end the war in Ukraine, 2) Challenges of peacebuilding in South Sudan, 3) Addressing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and creating its self-reliance and stability. Prof. Higashi visited Afghanistan in February in 2023 as UNDP Senior Peacebuilding Consultant; he directly worked with Ms. Yoko Kamikawa, President of Japan Parliamentarians Federation on Population (JPFP), non-partisan working group by parliament members of Japan on the issues of Afghan humanitarian crisis. (Ms. Yoko Kamikawa then became Foreign Minister of Japan in September 2023). Prof. Higashi was also assigned by Mr. Yoshimasa Hayashi, Japanese Foreign Minister at that time to visit South Sudan and to make some intellectual contributions to its peacebuilding in March 2023; he had numerous meetings with top leadership of the South Sudanese government, including Dr. Riek Machar, First Vice President of South Sudan. Prof. Higashi also made several important policy proposals about the roles of Japan as a chair of G7 to create global momentum to push Russian to withdraw its forces from Ukraine to end the war. He will share his own tackling of these global challenges and have intensive discussion with participants on the crucial questions.
About the speaker
Dr. Daisaku Higashi is a professor at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is specialized in mediation on armed conflicts, post-conflict peacebuilding, and international relations. He started his career as a program director at NHK, Japan Public TV Stations and produced numerous documentaries on international conflicts, including “Rebuilding Iraq: Challenges of the United Nations” which he received the silver medal from UN Correspondents Association in New York in 2004. Then, he took MA and Ph.D. in the political science at the University of British Columbia in Canada. He also worked for United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) as a team leader for reconciliation and reintegration in Kabul (2010), as well as Minister-Counsellor in the Permanent Mission of Japan to the UN (2012-2014) as a part of exchange program between Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and University of Tokyo where he served as Associate Professor. He transferred to the tenure position at Sophia University in 2016. Since 2018, Prof. Higashi has been frequently assigned by Japanese Foreign Ministers to go to Iraq and South Sudan to make some intellectual contribution to peacebuilding efforts in these conflicted states. His publication includes “How Can We End the War in Ukraine” (Iwanami Shinsho 2023), “Inclusivity in Mediation and Peacebuilding: UN, Neighboring States, and Global Power” (Edward Elgar 2022), “Civil Wars and Mediation: How Can We End the Modern Wars” (Chuko Shinsho 2020), “Challenges of Constructing Legitimacy in Peacebuilding: Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone and East Timor” (Routledge 2015), “Peacebuilding: Field Research in Afghanistan and East Timor” (Iwanami 2009).

Book Launch: "The New Knowledge: Information, Data and the Remaking of Global Power"
2023-11-23 12:00 - 13:15 | Hybrid – Zoom and room 131, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
From the global geopolitical arena to the smart city, control over knowledge—particularly over data and intellectual property—has become a key battleground for the exercise of economic and political power. For companies and governments alike, control over knowledge—what scholar Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure—has become a goal unto itself.
The rising dominance of the knowledge structure is leading to a massive redistribution of power, including from individuals to companies and states. Strong intellectual property rights have concentrated economic benefits in a smaller number of hands, while the “internet of things” is reshaping basic notions of property, ownership, and control. In the scramble to create and control data and intellectual property, governments and companies alike are engaging in ever-more surveillance.
The New Knowledge is a guide to and analysis of these changes, and of the emerging phenomenon of the knowledge-driven society. It highlights how the pursuit of the control over knowledge has become its own ideology, with its own set of experts drawn from those with the ability to collect and manipulate digital data. Haggart and Tusikov propose a workable path forward—knowledge decommodification—to ensure that our new knowledge is not treated simply as a commodity to be bought and sold, but as a way to meet the needs of the individuals and communities that create this knowledge in the first place.
About the authors
Blayne Haggart is an associate professor of political science at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. He is the author of Copyfight: The Global Politics of Digital Copyright Reform (2014) and co-editor with Natasha Tusikov of two volumes on the political economy of internet governance and knowledge governance, in addition to several journal articles on these subjects.
Natasha Tusikov is an associate professor in the Department of Social Science at York University in Toronto and a research fellow with the Justice and Technoscience Lab (JusTech Lab), School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. Her research examines the intersection among law, crime, technology, and regulation. She is the author of Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet (2017). She is a co-editor of Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World: Understanding Power Structures in the 21st Century (2019) and co-editor of Power and Authority in Internet Governance: Return of the State? (2021). Her research has also been published in Surveillance & Society and Internet Policy Review.

Conditioning Violence in the Anthropocene: The Conflict Impacts of Human Pressure on the Natural Environment in Southern Peru
2023-11-24 13:00 - 14:30 | Hybrid – Zoom and room 123, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
Does climate change and human pressure on local environments contribute to violent conflict?
Dr. Tom Deligiannis will present findings from research in Peru’s southern highlands that links human pressure on local agricultural resource endowments to the worsening of local group conflict in the decades leading to Peru’s dirty war against the Shining Path insurgency in the early 1980s. As climate change and development continue to transform traditional livelihoods in many developing countries, this research offers detailed local evidence about how human pressure on local resource endowments, combined with economic, political, and development changes, can exacerbate local violent conflict.
About the speaker
Tom Deligiannis is a Instructor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. His research focuses on the peace and conflict implications of human pressure on the natural environment, particularly qualitative research linking environmental change and violent conflict.

