RACISM & NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS | PREVIOUS CONFERENCES

* * *

*See Attached for Conference Posters and Flyer *

___________________________________________________________________

*** Please Circulate Widely ***

___________________________________________________________________

Announcing
The 7th Annual
NEW COLLEGE CONFERENCE
on
RACISM & NATIONAL
CONSCIOUSNESS

“WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE REGULATION OF IDENTITY”

Saturday October 25, 2008
10 am  – 5.30 pm
Wetmore Hall, 21 Classic Avenue (at Spadina)
New College
University of Toronto

___________________________________________________________________

This year the Annual New College Conference on Racism and National Consciousness will be looking at dimensions of tyrannical war-mongering white supremacy and the divisive construction and regulation of the identity of individuals communities and peoples to serve its aggressive predatorial accumulative domineering interests.  We will look at the function of imperial Eurocentric knowledge-power and imprisoning punitive imperial white law in the dissemination of terrorism and the criminalization, Inferiorization, dispossession, impoverishment and devastation of hundreds of millions of people it considers its Other to further its capitalist economic political and cultural interests.

This conference is free and open to all. Each year for the past six years it has attracted over 300 scholars, students, activists, writers, community and cultural workers from a wide spectrum of interests. Lunch will be provided. Please register at nc.programs@utoronto.ca well ahead of the date so we can cater for everyone.

___________________________________________________________________

Conference Program

10. am – 11.30 am
Keynote Speaker: Bonita Lawrence
Topic: “Genocide, Assimilation, or Incorporation? Indigenous
Identity and Modes of Resistance”

11.30 am – 12 noon
(Discussion)

12. – 12.30pm
(Lunch)

12.30pm – 1.30pm
Second Keynote Speaker: Arnold H. Itwaru
Topic: “Master Race Culture: White Supremacy, Liberal Democracy,
and the Continuing Colonization of the World”

1.30 – 2pm
(Discussion)

2pm – 2.15pm
(Break)

2.15pm – 3.15pm
Panel I: Schooling and the Pipeline to Jail
Panel Co-ordinators: Yolisa Dalamba and Kisha McPherson

Speaker: Cyril Cromwell Simmonds
Topic: “‘Beneviolence’ in the Education System: Contradictions,
Conformity, and Control”

Speaker: Nathan Okonta
Topic: “‘Policing the Crisis’: African Canadian Youth and
the ‘New Right’ Ideology”

Speaker: Umesh Sharma
Topic: “An Anthropology of Barbarism: Ideology, Schooling,
and the Sustenance of White Whiteness”

3.15pm – 3.30pm
(Discussion)

3.30pm – 3.45pm
(Break)

3.45pm – 4.45pm
Panel II: Good Muslim…Bad Muslim? White Supremacy and the
Regulation of Islam and Muslim Identity
Panel Co-ordinator: Zahir Kolia

Speaker: Dr. Sedef Arat-Koç
Topic: ‘”We Win Even When We Lose” Syndrome?: Muslims, Crisis
of Imperial Hegemony, and the Persistence of Western
Supremacy’

Speaker: Sumayya Kassamali
Topic: “Secularism and the National Imaginary: Talking About
the Toronto 18″

Speaker: Zahir Kolia
Topic: “Reflections Upon the Politics of Dismemberment: How
Student Activism Regulates the Sacred”

4:45pm – 5:15pm
(Discussion)

___________________________________________________________________

Dr. Bonita Lawrence (Mi’kmaw) is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Atkinson College, York University, where she teaches Native Studies and anti-racism. Her research and publications have focused primarily on urban, non-status and Metis identities, gender and colonization, and federally unrecognized Aboriginal communities. She is the author of “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native People and Indigenous Nationhood. (University of Nebraska Press and UBC Press, 2004), and co-editor (With Kim Anderson) of Strong Women’s Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival (Toronto, Sumach Press, 2003), a collection of Native women’s scholarly and activist writing. With Kim Anderson she also guest-edited a recent edition of Atlantis, entitled “Indigenous Women: The State of Our Nations” (Vol.29.2, Spring, 2005). She has four refereed publications, the most recent (with Enakshi Dua) is “Decolonizing Anti-Racism” in Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order, Vol. 32, No. 4, 2005. With Enakshi Dua she also co-wrote “Challenging White Hegemony In University Classrooms: Whose Canada Is It?” Atlantis, Vol. 24.2, Spring 2000, 105-122. She has a number of chapters in books as well. She is a traditional singer who continues to sing with groups in Kingston and Toronto at Native social and political gatherings.

