TORONTO, January 29, 2002 -- As the top financial policy-makers from the Group of Seven industrialized nations gather in Ottawa next week to discuss the global economy, leading Canadian scholars are advancing new theories to manage the dramatic social and economic changes wrought by globalization. They will discuss their work in the Distinguished Robarts Lecture Series 2002, sponsored by York University’s Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies.
"Society is at risk without strong new theoretical concepts to make sense of these changes and the empirical evidence to back it up," says political scientist Daniel Drache, director of the Robarts Centre. "We have in Canada today some exceptional social scientists who are recognized globally as leaders in their fields and whose research is providing a new understanding of a more complex world."
The Robarts lecture series features four such scholars -- Paul Lovejoy, Rosemary Coombe, Engin Isin and Leah Vosko – all of them recently awarded Canada Research Chairs to advance their work at York University in the human and social sciences. The series begins on Thursday, Feb. 7 with Paul Lovejoy’s The Digitalization of Knowledge: Tribal Ignorance and the African Diaspora, at 4:30 p.m. in the Harry Crowe room, Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies. Attendance is by invitation.
Biographies on each of the lecturers are attached.
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For more information, please contact:
| Prof. Daniel Drache | Susan Bigelow |
| Director, Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies | Media Relations |
| York University | York University |
| 416-736-5415 | 416-736-2100, ext. 22091 |
| drache@yorku.ca | sbigelow@yorku.ca |
YU/014/02
Paul Lovejoy is employing the new digital technologies of the information age to assemble an international database of biographies of enslaved Africans in the Americas that banishes forever the erroneous notion of a simplistic "tribal" Africa. As leader of the Canadian team that is in the vanguard of deciphering the African past from an African point of view, his work is forcing a total reassessment in the West of conventional thinking on Africa.
As director of the York/UNESCO/SSHRC Nigerian Hinterland Project, Lovejoy coordinates international research by 28 scholars on the African diaspora, focused on the Nigerian region. He is a world leader in the history of the slave trade and is working to establish a Canadian resource centre on the African diaspora named for Harriet Tubman. He has recently published The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Journey from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America, originally published in 1854 and written in Chatham, Ontario, then known as Canada West.
"The fate of Black refugees who came to Canada via the Underground Railroad is an important part of the history of Ontario, as well as Canada, and is very little appreciated or studied except within the Black community," says Lovejoy. He will soon publish, with David Trotman and Verene Shepherd, the previously unknown novel of Cyrus Francis Perkins, Busha’s Mistress, or Catherine the Fugitive: A Stirring Romance of the Days of Slavery in Jamaica, written in Brantford, Ontario in 1855.
Leah Vosko is a leading international thinker on one of the most profound developments in labour markets globally, the rise of precarious employment, which threatens to alter the foundations of our social and economic structure. "In Canada, women and minorities are most affected by this trend to low wage, insecure employment with limited benefits or statutory entitlements and little protection against health risks," says Vosko. Her research and analysis of the shifting employment relationships will provide the rationale for re-regulating the labour market with the goal of extending greater security, dignity and protection to workers.
As academic director of the SSHRC-funded Community University Research Alliance on Contingent Work, an alliance between three universities and six community organizations, Vosko is involved in constructing a profile of the contingent work force in Canada as well as addressing the relationship between gender, work, and global restructuring. She is also working with Statistics Canada to produce a national database on gender and work.
Vosko is the author of Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of a Precarious Employment Relationship (U of T Press, 2000), the first in-depth analysis of temporary work in Canada. She is co-editor with Jim Stanford of the forthcoming book, Challenging the Market: The Struggle to Regulate Work and Income, and co-editor with Wallace Clement of Changing Canada: Political Economy as Transformation (McGill-Queen’s University Press).
Vosko’s Robarts lecture, Rethinking Feminization: Contingent Work and the Crisis in Social Reproduction, will take place on Apr. 11 at 4:30 p.m.
Engin Isin, a leader in the emerging field of citizenship studies, is laying the groundwork for a new, intercultural notion of citizenship in the 21st century. He says the challenge of the 21st century is how to govern ourselves in multicultural and multinational states, and Canada has a significant role to play in influencing and shaping policy in other states, such as France, Germany and Japan, who originally imagined themselves to be ethnically homogeneous.
The new citizenship is not based on homogeneity. Instead, it recognizes cultural difference and is characterized by the ability to negotiate different rights and obligations. "Canada is in the forefront of dealing with multicultural, multinational and multilayered realities of citizenship, and does so in a manner that is deeper and wider than many other jurisdictions in the world," says Isin.
But ideas of citizenship are still coloured by the conventional western ideology that citizenship is an ‘occidental’ invention that did not take hold in ‘oriental’ cultures. "This ‘orientalist’ thinking is an impediment for developing the modern notion of citizenship," says Isin. Meanwhile, globalization continues to challenge the nation-state as the sole source of authority over citizenship and democracy. The realities of immigration and emigration, the formation of supranational bodies such as the European Union, the formation of new states such as Azerbaijan, Croatia and Slovenia, the movement of refugee populations, and the codification of international human rights norms are all increasing the recognition of citizenship as an intercultural matter.
"In an era of globalization, orientalism can no longer be the basis of understanding other cultures," says Isin. To that end, he is researching the history of citizenship in the orient as a way of understanding and re-thinking citizenship in the West, focusing on the Ottoman city of Istanbul.
"Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire was amongst the most cosmopolitan places on earth, where literally hundreds of ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious and national minorities made important contributions to the city and its relatively peaceful existence for more than four centuries," says Isin. He will be documenting evidence of the institutions of citizenship that western orientalist thinking has long presumed were not there. He is looking at how both British colonial authorities and Ottoman imperial authorities negotiated matters with various groups such as guilds, associations and corporations in the city, and how these groups negotiated with each other to develop norms and rules of conduct as citizens.
Isin’s latest book, Being Political, has just been published by the University of Minnesota Press. His lecture, Citizenship after Orientalism, will take place on Mar. 21 at 4:30 p.m.
Rosemary Coombe, a global specialist in intellectual property rights, works internationally to develop guidelines to better assist individuals, peoples, and nations to protect, distribute, and benefit from their innovative work in the new information-based economy. Author of The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties (Duke University Press, 1998), Coombe believes that intellectual property is fundamental to the processes we understand as globalization. As her work demonstrates, these legal protections provide the basis for a new political economy; shape the preservation of global biological and cultural diversity; influence structures and circuits of communication; pose grave issues about the future of democratic accountability in transnational institutions of governance, and have profound implications for Third World environmental sustainability and gender equity.
"Ultimately, global food security and the protection of human health will be contingent upon our capacities to make our intellectual property laws equitable ones which acknowledge the creativity of the poor as well as investments in capital; the innovative work done by farmers as well as pharmaceutical companies, by women in forests as well as scientists in laboratories, by the custodians of folklore as well as the producers of blockbuster films," says Coombe.
She insists that intellectual property rights are human rights, and the granting of such rights in the developed world must be divorced from and preclude the further exploitation of the world's disenfranchised peoples, their knowledge, and the unique genetic resources they hold in their bodies, in their fields, and on their ancestral territories. "Our survival may be integrally related to their self-determination."
Coombe’s lecture, Intellectual Property at the Nexus of Trade and Human Rights: the Emergence of a New Global Politics, will take place on Oct. 2 at 4:30 p.m.