The Keys to the Bullet Train: Has Canada’s Window of Opportunity for Sustainable High-Speed Rail Now Closed?
2023-11-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Hybrid – Zoom and room 123, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
There has been public interest in the idea of high-speed rail (HSR) for over half a Century in Canada. The country was once even poised to become a global leader in HSR development. Yet despite studying the commercial feasibility of HSR in various transport corridors, the country has never had a proposed project move forward to the delivery phase. Here I consider the conditions that would be required for a sustainable HSR project to become a reality in Canada. I argue that there are 12 conditions – the majority of which would have to be met – for a bona fide HSR project to see the light of day, and for it to serve as a sustainable mode of intercity transport. Moreover, considering the required conditions in light of Canada’s contemporary political economy, I discuss how the window of opportunity for such a project may be closing, particularly as the aviation and automobile subsectors are undergoing rapid technological change, potentially further undermining the investment case for HSR.
About the speaker
Ryan Katz-Rosene in an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies, where he researches and teaches a range of topics relating to global environmental politics, international political economy, and Canada’s role in the world. At the university Ryan helps coordinate the International Political Economy Network (IPEN), while off campus he serves as Vice President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada. In 2017 Ryan completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Ottawa, examining ongoing debates about the role of nuclear energy in climate change mitigation efforts. He obtained his Ph.D. at Carleton University in 2014, writing his dissertation about the environmental political economy of high-speed rail development. He lives on (and helps to manage) a small organic family farm in Cantley, Québec.

Political Rights and Economic and Social Rights in Informal Economies: A View from Cape Town
2023-11-29 10:00 - 11:00 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Political rights possess significant potential to facilitate the realization of economic and social rights by allowing marginalized groups to make claims on the state in the pursuit of justice, empowerment and equality. This is particularly promising for individuals engaged in informal economic activity who, by definition, face significant forms of exclusion. Cape Town, South Africa, is in many ways a model for this idea: following its post-apartheid democratization process, governments at the local, provincial and national level officially recognize the value of informality and have adopted policies to support it. Yet the economic and social rights of those who engage in informal economic activity remain unrealized. This presentation examines why this is the case. It will also consider what focusing on migrants in Cape Town’s informal food economy can add to our understanding of this puzzle.
About the speaker
Graeme Young is a Lecturer in Social and Public Policy at the University of Glasgow. He is a former QES Scholar who served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and a Visiting Researcher at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town with the Hungry Cities Partnership. Graeme received his PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2018.

MiFOOD is hosting a series of webinars on various topics about migration and food security that highlight the progress of the project. These webinars include conceptual discussion, empirical findings and policy analysis. Through these webinars, we intend to build a community with various stakeholders for knowledge sharing, deepen the understanding of the complex intersections between migration and food security, and facilitate the discussion of effective policy interventions. Follow the MiFOOD Twitter (Moving on Empty), Like the MiFOOD Facebook page to be notified about upcoming webinars.

Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India
2023-12-05 10:00 - 11:00 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Webinar link: https://cigionline-org.zoom.us/j/81713717569?pwd=[REDACTED]
This presentation will draw on the author’s recent book on the connections between migration and food security. In the past few years, these two issues of migration and food security have occupied centerstage in global development policy and research agendas. But discussions on these issues have tended to proceed in silos with little attention devoted to the relationship they bear with each other. Using primary, field-based evidence from rural India, this talk will attempt to bridge this divide. Going beyond the conventional understanding on the subject that invariably sees migration as a response to food shortages, this presentation will focus on two central features of migration in India that include i) circular moves, and ii) male-dominated migration, to highlight how these present two other key pathways through which migration-food security relationship plays out, and will argue that consideration of these linkages provides for a more holistic understanding of migration–food-security nexus.
About the speaker
Chetan Choithani is an Assistant Professor in the Inequality and Human Development Programme of the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru. Prior to his present employment at NIAS, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Urban Studies Institute of Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta.
Chetan obtained his PhD in Geography from the University of Sydney in 2016 as a recipient of the Australian Government’s competitive Prime Minister Postgraduate Award. Before his PhD, he completed a Master of Population Studies from the International Institute of Population Sciences, and a Master of Arts in Globalisation and Labour from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
The broad disciplinary domain of Chetan’s work is development studies. Within this area, his research and teaching interests include migration and urbanisation, food and nutrition, livelihoods, gender, and social policy and how they relate to development, particularly in the Indian context. He has published his work on these issues in peer-reviewed journals including World Development, Economic Geography, Gender, Place and Culture, Geographical Research, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Economic and Political Weekly.
Chetan has done extensive fieldwork in remote parts of India, and his research uses primary, field-based insights to engage with and inform larger issues of development.
MiFOOD is hosting a series of webinars on various topics about migration and food security that highlight the progress of the project. These webinars include conceptual discussion, empirical findings and policy analysis. Through these webinars, we intend to build a community with various stakeholders for knowledge sharing, deepen the understanding of the complex intersections between migration and food security, and facilitate the discussion of effective policy interventions. Follow the MiFOOD Twitter (Moving on Empty), Like the MiFOOD Facebook page to be notified about upcoming webinars.

Film Screening: Peace by Chocolate
2023-12-14 19:00 - 21:00 | CIGI Auditorium, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
December 18th is International Migrant Day. In recognition, we celebrate it by participating in the Waterloo Region Migration Film Festival (WRMFF) 2023 – #WRMigFest. This year, the International Migration Research Centre (IMRC), in collaboration with Immigration Partnership Waterloo Region, invite you to a screening of the 2021 film, Peace by Chocolate, written by Jonathan Keijser and Abdul Malik, and directed by Jonathan Keijser (96 min).
Movie description
After the bombing of his father’s chocolate factory, a charming young Syrian refugee struggles to settle into his new small-town life, caught between following his dream and preserving his family’s legacy. The film is based on a true story of a Syrian family, the Hadads, who fled as refugees to Lebanon, and after 3 years in Lebanon, resettled in Canada in Antigonish, Nova Scotia in 2016.
You can see more about the background to the story here: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170405-the-syrian-refugees-finding-hope-in-chocolate
And https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/syrian-refugee-says-family-s-chocolate-business-shows-value-of-canadian-openness/article_1bc428fb-d0cf-5a12-ba93-13fa687f870e.html
Watch the official trailer: https://peacebychocolate.ca/
Waterloo Region Migration Film Festival – #WRMigFest
December 1st to 18th, 2023
Storytelling is the oldest way to share and have impactful conversations around social issues. WRMFF is an educational tool that can influence perceptions and attitudes toward migrants, by bringing attention to matters that affect basic human rights!
The goal of the Festival is to pave the way for greater discussion around migration and relocation, by creating spaces for respectful interaction and dialogues.
Parking is available in the CIGI Campus lot or in the City of Waterloo Erb lot (https://uptownwaterloobia.com/uptown-parking/).

