Author: CMU

For release September 22, 2010

The Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA), an organization headquartered in the United States and affiliated with the International Peace Research Association, will hold its 8th Annual Conference this October 1 and 2, with Menno Simons College and UWinnipeg’s Global College serving as hosts for this important international conference. This year’s conference, with its anticipated 350 participants, focuses on the theme, “Building Bridges, Crossing Borders: Gender, Identity, and Security in the Search for Peace.”

The conference will be held on the campuses of the University of Winnipeg and Canadian Mennonite University, with opening ceremonies held at Thunderbird House on Friday morning.

“This will represent the PJSA’s first international gathering, as we strive to develop a truly North American association to address the many shared challenges before us, and we are extremely pleased to convene this annual conference in Winnipeg,” says PJSA Executive Director Randall Amster. “The notion of ‘crossing borders’ is particularly poignant in these times, given the present struggles over immigration in the U.S. and the hemispheric nature of the issues at hand.”

“We firmly believe that by coming together to explore just and peaceful strategies for achieving security and honoring identity, we can help foster a climate in which our differences are seen as strengths, and the crises we face become opportunities for mutual engagement and innovation,” Amster adds.

Eight lecturers will share their perspectives and views on the theme topic.

PJSA executive and conference organizers are pleased to welcome well known and highly respected lecturer and professor Cynthia Enloe as one of its keynote speakers. Author of 12 books, Enloe has taught and studied around the world in countries such as Guyana, Japan, Malaysia, and Sweden. Racial, class, ethnic, and national identities and pressures shaping ideas about femininities and masculinities have been common threads throughout her studies and writings.

Enloe’s presentation will centre on what happens in women’s lives when wars are concluded, and what post-war time challenges face women from diverse parts of the world.

Says Amster: “We are very pleased to announce that Cynthia Enloe will be presented with the Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement in Peace Studies Award at the PJSA conference.”

Also featured as a keynote speaker will be Chief Ovide Mercredi, who is Chief of the Misipawistik First Nation, Grand Chief of the Swampy Cree Tribal Council, and National Spokesperson for Treaties 1 through 11. A dynamic and thought-provoking speaker, Mercredi draws on experience gained in his roles as lawyer, negotiator, author, lecturer in Native Studies, and activist on behalf of First Nations in Canada. Mercredi, recipient of this year’s PJSA Social Courage Award, will be addressing the opening session of the conference being held at Thunderbird House on Friday morning.

Others presenting at the PJSA conference include: Marilou McPhedran, an international human rights lawyer; Catherine Morris, a leader in the field of conflict resolution in academic, community, non-profit, public, and private sectors; Carolyn Nordstrom, an anthropologist and author of several books on war and the shadow economies of war; Sherene Razack, a professor of gender and race issues at OISE in Toronto; Betty A. Reardon, the founding Director Emeritus of the International Institute on Peace Education, and a professor and activist for women’s rights; and Sandra Whitworth, a professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies and author of a central UN report on Women, Peace and Security.

Conference co- hosts, Menno Simons College and Global College, are excited to have such world-renowned speakers and leaders in their respective fields coming to the Winnipeg conference.

A non-profit organization formed in 2001, the Peace and Justice Studies Association serves as a professional association for scholars in the field of peace and conflict resolution studies, and it is the North-American affiliate of the International Peace Research Association <http://www.ipraweb.org> . PJSA is dedicated to bringing together academics, K-12 teachers, and grassroots activists to explore alternatives to violence and share visions and strategies for peacebuilding, social justice, and social change.

“Conference planning has been an exciting process and a very meaningful one for Menno Simons College,” notes dean of the College, Rick McCutcheon. “We are very pleased and honoured to have this opportunity to welcome PJSA to Canada and most particularly to Winnipeg, where we can draw on the synergies of our significant peace and justice programs and organizations.”

Menno Simons College, a College of Canadian Mennonite University and affiliated with UWinnipeg, is considered one of the largest peace and justice centres in the world. MSC offers course work and practicum
experience in International Development Studies and Conflict Resolution Studies, providing students with practical and meaningful ways to address world issues. In addition, MSC houses Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies. CMU offers a sister program to MSC’s program at its Shaftesbury campus, called Peace and Conflict Transformation Studies.

Global College is a multi-disciplinary forum for Canadian and international students. The Global College brings students and community members into contact with faculty, visiting scholars, local leaders, and notable speakers from around the world. Through The University of Winnipeg, Global College offers a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree in Human Rights and Global Studies.

For conference information, contact:

PJSA 2010 Conference Administrator
Caitlin Eliasson
pjsainfo@uwinnipeg.ca

Dean of Menno Simons College
Richard McCutcheon
rmccutcheon@cmu.ca

Media contact:
CMU Communications & Marketing Director
Nadine Kampen
nkampen@cmu.ca

Biographies: PJSA Distinguished Plenary Speakers 2010

Cynthia Enloe’s career has included Fulbrights in Malaysia and Guyana, and guest professorships in Japan, Britain and Canada, as well as lecturing in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Korea, Turkey and at universities around the U.S. Her books and articles have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and German. She has written for Ms. Magazine and has appeared on National Public Radio and the BBC. At Clark, Professor Enloe has been selected “Outstanding Teacher” three times and named University Senior Faculty Fellow for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship. In 2009, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of London’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies. Enloe’s twelve books include Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (2000), Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2004), and Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (2007). Her newest book is Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (forthcoming from University of California Press, spring, 2010). In years past, Enloe’s feminist teaching and research has focused on the interplay of women’s politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women’s labor is made cheap in globalized factories (especially sneaker factories) and how women’s emotional and physical labor has been used to support governments’ war-waging policies—and how many women have tried to resist both of those efforts. Racial, class, ethnic, and national identities and pressures shaping ideas about femininities and masculinities have been common threads throughout her studies.

Marilou McPhedran is an international human rights lawyer, who was appointed principal (dean) of Global College in June 2008, having resigned as the Chief Commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission to return to the University of Winnipeg. Born and raised in Neepawa, Manitoba, called to the Bar of Ontario, Dr. McPhedran was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1985 in recognition of her co-leadership in the successful campaign for stronger equality protections in the Canadian constitution. She cofounded several internationally recognized non-profit systemic change organizations, such as LEAF – the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, which has conducted constitutional equality test cases and interventions for 25 years. She is a pioneer in research and advocacy to counter human rights violations through systemic reform – in law, medicine, education and government. She founded the International Women’s Rights Project, located at the University of Victoria Centre for Global Studies – based on two of her intergenerational models: “evidence based advocacy” and “lived rights”. As chief executive officer of a federal center of excellence, she directed staff and programs including a cyber research network; she has chaired two public inquiries into the sexual abuse of patients; and she has co-investigated and co-authored a number of research projects on systemic reform and human rights, including: the ten country pilot study to assess impact of the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). As principal of Global College, she coordinates the University of Winnipeg contributions to the new joint Masters degree in Peace and Conflict Studies with University of Manitoba, directs the Institute for International Women’s Rights and the Global Citizenship Program with high school affiliates, lectures and conducts research on international human rights, and has launched a campaign to build the Global Learning Commons. As a volunteer, she is on the Board of the Winnipeg Women’s Health Clinic and is the Vice-President of the Canadian International Council – Winnipeg Branch.

Chief Ovide Mercredi is a Cree, a lawyer, a negotiator, an author, a lecturer in Native Studies, and an activist on behalf of First Nations in Canada. He was born into a traditional trapping hunting and fishing lifestyle in Grand Rapids, Manitoba in 1946. He is currently serving as Chief of the Misipawistik First Nation, Grand Chief of the Swampy Cree Tribal Council, and is also National Spokesperson for Treaties 1 through 11. Chief Mercredi is perhaps best known for his deep involvement in constitutional law reform issues, and Aboriginal and Treaty rights negotiations. He acted as a key adviser in First Nations’ opposition to the Meech Lake Accord, and in 1989 was elected Manitoba Vice-Chief of the Assembly of First Nations. He was first elected National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations in 1991, and served two terms until 1997. He also led the First Nations negotiations in the Charlottetown Accord. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours. In 2006 he was invested with the Order of Manitoba; the province’s highest honour. He was nominated for the Gandhi Peace Prize and has received honourary degrees from Bishop’s University, St. Mary’s University, and Lethbridge University. He has published a collection of his speeches in a book entitled In The Rapids – Navigating the Future of First Nations, and has contributed articles to two other recent books. He is also the subject of two Canadian documentary films. Chief Mercredi has spoken at hundreds of venues, from small community gatherings to universities and colleges throughout North America and internationally about his experiences.

Catherine Morris has been a leader in the field of conflict resolution since 1983, both in Canada and internationally. Working in academic, community, nonprofit, public, and private sectors, she has played key roles in numerous organizations and initiatives. Ms. Morris is the founder of Peacemakers Trust, a Canadian non-profit organization for education and research in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. As an adjunct professor, she teaches graduate level courses in conflict resolution, negotiation and international human rights at the University of Victoria where she designed and founded a multidisciplinary graduate program in dispute resolution. An Associate and former Executive Director of the university’s Institute for Dispute Resolution, she worked in several leadership roles from 1992-1998. As well at the University of Victoria, Ms. Morris is an Associate of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives (CAPI). She also regularly teaches at the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand and, in the past, has taught at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University and guest lectured at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She is presently Faculty Associate for the Program in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Arthur V. Mauro Centre at the University of Manitoba. Ms. Morris has been involved in design, planning, administration and presentation of workshops for senior public officials, leaders of non-governmental organizations, academics and professionals in several countries including Thailand, Cambodia, Bolivia, and Rwanda. Her research and writing has resulted in publications and papers on mediator ethics and qualifications, conflict and culture, ADR in legal education, the role of religion in peacebuilding, conflict transformation, peacebuilding in Cambodia, human rights education, and reconciliation. Hosted by Peacemakers Trust, her website-based bibliography, Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding: A Selected Bibliography has been used by tens of thousands of people in more than one hundred countries on all continents. Ms. Morris’ current interests include possibilities for reconciliation and justice after genocide and massive human rights violations. As a practicing lawyer with Lampion Pacific Law Corporation and a member of the Law Society of British Columbia, the Canadian Bar Association and the British Columbia Mediator Roster (Civil), she is widely experienced in conflict assessment, mediation, fact-finding and adjudication.

A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1997, Carolyn Nordstrom is an anthropologist at home in lecture hall and war zone alike. She studies wars, the illegal drug trade, gender relationships, and war profiteering. Her research has made her an eyewitness and scholar of worldwide urban and rural battlefields as well as of the shadowy worlds of diamond, drug, and arms smuggling. In addition to her teaching and lecturing, she has written dozens of articles, and several books including Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World; Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the 21st Century; A Different Kind of War Story; Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Stories of Violence and Survival, and The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror. “I have studied the ways in which people gain the necessities to wage war and create peace, and how people pay for these services,” she once said. “Drugs, precious gems, human labor and sex are routinely used in international black markets to purchase everything from guns and computer-based weapons systems to antibiotics and food. The integrity of my ethnographic research and the safety of those among whom I work have rested on having to delete basic data, which erases the extra-legal from public discourse. I want to develop a form of creative non-fiction that explores the lives of real people working in this complex, extra-legal network without revealing their locations.”

Sherene Razack is professor, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests lie in the area of race and gender issues in the law. Her courses include: ‘Race, Space and Citizenship;’ Race and Knowledge Production’ and ‘Racial Violence and the Law.’ Her most recent book is entitled Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2008). She has also published Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, 2004), an edited collection Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping A White Settler Society Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) and Canadian Feminism and the Law: The Women’s Legal and Education Fund and the Pursuit of Equality (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1991). Razack has been described as “one of the most influential thinkers in Cultural Studies in Canada.”

Betty A. Reardon is the Founding Director Emeritus of the International Institute on Peace Education, an annual intensive residential experience in peace education. Since 1982 the IIPE has been held at universities and peace education centers in Asia, Europe, Latin America and Central America. For this work she received a special Honorable Mention Award from UNESCO in 2001. Among her other initiatives in the international peace education movement, she initiated and served as the first Academic Coordinator of the Hague Appeal for Peace Global Campaign for Peace Education. Having taught as a visiting professor at a number of universities in the U.S. and abroad, she has 46 years of experience in international peace education and 33 years in the international movement for the human rights of women. She has served as a consultant to several UN agencies and national and international education organizations. Her widely published work in the theory and development of peace and human rights education, and in gender and peace issues, recognized in the awarding of the 2008 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Peace Studies from the Peace and Justice Studies Association, is archived in the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections at the University of Toledo Libraries. She is the recipient of the 2009 Sean McBride Peace Prize awarded by the International Peace Bureau, the oldest of the many nongovernmental peace organizations, founded in 1891.

Sandra Whitworth is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Sandra did her Ph.D. at Carleton University in Political Science (1991), and her first book, Feminism and International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan) was published in 1994. That book was translated into Japanese and was published by Fujiwara Shoten Press in 2000. Her most recent book was published in 2004 (Lynne Rienner) and is entitled Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis. She also adapted Joshua Goldstein’s textbook International Relations for use in Canadian university and college classrooms. She has written various articles and book chapters on issues such as gender in Canadian foreign policy and human rights and was invited (with co-author Dyan Mazurana) to produce the 2002 United Nations Secretary-General Study Women, Peace and Security. That study won one of the American Library Association’s ‘Notable Government Documents Awards’ for 2002. Sandra teaches courses at York in Global Politics, Gender and International Relations, and graduate courses in International Relations Theory. She is serving currently as the home base editor for International Feminist Journal of Politics. Sandra is an enthusiastic (though not particularly skilled) hockey player and thinks the world could be a better place if everybody played the guitar, read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and listened to live music whenever they have a chance.