Diana Kuprel

Cultural critic and Indigenous rights advocate Jesse Wente on turning your passion into your career

noreen.rasbach — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 17:02:28 +0000

Cultural critic and Indigenous rights advocate Jesse Wente on turning your passion into your career

noreen.rasbach Fri, 02/02/2018 - 12:02

Cutline

Cultural critic and Indigenous rights advocate Jesse Wente is the new director of Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office (photo by Jackie Shapiro)

Diana Kuprel

Topic

City & Culture

Alumni

Cinema Studies

Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

Indigenous

Innis College

Toronto International Film Festival

For Jesse Wente, the cultural critic and Indigenous rights advocate, giving back to the community is a top priority.

"In addition to being the first member of my Ojibwe family to attend university and the first Indigenous student to graduate from cinema studies, I was the first nationally syndicated Indigenous columnist," he says. "I say this because I feel strongly that the only reason being first matters is so you can open doors wide enough for numbers two to infinity to come through."

Wente’s family comes from Chicago and the Serpent River First Nation in Ontario. He is the longtime film and pop culture critic at CBC Radio’s Metro Morning, and has had a long association with the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where until recently he was director of film programs at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. There he curated the landmark film program First Peoples Cinema: 1,500 Nations, One Tradition and its companion gallery exhibition, Home on Native Land.

He has also been a film programmer for TIFF and for the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Festival. An Aboriginal arts advocate and passionate spokesperson for inclusion, Wente served as president of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest Indigenous performing arts company.

In 2017, he was appointed to the Canada Council for the Arts. Last month, he was appointed director of Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office. Wente graduated with an honours bachelor's degree in cinema studies from U of T in 1996.

Arts & Science spoke with Wente at the 2018 Next Steps Conference, an intensive two-day career exploration, education and networking conference for students in the Faculty of Arts & Science, recent graduates and alumni, where he delivered the keynote about pursuing one’s passion and turning it into a career.

What ignited your passion for film?

Star Wars – it was 1977, and that was the first movie I saw. It turned into an obsession.

Why did you choose to study cinema at U of T?

My intention was to become a filmmaker, but first I wanted to understand what makes a good movie. I enrolled in the cinema studies program at Innis College to gain skills in critical thinking and how to express critical thinking. After that I had planned to go to Humber College to get my hands on filmmaking equipment – remember this was the pre-digital era. I never did.

Where did your programming career start?

I ran the Victoria College Film Society with a friend. They gave me free reign in the facilities and a budget to rent prints. We blew our entire budget screening Superfly and Shaft. We showed Superfly out of sequence – we started with reel 3 – and no one noticed! We ended up programming the rest of the year using films from the U of T collection. That’s where my programming career really started.

What was the best thing that happened to you at U of T?

Meeting my wife, Julie (Ouellon-Wente). We’ve been together 24 years. She’s been my greatest champion; we’re partners in life. I couldn’t have done what I did without her – including landing my first job.

So how did you land your first job after graduation?

In between graduating from U of T and heading to Humber, I needed a job. It was Julie who pointed out that there was an internship at CBC Radio that was funded by the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation (now Indspire). Radio seemed the furthest thing from movies, and an odd choice for me. As my mom has said, as a teenager, I didn’t speak for seven years. I was the associate producer for radio syndication. Then while I was there, they asked me to fill in as the film critic for Metro Morning. So while Andy Barrie, who was the host, would read the Globe and Mail, I got paid for saying how films sucked. I thought it was just going to be a temporary gig, but 21 years later I’m still working at the CBC.

Basically, I was in the right place at the right time, and I took a job I didn’t want – I didn’t want to be a film critic but a filmmaker. After that, I ended up jumping around a lot on short-term contracts, until finally I got a real job as associate producer at the Arts Report with Michael Crabbe, and I worked with Eleanor Wachtel on her show, The Arts Today.

I have to say, the fact that the internship was funded by the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation was significant. My mother made it very clear to me that it came with a responsibility. She instilled in me the idea of reciprocity: to never take anything without giving something in return. I always had in my mind, how will I pay back to the community?

And what was your answer?

As soon as I could, I started volunteering on boards. There was an incredible need for Indigenous representation at the time, even on the boards of Indigenous organizations. I became the president of the board of a theatre company, even though I didn’t understand plays. The job was to manage the company, craft the strategy, deal with the finances, hire the staff. And I was able to build a career that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to because I gained complementary skills through volunteering. I was able to piece everything together to present a fuller package that made me a great candidate for a job – like running a movie theatre at TIFF.

But I feel that my time to give back is greatest now. I have built a big enough career in the mainstream sector. I have access to places that most people don’t. In addition to being the first member of my Ojibwe family to attend university and the first Indigenous student to graduate from cinema studies, I was the first nationally syndicated Indigenous columnist. I say this because I feel strongly that the only reason being first matters is so you can open doors wide enough for numbers two to infinity to come through.

What’s made you so successful at being a film commentator?

I’m an insomniac. I can watch 1,500 movies a year.

You’ve had a dream career, not just dream jobs. What is your advice to students and young alumni as they consider their post-university future?

Understand what you are passionate about, and be prepared for it to change as your life changes and as you get more experience. Don’t commit yourself to a single path. Experiment a bit, and do not be afraid of risk, of disruption. That way you can put yourself in a position for a job you didn’t even know was a job.

Be true to who you are and the life you want to lead. Know what you value, what is close to your heart. Embrace change, because it’s constant and you shouldn’t fear it as long as you stay true to yourself.

Hold to that and your happiness quotient may increase. Happiness can be a real struggle – I’m not a happy person; it has been a journey for me to find a balance with the whole of my life. But the footprints we leave will be more impactful if we’re happy.

Thinking back on your extraordinary career, what was one of the most meaningful or transformative moments for you?

There are so many. Some that are trivial that I will nevertheless cherish forever. But to be honest, it was that five minutes on the air talking about cultural appropriation with Matt Galloway. It was the most personal piece of radio I’d ever done, and it changed my life. Some for the bad, but mostly for the good. And I’ve only come to understand that because of what people who were listening to the show have told me – not the ones, obviously, who sent death threats. I thought, if my community was pleased, then it was worth whatever I had to go through. I admit I have a conflicted relationship with that moment.

Last year, you were appointed member of the board of the Canada Council for the Arts. What do you hope to achieve during your tenure?

It’s an exclusive space – the largest arts funding body in the country – and being granted access to it will enable me to speak truth to power, to try to influence culture. My goal is to be a voice in the room, to be an advocate for Indigenous people and Indigenous sovereignty. That’s what I’m in it for – not to pad my CV, but culture change. Culture change is what will allow some of the other changes that need to happen to happen.

And to be humble about why I’m there. It’s not about what I want to accomplish, but about what I can accomplish on behalf of others. I sit in a room with very powerful people who can make change. That’s also why I spoke tonight at the Next Steps Conference. Because someone in that audience has the capacity to make change, and I want to encourage that.