PhD Dissertation Defence: "Restricting Fossil Fuel Supply: Examining and Amplifying the Role of the Least Developed Countries’ Group in the United Nations Climate Negotiations
2024-01-11 09:00 - 12:00 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Choyon Saha’s dissertation defence.
Abstract
The demand for restricting fossil fuel supply—exploration, extraction, and transportation—has intensified recently and become the cornerstone of the global climate debate. Notwithstanding numerous impressive contributions of fossil fuels to socioeconomic developments, this demand has escalated. This is mainly due to the principal role of fossil fuel-based greenhouse gas emissions in pushing the Earth’s climate system outside of the safe boundary and stable state, thereby creating and worsening the cataclysmic consequences of climate upheaval worldwide. In the broader landscape of growing demand for constraining global supply of fossil fuels, the United Nations (UN) climate summit—Conference of the Parties (COP)—has become an important site to confront fossil fuel producing countries and restrict their fuel supply. In COP climate negotiations, the Group of 46 Least Developed Countries (LDCG), a negotiating bloc of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), finds itself in a unique position to challenge fossil fuel incumbents, thereby developing international policies to limit fossil fuel supply, which is widely known as supply-side climate policies (SSCPs). To analyze this position, this dissertation seeks to explore—and amplify—the role and capacity of the LDCG in UN climate negotiations to advance SSCPs. To do so, this dissertation sets and resolves three distinct interconnected questions, which have been addressed in the three manuscripts.
Manuscript-I asks and addresses what the paradox occupied by the LDCG looks like and to what extent this paradoxical position can be justified by the global distributive justice lens. Drawing on existing scholarship, this study examines the LDCG’s paradoxical political position and argues that LDCs call for G20 states in COP negotiations to phase-out fossil fuels while expanding their own fossil fuel supply-related projects with supports from the same G20 nations. By calling for G20 states to phase-out their fossil fuels, the LDCG has been playing a vitally important role in developing international SSCPs through UN climate negotiations. However, the continued expansion of fossil fuel supply projects in LDCs has resulted in diverse inherent concerns, while this extension is supported by the global distributive justice lens due to their fragile socioeconomic conditions, developmental needs, less access to energy, and negligible contribution (0.4%) to global CO2 emissions. These concerns are related to resource curse risks, emissions growth, uncertainty around staying below 1.5°C of warming, and obstacles to achieving sustainable development goals and net zero target. Therefore, the analysis suggests that G20 states’ investments for fossil fuel expansion in LDCs should be redirected toward developing the low carbon energy system. Likewise, the analysis focuses on reinforcing LDCs’ efforts to press G20 states to begin phasing out fossil fuels globally.
Manuscript-II provides answers to the questions of how the coalition of LDCs is strategizing to confront fossil fuel incumbents and their norms and practices, and to what extent the coalition has capacity to do so. Drawing on empirical interviews and the strategic power approach, this study argues that while negotiators use “soft” strategies in climate negotiations to call upon incumbents to cut fossil fuel consumption, observers undertake “hard” strategies at side events to pressurize incumbents to phase-out production. The results demonstrate that the coalition is overwhelmingly fragile to challenge fossil fuel incumbents for the transition from fossil fuels. This fragility mainly lies in the coalition’s strategic capacity, which is deeply obstructed by weak strategies of negotiators, diverse interests and fragmentation in the coalition and G77+China, interstate relations between LDCs and incumbents influenced by colonial legacy and political economic factors. The findings finally suggest that as the coalition’s capacity to challenge incumbents is very fragile, it needs to be upheld to facilitate the development of SSCPs through COP negotiations.
Manuscript-III resolves the questions of how the LDCG can advance SSCPs in climate negotiations and how the Group can reshape international mitigation policymaking through the UNFCCC. By addressing these questions, this study spotlights the compelling need of pinpointing strategic pathways to improve the LDCG’s capacity to play stronger roles in negotiations, which are very vital to accelerate the advancement of restrictive policies on the supply of fossil fuels. Drawing on interviews with negotiators and observers, this study offers politico-economic, institutional, and nonmaterial strategic pathways that would improve LDCs’ negotiation capacity to argue with producing states to curtail extraction, enable the LDCG to play robust roles in negotiations, and help address barriers that LDCs face while developing policies to constrain fossil fuel supply. The analysis suggests that the application of these strategies is crucially important for the LDCG to reshape the development of climate mitigation policies via the UNFCCC. This is because these strategies would help the LDCG facilitate the advancement of a consensus on transitioning from fossil fuels, the equitable development of supply-side policies in negotiations as compared to demand-side policies, and the diminution of influence of fossil fuel corporations on climate negotiations.
In short, the findings presented in the above three manuscripts—and/or this dissertation—stand to make novel contributions to the scholarly fields on supply-side climate politics, SSCPs, and politics in UN climate negotiations. In addition, the results also enrich theoretical literature by expanding the realm of distributive justice, enhancing the usefulness of strategic power, and materializing the logics of supply-side climate policies.
Supervisor: Dr. Angela Carter, Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo
Committee Member: Dr. Douglas Peers, Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo
Internal-External Member: Dr. Jatin Nathwani, Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo
Other Member: Dr. Peter Newell, University of Sussex
External Examiner: Pedro Alarcón, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales Quito, Ecuador
There are limited spaces available to attend the defence. Email events@balsillieschool.ca if you would like to attend. Please advise if you would like to attend in person or virtually.

Building a Climate Tech Start-up in a Volatile Climate
2024-01-11 12:00 - 13:30 | Hybrid – room 143 and Zoom, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
Join us to hear the story of Flash Forest, a new climate-tech startup, and learn about the opportunities and challenges of building a climate-tech startup company in Canada. This includes an entrepreneurial blueprint:

Idea incubation, market validation, and raising
Creativity: making the complicated simple
Balancing risk in entrepreneurship – too little vs. too great
Resilience, Resilience, Resilience

Cameron Jones will also speak about the important role of climate-tech in addressing climate issues, how you can get involved, and challenges and opportunities.
About the speaker
Cameron Jones is the Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Flash Forest, Canada’s largest and first to market drone-reforestation company. He has been with the company since 2019.
Before founding Flash Forest, Cameron was an Adjunct Professor at both the University of Alberta and Dalhousie University. In this role, he drafted curriculum and taught courses in renewable energy and Corporate Social Responsibility. Cameron was also the Director of Project Management of the Public Agency Secretariat at the Government of Alberta and acted as Chief of Staff for the Department of Energy. Cameron has over a decade of experience in start-up management, operations, climate policy, project management, and sustainable energy. He has published papers and co-authored books on renewable energy which can be found in Oxford University Press and Energy Strategy Reviews.
He and his team are the recipients of multiple awards, including:

World Government Summit Award
2020, Top 100 CSR Influence Leader
2020, Premier’s Public Service Award, 2018

Cameron is currently earning his Master of Laws (GPLLM) from the University of Toronto. He also has a Master of Science (MSc) in Energy Policy for Sustainability, in 2014, from the University of Sussex.
Cameron and his company have been featured on CNN, Forbes, NowThis, CBC, Daily Mail, National Geographic, Newsweek, and Fast Company.
Media Links: CBC Documentary, Fast Company, Now This News
Website: Flash Forest

A Conversation with The Honourable Elizabeth Dowdeswell
2024-01-16 12:15 - 13:30 | Room 1-23, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
The Balsillie School is pleased to welcome The Honourable Elizabeth Dowdeswell to discuss her roles as Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and United Nations Environment Programme’s 3rd Executive Director.
The Honourable Elizabeth Dowdeswell served as the 29th Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, the Canadian province’s vice regal representative of Queen Elizabeth II, from 2014 to 2023.
Ms. Dowdeswell served as the Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) between 1992 and 1998. Under her leadership, UNEP enhanced its use of technology to better understand environmental issues.
Her work as the founding President and CEO of Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization resulted in a government decision on the long-term management of Canada’s used nuclear fuel. As Assistant Deputy Minister of Environment Canada, Ms. Dowdeswell was responsible for the national weather and atmospheric agency, including negotiating the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Her early career included terms as Deputy Minister of Culture and Youth for the Province of Saskatchewan, educational consultant, university lecturer and high school teacher.

Deportation Limbo: On State Violence and Contested Borders in the Nordics
2024-01-22 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Deportation limbo: State violence and contestations in the Nordics traces the violent state practices deployed by Nordic welfare states to contain, pressure, and deport people who have been made deportable. The book builds on ethnographic research of the institutions, actors and practices that make up Sweden’s and Denmark’s deportation regimes. It details how state fantasies of ‘effective’ deportations and ‘humane’ enforcement politics translate into practices of slow violence and dehumanisation – of the deportable people it targets, and and of those enforcing it. This talk provides an overview of some of the book’s key findings and discusses what they might imply for our understanding of state violence (direct and slow), the racial welfare state, and the imperative of radical change in the ways borders shape our political imagination.
About the speaker
Annika Lindberg (she/her) is a researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, and the HES-SO Valais. Her research draws on critical border studies and political ethnography, and focuses on deportation regimes, bureaucracy, and the different forms of violence manifesting at Europe’s borders. She is the author of Deportation limbo: State violence and contestations in the Nordics (Manchester University Press, 2022) and co-author of Migrants Before the Law: Contested Migration Control in Europe (Palgrave, 2019), and of the research report Stop Killing us Slowly. Her work on state power and bordering also appears in Geopolitics, Social Anthropology, and Migration and Society.

Book Launch: The Concertation Impulse in World Politics
2024-02-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Hybrid – room 143 and Zoom, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
The Concertation Impulse in World Politics: Contestation over Fundamental Institutions and the Constrictions of Institutionalist International Relations unravels the centrality of contestation over international institutions under the shadow of crisis. Breaking with the widely accepted image in the mainstream, US-centric literature of an advance of global governance supported by pillars of institutionalized formality, Andrew F. Cooper points to the retention of a habitual impulse towards concertation related to informal institutionalism.
Rather than endorsing the view that world politics is moving inexorably towards a multilateral, rules-based order, he places the onus on the resilience of a hierarchical self-selected concert model that combines a stigmatized legacy with the ability to reproduce in an array of associational designs.
Relying for conceptual guidance on the recovery of a valuable component in the intellectual contribution of Hedley Bull, a compelling case is made that concertation represents a fundamental institution as a peer competitor to multilateralism. In effect, the debate over institutional design is recast away from an emphasis on utilitarian maximization towards a wider set of cardinal— and highly contested—questions: the nature of rules at the global level, the salience of institutional clubs, and the meaning and impact of (in)equality and cooperation/ coordination among states across the incumbent West/non-incumbent Global South divide.
About the author
Andrew F. Cooper is a Professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and University Research Chair, the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo where he teaches in the areas of International Organization, Global Governance, Comparative Foreign Policy and International Diplomacy. He holds a DPhil in International Relations from Oxford University. In 2009 he served as Visiting Fulbright Chair at the Center on Public Diplomacy, University of Southern California, and he has also been a visiting professor at Australian National University, SAIS Johns Hopkins, Stellenbosch University, Shiv Nadar University and Harvard University. Currently he is an Associate Research Fellow-UNU CRIS. In 2019 he was the first recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Diplomacy Section of the International Studies Association.
Dr. Cooper is the author/co-author of 12 books ranging from the first stand-alone book on the G20, with a Foreword by the Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, to works on The BRICS, Celebrity Diplomacy, Diplomatic Afterlives, and Internet Gambling Offshore. He is also editor/co-editor of 21 collections including The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy. His articles have appeared in leading journals such as International Organization, International Affairs, World Development, International Studies Review, International Interactions, Political Science Quarterly, Global Policy Journal, Washington Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Global Governance, Third World Quarterly, and New Political Economy. His work has been profiled via ABC Good Morning America, The Independent, CBC’s Q, Variety Magazine, Times of India, China Daily, and the Washington Diplomat.

