Director's Message
Dr. Juanita De Barros,
February 2023
Welcome to the Winter 2023 edition of the Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice (CHRRJ) newsletter. CHRRJ provides a site where a multi-disciplinary group of scholars as well as policy makers, practitioners, and community leaders can explore human rights and restorative justice issues. In just a few short years, the faculty, students, and fellows affiliated with the Centre have accomplished a great deal, despite the challenges of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this newsletter, we acknowledge and celebrate their accomplishments over the past year. This work helps advance the important task of expanding our understanding of human rights’ issues, today and in the past.
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Dr. Juanita De Barros
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In this edition of the newsletter, we highlight the varied research activities and events undertaken over the last year by the researchers and collaborators affiliated with the Centre and which support and advance the CHRRJ’s mandate.
As pandemic restrictions ease, we have been able to resume in-person events which have allowed for rich and exciting intellectual exchanges. The various techniques we developed in the early years of the pandemic, and which enabled us to communicate and meet virtually, remain useful. Notably hybrid events, such as the recent “Child Protection and the Rights of the Child” conference, provide important networking opportunities for researchers who are unable to travel to Hamilton, allowing them to share their research. Significantly, these techniques also offer opportunities for student involvement in research projects as the activities undertaken under the auspices of the Participedia project, which is housed at the Centre, demonstrates. These virtual and in-person exchanges benefit all of us.
In the year ahead, we will have many opportunities to build on these accomplishments, by finding ways to engage students in our work as well as by maintaining and expanding our research networks and continuing to develop new and exciting research projects.
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Welcome Remarks by Dr. Martin Horn
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On January 27th and 28th 2023, we held a hybrid conference on “Child Protection and the Rights of the Child.” Supported by McMaster University’s Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice (CHRRJ), this conference brought together an international and multidisciplinary group of researchers to explore patterns and changes in discourses, policies, and practices in child saving, child protection, and the rights of the child.
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In-Person Attendees
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The conference was well-attended, with virtual and in-person attendance. It included six academic sessions that addressed a range of topics, including the experiences of children in conflict zones; child labour in the past and the present; the emergence and evolution of international children’s rights discourse; adoption and child migration; and children’s experiences in state institutions.
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Keynote Talk
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One of the conference highlights was the keynote talk by the Indigenous historian Dr. Crystal Fraser (Gwichyà Gwich'in/originally from Inuvik and Dachan Choo Gę̀hnjik, Northwest Territories), titled “Histories of Indian Residential Schooling: Approaches to Studying Institutionalized Indigenous Children during the Twentieth Century.”
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Research Assistants
Sara Abdella - Nadim Al Nakhl - Zeynep Yilmaz - Valeria Flores - Oyinade Adekunle
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The conference also included a workshop led by the McMaster Children and Youth University (MCYU) which explored the MCYU community-campus model for co-creating knowledge. Research assistants working with the Participedia project at CHRRJ (and with the permission of the participants) interviewed some of the conference attendees with the goal of ensuring that these professional recordings will be made available to academics and members of the public.
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Participants Asking Questions
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The conference helped advance our understanding of changes and continuities in the treatment of children over time and the impact of international agreements and local policies focusing on children’s rights and the ways in which they interacted. The conference was supported by the Office for Community Engagement, the History Department, the Provost’s Office, the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University, as well as by the CHRRJ.
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Panel 4: Children's Rights in Politics & Education Panelists Presenting
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Adebisi Alade
Dr. Adebisi Alade, an associate member of the CHRRJ, has assumed a tenure-track position at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Before joining UVic in July 2022, Dr. Alade was a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at McMaster University under the supervision of Prof. Bonny Ibhawoh. His dissertation, “A Mission to Sanitize: Public Health, Colonial Authority, and African Agency in Western Nigeria, 1900-1945,” examines how subaltern resistance and politics shaped public health development in Africa. Using food hygiene and environmental sanitation as lenses to better understand how Africans engaged British disease control programs, his thesis deconstructs the colonial discourse of private and public hygiene in Africa.
Dr. Alade accepted the position of Assistant Professor in UVic’s Department of History three months before defending his doctoral thesis in May 2022. At UVic, he teaches African History and the History of Medicine in the Colonial World. Dr. Alade currently chairs his Department’s Indigenous and Antiracist Initiatives Committee while representing the Faculty of Humanities on the Global Development Studies Program Committee. His publications have appeared in edited volumes and reputable journals, including the Journal of Social Development in Africa, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, African Studies Quarterly, and the South African Journal of Cultural History.
During his time at the CHRRJ, Dr. Alade was not only an active member of Participedia. He also coordinated Confronting Atrocity, a transnational project on truth commissions and restorative justice, including the 2019 international conference at the University of Ghana in Accra, Ghana.