As an Indigenous rights and Aboriginal arts advocate, what are your thoughts on how can we as individuals and a society can get better at fostering the kind of change we need?

Storytelling is key. We struggle with a storytelling problem. With Indigenous people, the theft of our stories is inextricably linked to the theft of our land, the theft of our bodies. I think it’s harder to accept the theft if you actually know the people – and you get to know them through storytelling. A function of that is who gets to tell those stories.

After all, you can’t expect society to change if we have the same storytellers. In Canada, we need to empower Indigenous people to tell Indigenous stories. Doing so will ultimately create the conditions by which misrepresentation is simply unacceptable.

It’s hard in Canada to have a real discussion about the return of Indigenous land without a lot of storytelling before that to get Canadians to a point where they understand why that’s important.

And frankly, I think we’re getting there quite rapidly. Certainly in Canada, there have been some very constructive debates, putting to rest some old ideas. I think there’s now a big appetite now to hear these stories.

You believe that inclusion is a benchmark and pathway to success. What should organizations look at for increasing inclusion and diversity?

If you have any consciousness of global migration and demographics, you will understand that your customers 10 to 15 years from now, or your employees, or whomever you’re serving, are unlikely to come from the same places as those you have today. And if you’re not already thinking about that and being ahead of the curve, then you’re behind it. So organizations, businesses, institutions all have to understand that the communities that are feeding your organization are changing faster than you are reacting to that change.

Inclusion is the better word. And you just have to start. The most effective way is to hire differently. As a friend of mine, Ry Moran (director of the University of Manitoba’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation), says, nature is diverse. You look at a forest, and there’s not just one kind of plant or tree. And if you come across an area that has only one type, then that’s where there’s a problem. Diversity is the natural order of things. It’s the same in a forest, a city, a country. People, ideas, energies, access to communities – if you’re not diversifying your audiences that could be because you are not diversifying your staff. And if you’re resisting diversity, you’re resisting the natural order.

What is the role of leadership in this context?

Leaders don’t acknowledge what they don’t know often enough. One of the real keys to leadership is understanding what you don’t know, who you don’t know, where you don’t know, and surrounding yourself with people who do know those things. You’ll have a much better organization and success if you do it that way. And that means you have to be inclusive; you have to figure out who’s not in the room, because that’s who you’re not going to serve.

So how do you view your role as a leader in Indigenous rights advocacy in Canada?

Leader? I wouldn’t say I’m a leader. It’s my obligation to do these things. I’ve led a privileged life and I think privilege is only worth having if you extend it beyond yourself and see it as a pathway to give back as much as you can.

U of T expert on the politics of precarious labour and democracy in South Korea

rasbachn — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 04:00:00 +0000

U of T expert on the politics of precarious labour and democracy in South Korea

rasbachn Fri, 11/03/2017 - 00:00

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Yoonkyung Lee in Toronto's Koreatown on Bloor Street West (photo by Jaclyn Shapiro)

Diana Kuprel

Topic

Global Lens

Faculty of Arts & Science

Global

South Korea

Yoonkyung Lee is an associate professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts & Science who studies labour politics, social movements and political representation.

She was appointed to the University of Toronto in 2016, and holds the Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies.

She spoke with Diana Krupel about the uniqueness of political life in South Korea, and why we have to be careful not to judge the country and its democratic experience through a Western lens.

“Politics in [South Korea and Taiwan] cannot be understood without the historical legacies of colonialism, war and national division, which have set a different terrain for the creation of democratic politics,” she says.

You trace the historical formation of political opposition in South Korea. What is unique about South Korean society and political life?

Our understanding of democratic politics is hugely pre-defined by the political experience of Western societies. We work with presumed notions, such as modern political systems emerging with industrialization, political pluralism exercised by political parties, and civil society buttressing micro-level democratic processes. By doing so, we often make the mistake of assuming that if something is “different” from the “Western standard,” democracy is an aberration and deficient.

Over the years of my comparative study of political development in non-Western societies like South Korea and Taiwan, I have come to learn that they need to be approached on their own terms. Politics in these societies cannot be understood without the historical legacies of colonialism, war and national division, which have set a different terrain for the creation of democratic politics. My task as a scholar is to identify the different trajectories and to explain what this “difference” adds to our knowledge of politics, democracy and social change.

In this sense, South Korea presents an intriguing case, with a strong state, a contentious social movement, and relatively weak political parties. These three actors have formed a unique political dynamic under which political stability and predictability are hard to come by. The political force that seizes state power strives to use the overarching authority. Vocal social movements mobilize to contest the excessive state. And political parties are unable to harness the conflicting interests into the formal political process. It is this very dynamic that creates sporadic historical moments when people mobilize, become politically enlightened, directly participate, and make a drastic change in the course of politics. The phenomenal protest that occurred in South Korea over several months in 2016 and 2017 led to the formal impeachment of the incumbent president Park Geun-hye – there is no better example that shows the unique political dynamic of Korea.

What does your research tell us about the rising socioeconomic inequality in East Asia and how labour is reacting to it?

East Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan are often praised for achieving both economic affluence and political democratization in just a few decades after their devastating experience of colonialism and war. Yet, workers and labour unions have never been fully embraced as legitimate actors. Military dictatorships that led economic development repressed labour for two reasons: to keep labour costs low in order to spur the success of export-oriented industrialization, and to inhibit workers from becoming a collective force for political opposition. Political democratization in the late 1980s could not overturn the weakness of labour, and the neoliberal change in the 1990s worsened labour’s position.

In a sense, rising economic disparity in South Korea is a result of weak labour and its lack of political voice, which in turn further undermines the bargaining position of labour. About half of the South Korean labour force is known as “irregular” workers who have few protections under labour law or social welfare. Fewer than 10 per cent of all paid employees are unionized. In short, South Korean workers are placed under a highly exploitative system without proper channels of intermediation. Workers who are pushed into an extreme corner resort to an extreme form of protest, like protesting in a high-altitude structure (such as industrial cranes and transmission towers) for days and months. Precarity and poverty have reached a point where it is no longer a class issue but a social issue that requires a serious political intervention.

As we look at our own society in North America, are there lessons that can be drawn from East Asia and to which we should pay heed?

The starting point of addressing issues of inequality is to understand the reality of the rising economic gap and its distinctive features. My concern for Canada is that there isn’t enough recognition and discussion about worsening inequality despite the fact that income gaps have been rising in the past 20 years. Racial and ethnic dimensions are important features of inequality that require public and scholarly attention, too. If a serious social issue is unspoken, it will never be addressed.

You came to Toronto from the United States to take up the Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies. What attracted you to the University of Toronto?

Around the time I was getting my tenure and promotion to associate professor at Binghamton University in the United States, I was looking for an opportunity to move to an academic institution that offers a more diverse and vigorous intellectual community. I was familiar with a number of U of T faculty in sociology, political science, East Asian studies and anthropology, and I admired their scholarship. Then I saw the job posting for a Korean studies social scientist. Equally attractive was the city. I had been to Toronto for conferences before, and I could definitely see the vibrancy of the city. Toronto has so much to offer, from cultural diversity to unlimited culinary choices, as well as a perfect mix of metropolitan features, traditional neighbourhoods and natural landscapes. Now that I am here, I am excited to be a part of this incredible intellectual community in such a beautiful city.