'Police Authority is Necessary': The Canadian Origins of the Legal Powers to Detain and Deport, 1893-1902
2024-02-06 16:00 - 17:30 | Hybrid – Zoom and room 142, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
When and why did Canada develop the legal powers to detain and deport immigrants? At the beginning of the twentieth century, Canada did have legal powers authorizing deportations, but the laws lay as inactive dead letters. After a significant American diplomatic effort to establish a continental immigration exclusion program, initially resisted by Canadian corporate and state actors, Canada activated immigration police powers in the summer of 1900. After extensive archival research, this legal history shows that the government endorsed immigration police powers when it appeared that Canada was the destination for thousands of Jewish Roumanian refugees and that the Americans planned to set up extensive border controls along the Canadian-American frontier. From there, Canada quickly developed and enhanced its immigration policing powers and laws to forestall American economic sanctions. This article considers how government, corporate interests, international law, and American interest combined to eventually lead to the passage of a 1902 law that firmly established Canada’s right to arrest, detain, and deport undesirable immigrants.
About the speaker
Simon Wallace is an immigration detention and deportation defence lawyer who is completing his doctorate at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. His researches immigration law history and how computational methods can be used to advance legal research. His writing has appeared in national and international journals. Simon has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada, the Federal Court of Canada, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, and many administrative tribunals

Woman, Outsider, Researcher: Navigating Complexities of Feminist Ethnographic Research into Masculinities in the Turkey-Georgia Borderlands
2024-02-13 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
This presentation will focus on the complexities of conducting feminist ethnographic research on gender, men, and masculinities. The talk is inspired by my six-month-long PhD dissertation fieldwork in Hopa, a small town at the Turkey-Georgia borderland, exploring the reconfiguration of gender and masculinities since the opening of this border in 1989. I will shed light on how my intersecting positionalities as a woman, an outsider, and an academic researcher introduce gendered openings and challenges in the field. These relations detail the multiple and overlapping methodological conundrums of undertaking feminist research with men as a woman, and the intricacies of studying gender and masculinities in a patriarchal and hyper-masculine context. By emphasizing diverse research encounters, including those based on gendered power dynamics, I draw attention to the often-overlooked vulnerabilities of women researchers in the field, and highlight the connections between research experiences and broader structural inequalities, and the merit of a feminist methodology involving research with men. The talk calls for more gender-sensitive discussions on research methodologies.
About the speaker:
Pınar Ensari is a visiting researcher from Koç University in Turkey, who will be at BSIA this academic year and collaborating with Suzan Ilcan. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Koç University in Turkey. She obtained double BA degrees in Philosophy and Political Science & International Relations from Boğaziçi University and an MA degree in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University.
Prior to her PhD studies, Pınar worked as a Project Coordinator in several non-profit organizations in Turkey, focusing on hate speech, human rights, strengthening the capacity of civil society, and philanthropy.
During her PhD, Pınar engaged in extensive research activities and conducted fieldwork in different parts of Turkey. She worked at the Migration Research Center at Koç University (MiReKoC) as a researcher in a Horizon 2020 Project titled MIGNEX, exploring the relationship between migration and development in 10 countries of origin and transit. Additionally, she contributed as a researcher at Sabancı University‘s Gender and Women’s Studies Center for Excellence (SU Gender) in a Horizon 2020 Project titled RESISTIRE. This project delved into the gendered inequalities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 30 European countries and involved co-designing solutions to be deployed by policymakers, stakeholders, and actors in the field.
Pınar’s research interests encompass borders and borderlands, cross-border mobility, migration, gender, and masculinities. Her dissertation focuses on the rapid social transformation and reconfiguration of gender and masculinities in Hopa, after the opening of the Turkey-Georgia border in 1989, with particular attention to cross-border mobility and trade.
She is one of the co-editors of the “(Better) Stories from the Pandemic” (Örebro University Press, 2023) and has also published on diverse topics such as migration policy, migration and development nexus, Kurdish issues, and hate speech.

Launch of the MiFOOD Network Website
2024-02-21 10:00 - 11:00 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
The MiFOOD Network is thrilled to unveil their new website—an initiative spearheaded by the Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) and funded by a Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This platform is dedicated to advancing global research on the intricate relationship between migration and food security in the Global South.
About MiFOOD
The MiFOOD Project, hosted by HCP, focuses on neglected connections between migration and food security. Collaborating with over 90 researchers and partners across 13 countries, MiFOOD aims to enrich the global discourse on migration and food security, informing policies and empowering institutions to address vulnerabilities of migrants.
Event Agenda:

Welcome & Introduction
Overview of the Website Design and Content
Comments and questions

Surveillance Capitalism: A Conversation with Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Balsillie
2024-02-22 16:00 - 17:30 | Hybrid – CIGI Auditorium and Zoom, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
Register for this event here.

Join us for an urgent discussion on “surveillance capitalism”, its threat to our information civilization, and how its trajectory undermines democratic norms and the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.
The Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Centre for International Governance Innovation cordially invite you to a discussion on surveillance capitalism, featuring Professor Shoshana Zuboff (Professor Emerita, Harvard University and author) and Mr. Jim Balsillie (Canadian business leader and philanthropist). The discussion will offer perspectives on the concept of surveillance capitalism and its implications for an information civilization. The conversation will also raise issues concerning governance and public policy challenges in a marketplace of intangibles, where power is based on who controls and owns data and intellectual property. Offering both research and practitioner perspectives, Professor Zuboff and Mr. Balsillie will highlight ways in which surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.
Moderated by Professor Ann Fitz-Gerald (Director, BSIA) and Dr. Paul Samson (President, CIGI).
A reception will follow this event (5:30-6:30pm) in the CIGI Campus foyer.
Register for this event here.

