Recorded: 19 March 2021

How do we teach now for a globalizing present and towards decolonial futures? Join Dr. Thashika Pillay (Faculty of Education, Queen’s University) and Dr. Beverley Mullings (Geography and Planning, Queen’s University), scholars concerned with diasporic and global identities, as they seek common and uncommon ground, in a Fireside Series chat about teaching in, from, and to the current moment.

Speaker Details:

Beverley Mullings – Professor, Department of Geography and Planning, Queen’s University

Beverley Mullings is a Professor of Geography whose work is located within the field of feminist political economy and engages questions of labour, social transformation, neoliberalism, and the politics of gender, race and class in the Caribbean and its diaspora. She is interested in the ways that evolving racial capitalist regimes are recasting and transforming work, divisions of labour, patterns of urban governance and ultimately, responses to social and economic injustice. Beverley is currently engaged in three major research projects: one examines the financialization of Caribbean remittance economies; the second explores the possibilities that diasporic dialogue holds for reviving Caribbean Radical Traditions; the third project traces the impact of the Black middle-class on social transformation in post-Plantation Economies. Find out more about Beverley Mullings here.

Thashika Pillay – Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, Queen’s University

Dr. Thashika Pillay is Assistant Professor in Educational Policy in the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. Thashika has extensive research and teaching experience in K-12 and higher education in Canada, Australia, and Ethiopia. Her research program explores questions of social, cultural, economic, political, and epistemic justice and the possibilities for anticolonial educational policy in formal and informal contexts. Her current research explores the gaps exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic as related to racialized students’ educational experiences and the role of social media in educating youth around issues of justice and equity. In addition, Thashika is co-editor of Decolonizing Global Citizenship Education (2015) and Global Citizenship, Common Wealth and Uncommon Citizenships (2018). Find out more about Thashika Pillay here.

Tags:

Fireplace Series, Queen’s University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Stauffer Library, Beverley Mullings, Thashika Pillay

Credits:

• Series Directors: Dr Laura Jean Cameron (Department of Geography and Planning) and Dr Allison Morehead (Art History and Art Conservation)
• Assistant Coordinator: Claudia Hirtenfelder (PhD candidate, Department of Geography and Planning)
• Podcast recording and editing: Dr Matt Rogalsky (DAN School of Drama and Music)

20 November 2020

As our relations to time shift in the coronavirus crisis, this Fireplace Series conversation aims to spark interdisciplinary thought about the temporality of university life and its relationship to what appears to be sudden change. Queen’s University’s Elizabeth Hanson (English, FAS) and Elspeth Murray (Smith School of Business) meet for an impromptu and stimulating conversation, seeking both common and uncommon ground.

Speaker Details:

Elizabeth Hanson – Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Queen’s University

Elizabeth Hanson is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University. Elizabeth is interested in the English Renaissance Drama, humanism, and the political economy of the modern day university. She is the President of Queen’s University Faculty Association (QUFA). Find out more about Elizabeth’s work here.

Elspeth Murray – Associate Dean, Smith School of Business, Queen’s University

Elspeth Murray has served as the Associate Dean – MBA and Masters Programs since 2012, and has been a professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Smith School of Business since 1996. Her current research is focused on best practices in leading and managing change to create an analytics culture. Find out more about Elspeth’s work here.

Tags:

Fireplace Series, Queen’s University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Stauffer Library, Time, Covid-19, Elizabeth Hanson, Elspeth Murray, Tertiary Education

Credits:

• Series Directors: Dr Laura Jean Cameron (Department of Geography and Planning) and Dr Allison Morehead (Art History and Art Conservation)
• Assistant Coordinator: Claudia Hirtenfelder (PhD candidate, Department of Geography and Planning)
• Podcast recording and editing: Dr Matt Rogalsky (DAN School of Drama and Music)
• Event Assistance: Thank you to the FAS and Queen’s Library for supporting the podcast series with special thanks to Barbara Crow, Sandra Morden, Michael Vandenburg, Jacquie Jameson, Nancy Petri, Vicky Arnold, Katie Vincent, and Donald Napier. Thank you also to Elizabeth Gibson and Constance Adamson for compiling the reading lists.
• Music: Marjan Mozetich
• Photograph: Matt Rogalsky

Reading List:

• Gibbs, Paul, editor. Universities in Flux: an Exploration of Time and Temporality in University Life. Routledge, 2015.https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.4324/978131573883

• Morrish, Liz, and Helen Sauntson.

Recorded: 13 March 2020

This chat brings together scholars who spend much of their lives thinking about matter – what it is and what it does. Bronwyn Parry, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London (and herself an amalgam of anthropologist, sociologist and human geographer) here engages in conversation with Associate Dean Nick Mosey of Queen’s University to discuss how matter comes to matter in chemistry, forensics and wider social and public life. In thinking through these questions they consider how we understand presence and absence, wear and tear, and the politics of track and trace. These scholars invite you to join them in unpacking the interplay between mechanical forces, chemical reactions and affective materialities.

Speaker Details:

Bronwyn Parry – Professor, School of Global Affairs, King’s College London,

Bronwyn Parry is Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine and Head of the School of Global Affairs at King’s College London. Bronwyn is interested in the social, ethical and legal implications of transforming human tissues and DNA into bio-information that can be circulated across multiple platforms and into multiple markets simultaneously. Her books Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-information (2004) and Bio-Information (2017) investigate the emergence of new global economies in bioinformation, revealing how tissue samples and DNA segue into and out of the commodity form at different moments and places in their careers. Find our more about Bronwyn Parry’s work here.

Nick Mosey – Associate Dean, Department of Chemistry, Queen’s University

Nick Mosey currently serves as the Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen’s University. He is also a Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Physics and oversees students working in the Mosey Group. Research in the Mosey Group focuses on developing chemical simulation methods and using chemical simulation as a tool for gaining atomic-level insights into the properties and behaviour of molecules and materials. Find out more about Nick Mosey’s work here.

Tags:

Fireplace Series, Queen’s University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Stauffer Library, Matter, Bioinformation, bioethics, posthumanism, Chemistry, molecules, Bronwyn Parry, Nick Mosey

Credits:

• Series Directors: Dr Laura Jean Cameron (Department of Geography and Planning) and Dr Allison Morehead (Art History and Art Conservation)
• Assistant Coordinator: Claudia Hirtenfelder (PhD candidate, Department of Geography and Planning)
• Podcast recording and editing: Dr Matt Rogalsky (DAN School of Drama and Music)
• Event Assistance: Thank you to the FAS and Queen’s Library for supporting the podcast series with special thanks to Barbara Crow, Sandra Morden, Michael Vandenburg, Jacquie Jameson, Nancy Petri, Vicky Arnold, Katie Vincent, and Donald Napier
• Music: Marjan Mozetich

Recorded: 14 February 2020

Laila Haidarali (Queen’s University, Departments of Gender Studies and History) and Martin Hand (Queen’s University, Department of Sociology) discuss looking online: how we look at our ourselves, how we look at others, and how we perform ourselves for visual consumption online. Their discussion will consider cultures of beauty and the performance of self online and offline, and in particular how racial and gender identities are experienced, constructed, and deconstructed through various acts of looking, in an attempt to make links between the pre-digital and digital ages.

Speaker Details:

Laila Haidarali – Associate Professor and Graduate Head, Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University

Laila Haidarali is a Queen’s National Scholar in African American Gender History, and is cross appointed to the Gender Studies and History Departments at Queen’s University. Her monograph, Brown Beauty: Race, Sex, and Color from the Harlem Renaissance to World War Two, traces the interwar development of a powerful discourse of brown beauty, foregrounding brownness of skin as the idealized complexion of respectable middle-class African American women. Her next major work, The Model Project, develops ideas on brown beauty as a consumer-based ideal, to study the postwar glamorization of the “Brownskin” model.

Martin Hand – Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Queen’s University

Martin Hand is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University who has written extensively about digital culture, visuality, and consumption. His recent research has focused on how smartphone and app use changes people’s understanding, organization, and experience of time. His monographs include Ubiquitous Photography (2012) and Making Digital Cultures: Access, Interactivity and Authenticity (2016 [2008]). He co-edited the book Big Data? Qualitative approaches to digital research (2014) and co-authored The Design of Everyday Life (2007).

Tags:

Fireplace Series, Queen’s University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Stauffer Library, Online, Digital Culture, Visuality, Cultural Sociology, Beauty, History, Race Studies, Gender Studies, Laila Haidarali, Martin Hand
Credits:

• Series Directors: Dr Laura Jean Cameron (Department of Geography and Planning) and Dr Allison Morehead (Art History and Art Conservation)
• Assistant Coordinator: Claudia Hirtenfelder (PhD candidate, Department of Geography and Planning)
• Podcast recording and editing: Dr Matt Rogalsky (DAN School of Drama and Music)
• Event Assistance: Thank you to the FAS and Queen’s Library for supporting the podcast series with special thanks to Barbara Crow, Sandra Morden, Michael Vandenburg, Jacquie Jameson, Nancy Petri, Vicky Arnold, Katie Vincent, and Donald Napier
• Music: Marjan Mozetich
• Photographs: Alexander Rose

Recorded: 1 November 2019

Focusing on Settler Accountability and Responsibility, Selena Couture and Dorit Naaman explore settler relationships to land in different area contexts, asking questions about how settlers can construct accountable and responsible relationships in and with occupied spaces, places, and peoples. Selena and Dorit delve into the role of language in relation to responsibility as well as what to make of the discomfort that conversations on accountability and responsibility evoke.

