Event Date: November 4, 2026 - 12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS

We are the most connected human beings who have ever lived — and, by nearly every measure, the loneliest, most anxious, and most fragmented. In this featured talk, internationally acclaimed artist, author, and philosopher Patricia Karen Gagic argues that this is not a paradox but a clue: we have built connection without genuine crossing, and the cost is visible everywhere at once — in a climate crisis every nation can measure yet none can meet alone, in migration too often reduced to logistics rather than a meeting of human beings, and in conflicts that harden even as every channel of communication stays open. Drawing on a fifty-year artistic practice, decades of humanitarian work in Cambodia, and a philosophy shaped by both triumph and profound loss, Gagic asks the questions beneath all of them: what does it actually mean to be fully human right now, and how do we stay human in a world engineered to fragment us?

Speaking to those whose work asks them to cross fire again and again — diplomats, humanitarian practitioners, officials of the institutions built to hold a world together, and the students who will follow them — Gagic offers not a strategy for fixing the world, but a discipline for remaining whole while trying. Her central claim is that the repair of the world and the repair of the human heart are not two projects but one: you cannot build a connected world out of disconnected people. This is a talk about courage, presence, and the deliberate art of staying fully alive to our own lives in the time we are given.

A light lunch will be served.

Photo credit: Patricia Karen Gagic

Speaker:

Patricia Karen Gagic is an internationally acclaimed Canadian artist, author, philosopher, and humanitarian, and the founder of the Karmic Framework and the Lemniscate Prauscate philosophy. In 2018 she became the first Canadian woman to receive the Gold Medal in Photography from the Salon National des Beaux-Arts at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, and she has exhibited across Europe, North America, and Asia. A four-time inductee into the WXN Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada Hall of Fame and an Honorary Commissioner at the Venice Biennale, she has developed her practice over twenty-seven years under French master artist Dragan Dragic. She has also given decades of humanitarian service across many organizations, including her long collaboration in Cambodia and her role as an advisor to Help Heal Humanity. Through her painting, her writing, and her philosophy, Gagic explores what it means to remain fully human in a fragmenting world — a question that reaches from the most personal act of being seen to the shared global crises of our time.

Chair:

Alexandra Gheciu is a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) and the Director of CIPS.