An international and interdisciplinary colloquium titled “Languages of Economic Crises” will take place March 17 from 7 to 9pm and March 18 from 11am to 3pm.

Speakers from five countries will present both live and via teleconference during the event. Panellists will explore the way in which language serves as a response to economic crises and a way of thinking of the economy otherwise through a series of international dialogues.

This is a free and public event, and refreshments will be served. It takes place in South 802, Ross Building.

The schedule of events and speakers include:

Thursday, March 17, 7 to 9pm

Katherine Gibson will present from Australia via teleconference. She is a renowned economic geographer at the University of Western Sydney. Her work with Julie Graham (under the pen name JK Gibson-Graham) includes influential texts such as The End of Capitalism (as we knew it); A Postcapitalist Politics and Take Back the Economy. This session will focus on the intersections between gender, language and economic crisis. Given the recent global financial crisis, we will explore ruptures in capitalism, language and the possibility of community-based economic organization. Professor Phillip Kelly (York University, Department of Geography) will give an introduction to the work of Gibson-Graham. Panellists Katharine Rankin (University of Toronto, Department of Geography) and Nancy Worth (York University, Department of Geography) will join the conversation on language, gender and the economy.

Friday, March 18, 11am to 12:15pm

The panel for “Constituting and Recovering Crises: Spain and Argentina” includes Jose Luis Carretero Miramar who is an author (La autogestión viva: Proyectos y experiencias de la otra economía al calor de la crisis) and activist from Madrid, Spain. He will give a talk on “Spain: crises and resistances. From social devastation to a battle for institutions”, which will address the context of the economic crisis in Spain, the discourse of popular resistance through the M-15 movement and the battle for institutions through radical municipal governments and the rise of the anti-austerity Podemos party nationally.

Joining this dialogue on the recovery from crisis is Professor Marcelo Vieta (University of Toronto OISE, Leadership, Higher and Adult Education). His research deals with worker self-management and cooperatives in Italy and Argentina. He has recently authored a book entitled There’s no stopping the workers: Crisis, autogestión, and Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises. His paper entitled “The language of autogestión: Argentine workers’ ethics-of-the-other in their stories and practices of self-management” will explore the language of the recovered factory movement in Argentina.

Friday, March 18, 12:30 to 1:45pm

Daniele Besomi, a researcher at the Centre Walras-Pareto (University of Lausanne), has written extensively on crises and business cycles, and has edited an authoritative collection on Cycles and Crises in Economic Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias (Routledge 2011). He will explore the shifting register of metaphors used to represent economic crises throughout the past two hundred years during a presentation entitled “Metaphors of Crisis”.

Joining this conversation is Sonya Scott, who is a professor of Business & Society at York University. She has written on the relationship between subjectivity and economic thought in a book titled Architectures of Economic Subjectivity: the philosophical foundations of the subject in the history of economic thought. She will present a paper on the use of the ‘vulture’ metaphor to describe predatory financial capitalism in sovereign debt crises, specifically focusing on Argentina during the recent governments of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner.

Friday, March 18, 2 to 3:15pm

Peter Bratsis, a professor of Political Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), is the author of several books, including Everyday Life and the State. His research focuses on the Greek crisis and the relationship between the state and popular movements. He will present a paper on the challenges posed by the way in which the Greek crisis was framed – from its characterization as a problem of PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) to the left response which focused on putting an end to human suffering and a desire to end austerity measures.

Also part of this panel is David McNally, both an activist and a professor of political science at York University. He is the author of many books, including Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Langauge, Labour and Liberation; Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism; and Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. McNally will join the conversation with an intervention on the nature of contemporary crises and forms of popular resistances thereto.

The Lusophone Coffee Hour (Café Lusófono) series returns on March 23 with a presentation by guest speaker Anthony De Sa.

A Portuguese-Canadian author, De Sa will discuss “The Cultural Embrace” from 4 to 5:30pm in the Ross Building South, Room 562.

The author looks back at the fundamental events in his Portuguese upbringing – social and political – that informed his writing and shaped his character.

De Sa grew up in Toronto’s Portuguese community. His short fiction has been published in several North American literary magazines. His first book, Barnacle Love, was critically acclaimed and became a finalist for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2009 Toronto Book Award. His new novel, Kicking the Sky, was a finalist for the 2014 LIBRIS award, the 2014 Canadian Authors Association Literary award, and the 2014 Toronto Book Award.

De Sa graduated from University of Toronto and Queen’s University. He is currently a teacher-librarian at Michael Power/St. Joseph High School. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three boys.

The event is free. Light refreshments will be served.

Gerald Gold, professor emeritus at York University in the Department of Anthropology, died on March 9.

Prof. Gold, or “Gerry” as he was known in the department, was a long-serving faculty member of York University, joining the department in 1976 and serving through to his retirement in 2015.

Prior to settling into his role at York University, he worked at Glendon College, the University of Guelph and Laval University after receiving his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota.

Prof. Gold developed an international reputation with his research on community studies in ethnicity, economic anthropology, entrepreneurial cultures; and studies in diaspora, nationalism and identity, focusing closely on French Canada, Quebec and French-speaking minorities in North America.

Two editions of his monograph Saint-Pascal: Changing Leadership and Social Organization in a Quebec Town were published by Waveland Press.

