Event Date: February 13, 2023 - 1:00pm to 2:30pm EST
Location: FSS 4007; in person only

Registration: Eventbrite

Presented by CIPS as part of Black History Month

Through an intimate exploration of the roots of Black identities in North America and the routes taken by we who have crisscrossed the world’s longest undefended border in search of freedom and belonging, this lecture journeys back and forth across the Canada/US border, and from coast to coast, combining memoir and analysis to highlight the tensions, contradictions, translations, and complications that anchor our understandings of race. It examines key, competing facets of Canadian and American manifestations of racism, including the intersection of racial formations and settler colonialism, analyzes the transnational dynamics and contours of the African diaspora in North America, and ultimately seeks to think through what it means to be in a place, but not be of that place. Across time and space, this research asks: where is home for those of African descent, and is belonging within the confines of the nation-state either possible or desirable?

This event will take place in English.

Refreshments will be served.

Speaker:

Dr. Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. She is a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race, with teaching and research interests that focus on the relationships among race, the state, and inequality in Canada and other democratic societies. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (2016) and The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging in North America (Simon & Schuster, 2022), one of Indigo and CBC’s top 100 books of 2022 and a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Moderator:

Dr. Philippe Frowd is an Associate Professor at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa.