Distinguished Critical Thinkers in World Politics Seminar Series 2000-2006
Your Blues Ain’t My Blues: The Constitution of International Security and Insecurity at the Edge of an African Landscape
Professor Siba Grovogui
Thursday 05 November 2009, 2:30-4:30pm
Conference Centre
Room 519, 5th Floor
York Research Tower (YRT)
York University
In this presentation, Professor Grovogui will examine the new Tuareg rebellions in Mali and Niger in the context of the US Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism initiative. Professor Grovogui will also address two seldom explored conditions of civil strife and insecurity in postcolonial Africa. The first is of a political order. It is the adoption by African states of globalized notions of order and security that undermine regional and national systems that had previously sustained life and secured the well-being of populations. The second condition of insecurity, resulting from the first, is constitutional. It is the failure of postcolonial states to align the constitutional order on the exigencies of social life, specifically the securitization of domestic systems of production, distribution, solidarity, justice.
Professor Grovogui is Professor of International Relations and Political Theory at the Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, where he has been a faculty member since 1995. A specialist in international relations theory and political theory, Professor Grovogui has written frequently about African sovereignty, including Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (1996) and "Regimes of Sovereignty: Rethinking International Morality and the African Condition". Professor Grovogui previously taught at Eastern Michigan University and holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a law degree from the Institut Polytechnique, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Guinea.
Geopolitics, Empire and the Bush Doctrine
Simon Dalby, Professor of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Department of Geography, Carleton University
Dr. Dalby reflects on the evolution of the Bush doctrine since the initiation of a war on terror in late 2001, linking discussions of the geopolitical premises of the doctrine with contemporary debates about the possibilities of war with Iran, and with how formulations of empire might be useful intellectual tools for interpreting contemporary events.
Wednesday, 28 November 2007
11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m., 280 York Lanes
Development and Emergency: Blurring the National/International
Mark Duffield, Professor of Development Politics, Department of Politics, University of Bristol
It is now commonplace for politicians to claim that, in an interconnected world, the Western way of life is placed at risk by international instability and extremism. Strengthening social cohesion at home is strategically meshed with reducing poverty and reconstructing fragile states abroad. The talk explores how the control of immigration acts as a lynchpin connecting these regimes of internal and external development. Formed at the time of decolonisation (in response to each crisis of circulation) this risk-based international security architecture has been deepening ever since. The traditional national/ international dichotomy, for example, has now blurred in political imagination and practice. Within this strategic and expansive architecture it is possible to detect the contours of global civil war.
Thursday, 3 May 2007
1:30 p.m.-3:00 p.m., Verney Room, S674 Ross Building
Deconstructing Colin Powell
Hugh Gusterson, Cultural Studies and Sociology, George Mason University
Hugh Gusterson has a B.A. in history from Cambridge University and a Ph.D in anthropology from Stanford University. He is the author of the books Nuclear Rites (UC Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb (Minnesota, 2004), and co-editor of Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong (UC Press, 2005) and Cultures of Insecurity (Minnesota, 1999). His articles have appeared in Alternatives, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Social Studies of Science, and Science, Technology and Human Values. He writes a monthly column for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Technology Review, Science, and Tikkun.
Friday, 9 March 2007
1:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m., 305 York Lanes
As part of the 2005-2006 Feminist Speakers’ Series, the GPSSA Women’s Caucus is pleased to present:
“What is Gender? Where is Europe? Walking with Etienne Balibar”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Wednesday, 1 March 2006
7:00-9:00 p.m., Stedman Lecture Hall D, York University
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University . She holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Toronto and London. An activist as well as educator, she is involved in international women's movements and issues surrounding ecological agriculture. She has been deeply involved in rural education in Asia for nearly two decades. Professor Spivak has published numerous books including: Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, 1976); Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993); Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993); A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999); Death of a Discipline (2003), and Other Asias (2005). Her translations of the Indian writer Mahasweta Devi includes Imaginary Maps (1994); Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999); Chotti Munda and His Arrow (a novel, 2002); Her translation from eighteenth century Bengali mystical lyric is entitled Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with introduction of Ramproshad Sen, 2000). "Righting Wrongs" (2003) and "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching" (2004); "Translating into English" (2005) are recent articles that reflect Spivak's activism and her concern for human rights.
