The Centre hosts exceptional international scholars each year for public talks. The series self-consciously curates the cutting edge of diaspora and transnational studies, with our audiences often including a mix of undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, faculty from across the University, and members of the public. Talks are generally 45 minutes long with additional time for questions and answers.

Professor Jonathan Boyarin 
Modern Jewish Studies, Cornell University
Race, Religion, Family: Twenty-Five Years After Kiryas Joel
Tuesday, November 19, 2019 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB100A and 100B, Jackman Humanities Building

The United States Supreme Court’s 1994 decision in Grumet v. Kiryas Joel showed the difficulties of a jurisprudence of religious freedom based on individual rights when it is confronted with the demands of a diasporic, intergenerational collective. 25 years later, the persistence of kin-based, separatist Jewish communities disturbs neat categories of race and religion as bases for claims of right, and undermines standard narratives of the progressive assimilation and “whitening” of Jews in the United States.

Professor Jamie Kreiner
University of Georgia
Pig Work in the Early Middle Ages
Thursday, December 5, 2019
Room: JHB318
Co-sponsored with the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources

In the early medieval West, pigs were the only livestock raised exclusively for their meat. But they were no mere commodity. Pork production depended on pigs’ own laboring of converting almost any sort of organic matter into meat that humans loved. They were also smart and curious animals that were difficult to house and herd. And in the process of managing their pigs, humans of all ranks – swineherds, landowners, and lawmakers – bent their own practices and policies in order to accommodate them.

 
Professor Namita Dharia
Department of History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences, Rhode Island School of Design
The politics of pyaar (love) in India’s construction industry
Tuesday, January 21, 2020 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB318, Jackman Humanities Building

Set on a large real estate construction site in India’s National Capital Region, this paper discusses the Hindi word for love—pyaar— and its everyday interpretations and expressions. Graffiti surreptitiously drawn by construction workers serve as aesthetic expressions of life narrations of various classes of workers and connects to the emotions and aesthetics of doing work in construction. Professor Dharia engages with different forms of wall drawings on the architecture under construction to argue that the political economy of the construction industry is undergirded by the politics of pyaar.

 
Professor Krishnendu Ray
Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, New York University
Globalization from Below: Towards an Analytics of Fun and a New Kind of Collaborative Critique
Tuesday, February 25, 2020 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB100A and 100B, Jackman Humanities Building

In Delhi, as in Toronto and New York, street-food is served mostly by non-natives, migrants from the country to the city, and from city to city. The pleasure of urban street food provides an opening into the politics and poetics of vernacular taste that can disrupt presumptions of good taste with cultural domination. Mazaa in cheap viands such as chaat, kebab, vada pao has the potential to decolonize the palatal and philosophical expectations of gastronomy that are dominant today. Viewed from the bottom up, much of street food is a study of mazaa and poor peoples’ livelihoods, in a matrix of cross-class interests. This presentation takes the case of popular urban food cultures – based on a large transnational collaborative project — to explore questions of liveliness of cities and epistemologies of fun. What are the best ways to register the bottom-up, sensuous materiality and sociability in theory, without falling into the gourmand’s trap of pure apolitical pleasure? It seeks new grounds for a critique of a global hierarchy of taste and globalization from above, and indicates how mazaa can press us towards social justice from below, by seeking better alliances for livelier cities.

 
Professor Lauren Coyle Rosen 
Department of Anthropology, Princeton University
The Spiritual Laws of Gold: Time, Space, and Mining Rituals in Ghana
Tuesday, March 17, 2020 from 4:00 to 5:30
Room: JHB100A and 100B, Jackman Humanities Building

What are the spiritual dimensions that govern gold in Ghana and elsewhere? How do miners and others making claims to the sacred ore harness, supplicate, neutralize, or otherwise try to navigate the numinous realms that suffuse the gold fields? How do the divine laws that pertain to gold rituals unsettle and expand conventional notions of time and space, as well as of nature and culture? This talk draws from extensive ethnographic research on gold mining and spiritual jurisdictions in Ghana, focusing on contemporary struggles among corporate and artisanal miners in the penumbra of the industry.

 
Professor Sarah Milov
Department of History, University of Virginia
The “Heroine of FDA:” Gender and Expertise in the Thalidomide Tragedy That Wasn’t 
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Room: TBA

In the 1950s, thousands of babies in West Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom were born with phocomelia, or “seal limb.” This serious birth defect, which led to death before the first birthday for 40% of afflicted children, resulted from their mothers’ use of thalidomide, a sedative prescribed for morning sickness, during pregnancy. The drug was never marketed in the United States, largely due to the “skepticism and stubbornness” of Frances Kelsey, the FDA medical officer assigned to review the drug’s marketing authorization. This lecture asks what role Frances Kelsey’s gender played in thalidomide’s regulation. Drawing upon Kelsey’s personal papers, contemporary media accounts, and legal records, it explores the interaction between gender, bureaucracy, work and expertise. It also represents an early chapter in Professor Milov’s new project on gender and whistleblowing in the twentieth century United States.

 
Professor Lynn Itagaki
Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Missouri
The Civility of Interracial Trust: Civil Racism from the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion to Trump’s America
Monday, April 6, 2020
Room: TBA