Navigating Data “Silence(r)s”: Researching Migration in the Caribbean
2024-02-27 10:00 - 11:00 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
MiFOOD Webinar No. 15
Attributed in part to an absence of systematic data collection infrastructures, and to the region’s very geography, it has been an enduring empirical struggle to engage in comprehensive analyses of migratory movements across the Caribbean region. In this paper, we adopt a comparative case study approach to reflect on challenges encountered while collecting data on Venezuelan migration in the Southern Caribbean. These included limited access to potential interviewees and other research participants for projects undertaken in Aruba, Curaçao and Trinidad and Tobago. With hardened borders, Venezuelan migrants have increasingly engaged in irregular movement via boat journeys to Caribbean islands. To further complicate this matter, these migration flows are occurring in highly politicized environments, as small island developing states seek to respond to these in-flows. Thus, compounded by the clandestine nature of these migrant journeys, and Caribbean governments reticence to publicly comment on the issue to ‘outsiders’, researchers are faced with multiple data silences and silencers during data collection. Acknowledging that these silences are fraught and powerful, we are, however, able to harness and reappropriate them, through for example, reading these silences within the larger socio-political contexts, and allowing these silences to direct us to supplementary data sources. We therefore interrogate the concept of silence in qualitative research, which has typically been applied to the interview process. We argue that data silencers can be used as productive methodological instruments toward understanding unfolding migration phenomenon. While our scholarship is grounded in Migration Studies, our research will appeal to demographers, anthropologists, and sociologists. In addition, our case study is applicable to the wider discourse on data collection on sensitive topics, and specific issues, such as interviewing, gatekeeping and insider status.
Speakers:

Natalie Dietrich Jones, University of the West Indies
Shiva S. Mohan, Toronto Metropolitan University

Natalie Dietrich Jones is Research Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies Mona campus. Her interests include geographies of the border, governance of migration, and intra-regional migration in the Caribbean. Natalie is Chair of the Migration and Development Cluster, an interdisciplinary group of researchers exploring contemporary issues concerning migration in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Natalie holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Development Policy and Management from the University of Manchester. She is currently undertaking a multi-sited project on the response to Venezuelan migration in small island developing states in the Southern Caribbean. She is also Principal Investigator for the Jamaica (Kingston) component of South-South Migration and Migrant Food Insecurity: Interactions, Impacts and Remedies (MiFood Project), a multi-city research initiative which is led by the Wilfrid Laurier University.
Shiva S. Mohan is a human geographer with research interests situated at the interface of migration and mobility studies, island studies and political geography. His work seeks to underscore the ambivalences, contradictions and precarities within migrants’ lived experiences, in addition to those faced by territories vis à vis transnational migrations. Shiva is currently a Research Fellow at the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration program at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he leads two research projects: as part of a Horizon Europe consortium, the “Measuring irregular migration and related policies in the Canadian context” project (MIrreM Canada), and a Soli*City project investigating intergovernmentalism and “firewalls.” Shiva is a member of the Migration and Development Research Cluster at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), The University of the West Indies. He is also an associated researcher and trustee with Swiss-based research NGO, Environmental Mobility Research Unit (EMRU).
MiFOOD is hosting a series of webinars on various topics about migration and food security that highlight the progress of the project. These webinars include conceptual discussion, empirical findings and policy analysis. Through these webinars, we intend to build a community with various stakeholders for knowledge sharing, deepen the understanding of the complex intersections between migration and food security, and facilitate the discussion of effective policy interventions. Follow the MiFOOD Twitter (Moving on Empty), Like the MiFOOD Facebook page to be notified about upcoming webinars.

International Political Economy, Climate Change and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism
2024-02-29 12:00 - 13:30 | Hybrid – Zoom and room 143, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
This hybrid panel, co-organized by WatPEG/Global Political Economy Research Cluster and the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) at the University of Warwick, takes stock and discusses recent developments in field of political economy and climate change.
Speakers
Ben Clift (Warwick): Business-as-usual despite fast-approaching environmental tipping points? The IMF’s curious approach to tackling the climate crisis.
James Chamberlain (Warwick) and Nick Bernards (Warwick): Insurance and the contradictions of the climate-development-finance nexus: The case of the African Risk Capacity
Derek Hall (Laurier): ‘Whats’ and ‘Hows’ in Proposals for Radical Climate Action.
Comments by Madison Lee (Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo).

Intersectional Feminism and Migration in the Cinema of Aotearoa New Zealand
2024-03-05 18:30 - 21:00 | Room 1-42, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
This event will spotlight the dynamic link between intersectional feminism and women’s cinema in Aotearoa, which illustrates a startling variety of perspectives on the challenges women face on and off-screen, as well as a refreshing willingness to confront head-on the differences among women in the diverse island nation of roughly 5 million people (of whom 27.4% are not New Zealand born)[1]. Kāinga (2022) is the latest anthology film from producers Kerry Warkia and Kiel McNaughton, the pair behind the rules-based and women-authored collaborative features, Waru (2017) and Vai (2019). Waru is comprised of eight 10-minute long takes written, directed by, and starring Māori women, while Vai’s eight 10-minute long takes are directed by Pasifika women and set across the Pacific. Kāinga completes Warkia and McNaughton’s trilogy of women-of-colour centred anthologies, yet departs from the first two by electing not to focus on Indigenous but on migrant women, with Asian New Zealanders helming the feature film.
After screening Kāinga, Missy Molloy (Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington) and Selmin Kara (OCAD University) will lead a discussion of the intersectional feminism that grounds the film, with special attention paid to its unifying element: a house in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, through which a parade of Asian immigrant families transit over a 50-year span. In a bold move, the film’s title applies a Māori concept of home, “kāinga,” to recent Asian immigrants only temporarily occupying the house in Auckland, which can be interpreted as an acknowledgement of shared struggles among women of colour whose experiences of home and belonging have been shaped by colonial histories that continue to reverberate in contemporary patterns of global migration. Molloy is a senior lecturer in film in Aotearoa, where she coordinated an event celebrating Waru and Vai with Warkia and McNaughton in 2019, and Kara is a Toronto-based film scholar who specialises in environmental, alternative and Indigenous cinemas. To the “migration storytelling” series, Kāinga contributes sophisticated cinematic storytelling that showcases the impressive range of colonial, racial, class and gender contexts present in contemporary Aotearoa, wherein a growing number of women filmmakers are confronting “the dominant, white, mono-cultural perspective on life” (Merata Mita) long upheld by mainstream cinemas.
About the speakers
Selmin Kara is an Associate Professor of Film and New Media Studies at OCAD University in Toronto. Her primary research interests are digital aesthetics and ecological sensibilities in cinema as well as the use of sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. She is the co-editor of Contemporary Documentary, Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision, and the Visible Evidence Forum. Her work has also appeared in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Screen, Sequence, Resilience, Music and Sound in Nonfiction Film, The Philosophy of Documentary, and Studies in Documentary Film.
Missy Molloy is Senior Lecturer in film at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand, where she lectures on women’s, queer, posthuman and activist cinemas. She is co-author of Screening the Posthuman (Oxford University Press 2023) and co-editor of ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier (Edinburgh University Press 2018). Her publications include “Indigenous Futurist and Women-Centred Dystopian Film” (Feminist Posthumanism and Postfeminist Humanism 2023), the video essay “Art Cinema’s Suicidal Posthuman Women” ([in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 2024), and “Indigenous Feminism Revitalizing the Long Take: Waru and The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open” (Jump Cut 2021).