* * *

Dr. Arnold Itwaru designed & developed the Caribbean Studies Program at New College, University of Toronto, and was its Director for 10 years. His research and teaching focus on problematizing Caribbean thought, racism, the capitalist press and the new imperialism. He is the author of 13 books including Home and Back, Morning of Yesterday: Seven Stories, Negative Ecstasy: The Star Trek Seductions and Other Mass Deceptions, Critiques of Power, and co-author of Closed Entrances: Canadian Culture and Imperialism. He is currently editing a forthcoming book entitled “The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism Imperialism Colonialism Racism,” as well as working on his own forthcoming book “Master Race Culture: White Supremacy, Liberal Democracy, and the Continuing Colonization of the World.”

___________________________________________________________________

Cyril (C.J.) Cromwell Simmonds is a second year Ph.D. student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. His work within the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education has focused on issues of social control, race relations and the prevailance of oppressive discourses in so-called “progressive” cultures. His masters thesis, “Discourses of Contradiction: Politicizing the ‘Beneviolence’ of Racism,” introduced a conceptual framework for engaging institutional violence in popular media and other powerful institutions as they effect marginalized and racialized populations. Through his involvement with critical academia and various community initiatives, Cromwell Simmonds’ actively pursues the upliftment of his Community through a combination of critical thought and action while utilizing his experience with video and photography to make his academic and community work accessible, engaging and practical.

* * *

Nathan Isioma Okonta is presently a community based researcher on various issues that cut across racialism, immigrant status, economic segregation and exclusion and youth criminalization. He has a B.Com. Degree in Environmental Studies and Economics from the University of Toronto, and an MES Degree in (critical) Development Theory from York University. A former member of the steering committee for the Metro Network for Social Justice and 50 Years of Black Activism in Canada, Nathan has been involved in youth justice issues in Toronto since 1996, and has participated in youth activism across Canada.

* * *

Umesh Sharma is a co-ordinator of the New College Conference on Racism and National Consciousness.

___________________________________________________________________

Dr. Sedef Arat-Koç is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. Her research interests include immigration policy and citizenship, especially as they affect immigrant women; transnational feminism; politics of imperialism; racialization and the politics of racism; and reconfiguration of social and political identities under neoliberal globalization.  Currently, she is working on “whiteness” in Turkey as a cultural, political and class identity in the context of neoliberalism and post-cold war geopolitics. Her publications include:  ‘(Some) Turkish Transnationalism(s) in an Age of Capitalist Globalization and Empire: “White Turk” Discourse, The New Geopolitics and the Implications for Feminist Transnationalism.’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (Special Issue: Transnational Theory, National Politics and Gender in the Contemporary Middle East/North Africa) 3:1 (2007): 35-57.“Echoes of the 1930’s: Today’s Hotel Workers Lead the Struggle to ‘Upgrade’ the Service Economy” (with Bryan Evans and Aparna Sundar). Relay: A Socialist Project Review (Jan.-Feb. 2007): 16-17. [Reprinted by MRzine (On-line Monthly Review), March 15, 2007] “Whose Social Reproduction? Transnational Motherhood and Challenges to Feminist Political Economy.”  In Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism, ed. Meg Luxton and Kate Bezanson, 75-92. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.  “Whose Transnationalism? Canada, “Clash of Civilizations” Discourse and Arab and Muslim Canadians.” In Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada, ed. Lloyd Wong and Vic Satzewich, 216-240. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2006.  “The Disciplinary Boundaries of Canadian Identity After 9/11: Civilizational Identity, Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Anti-Imperialist Feminism.” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order, (Special Issue: Race, Racism and Empire: Reflections on Canada) 32:4 (2005): 32-49.  “Imperial Wars or Benevolent Interventions? Reflections on ‘Global Feminism’ Post September 11th.”  Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal 26:2 (Spring/Summer 2002): 53-65.

* * *

Sumayya Kassamali is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at OISE, University of Toronto. She has been actively involved in various forms of community and faith-based activism, including antiwar and Palestinian solidarity work, as well as radical migrant justice organizing with the No One is Illegal network. Her academic research interests include Islamic Feminisms and the challenges posed to secular modernity by the proliferation of transnational ‘conservative’ Muslim women’s movements.

* * *

Zahir Kolia is a graduate student in Social and Political Thought at York University.   His research interests include the connection between settler colonialism, temporality, and death as they relate to racialized newcomers and Indigenous peoples. Particularly, how ‘canadian’ sovereignty is predicated upon the violent constitution of Indigenous peoples through absence, vanishing, and death. Other interests include the connections between settler colonialism, whiteness, guilt, melancholy, and fantasies of becoming the Other.

___________________________________________________________________

CONFERENCE CO-ORDINATORS:

|  ARNOLD H. ITWARU  |  N. KSONZEK  |  UMESH SHARMA  |

___________________________________________________________________

SUPPORTED BY THE OFFICE OF THE PRINCIPAL, NEW COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

___________________________________________________________________

***

* * *

* * *

* * *