Speaker Details:

Selena Couture – Assistant Professor of Drama, New Works Festival Coordinator, University of Alberta

Selena Couture is Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta where she teaches Canadian and Indigenous theatre and performance. Couture identifies as a settler performance studies scholar who works in Edmonton/Treaty 6 territory and Métis homelands. She researches Indigenous performance, place, languages and historiography with a parallel inquiry into performative constructions of whiteness. Publications include Against the Current and Into the Light: Performing History and Land in Coast Salish Territories and Vancouver’s Stanley Park (McGill-Queen’s Native and Northern Series, Jan 2020) and On this Patch of Grass: City Parks and Occupied Lands (Fernwood 2018).

Dorit Naaman – Professor and Graduate Coordinator, Film and Media, Queen’s University

Dorit Naaman is Professor and Graduate Coordinator for Film and Media at Queen’s University. Focusing on Israel and Palestine, Dorit has combined her theoretical interests in gender, militarism, and nationalism with her filmmaking practice. Her projects include: Jerusalem, We are Here and DiaDocuMEntaRy, which offer new modes of documentary to address political questions.

Recorded: 11 October 2019

Animals are a part of human ethics and everyday politics, and in this episode of the Fireplace Series Will Kymlicka and Samantha King reflect on their own writings pertaining to animals. Coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, Samantha and Will have an open-ended discussion about animals and what it means to be in relation with them both politically and ethically, touching on animals’ status as property, the responsibility of the state to animals, as well as tensions between individual and structural practices that affect the lives of animals.

Speaker Details:

Will Kymlicka, Canadian Research Chair in Political Philosophy

Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy and a professor at Queen’s University. He has been widely acclaimed for his work on multiculturalism and, more recently, his ideas on philosophy and animals. In 2011, together with Sue Donaldson, Will published ‘Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights’

Samantha King, Head of Queen’s University’s Gender Studies Department

Samantha King is Head of the Department of Gender Studies and Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University. Her research and teaching explore the embodied dimensions of consumer culture with a recent focus on multispecies corporeality. Samantha is one of the editors of the recently released book, Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food (Fordham, 2019).

Credits:

• Series Directors: Dr Allison Morehead (Art History and Art Conservation) and Dr. Laura Jean Cameron (Department of Geography and Planning)
• Assistant Coordinator: Claudia Hirtenfelder (PhD candidate, Department of Geography and Planning)
• Podcast recording and editing: Dr. Matt Rogalsky (DAN School of Drama and Music)
• Event Assistance: Thank you to the FAS and Queen’s Library for supporting the podcast series with special thanks to Barbara Crow, Sandra Morden, Michael Vandenburg, Jacquie Jameson, Nancy Petri, Vicky Arnold, Kim Bellefontaine, and Donald Napier
• Music: Marjan Mozetich
• Photographs: Oliver Hirtenfelder

Recorded: March 28 2019

We are living in a time of increasing ecological loss – with some being forced to feel it more acutely than others. For instance, temperatures are warming much faster in the north of Newfoundland and Labrador than in the rest of the world. And with the loss of sea ice, people’s home places have been changing rapidly. ’Ecological grief’ has emerged as a necessarily interdisciplinary concept, open to a range of methodological and epistemological interpretations. Helping us to begin a conversation about this important topic at Queen’s, we have with us playwright and scholar, Dr. Julie Salverson, and a geographer specializing in northern environments, Dr. Robert Way. Together they share stories and engage with the audience about how to grapple with ecological loss and grief in today’s world.

Speaker Details:

Julie Salverson, Associate Professor

As an author, playwright and scholar, Julie Salverson explores what it means to witness a terribly beautiful world and the role stories, the imagination and the absurd play in how we live. Julie is affiliated with Queen’s University’s Dan School of Drama & Music and the Department of Cultural Studies, Royal Military College of Canada, Playwrights Guild of Canada, Writers Union of Canada.

Robert Way, Assistant Professor

Robert Way is a physical geographer at Queen’s University who specializes in understanding the impacts of climate change on the terrestrial cryosphere (glaciers, permafrost, ice). Robert is of Inuit descent (Nunatsiavummiut) and was born and raised in the central Labrador community of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL.

Recorded: February 14 2019

Set around a fireplace in Queen’s University’s Stauffer Library, this conversation addresses the relations between kindness and interconnectivity. Queen’s Jacqueline M. Davies (Professor in Philosophy) and Paul Grogan (Professor in Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology) consider, from different disciplinary perspectives, questions like: what does kindness and awareness of interconnection mean in the classroom? The conversation begins and ends with a guided meditation before the audience is invited to join in to further the discussion.

Speakers:

• Paul Grogan is interested in how the plants, animals and soil organisms of terrestrial ecosystems interact with each other and with their physical environment. Understanding these inter-relationships between biology and the flows of energy and nutrients is the basis for predicting how terrestrial ecosystems will respond to changes in climate, land-use, and other perturbations.
• Jackie Davies is a mother, teacher, immigrant and settler who has spent most of her life in Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory, much of it at Queen’s. From her undergraduate studies in Life Sciences, Psychology, and Philosophy to her current affiliations with Philosophy, Gender Studies, Jewish Studies, and Cultural Studies, Jackie is convinced of the epistemic necessity of interdisciplinarity.

Credits:

• Series Coordinator: