The Cynical Citizen: Teasing the Inside of the Settler State

Nathan Prier

PhD Candidate, Geography

 York University

January 26

749 York Research Tower

1:30 – 3 pm

The Cynical Citizen: Teasing the Inside of the Settler State

This is a set of reflections on emergent anti-colonial migrant justice organizing in Toronto and questions on “the political” and the insides and outsides of “citizenship”.  In the struggle for “Status for All”, a strategy to make the city substantially accessible in all manners to non-status migrants and refugees, the political dimensions of struggle have been framed not as “begging for recognition” but as a direct confrontation of Canada’s colonial state structure. In this framework, difficult questions around what “access without fear” means in terms of validating the state’s role as authority over the powers of life and death have been wrestled with in complex, if unsettled, ways.

Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012

12:30 – 2:30 in HNES room 141

Miriam Duailibi, Director of the Ecoar Institute for Citizenship, Brazil

In today’s society, global networks that link together civil society, academia and governments are extremely important. They are vital to success and are necessary to create adaptive solutions important community issues such as: geographic, social, cultural, and economic vulnerabilities to global warming.

In particular, the semiarid regions of the Brazilian Northeast are being severely hit by these changes. However, NGOs, in partnership with universities and public entities, are taking actions that are gaining ground and improving the quality of life of communities in these areas. In Brazil, the restoration of traditional agricultural techniques and water management solutions for the retention and storing of water have improved the lives of many rural citizens. This has particularly impacted women’s lives.  Innovative social technologies are emerged from the understanding of local communities and then integrated with science.