Upcoming Talk: The People vs. The System

Jennie Phillips

Come out this Friday and catch one of our SMRT Boler team members in action!

Jennie Phillips, PhD student at OISE studying disaster response and online communities, will be speaking at the Dynamics of Global Change Workshop this Friday April 26 hosted at Munk School, University of Toronto. She will be delivering a presentation titled “The People vs. The System: An Explanation of How Disaster Transforms Humanity and How The System Gets in The Way.” Discussion will cover the realities of disaster situations, promote the power of social capital and provoke reconsideration regarding how we go about planning for and responding to crisis. The aim of her talk is to encourage the way we think about preventing/mitigating, preparing for, responding to and recovering from crisis.

Registration for the event it free (and includes lunch):
http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/event/13629/

A more detailed description of the event is below (from source):

Dynamics of Global Change Program 2013 Graduate Student Workshop

Friday, April 26, 2013
10:30 am to 4:00 pm

This workshop brings together doctoral students from across the university to present aspects of the their research, connected by the overarching theme of exploring the sources, structure, and pace—in short, dynamics—of change.

Professor Melissa Williams will deliver a lunchtime keynote address.

Session A (10am-12pm): Student Presentations

  • Ushnish Sengupta (OISE): Entrepreneurship as an Alternative Pathway to Self-Determination for Aboriginal Young Adults
  • Lameck Zingano (Anthropology): EcoCash Through a Cellular Technology
  • Jeff Myers (OISE): The Institution of Becoming Canadian and Global Justice: Incompatible?

Lunch and Keynote (12pm-2pm): “Glocalizing” Global Justice: Democratic Translations of Human” by Professor Melissa Williams

If there is such a thing as global justice, it demands two things of us, argues Melissa Williams (Political Science, University of Toronto): first, that we advance the real protection of human rights; and second, that we redress unjustifiable inequalities in the global distribution of wealth and opportunities. In general, philosophic perspectives on the problem of global justice (all of which are rooted in Western philosophic traditions) enjoin us to understand human rights as universal and distributive justice as contextual; that is, mediated by our membership in bounded political communities. But we might also adopt the perspective of the “glocal” citizen-activist who is trying to advance human rights and distributive justice in theord context of a globalized capitalist economy and networked transnational public space. If we do, we find a dynamic process of democratic translation taking place in which the polarities of human rights and social justice, universalism and contextualism, are reversed. Human rights now appear as contextual, and social justice appears as immanently) universal. Combining these perspectives opens up new pathways for understanding multiple sites and scales of activism as complementary contributions to a global system of human rights and social justice.

Session B (2pm-4pm): Student Presentations

  • Jennie Phillips (OISE): The People vs. The System: An Explanation of How Disaster Transforms Humanity and How The System Gets in The Way
  • Wilfrid Greaves (Political Science): Climate Change, Indigeneity, and Security in the Circumpolar Arctic
  • Jodi Adams (Political Science): Dynamics of Carbon Sinks in the CDM: Actors, Interests and Ideas
  • Alicia Grubb (Computer Science): Comparing Temporal and Scalar Aspects of Systems Models

 

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