What are your goals as the Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies?

I want to fully realize the potential of the existing resources by encouraging collaborations between faculty and graduate students at the University of Toronto and York University. We have so many excellent scholars across different disciplines at these two institutions that exciting and innovative scholarly projects can readily be launched by working together.

U of T researchers unravel mysteries of ancient Buddhist manuscripts

rasbachn — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 19:24:16 +0000

U of T researchers unravel mysteries of ancient Buddhist manuscripts

rasbachn Thu, 10/26/2017 - 15:24

Cutline

PhD student Annie Heckman (left) and Amanda Goodman, an assistant professor of Chinese Buddhism at U of T’s department for the study of religion (photo by Jaclyn Shapiro)

Diana Kuprel

Topic

Global Lens

Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

Religion

Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies

Subheadline

Along the Old Silk Road – the ancient network of trade routes that once linked China and the West – is a complex of roughly 500 rock-cut caves carved into the cliffs above the Daquan River. The caves, known as the Mogao cave complex, are located near the oasis town of Dunhuang, perched at the edge of the Gobi Desert in what is now northwest China. Up until the disintegration of the Mongol empire in the 14^th century, traders, pilgrims and other travellers would stop at this hub of commerce and religion to secure provisions, pray for the journey ahead, or give thanks for their survival. This was before Islam conquered the region and sea routes began to dominate China’s trade with the outside world.

Adorned with Buddhist statuary and frescoes, the individual cave shrines, which date back to the fourth century CE, were active sites of Buddhist study and worship for more than 1,000 years. The major cave chapels were sponsored by local patrons: eminent monks and nuns, the ruling elite and foreign dignitaries – even Chinese emperors. Other caves are thought to have been commissioned by travelling merchants, military officers and lay Buddhist societies. Monks would visit at regular intervals to pay homage to the Buddhas, and members of the local Buddhist community would commemorate important Buddhist ritual days at the site. Hundreds of years later, one can still see iron hooks in the ceilings where banners once hung, and soot marks from the oil lamps that burned brightly on the altars during the annual rites.

One of the caves, now referred to as cave 17, or the “library cave,” originally served as a mortuary for an eminent local monk named Hong Bian. As memory of Hong Bian grew distant, locals began storing Buddhist manuscripts and ritual paraphernalia in the chamber, until it was sealed, likely sometime in the early 11^thcentury.

Then in 1900, a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu opened up the cave, and discovered what would turn out to be the largest cache of medieval manuscripts in Eurasia – some 60,000 manuscripts, many fragments, as well as fine portable paintings and dozens of statues and banners dating mostly from the ninth, 10^th and early 11^th centuries. Included were secular documents as well as works of history, poetry and religion – primarily Buddhism, but also Daoism, Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism, often written on the backs of recycled manuscripts. A few years later, Wang Yuanlu began selling the manuscripts to Western scholar-explorers, who carried off hoards of artefacts. The artefacts were then scattered around the world – to London, Delhi, Paris and St. Petersburg. One piece – a 10th-century woodblock print of a Buddhist prayer sheet – eventually made its way into the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) collection, in an exchange with the British Museum. All the manuscript collections are being digitized by the International Dunhuang Project, housed at the British Library, and can be freely accessed online, a boon to scholars.

What was the purpose of the Dunhuang cave library? Was it a sacred waste disposal site? After all, one couldn’t simply discard Buddhist scriptures without risking karmic retribution. And why was cave 17 sealed? Was it because of a threat of an Islamic invasion? These are just some of the mysteries and theories – some since debunked – that have fascinated archaeologists and scholars for more than 100 years.

Amanda Goodman, an assistant professor of Chinese Buddhism at U of T’s department for the study of religion, has a simpler theory: “I think it was an unofficial archive of a small group of local monastics who had a large number of documents that needed to be stored, possibly for repair or to be used to replenish local libraries. Hong Bian’s memorial chapel had fallen into disrepair and the materials just kept accumulating… kind of like your proverbial kitchen drawer. At a certain point, it just filled up and they sealed it.”

We may never know for sure. The first European archaeologist-explorer to visit the site neither knew Chinese nor understood the indigenous archiving system used to organize the manuscripts found in cave 17.

“The traditional Chinese way of classifying things is not A-Z, but rather uses an archaic system for numbering manuscripts, which were further grouped by genre or status, such as ‘damaged’ or ‘pristine’,” explains Goodman. “But in their excitement, the first wave of explorers removed the cloth wrappers used to bundle the manuscripts, to disastrous effect. We’ll probably never have a definitive answer as to why the contents of cave 17 came to be stored together.”

As for when? Scholars guess it was around the year 1003 CE, give or take five years, based on the fact that the most recent documents are from the early 11^th century.

Goodman, who is affiliated with U of T’s newly launched Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies, is the only Dunhuang specialist in Canada studying this special cache of manuscripts. Supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, and with a small team of graduate research assistants, she is working on Chinese Buddhist ritual manuscripts from the 10^th century, identifying, dating, translating and studying them, as she prepares a book, appropriately titled Buddhism from the Margins.

Two manuscripts from the Dunhuang cave library (image courtesy of the International Dunhuang Project)

Goodman’s focus is not on the formal or official canonical texts recovered from Dunhuang, but on the “messy manuscripts,” and especially ritual miscellanies, that found their way to London, Paris and Beijing. She is looking at the working or practical canons, including liturgical books, primers, prayer sheets and personal notebooks, which give a clearer picture of what Buddhist study and practice actually looked like at this remote outpost. Tracing distinctive reading marks and scribal conventions, she examines manuscripts cobbled together on recycled slave documents, divorce decrees and other scrap paper (paper was a rare commodity). She looks under corrections that cover up errors like old-fashioned white-out.

“I love the messiness of the manuscripts, and try to find meaning in that messiness,” she says.

These fascinating texts give evidence to an extraordinary cross-fertilization of cultures and religions that occurred during this period in the region.

“There is a significant corpus of bilingual, even multilingual manuscripts,” says Goodman. “To read these texts, you need to know Chinese and Tibetan as well as Khotanese and Uyghur: The scribe or copyist would begin by writing down a prayer in Khotanese, but when you flip the page, you find a Tibetan prayer followed by lengthy tracts written in Chinese. There are also sketches and diagrams scattered throughout these particular manuscripts. What these texts show is that there was significant interaction, in particular between the local Tibetans and Chinese, in the 10^th century, and that these Buddhist communities were engaged in a sophisticated conversation with each other.”

In fact, 12 different linguistic groups, including Hebrew, are represented at the site, which makes having a multilingual research team critical to reading both the source texts and the rich body of scholarship – in English, French, Chinese and Japanese – that has been produced in recent years.