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Alpha Abebe & Bonny Ibhawoh
Centre members Dr. Bonny Ibhawoh and Dr. Alpha Abebe participated in a collaborative effort with a multi-disciplinary team to work on the McMaster African and Caribbean Leadership Exchange (MACLeads) program. This project is designed to provide young, emerging leaders in Canada with experiential learning opportunities through placements with African or Caribbean partner institutions and organizations. MACLeads aims to enhance the education of undergraduate students and prioritize students who have historically faced barriers to participating in global exchange initiatives. Students will have opportunities to interact and learn from Black/racialized global leaders in post-secondary institutions, policy institutes and non-governmental organizations in countries such as Barbados and Ghana.
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Chandrima Chakraborty & Ingrid Waldron
Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty and Dr. Ingrid Waldron received a Wilson Foundation, Future of Canada Grant, for their project, “COVID-19 in Racialized Communities in the Greater Toronto Area: Experiences and Conceptualizations of Loss.”
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Jorge Fabra Zamora
On September 2022, Dr. Jorge Fabra Zamora started his position as Associate Professor of Law at the University of Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York. He will be teaching torts, jurisprudence, and international human rights law. Prior to joining the law school, he was a Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Adjunct Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.
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Juanita De Barros
In 2022, one of Dr. De Barros' articles won the Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize, 2022 (Association of Caribbean Historians) for the best article in Caribbean history: “The Death of Molly Schultz: Race, Magic and the Law in the Post-slavery Caribbean.” Journal of Social History (Winter 2021): 1-29.
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Oyinade Adekunle
Oyinade Adekunle’s research interests included legal history, human rights and crime in Africa. Adekunle will conduct field research in the United Kingdom and Nigeria in the spring of 2023 on Capital Punishment in Colonial British West Africa. Currently, she is working on Casualties of War during the dispensation Armed Forces duties in African Continent. She received the Mildred Barrett Armstrong History Fund and the Richard Fuller Scholarships for History awards to aid research activities.
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Paul Ugor
Dr. Paul Ugor is currently conducting research on a variety of topics related to African literature and film, African youth cultures, and black popular culture. His current projects include a monograph on the screen media output of Nigerian film director and TV producer, Femi Odugbemi, two edited volumes on the Postcolonial Bildungsroman (with Arnab Roy of Florida Gulf Coast University) and Narratives of Transitional Justice in World Literatures (With Dr. Bonny Ibhawoh).
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Sara Abdella
The Just Participation Podcast, is a global-student-led podcast produced by Participedia RA’s Sara Abdella, Zeynep Yilmaz, and Nadim Al Nakhl. The podcast uses reflexive methodologies that mindfully confront biases to explore the stories of diverse research and practitioner experiences from within the Participedia community. To avoid echoing similar interests and perspectives, each episode invites participants to work from different practitioner and scholarly approaches to unite on a common topic.
In its first season, the podcast has collaborated with professors from around the world discovering research on “Democracy & Technology”, unravelling indigenous sovereignty and the tensions and challenges of designing an inclusive knowledge-sharing platform based on feminist co-design principles, “Best-Interest Decision-Making”, decisions made on behalf of those who lack representation in decision-making processes through the examples of children, animals, and marginalized indigenous communities, and “Democratic Legitimacy and Silence”, analyzing the theory of silent citizenship as applicable to political legitimacy and trust, focusing on Britain from the Global North along with Uganda, Malawi, and Sri Lanka from the Global South.
In Winter 2023, the Podcast is further exploring issues regarding human rights as well as undiscovered areas of research with collaboration from Dr. Paola Ardilles Gamboa, a senior lecturer and advisor at Simon Fraser University, Syrus Marcus, a social justice activist and associate with McMaster, and Dr. Aytak Akbari Dibavar, a decolonial feminist educator at the University of Toronto Scarborough, on an episode exploring “Art-Spaced Social Justice Work & Decolonization”.
It is followed by a Participedia Democracy Across Borders Episode highlighting “Global Assemblies” through the work of Mission Publiques and I4Policy. The podcast is expanding its scope to include non-traditional ways of democratic pedagogy and exploring not only the works of educators and scholars but practitioners who have advanced citizen participation globally.
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Chandrima Chakraborty
Journal Article Publication
“Contagious Minorities: Chinese Canadians during COVID-19.” Journal of Canadian Studies. 56.3 (2022): 393-409. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs-2022-0017
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Juanita De Barros
In 2022, Dr. De Barros published a co-edited special issue of Histoire sociale/Social History (with Dr. Laurie Jacklin): "Finding Home Abroad? Building Caribbean Communities in Canada and Beyond". The special issue includes an introduction that she co-wrote with Dr. Laurie Jacklin: “Race, Migration, and Community: Telling Caribbean Histories.” And she contributed an article to this special issue: “Diasporic Sources and Caribbean History.”
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