Unravelling a Displaced Future: Syrians Between Emergency and Protracted Crisis in Lebanon
2024-03-07 16:30 - 18:00 | Hybrid – room 143 and Zoom, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
In 2015, Lebanon ended the informal asylum period characterizing the first years of the ‘Syrian refugee crisis.’ Previously, the Lebanese state treated the displacement of Syrians as a humanitarian emergency. Slowly and inevitably, however, the crisis became protracted, pushing the Lebanese state to reject the ‘Syrian presence’, a dictum encapsulated by the visa regime issued in January 2015. For Syrians, these phases, and the Lebanese state’s radical turns, made up a present of uncertainties that constantly redefined how they inhabited displacement.
The fragility of the present also produced different modes of imagining and acting upon the future, even if this future was on hold–especially until 2014–as Syrians could only wait out the crisis. The new regulations unveiled that such waiting was in vain. A future beyond the crisis–of war in Syria and displacement in Lebanon–was out of reach for many who felt compelled to undertake the perilous journey to reach Europe bi-tariq al-bahr (by sea, i.e., by crossing informal borders).
Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon, this talk captures the unravelling of the future as a project-in-the-making for a liveable life throughout the different tempos characterising the transition from emergency to protracted crisis in which the social becomes intertwined with the legal and the bureaucratic. Indeed, understanding ‘displacement and futurity in relation’ requires us to see how future-making relies on the past and present even in times of crisis. However, I argue that imagining the future in times of crisis is not only about linear time, but a renegotiation of different times and temporality, their hierarchies, and the logics governing each temporal rhythm and different geography.
About the speaker
Veronica Ferreri is a Global Marie Curie Fellow at the Dept of Humanities in Venice’s University of Ca’ Foscari and an affiliated researcher at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo. She works at the intersection of Social Anthropology and Migration Studies with a focus on exile and displacement, solidarity and vernacular humanitarianism, and bureaucracy and documents. Her current project – Archives in Times of War – examines the centrality of the archive of legal documents in the life of Syrian families living in Europe. Her work appears in Citizenship Studies, Conflict and Society, Allegra Lab and Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

2024 Prospective Student Open House
2024-03-15 13:00 - 15:00 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
By Invitation Only
The Balsillie School welcomes prospective students to meet virtually with the School’s Director, Program Directors and Officers, current students and graduates to learn about all the unique opportunities on offer at the School.
AGENDA
1:00 pm – Welcome and introductions, Ann Fitz-Gerald, Director, Balsillie School of International Affairs
1:10 pm – Research Clusters and experiential learning opportunities, Ann Fitz-Gerald, Director, Balsillie School of International Affairs
1:20 pm – Graduates Fellows Program, Andrew Thompson, Global Governance Programs and Partnership Manager
1:40 pm – Program breakout sessions
MAGG
Andrew Thompson, Program Manager
Rachael Gergley, Program Coordinator
Madelyn Rawlyk, current MAGG student
MIPP
Colleen Loomis, Program Director
Kim Rygiel, Professor, Political Science
Maureen Ferraro, Program Officer
Jessica Stewart, current MIPP student
Julye-Anne McKenny, current MIPP student
Varinia Salazar Barrientos, current MIPP student
2:20 pm – MAGG and MIPP alumni panel
Spencer Page, MAGG 2021
Sakshi Jain, MIPP 2018
Fahd Shah, MIPP 2022
2:55 pm – Closing remarks
The link to attend the virtual open house will be sent to all registrants on March 14th.

MiFOOD WS2 Configuration Workshop: Migrant Precarity and Urban Food in the Global South
2024-03-20 08:30 - 11:40 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Join the webinar using this link: https://cigionline-org.zoom.us/j/82451733735?pwd=[REDACTED]
The MiFOOD Network and the IMRC welcome your participation in the MiFOOD WS2 Configuration Workshop on “Migrant Precarity and Urban Food in the Global South”. This workshop brings together esteemed and early-career scholars to discuss research plans focusing on Workstream 2 of the MiFOOD project—specifically, the role of migrants in transforming urban food chains. Researchers will engage in a comprehensive exploration of the interplay between migration, informality, gender, and food security. Spanning geographical regions including Asia, Latin America and Africa, the sessions will cover diverse topics: the links between migration and food security, the role of migrants in urban food systems, the impact of COVID-19 on women informal food vendors, and various other facets of food environments in the Global South. The purpose of this workshop is to contribute scholarly perspectives on the complex challenges surrounding migrant precarity and food systems in the Global South. It aims to foster the generation of new research ideas through mutual learning, and provide opportunities for comparative, interdisciplinary, and collaborative studies within and beyond the MiFOOD network.
Agenda

Session 1: Asia
8:30-9:30

Irudaya Rajan (IIMAD, India). “Food Security and the Kerala Migration Survey”.
Sujata Ramachandran (BSIA, Canada). “‘Little Pockets of Happiness’: Nepali Migrants and Momos Informal Enterprises in New Delhi, India”.
Huiguang Chen (Nanjing Agricultural University, China). “Understanding the Reciprocal Links Between Migration and Food Security in Nanjing and the Nearby Changzhou Cities, China”.
Taiyang Zhong (Nanjing University, China). “Role of Migrants in Urban Food Retailing: Focusing on Vendors and Takeaway Riders”.

