In This Issue:

Upcoming Events:

• Wednesday: “Do Appeals to Human Rights or Canadian Values Change Canadian Public Opinion? Race, Legal Status and the Framing of Positive and Negative Rights”
• 5th Annual Canadian Family Thanksgiving
• Book talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945

Research Opportunities

• Call for applications: Immigration Research Initiative Doctoral Visiting Fellowship

External Events

• Expert Roundtable on Wildfire and Forest Resilience

UPCOMING EVENTS

Do Appeals to Human Rights or Canadian Values Change Canadian Public Opinion? Race, Legal Status and the Framing of Positive and Negative Rights

Wednesday, September 21 | 12:30 pm

Room change: 201 Moses Hall | RSVP here

Who should be granted state protection? Advocates often deploy appeals to human rights or shared national values when advocating on behalf of immigrant noncitizens. But do these approaches actually work? Few studies have empirically tested strategies for persuading dominant majorities to extend social benefits and civil rights to vulnerable minority outgroups. This lecture will draw on newly-published survey data from Canada, a democratic country often portrayed as highly tolerant, diverse, and inclusive, to reveal the limits of rights-based appeals, and the degree to which categorical inequality informs public views of who is “deserving” of these benefits.

Irene Bloemraad is a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and director of the Canadian Studies Program. She studies how immigrants become incorporated into political communities and the consequences of their presence on politics and understandings of membership. Bloemraad holds the Class of 1951 Chair in Sociology and the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair in Canadian Studies, and is the founding Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI). Beyond campus, she serves as the co-director of the Boundaries, Membership and Belonging program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

This event will be held in person and streamed live online. Please RSVP above if you plan to attend. If you require an accommodation for effective communication or information about campus mobility access features in order to participate in this event, please contact us at canada@berkeley.edu at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI).

5th Annual Canadian Family Thanksgiving

Saturday, October 8 | 5:00 pm

Clark Kerr Campus, UC Berkeley | Buy tickets here

Canadian Studies is pleased to partner with the Digital Moose Lounge for our fifth annual Canadian Thanksgiving dinner! Join us for a special meal celebrating the Bay Area’s Canadian community, as you mingle with your fellow SF Bay Canadians while enjoying entertainment and a delicious turkey dinner.

Tickets may be purchased through the Digital Moose Lounge.

We’re also looking for volunteers to help staff the event. A limited number of reduced-price tickets are available to volunteers; please contact us for more information.

Book Talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945

Wednesday, October 19 | 12:30 pm | 223 Moses | RSVP here

Andrea Geiger will discuss her new book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, the book highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia’s interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another.

Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings. To see the North Pacific borderlands only as a remote outpost that marked the westernmost edges of the U.S. or British empire, is to miss not only the central place it occupied in the lives of the Indigenous peoples whose home it continues to be, but the extent to which it functioned, in the eyes of Japanese entrepreneurs, as an economic hinterland for an expanding Japanese empire, as well as the role it played in shaping wartime policy with regard to citizens and subjects of Japanese ancestry in both Canada and the United States.

Andrea Geiger is professor emerita of history at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include transpacific and borderlands history, race, migration, and legal history. She received a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington, and is the author of the award-winning Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, and the Department of History.

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES

Application deadline: November 1, 2022

The Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) located in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University (Montreal) announces its Doctoral Visiting Fellowship competition. IRI is seeking applications for three 3-month doctoral fellowships for the winter of 2023 in the field of immigration.

Funded by the Secrétariat du Québec aux relations canadiennes, IRI’s objective is to build bridges between immigration research in Quebec and elsewhere in the world. Its Doctoral Visiting Fellowship program is designed to support doctoral students who are conducting or who wish to conduct a research project comparing Quebec to the rest of Canada or to other regions of the world. More specifically, IRI is looking for applicants who wish to develop a project on: 1) immigrant integration and/or attitudes towards immigration or 2) comparative immigration policies. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are welcome. The successful candidate will work in collaboration with Antoine Bilodeau and/or Mireille Paquet.

The award is worth $4000 to cover travel and living expenses while at Concordia University. The selected candidates must be present at Concordia University for a period of 3 months and must begin their stay before March 1st, 2023. Selected candidates will also be integrated into the activities of the Research Team on Immigration in Contemporary Quebec.

To submit your application, interested candidates should send:

• A letter describing the candidate’s research expertise
• A one-page description of the proposed research project, highlighting the place of the Quebec case in the project and its relationship to IRI’s objectives, and indicating the stage of development of the project
• A curriculum vitae
• Two letters of reference

For more information or to submit your application, email Antoine Bilodeau. Offers are contingent upon compliance with public health standards related to COVID-19 and receipt of appropriate visas, if required.

EXTERNAL EVENTS

Expert Roundtable on Wildfire and Forest Resilience

Wednesday, September 21 | 10:30 am PT

Online | RSVP here

Exacerbated by climate change, the increasing frequency and scale of wildfires have devastated communities and ecosystems around the world, while releasing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. California and Canada are among the regions that have experienced record-breaking wildfires in recent years. Five of California’s six largest wildfires in modern history burned in 2020 alone. And over the past decade, suppression costs and economic disruptions have risen.

In the face of these accelerating challenges, calls for climate-smart management of natural lands have grown louder among policymakers, experts, and stakeholders. Government and civil society programs have begun investing in forest resilience and nature-based solutions to deliver on mitigation and adaptation goals, working with Indigenous partners whose knowledge and experience are vital. Recognizing the need to bring together interdisciplinary, international coalitions to advance wildfire prevention, mitigation, and response, Prime Minister Trudeau and Governor Newsom committed their respective governments to hosting a roundtable on wildfire and forest resilience within their broader Climate Action and Nature Protection Partnership which they announced in June.

This event will feature The Honorable George Heyman, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy for British Columbia, and Randy Moore, Chief of the US Forest Service. It will be moderated by California Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot. This event is part of Climate Week NYC and is sponsored by the Government of Canada.