Prof. Gold directed a large project in French Louisiana focused on the French language and its survival, and also spent several years in northern Ontario, focusing on the multicultural character of the creation of community in northern mining towns.

In the late 1980s Prof. Gold was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and shifted his research to focus on disability, becoming one of the first anthropologists in North America to do so.

In the early 1990s, he began a five-year involvement with the Commission on Disability of the American Anthropological Association. At the same time, he also became interested in virtual disability communities and computer-mediated communication as a form of public culture.

This research resulted in a number of publications including “Rediscovering place: experiences of a quadriplegic anthropologist” in Canadian Geographer (2003). Most recently, he had been working on a manuscript focusing on the cultural constructs of accessibility, virtual disability and social action. He also taught several courses in disability studies at York University and was one of the organizers of the graduate program in disability studies. He was also an active participant in disability politics in southern Ontario.

Prof. Gold was committed to his career and teaching, despite the severely debilitating aspects of his illness in recent times. At York, he developed one of the first anthropology courses focusing on disability in Canada.  His disability slowed him down physically, but he retained his intellectual brilliance throughout. His wife Barb provided devoted support and assistance, and was instrumental in helping him continue to pursue his teaching and research.

He will be greatly missed by his colleagues and friends at York University and beyond.

The Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) presents “Feminism and Palestinian Women’s Struggles”, a talk by Nahla Abdo, on March 17 from 3 to 5pm at 305 Founders College.

Palestinian women’s experiences in the anti-colonial struggle are as long as their experiences with settler colonialism. Still, and not unlike the struggles and very existence of their people in general, women’s struggles have largely been ignored, if not silenced.

When Palestinian women began to get involved in the armed struggle against settler colonialism, the West, in general, and the feminist movement, more specifically, began to take interest in their struggle.

This talk discusses the Western feminist discourse on Palestinian women’s struggles and the responses to such discourse by Palestinian women political activists.

Abdo is an Arab-Canadian feminist, political activist and professor of sociology at Carleton University. She has extensive publications on anti-colonial feminism, racism, nationalism and the state in the Middle East with special focus on Palestinian women.

The introduction will be led by Meg Luxton, a professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LAPS).

Light refreshments served. RSVP to juliapyr@yorku.ca. Please note this event counts towards seminar requirements for GFWS students.

The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Department of Equity Studies, Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Department of Social Science, Department of Political Science, and the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought.

For more information, email cfr@yorku.ca.

Two women named in the YWCA Toronto International Women’s Day 2016 Women of Distinction announcement will be guest speakers at the Alexander F. Chamberlain Speaker Series at York University on March 15.

Youth activists Tessa Hill and Lia Valente will speak about their activism, their use of digital media to create community, and their commitment to changing rape culture from 10:30am to noon in the Renaissance Room, 001 Vanier College.

Hill and Valente began the successful “We Give Consent” campaign to encourage the Ontario Liberal government to include consent in the Ontario sexual education curriculum. Their online petition was signed by over 40,000 people, resulting in an invitation by Premier Kathleen Wynne to discuss their concerns about the curriculum.

The producers of Allegedly, a documentary on rape culture available on YouTube, Hill and Valente have been widely interviewed by the media and have recently been nominated for CBC Radio’s “Torontonian of the Year” award.

The YWCA Toronto’s 2016 Women of Distinction list salutes the achievements of women and the impact of those achievements “one the lives of girls and women in this city – and beyond”.

The event is presented by the Children’s Studies Program in the Department of Humanities in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies.

The Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) presents “The Hidden Palace: Everyday Practices and Performances of Affinitive Labour in Queer Japanese Migrant Lives”, a talk by Dai Kojima, on March 15 from 3 to 5pm at 626 Kaneff Tower.

In this talk, Kojima will discuss formations of queer kinship through his ethnographic engagements with “Ooku Vancouver,” a self-organized collective of gay Japanese men located in Vancouver, B.C.

Carefully attending to informants’ identifications with the popularized drama of women who were both emplaced and displaced (Ooku was the secluded living quarters for the wives and concubines of the Shogun in medieval Japan), this presentation traces the economic, affective and pedagogical dimensions of queer immigrant kinship that Ooku Vancouver (OV) enables.

Based on two case studies, OV as an im/migrant entrepreneurial node and OV’s regular, private karaoke events, this talk considers these hidden practices of care and kinship as affinitive labours which structure and mediate intergenerational feelings of loss and collective survival.

Kojima argues for a queering of representations and archives of Japanese im/migration experience beyond stereotypes of stoicism, servitude and silence, and towards a reconceptualization of kinship relations and political possibilities in the Japanese diaspora in Canada.

Kojima is the 2015-16 Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at CFR. He received his PhD from the University of British Columbia specializing in migration and diaspora studies, queer studies and media studies. His ethnographic doctoral research examined the cultural politics of mobility in queer Asian diasporas. His current research explores the gendered and queer dimensions of labour practices among Japanese im/migrants and queer entrepreneurs in Vancouver and Toronto. His most recent works appear in Anthropologica and Reconstruction.

He will be introduced by David Murray, professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS).

Light refreshments served. Please RSVP to juliapyr@yorku.ca.

The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR), and Sexuality Studies, York University.

Please note this event counts towards seminar requirements for GFWS students.