One of Goodman’s research assistants is PhD student Annie Heckman, a specialist in French and Tibetan languages who had an active studio and teaching practice in art at Chicago’s DePaul University before deciding to go back to graduate school to pursue Buddhist studies. U of T’s community of Buddhist scholars and the opportunity to work with Goodman on the project were major motivators for Heckman to make the move to Toronto. In addition to reviewing the contemporary French-language materials about mandala sketches at Dunhuang, she is establishing the contents and bibliographical history of Tibetan-language texts that appear as excerpts in ritual manuals.

“This work helps us get a sense of the impact of certain texts over time, allows us to grasp their significance in later Tibetan contexts, and may perhaps lend more insight into how and why they were used in ritual contexts at Dunhuang,” Heckman says.

The ritual texts that the team is studying also give evidence to “hybrid” regional traditions that are markedly different from the Buddhism practised in elite urban monasteries. Goodman explains, “The Tibetan and Chinese ritual materials are pretty parallel in terms of the rituals they are using: If you follow the traditional story of Buddhism you wouldn’t think that Chinese Buddhists of 980 CE were doing the same things as Tibetan Buddhists at that time, but they clearly were at Dunhuang. They were exchanging ideas and texts and mixing indigenous Chinese material like seals that trap demons with Tibetan Buddhist visualization techniques, using every ritual technology at their disposal.”

So far her team has transcribed about a dozen ritual texts that appear on composite manuscripts as movable textual units; one can actually see how individual copyists were moving ritual units around or dropping them from liturgical sequences.

Heckman describes the process of working on Goodman’s project as “unravelling a mystery over time, combining different language capacities to put together the pieces of an ever-growing puzzle.”

Much like the provenance of the caves themselves, Heckman’s ability to decipher the mysteries of the mantras discovered there has been made possible in part because of the spirit of philanthropy that animates Buddhism. Her work is supported by the Phool Maya Chen Scholarship in Buddhist Studies. “When I first received news that I was awarded the scholarship, I felt welcomed into a community of committed scholars, and that my years of study were being recognized through the generosity of our donors,” says Heckman.

“Not only does the scholarship take away some of the material pressures I face as a student, it allows me to devote several hours a day to Tibetan readings, which has been of tremendous benefit to advancing the project, and to take on its challenging questions with even greater energy.”

U of T establishes first-in-Canada chair in Japanese politics and global affairs

ullahnor — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 16:00:34 +0000

U of T establishes first-in-Canada chair in Japanese politics and global affairs

ullahnor Thu, 03/30/2017 - 12:00

Cutline

The endowment will enable the university to recruit a top expert in the politics, diplomacy, security and global affairs of Japan (photo by Caribb via Flickr)

Diana Kuprel

Author legacy

Diana Kuprel

Topic

Global Lens

Japan

Faculty of Arts & Science

Japan is contributing US$5 million to the University of Toronto to establish an endowed chair in Japanese politics and global affairs, and to launch a Centre for the Study of Global Japan.

The University of Toronto is the first Canadian university to receive such support from the Japanese government.

The announcement comes on the heels of the Japan-Canada Summit in May 2016 when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe noted that Japan wished to support Japanese studies at Canadian universities in order to promote mutual understanding between the two countries.

“At a time when we are experiencing significant changes and instability on the global stage, Japan and Canada, as members of G7 countries that share common values, have a responsibility to make contributions to the world community that ensure peace and prosperity,” said Yasunori Nakayama, the consul general of Japan in Toronto. “We also share common challenges such as terrorism, global warming and our aging populations. It is therefore imperative that our academic institutions are able to conduct extensive research that enables us to properly understand each other. The University of Toronto is one of the oldest, biggest and most influential universities in Canada. I am delighted that an institution as prestigious as the University of Toronto now has the means to significantly broaden its study of contemporary Japan with a global perspective.”

“The University of Toronto has a keen, long-standing interest in Japan because of its importance on the world stage and the strong political, economic and cultural ties between our two countries,” says U of T President Meric Gertler. “We are deeply honoured, therefore, to have been selected by the Government of Japan for this landmark endowment, which will extend and amplify our impact in the study of Japan as a major global power.”

The University of Toronto is home to Canada’s first department of East Asian studies and has substantial expertise in the field. The gift will enable the university to recruit a top expert in the politics, diplomacy, security and global affairs of Japan. The chair-holder will be cross-appointed to the department of political science and U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs at the Faculty of Arts & Science.

In the interim, David Welch will be appointed the inaugural visiting chair. Welch, a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, holds the Centre for International Governance Innovation Chair of Global Security at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

“The endowed chair will secure the permanent presence here of a scholar who studies the political dimensions of Japan’s vital contributions to regional and global order,” said Professor Louis Pauly, chair of the department of political science.

The chair will also lead the Centre for the Study of Global Japan.

The centre, which will be housed at Munk, will expand teaching, research and public outreach by bringing together scholars of Japan from across the university and beyond, as well as practitioners and others interested in the country and the region. It will organize a permanent lecture and seminar series, anchored by an annual lecture by an eminent analyst of Japanese politics and diplomacy.

“The centre will open up more bilateral opportunities to build strong relationships and lifelong interests in Japanese politics and global affairs,” says Munk School of Global Affairs Director Stephen Toope. “This partnership will ensure that the university is able to promote and disseminate knowledge of contemporary Japan to the next generation of leaders, especially important during this time of dramatic change.”

Buddhist expert Frances Garrett talks about U of T's new Centre for Buddhist Studies

ullahnor — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 15:34:34 +0000

Buddhist expert Frances Garrett talks about U of T's new Centre for Buddhist Studies

ullahnor Mon, 12/05/2016 - 10:34

Cutline

Associate Professor Frances Garrett: "Over the last decade, our Buddhist studies faculty and student body have grown substantially, and we now have the largest program in Buddhist studies in Canada" (photo by Jaclyn Shapiro)

Diana Kuprel

Author legacy

Diana Kuprel

Topic

Global Lens

Religion

Centre for Buddhist Studies

Faculty of Arts & Science

Buddhist studies scholar Frances Garrett has been appointed as the inaugural director of the newly launched Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto. The centre, which is part of the department for the study of religion at the Faculty of Arts & Science, was established thanks to a gift from the Hong Kong-based Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation.

U of T's Diana Kuprel talked with Garrett, an associate professor of Tibetan and Buddhist studies and the associate chair of the department for the study of religion, about the study of Buddhism, what it has to offer contemporary society and what inspired her as a teacher.

What initially intrigued you about Buddhism that you decided to devote your career to it?

I went to India on a study abroad program when I was an undergraduate student at Columbia University. We lived in a Buddhist monastery for a semester and traveled around to sites important in the history of Buddhism. That was such an influential experience for me, which is partly why I’m so supportive of such opportunities for our undergraduates now.

What is your main research project?