Reception and refreshments to follow in Hospitality York Dining Room, S167 Ross.
Co-Sponsored by:
The Graduate Programme in Political Science
The Department of Political Science
The Faculty of Graduate Studies
The Office of the VP Academic
The YCISS Distinguished Critical Thinkers in World Politics Seminar Series
Exposed Singularity
Jenny Edkins, International Politics, University of Wales Aberystwyth
Jenny Edkins is Professor in the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. Her most recent books are Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and, with Véronique Pin-Fat and Michael J Shapiro, Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Thursday, 24 February 2005
10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., 305 York Lanes
Security, Life, Terror
Professor Michael Dillon, Politics & International Relations, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Michael Dillon is primarily interested in the intersection of global political issues with philosophical and theoretical ones and has written extensively on international political theory, continental philosophy, security studies, and cultural research. His current research, inspired amongst others by the work of Michel Foucault, is concerned with analyzing the bio-power of global governance and liberal peace and the profound questions about politics and democracy as well as peace and war that it raises. He is specifically concerned with how the global confluence of the information and communication revolutions with the revolution in genomics is not only producing a revolution in military affairs but also a complex re-problematization of security. He is also co-editor of Cultural Values and one of the international editors for the Edinburgh University Press Political Theory Series 'Taking on The Political'.
Tuesday, 21 September 2004
12:00 noon-1:30 p.m., 305 York Lanes
Maladies of Our Souls: Identity and Voice in the Writing of Academic International Relations
Roxanne Doty, Associate Professor, Arizona State University
Professor Doty received her B.A. and M.A. from Arizona State University and Ph.D from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Imperial Encounters: Patterns of Representation in North/South Relations and she has contributed articles to International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, and Millennium. Her current research interests include race and international relations, and immigration.
Monday, 15 March 2004
3:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m., 305 York Lanes
The Problem of Sovereignty and the New Exceptionalism
R.B.J. (Rob) Walker is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Graduate Program in Cultural, Social and Political Thought at the University of Victoria, BC, and Professor of International Relations at Keele University in the UK.
He is the editor of the journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political and the author of Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory and many other writings on the future of political thought and practice. His current work focuses partly on contemporary theoretical debates about the limits of specifically modern forms of sovereignty and partly on the restructuring of boundaries between “security” and “liberty” in Europe.
Thursday, 27 November 2003
2:30 p.m.-4:00 p.m., 305 York Lanes
TIME IS BROKEN: The Return of the Past in the International Response to September 11
David Campbell, Professor of International Politics, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
David Campbell's current research is for a project entitled "Disaster Politics," which deals with the philosophy and practice of humanitarianism. His recent work includes "Justice and International Order: The Case of Bosnia and Kosovo" in Ethics and International Affairs: Extent and Limits (2001). Another work entitled "Salgado and the Sahel: Documentary Photography and the Imaging of Famine," in Mediating Internationals, is forthcoming in 2002.
Thursday, 25 October 2001
12:00-2:00 p.m., Room 305 York Lanes
European Views on Cooperative and Human Security: The Enduring Role of the State
Michael Williams, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Tuesday, 10 July 2001
3:00-4:30 p.m., Room 390 York Lanes
International Relations as an Ethnographic Practice
Siba Grovogui, Johns Hopkins University
Tuesday, 8 May 2001
2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 305 York Lanes
Faking it with Graduate Students - an informal discussion
Professor Cynthia Weber, University of Leeds
Tuesday, 10 April 2001
4:00-6:00 p.m., Room 305 York Lanes
Atrocity, Memory, Photography: Imaging the Concentration Camps of Bosnia - The case of ITN v. Living Marxism
David Campbell, Professor of International Politics and Director of the Centre for Transnational Studies, University of Newcastle
Monday, 19 February 2001
11:30-1:30 p.m., Room 305 York Lanes
