January 23, 2013 4-6 p.m.
Speaker: Dr. Kimberley Williams, Mount Royal University
Title: ‘An Interesting Partnership between Two World Views’: The Indian Princess at the Centennial Calgary Stampede.
Location: Wilson Hall, Rm 2053
Coordinator of the Mt.Royal Women and Gender Studies Program, Dr. Williams is the author of the prizewinning 2012 monograph Imagining Russia: Making Feminist Sense of American Nationalism in U.S.-Russian Relations. Her research talk presents her new project, At the Heart of the New West: Sex, Gender and the Calgary Stampede. How has the stampede come to operate as a sex tourist destination through and on the (hetero) sexualized bodies of immigrant and First Nations women? Exploring how the cultural dynamics of globalization have made sex workers integral to local development, the project is situated at the intersection of cultural criticism, sexuality studies, international political economy, and critical race studies.
January 28, 2013 4-6 p.m.
Speaker: Lia Bascomb, University of California Berkeley
Title: Branded Beautiful: Brand Rihanna Meets Brand Barbados
Location: Wetmore Hall, Rm 74
Lia Bascomb, a graduate of Yale, is currently completing a doctoral dissertation at University of California Berkeley. Her publications deal with African American Studies and with popular culture in the Caribbean. A performance artist and activist as well as a scholar, Lia Bascomb has received a number of service and teaching awards. Her research talk highlights aspects of her doctoral dissertation In Plenty and In Time of Need: Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbardian Identity. Employing historical archives of performance sites as well as Independence era memoirs and fiction, Bascomb uses the methods of diaspora studies to argue that the gendered performances of popular culture are a site of postcolonial identity formation.
January 30, 2013 4-6 p.m.
Speaker: Dr. Victoria Tahmasebi, University of Toronto, Mississauga
Title: Mapping Gender in the Digital Diaspora: A Case Study of Canadian Iranians and Transnational Women’s Movements
Location: Wilson Hall, Rm 2053
Dr. Victoria Tahmasebi holds a doctorate from York University in Social and Political Thought. She is an award-winning instructor who currently teaches on the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. Her Emmanuel Levinas on the Politics of Non-Violence, which employs continental feminist theory, is forthcoming from University of Toronto Press. Dr. Tahmasebi’s publications include an eye-witness account and reflection upon emerging roles of women in recent Iranian protest. The research talk focuses on online representations of these women in Iranian diasporic communities, applying both transnational feminist theory and new media studies.