I’m just wrapping up a big collaborative project, working with a team of scholars and students in China. We are documenting a group of stories about healing, illness and medical knowledge in the epic of King Gesar, a cycle which is known across inner Asia, most widely by Tibetans and Mongolians. It is the most important shared cultural narrative for millions of people across this massive region of Asia, similar to the Ramayana or Mahabharata for South Asians or the epics of Homer in the West.

In another project, I have a team of students involved in developing an online Classical Tibetan course focused on learning to read Buddhist texts that is funded by grants from the Canadian government. This open-access language course utilizes digital texts in Tibetan that are tagged with grammatical parts of speech. There is no other Tibetan language course that utilizes digitized and tagged Classical Tibetan texts in this way.

You were recruited to U of T in 2003. How has the move been important to you as a scholar and teacher?

The quality and diversity of students here is probably what I’m most grateful for. My teaching practice is substantially collaborative. So at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, I’ve involved students in a variety of research-oriented and experiential-learning opportunities. My graduate students have participated in a number of Buddhist studies and digital humanities working groups and research programs that I’ve organized at U of T and elsewhere, and I’ve taken graduate and undergraduate students on research and study trips in India and China.

Teaching in a large multicultural city like Toronto makes all kinds of things possible that would be more difficult elsewhere. I taught a course on oral history that engaged students with members of the Buddhist community in Toronto, for example, and trained students in technologies to create complex websites based on their own research. In another course, student teams visited 22 Buddhist centres in Toronto and their research was placed on a website, georeferenced to provide a student-run multimedia study of Buddhist communities in the area.

We also have a growing set of international programs, and more and more students are studying abroad. Earlier this year, for example, I co-led a group of students on a trip to India to study Buddhist pilgrimage. This trip will run again next spring. In my view, teaching begins with thinking deeply about what learning involves, and how and where it occurs. It is sustained by creatively experimenting with methods of engaging students. Through this process of working with students, I continue to learn as a teacher and researcher myself.

Why is it so important to have this centre at the University of Toronto at this time?

Over the last decade, our Buddhist studies faculty and student body have grown substantially, and we now have the largest program in Buddhist studies in Canada. The group generates a lot of energy and excitement, and throughout the year we host so many events and visitors. This is the perfect time to open a new centre, which will provide a focused home for our activities and help us reach out to new communities interested in Buddhist studies.

Why is the interest growing?

Our undergraduate students have a really wide range of interests, and courses in our programs lead many of them into independent research. In the past couple of years, for example, we’ve had undergraduate students in Buddhist studies interviewing traditional doctors in Himalayan villages and medical camps, doing textual research while learning Pali and Burmese, and surveying Buddhist and other religious traditions in the northern Indian state of Sikkim.

Our graduate students are similarly diverse with a large cohort now doing research on topics such as Buddhist practices supporting women’s health or end-of-life care, Buddhist epic and biographical literature, Buddhist manuscript and print culture, strategies of Buddhist revival in Mongolia, Nepal and Myanmar, and diasporic Buddhist communities around the world.

What are some of the lessons that Buddhism, and its scholarly study can teach us today?

The study of Buddhist traditions around the world can help all of us think more carefully and sensitively about a range of cultural and historical issues. How do people construct themselves as members of society? How do they decide on values that work for open-minded communities? How can traditions grow in response to creativity and change?

These are questions that are central in classrooms of Buddhist studies, as well as to those who study other religions of the world. Opening our horizons to ideas and practices that are new to us is one of the foundations of learning in the humanities – and this can happen every day here in a course on Buddhist studies.

University of Toronto launches the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies

ullahnor — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 15:32:45 +0000

University of Toronto launches the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies

ullahnor Mon, 12/05/2016 - 10:32

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'Seated Buddha' on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, United Kingdom (photo by Waring Abbott/Getty Images)

Diana Kuprel

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The University of Toronto has launched The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies on its downtown Toronto campus, providing an intellectual home for the largest contingent of Buddhist studies experts in Canada.

The centre comes thanks to an endowment originally from Tung Lin Kok Yuen, the Hong-Kong based charitable organization established by Robert H. N. Ho’s grandmother, Lady Clara Ho Tung.

“Our esteemed colleagues at The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation have demonstrated tremendous global leadership in its support of institutions dedicated to advancing the academic study of Buddhism. I’m very proud that the University of Toronto, my alma mater, now hosts a centre that bears its name,” said the Honourable Vivienne Poy, Chancellor Emerita of the University of Toronto. “It will be a catalyst for innovation and new insights into Buddhism’s place in society.”

The new centre’s inaugural director is Frances Garrett, an associate professor of Tibetan and Buddhist studies and the associate chair of the department for the study of religion in U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science.

“This is an exciting time for Buddhist studies at the University of Toronto,” says Garrett. “Our scholars reflect the amazing breadth and richness of the tradition: they are delving into Buddhist ritual, art, philosophy, medicine and other intellectual developments and modes of practice in regions throughout Asia. This support creates, for the first time, a university-wide locus for advancing research, teaching and public education on an extraordinarily rich and diverse global tradition.”

Rosemary Sullivan awarded Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

sgupta — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 11:56:13 +0000

Rosemary Sullivan awarded Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction sgupta Wed, 10/07/2015 - 07:56

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A Q & A with the celebrated author

Rosemary Sullivan, the University of Toronto professor emerita of English and celebrated critic, poet and biographer, has won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

The $60,000 award, one of the most prestigious in the country, goes to Sullivan’s latest book, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Published earlier this year to critical acclaim, the book tells the astonishing story of a woman fated to live in the shadow of one of history’s most monstrous dictators.

The prize is the latest in a series of accolades for Sullivan’s work. Her first collection of poetry, The Space a Name Makes (1986), was awarded the Gerald Lampert Award. Her biography of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Shadow Maker (1995), won the Governor General's Award. She was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012 for her outstanding contributions to Canadian literature and culture.

On November 1, Sullivan is appearing at the International Festival of Authors, where she will be in conversation with U of T alumna Anne Michaels; they will be joined onstage by Chrese, Svetlana’s daughter, in a rare public appearance.

Listen to an excerpt from Stalin's Daughter on the Faculty of Arts and Science Planet artsci podcast below:

Diana Kuprel, a writer with the Faculty of Arts & Science, interviewed Sullivan.

What inspired you to write a literary biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva, otherwise known as Stalin’s daughter?

When the obituaries of Lana Peters (aka Svetlana Alliluyeva) began to appear in November 2011, I was intrigued by her quoted words: “No matter where I go, to Australia, to some island, I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name.” What would it be like to live in the shadow of such a name? She was also quoted as saying: “You can’t regret your life, but I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.” To range from tragedy to humour! Who would this woman turn out to be? I talked with my editor at HarperCollins, NY, and she gave me seven days to write a proposal; it was accepted immediately.

I have always been fascinated by Russia – I first visited in 1979 in the Brezhnev era. I knew this would have to be a book focused on a woman’s life, but in the background would be the most tragic events of the 20th century: from Stalin’s Terror and his postwar anti-Semitic campaigns, to the Cold War and up to current Russian politics.