Session 2: Latin America
9:30-10:00

Tiana Hayden (El Colegio de México), Fernanda Vazquez (Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico). “The Role of (Transit) Migrants in Urban Food Systems in Three Mexican Cities”.
Mercedes Eguiguren (BSIA, Canada). “Beyond Informality: Migrants in the Popular Food Economy in Quito”.

Break
10:00-10:10
Session 3: Africa 1
10:10-10:55

Sam Owuor (University of Nairobi, Kenya). “The Impact of COVID-19 on Women Informal Food Vendors in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements.”
Elizabeth Onyango (University of Alberta, Canada). “A Gendered Analysis of the Role of Women-led Informal Food Businesses in Urban Household Food Security and Wellbeing of Urban Dwellers Kisumu City, Kenya.”
Cherie Enns (University of the Fraser Valley, Canada). “Urban South Sudanese Refugees: Opportunities and Constraints Related to Food Supply Chains in Nairobi and Nakuru Kenya.”

Session 4: Africa 2
10:55-11:25

Sean Sithole (University of the Western Cape, South Africa). “Urban Transformation, African Migrants and the Informal Food System in Cape Town”.
Bernard Owusu (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada). “Examining the Meat Food Value Chain and Food System in Accra, Ghana”.

Concluding Remarks
11:25-11:40
Download the agenda

Queen's-BSIA International Migration and Mobilities Graduate Symposium 2024
2024-03-22 09:00 - 15:30 | Room 1-42, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
Registrations are now closed for this event.
Join us for this year’s in-person Graduate Student Symposium on international migration and mobility, hosted by Queen’s University and the Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA). Students will be presenting research addressing this year’s theme of Borders and (Un)Bordering: Analyzing Migration and Mobility Through Contestation and Conflict.
About the Symposium:
The Queen’s-BSIA International Migration and Mobilities Graduate Symposium is designed to showcase graduate students’ work and promote their professionalization. Students will have the opportunity to discuss and receive feedback on their ongoing research from peers and a panel of invited faculty members. The symposium seeks to tease out how bordering occurs along race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, indigeneity, or religion to force some people more than others into involuntary (im)mobility. Graduate students will share their research with the BSIA and the broader community, and receive feedback from invited faculty from Queen’s, Laurier and the University of Waterloo, and faculty affiliated with Laurier’s International Migration Research Centre and the BSIA’s Migration, Mobilities and Social Politics Research Cluster.
Agenda
9:00 – 9:10 am – Welcome
9:10-10:15 am – Roundtable Discussion
10:30 – 11:40 am – Panel 1: Border Controls and the Politics of Migrant Governance
11:40 am – 12:40 pm – Lunch
12:40 – 1:45 pm – Panel 2: B/Ordering, (Im)mobility and (re)shaping of identity formation
2:10 – 3:30 pm – Roundtable Discussion
View the full schedule

Wars, Displaced Populations and Food Insecurity
2024-03-26 10:00 - 11:00 | Virtual, Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Join the webinar: https://cigionline-org.zoom.us/j/81730518530?pwd=[REDACTED]
Despite some notable progress towards the targets of Rome Declaration on foodcsecurity in some countries around the world, food insecurity rates continue to rise among the most vulnerable groups in recent years again. World Food Program estimated that as many as 783 million people were facing chronic hunger in 2023. The Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC 2021) reported that food insecurity rates reached crisis level in 55 countries/territories both in terms of severity of the situation and the numbers of people involved and a significant portion of these are warn torn countries. While rising inflation, COVID-19 and financial crisis are often blamed, one of the most significant contributors to food insecurity has been wars and other forms of armed conflict in certain parts of the world. Wars destroy lives, livelihoods and environment. Funds spent for armament also rub societies out of investing in social welfare and development.
Displaced peoples are especially vulnerable to food insecurity. According to the UNHCR, the numbers of people who fled their homes because of armed conflict and persecution reached to an unprecedented 100 million people around the world in 2022. Displaced people because of armed conflict have been the most significant contributors to rising food insecurity rates in recent decades.
Koc argues that food insecurity should be seen beyond the food system’s failure in food provisioning but located in the failure of the key institutions of power in modern societies: international agencies of governance, the nation states, and the market. Using examples from recent cases of armed conflict from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Palestine this paper examines how armed conflicts contribute to food insecurity at the national, regional and global levels.
About the speaker
Mustafa Koc is emeritus professor of Sociology and the Director Centre for Studies in Food Security at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research and teaching interests involve food studies, food security, food policy, and the sociology of migration. Professor Koc was among the founders of the Centre for Studies in Food Security, Food Secure Canada, and the Canadian Association for Food Studies. His publications on the sociology of agriculture and food, social change and development, and immigration, include For Hunger-proof Cities, Working Together (2001), Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Food Studies (2008), Küresel Gıda Düzeni: Kriz Derinleşirken, and Critical Perspectives in Food Studies. His current research focuses on culinary practices, food security, and food safety concerns of immigrants and refugees. Prof. Koc received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement award from the Canadian Association for Food Studies (2017).
MiFOOD is hosting a series of webinars on various topics about migration and food security that highlight the progress of the project. These webinars include conceptual discussion, empirical findings and policy analysis. Through these webinars, we intend to build a community with various stakeholders for knowledge sharing, deepen the understanding of the complex intersections between migration and food security, and facilitate the discussion of effective policy interventions. Follow the MiFOOD Twitter (Moving on Empty), Like the MiFOOD Facebook page to be notified about upcoming webinars.