Your research is prodigious, including interviews, Alliluyeva’s own letters, the contents of CIA, KGB and Soviet archives – and your journey took you across three continents. Can you describe what was involved?

I began my research by contacting two people: Svetlana’s American daughter and Robert Rayle, the CIA officer who escorted her out of India. Chrese gave me permission to quote from her mother’s published and unpublished manuscripts and letters, and Rayle gave me his unpublished account of Svetlana’s defection as well as copies of several hundred letters she had written to the Rayles over the years. Once I had their cooperation, I knew I had a book.

I contacted Lynne Viola, a U of T historian, to ask for her recommendations about Russian-speaking research assistants. She was wonderfully generous and put me in touch with my brilliant young researcher, Anastassia. Then came the collecting of material under FIOA. The FBI files had just been released; there were troves of material at the Yale and Princeton libraries. My US research assistant, Sim, found me an invaluable collection of Svetlana’s papers at the Hoover Institute, which included some authentic KGB documents. Each time I met someone, the circle of people I had to interview widened.

People, including Stalin’s relatives, were very willing to talk with me and to give me copies of their correspondence with Svetlana. They wanted the real story told. When I’d finished the book, I asked Lynne to read it to correct any inaccuracies I might have made in the historical backdrop; she was wonderfully generous with her time.

It turned out this was the right moment to write this story. Several of the people I interviewed have, sadly, since died. It was an honour to meet them.

Svetlana seems to be different to every person with whom she came in contact – or rather, each person cast upon her their own interpretation of who she was. Who, for you, is the ‘real Svetlana’?

This would seem to suggest she was unstable, as she was often portrayed in the US. But she only “changed her identity” once. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, she assumed her mother’s name Alliluyeva, which was a common practice in the US. She did say the name Stalina felt like steel in her mouth. In 1970, she married Wesley Peters and legally became Mrs. Lana Peters, the name she kept for the rest of her life. But yes, she was on the receiving end of people’s projections, though, as the Dowager Lady Pamela Egremont told me, Svetlana herself was solid as a rock.

Svetlana was a writer at a time when “Soviet officialdom believed books were bombs”. This is something she understood well. Do you think her contemporaries in the West understood or appreciated this? What power can books today wield?

It is a strange irony that under any repressive political system, literature often flourishes because it is driven by a moral imperative to break the silence. So many writers wrote “for the drawer,” as they said in the USSR, and circulated their manuscripts as samizdat. Literature was a matter of life or death. The price is high – I think of Sinyavsky sentenced to seven years in the labour camps as late as 1966 for allowing his work to be published in the West. The regimes are always afraid of books, of writers who can touch the heart of a people. Most of the masterpieces of Latin American literature were written by writers exiled from their countries.

In the West, alas, books are often seen as a commodity. I doubt that Svetlana understood this. Selling her memoir for $1.5 million in 1967 had no meaning for her. As a Soviet, she did not understand the concept of money and lost most of it. And I wonder if, since 1967 when she defected, things have only gotten worse. Often the books that achieve prominence are self-help books, or formula novels, which get the publicity departments of publishing houses behind them. But this may be an exaggeration: books will always be read, and they do have an impact.

What reception do you think your biography will have in the former Soviet Union?

Russian rights were sold early on for a modest sum. Someone wanted to know the story. Because I quote Svetlana’s correspondence after 1999, in which she warns friends that the election of a former KGB colonel would inevitably mean the development of a parallel government run by the FSB, the secret service, and was very critical of President Putin’s echoing her father’s cult of personality, there may be problems. According to the historian Stephen Cohen, modern Russian is split 50/50 on their response to Stalin, whose memory is still very much alive. Perhaps the reception of my book in Russia will follow the same lines.

What does Svetlana’s story tell us – in Western democratic countries – about our own society and what we should take heed of?

Perhaps one of the surprises of my research was to discover that the US State Department initially refused Svetlana political asylum when she defected. My book opens with the cloak and dagger intrigue of her flight from India in March 1967. I suppose what we may learn from Svetlana’s story is that power structures control our lives in ways that we do not imagine. We think these are abstract matters, but in fact, political power structures are created by the personalities of the people who run them. Svetlana was a brilliant reader of the subtext of politics, which is why she detested politics.

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What does a life dedicated to humanitarianism look like?

sgupta — Tue, 20 May 2014 10:52:08 +0000

What does a life dedicated to humanitarianism look like? sgupta Tue, 05/20/2014 - 06:52

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James Fraser takes a selfie (all photos below of Fraser in Malawi are by Ian Brown)

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Meet alumnus James Fraser, CEO of ChipCare, co-founder of Dignitas

After graduating from the University of Toronto, James Fraser (BA 1996; MA 2001) worked with Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF), where the political scientist led exploratory missions and managed health care, water and community-based programs in 10 countries.

In 2003, he co-founded Dignitas International, a Toronto-based medical research organization focused on increasing access to HIV/TB treatment in low- and middle-income countries; he served as president and chief executive officer until 2012.

Faculty of Arts & Science writer Diana Kuprel caught up with Fraser in between trips to Africa at ChipCare, a start-up company where he is now chief executive officer. What follows is a condensed version of the interview. (Read the unabridged version.)

You’ve dedicated your academic and professional life to humanitarian work. What sparked this interest?

The spark was when I punched my brother. I grew up in Sudbury, and violence—at hockey games, watching all-night kung fu marathons with friends—was part of it and it was a caricature. I don’t really remember why, but I punched my brother in the face in front of my mom. He flew back, bloodied. My mom collapsed, wailing. I remember standing there over my brother and I had the overwhelming sense, for the first time, of what violence really is. That was the start of wanting to understand the causes of conflict, violence and suffering.

How did your university studies contribute to this journey?

I actually had a few starts, as it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to commit to. I started with Actuarial Science at U of T, because I was told it could help me earn a lot of money, and with a lack of direction that sounded like a good thing; but I didn’t like it. I went to Laurentian to study Phys Ed; but that wasn’t right either. I left school and became an ambulance attendant and a forest firefighter in Northern Ontario. The first Gulf War happened then, and I was transfixed by it. I was flipping through the U of T calendar and noticed there was a program called International Relations and another called Peace and Conflict Studies; I didn’t know you could study something like that. Those programs brought me back to U of T.

I started studying all these theories under Professor Tad Homer-Dixon and Professor Janice Stein, who were both terrific. I remember thinking, though, that what I was learning wasn’t real; it was just theory. So I did an independent study under Tad, travelling to Armenia and Azerbaijan to examine how people create enemy images. The root of violence—the ability to kill someone else—is this act of dehumanization by which one turns another person into an image of an enemy. I interviewed soldiers, refugees, humanitarian workers and academics because I wanted to figure it out for myself. It was 1994 and the Nagorno-Karabakh War—an armed conflict that was ignited when the Soviet Union collapsed—was just ending. Before the war, there were lots of intermarriages between the ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the region. At the end, each side had been basically ethnically cleansed. I wanted to figure out why. What goes through your brain when you are married to someone from the other group and a few years later you hate them all and you are ready to kill them? How does that happen within the space of a few years?

Then I did another independent study in El Salvador on its democratization process. After graduation, I was recruited by MSF.

It takes great courage to do this kind of work. Where does that come from?

I don’t think of it as courage. With my brother, I saw what violence was and I was gripped by it. When I was an ambulance attendant, I tried to help people whom we couldn’t save. Once you have these kinds of experiences, it changes you. It’s hard to turn your back on something when you know it exists, and by then I knew violence and suffering existed.

It became hard to imagine a life in which I wasn’t engaged in these issues. You have one life (I think), so what is your stomach telling you to do? What are your values? These are constant companions. My mom said I’ve been having a middle age crisis since I was 18.

During your time at MSF, you worked in some of the world’s hotspots, like Colombia, Turkmenistan, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Looking back to that time, what would you say is your biggest regret?

In February of 1997, I was working with MSF in Eastern Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo). I was on an exploratory mission to set up transit camps with food, water and medical attention for refugees trying to return to Rwanda. In South Kivu, where we wanted to set up the camps, militias were trying to stop the refugees’ return by massacring them. My team and I came across a number of mass graves. Locals who helped us were later killed by the militias. We were detained and told how we would be killed and how they were going to get away with it. It was pretty intense.

On our way back out of the forest, we came across a woman lying on the side of the road. She was on her side, weak, emaciated. She had a hole in the side of her neck and I could see almost right through to the other side. Her breathing was shallow, rapid. She was dying. It was so terrible. It was like I was looking at her through a pane of glass—it was not real. No one on my team reacted.

There were some villagers nearby and we asked why they were not helping her. They said they couldn’t help the refugees because the militias had warned them that if they did, they, too, would be killed. Eventually, I grabbed some oral rehydration tablets from my bag and dropped them next to her. We got back in the vehicles and left.

Soon after leaving, I realized that no one had touched her, that I had not touched her. If I had, or if I had spoken to her, we would not have changed her fate—she still would have died—but she might have died differently, not as an animal, but as a human being. But I didn’t. Instead she died alone on the side of the road with no dignity. This is my biggest regret.

How did you come to co-found Dignitas International? It’s a huge undertaking to start up an NGO.

The question of regret actually goes to the genesis of Dignitas International. I left MSF in 2002. When my wife, Laura, and I were expecting our first child, I realized I couldn’t do the same kind of work anymore. I thought I would try to write a book on my experiences, to make sense of them, I guess. Literally, I was working on the first page when the image of the woman in Zaire who was dying on the side of the road appeared before me. I stopped writing. While I was in the field, I had seen the impact of HIV, which was devastating families and communities. The world was turning its back on the millions of people dying unnecessarily of AIDS in the developing world. It was akin to my turning my back on the woman on the side of the road. I got up, opened the door; Laura was standing there. I said we had to do something. We conspired and Dignitas was conceived. I bought a plane ticket, set up meetings in Africa to do an exploratory mission, then called a number of colleagues from MSF and we founded Dignitas.

Last year, you spoke with students at U of T’s Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice Studies, where you had done your undergraduate studies. What did you say to them?

I said, “You are agents of change and you can do anything. Too many Canadians wait for permission. If something in the world is bothering you, do something about it. Create a plan and work it, step by step. Don’t ask or wait for permission. Act.”

Tell us a bit about ChipCare, the start-up founded by U of T engineers, doctors and chemists.

We are developing a simple-to-use, extremely mobile, laboratory-quality, blood-testing platform for infectious and non-communicable diseases in low- and middle-income countries.

The brilliant ChipCare inventors have leveraged recent advances in microfluidics and biomarker technologies to make a truly revolutionary platform. The Flow-LM’s extreme mobility and simplicity of use enables community-level and mobile clinic health workers to conduct diagnostic testing in small primary care clinics, in rural health outposts and even in patients’ homes.

They will be able to perform a range of tests individually or as part of test panels for multiple diseases on a single chip. Health workers can have confidence in test results because internal and remote test validation ensures laboratory quality. And the cost of the device is significantly lower than the competition.

We have raised an investment of over $2 million from Grand Challenges Canada, Maple Leaf Angels, MaRS Innovation, Ontario Centres of Excellence and the University of Toronto. This funding will allow us to turn our bench-top prototype into a hand-held device. We expect to develop the alpha of the device by February 2015, and a sellable version by July 2015.

What do you see as the biggest challenge in global health today?

The biggest challenge—and it’s not a new one—is the lack of political will to make a difference. For most global health needs, the technology, diagnostics and know-how to strengthen health systems all exist. It is a question of the resources and political will to get them to the people who need it.

I have to say, with respect to HIV/AIDS, there’s been a huge change. The incidence of HIV is decreasing in many countries. Many people’s lives have been saved, and they are living with HIV as a chronic condition. And when you consider the impact of the response to HIV, not only on those people accessing treatment, but on their families, communities, schools, businesses… it is immense.

I remember when I first went into Malawi, local village chiefs spoke of Armageddon: it was all death and despair because people had no access to treatments. Society was imploding. Now it’s all changed—10 million people are now accessing lifesaving treatment globally. But 1.6 million people still died of HIV last year; another 16 million are still in need of treatment. We have a long way to go.

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Afghanistan war, Marshall McLuhan and Green Lantern

sgupta — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 11:39:56 +0000

Afghanistan war, Marshall McLuhan and Green Lantern sgupta Tue, 04/15/2014 - 07:39

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Rita Leistner in Afghanistan (all photos courtesy Rita Leistner/Basetrack)

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U of T's Rita Leistner on war, literature and mentoring

War photographer, University of Toronto lecturer and alumna Rita Leistner has just returned from France where she was artist-in-residence for two exhibits – one based on her collaboration with Marie Clements, The Edward Curtis Project, and the other on Leistner's new book, Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan.

In 2011, Leistner spent three weeks in Helmand province, and another three in Kabul - on assignment with Basetrack, a journalism experiment that integrated new technologies and platforms, such as social media and smartphones, into a military embed with US Marines in Afghanistan. Designed to connect more than a thousand Marines and corpsmen with their families, and to connect the broader public with the war, Basetrack involved tweeting and uploading photos on a daily basis and had its own Facebook page. The experiences were the catalyst for Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan, which places social media, smartphones and military technology into what Leistner calls “a much broader, semiological context".

What follows is a condensed version of an interview Leistner gave to Faculty of Arts & Science writer Diana Kuprel about the book and her career. (Visit Alumni + Friends to read the full article.)

What was it like shooting on an iPhone?
I own a lot of cameras and lighting equipment, and I’d never imagined I’d ever have a need or desire to use a phonecam. But I wanted to fully embrace the concept of the Basetrack project, and I ended up getting quite excited about using this technology in a place that modernity seems on so many levels to have passed by. Putting aside traditional photography for the sake of the project required a leap of faith.

One day, the Battalion’s Master Gunnery Sergeant asked me what it was like to use an iPhone as a camera. I replied, “Imagine if one day all the expensive equipment you’d mastered, all your training, all your experience and knowledge, everything you’d spent your life sweating to learn, became obsolete, and was replaced with a Green Lantern Power Ring that anyone could use. That’s what using the iPhone as a camera feels like to me.”

But there’s no denying the smartphone is a real game changer. For the first time in history, images and text are seamlessly merged on the same device. This co-dependence of image and text seemed like a moment I’d been waiting to talk about my whole life.

What inspired you to become a photojournalist who covers war?
I wanted to be a photojournalist from the age of 12, when I read about Idi Amin’s secret torture chambers in Uganda in Life magazine, and then again when I saw Roland Joffé’s film The Killing Fields, about the Cambodian genocide, and the complete news and media blackout that descended on the country for nearly four years of Khmer Rouge rule. I had a perhaps naïve idea that journalism and photographs could help curtail these kinds of atrocities. Twenty years later, I ended up living in Cambodia learning photojournalism on the ground from veteran war correspondents who were in Phnom Penh when the city fell to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975.

You took a bit of a detour first.
After high school, I had no idea how to go about becoming a photojournalist. I ended up at Woodsworth College, studying French and English literature and American history. I was particularly interested in the Vietnam War. I was born in 1964 – too early to remember much of the war from the news, but late enough that it was already being taught as history by the time I reached university. In fact, I’ve just published a book review in the Literary Review of Canada of Michael Maclear’s memoir of covering Vietnam and how he had to convince the CBC that the war was important to a whole generation, not just Americans. I’m definitely part of that generation that was deeply affected by the war in Vietnam.

But I was only 18 years old. I wasn’t ready to pack my bags and move to a war zone. So I set aside my dream of being a war correspondent, and just read about war. In the meantime, I fell in love with literature. I’m an obsessed Francophile, and I love alphabets and linguistics and read grammar books for fun and relaxation.

I’ve never been a “typical academic.” In my first year at grad school, I asked for an extension on a paper about Umberto Eco so that I could go tree-planting, which was my summer job for 10 years. I’ll never forget Professor Lubomír Doložel’s response: “Not enough philosophers know how to drive a nail.” (I got the extension).

The next year, I wrote an essay on logging literature as a way to bring together my academic work with the world being introduced to me through tree-planting. I read Howard White’s 1983 collection of poems about his years in the logging industry in British Columbia. In the introduction to The Men There Were Then, White wrote: “If the truth be known, I’m not much better at bulldozer driving than I am at being a poet, but I’ve always been able to turn a lot of heads with the combination.” I identified immediately and thought, hmmm, I could be like that: I could turn heads by having a weird combination of skills and interests. Since I was already in the MA program in Comparative Literature, which is as genre-crossing as you get in literature programs, I was already well on my way.

A focus of your work is portraiture—The Edward Curtis Project, Portraitscapes of War (Lebanon), the Women of al Rashad (inside Baghdad’s largest psychiatric hospital), American Women Wrestlers, Crazy Horse in Iraq (American Cavalry Soldiers)… Even your first short documentary film, Miklat: The Bomb Shelter Project, which premiered at the New Orleans International Film Festival last October. Yet your book is a departure from portraits. Why?
I decided to try something different and look at humanity through our technologies, what McLuhan calls “the extensions of man.” But even though portraits are not heavily present in the book, they are present through their absence, through my discussions about language, man-made artefacts and the image captures of smartphones. There are some places where I really riff on the idea of capturing portraits inside cell phones.

What have your experiences in war zones taught you?
It’s normal to come across things in life we think we want, even if we don’t really know what they would mean to us if we had them. Getting to a certain place in a certain way is as much about the doors that have been shut on us, as it is about the opportunities we become open to once those doors have been shut.

Take for instance the way I went to Iraq. I couldn’t get an embed because I wasn’t American and because I wasn’t affiliated with a big media outlet. Ironically, I eventually did do one of the longest embeds of the war, spending three months with the American Cavalry, which ended up being a cover story in The Walrus. I could have so easily said, “It’s too difficult.” Instead, I made my way to eastern Turkey and from there walked to Iraq in the company of Kurdish smugglers. It was a grueling, highly illegal, three-day journey through rugged mountainous terrain carrying heavy gear. We travelled mostly at night to elude Turkish border guards, who had shoot-to-kill orders. Halfway through, I nearly fell to my death, badly injuring my knee. But in the end, it was a very different story than most journalists had, and it meant that my introduction to Iraq came through the people who helped me along the way, not as someone at the top of an American tank whose first encounters with Iraqis were as an enemy to be killed. And so what had at first been a bitter disappointment and seemed like a huge disadvantage actually ended up being a great advantage.

I wouldn’t have told you that when we were in the middle of the Taurus mountains with what seemed like no way out. I would have turned back time to be at home in a second if I could have. (Image below from Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan, courtesy Rita Leistner.)

You’ve been invited to teach photojournalism courses at U of T’s Victoria University and Sheridan College. You’ve also been invited to talk to Comp Lit students as an alumna who went on to a non-traditional career, most recently last fall. Why do you mentor?
It's funny you should ask, because I actually say in the acknowledgements to my book that I hope the book helps answer the question, “What do you do with your degree in Comparative Literature?” That was the theme of the most recent Comp Lit event, so when I was asked to attend, I knew I could speak to it.

Anyone who teaches or mentors will tell you it’s a two-way relationship. There is a lot to be said for the discipline of having to describe how and why you do what you do. One of my most hated phrases is, “Those who can do, those who can’t teach.” Teaching is phenomenally challenging as well as rewarding. It’s surprised me how much my teaching has contributed to my practice as well.

Being engaged in the University and being around the energy of the students was really instrumental in my inspiration for writing Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan. Those who don’t see the personal value in giving back are missing out. Throughout my life and career, many people have been very generous to me. The acknowledgements to my book, for instance, are 1,500 words long.

So apart from your camera, what’s the one thing you couldn’t do without on your travels?
That’s easy: something to read, usually related to the place I’m in or the project I’m working on. Oh, and a flak jacket of course.

Rita Leistner is an award-winning war-photographer, documentarian and politically engaged artist. She is the co-author of Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq (2005), The Edward Curtis Project (2010), Memory of Fire: Images of War and The War of Images (2013) and Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq (2013). For more on Rita Leistner, visit her website.

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Diana Kuprel

Cultural critic and Indigenous rights advocate Jesse Wente on turning your passion into your career

U of T expert on the politics of precarious labour and democracy in South Korea

U of T researchers unravel mysteries of ancient Buddhist manuscripts

U of T establishes first-in-Canada chair in Japanese politics and global affairs

Buddhist expert Frances Garrett talks about U of T's new Centre for Buddhist Studies

University of Toronto launches the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies

Read more about the centre and Associate Professor Frances Garrett

Rosemary Sullivan awarded Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

What does a life dedicated to humanitarianism look like?

Afghanistan war, Marshall McLuhan and Green Lantern