Where do you Live? Housing Narratives in Toronto Emily-Camille Gilbert Housing is a concern for many Canadians, as is demonstrated by the 10-year, $40 billion National Housing Strategy announced in November 2017. The razing of subsidized housing projects and replacement with mixed-income, public-private partnership developments has increasingly been used in urban centres like Toronto. This... Continue Reading →

Jesus wuz here...Literally: Painting Jesus' Face in Contemporary Palestine Connie Gagliardi What is a Byzantine icon, and what do they mean for the lives of Palestinian Christians today? This talk will examine the realities and experiences of Palestinians living under Occupation, and the role that icons and iconographers play in this world. It will also... Continue Reading →

Are you  your brain? How neuroscience transforms us Johanna Pokorny How neuroscientists think about thinking in the lab using complex technologies has profound impacts on how we act in everyday and ordinary ways. This talk will explore how the brain has become viewed as the location of personhood, and how neuroimaging technologies used in neuroscience... Continue Reading →

From Small Groups to Supercities: The Energy that Fuelled Human Transition Simon L'Allier How do we explain that some human groups contain about a hundred individuals, while some cities may be filled with 33 million people? In other primate groups, increases in group size lead to growing competition over food resources and larger energy expenditures... Continue Reading →

Growing Old Between Two Worlds: How to Age "Successfully" in the Pacific Vanessa Maloney What does it mean to age 'successfully'? We like to think of ageing as a biological process, but anthropologists have shown through cross-cultural comparison that 'growing old' is profoundly shaped and influenced by our culture. Our ideas surrounding what it means... Continue Reading →

Mango Trees and Jealousy Fees: Inequitable Entanglements and Development Aid in Northern Uganda Sarah O'Sullivan This talk explores the recent mushrooming of Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) in northern Uganda and their impact on post-conflict life, especially for Acholi people living with HIV. In recent years, there has been a large retraction of funding... Continue Reading →

Reefer Madness? Facts, Fictions, and Myths about Medical Cannabis Walter Callaghan Is cannabis addictive?  Can cannabis cause schizophrenia?  The answers to these questions are not as simple as are frequently portrayed by psychiatry and addiction counselors, some of whom seem to resort to a form of fear-based messaging that stretches and distorts the available evidence.  This... Continue Reading →

Sabr: Pain and Palliation in the Islamic Middle East Elisabeth Feltaous Palliative care and the rhetoric of dying with dignity has proliferated in the past 20 years in the Western world yet progress has been slow in the Middle East.  This talk examines the Human Rights discourse of dying with dignity and contrasts it with... Continue Reading →

Constructing Diagnosis Kaitlyn Vleming This talk draws on Kaitlyn's research on polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) as well as other examples to explore how social-cultural anthropologists look at medical diagnoses. Diagnostic categories are situated in particular historical and social contexts (for example, social ideas about gender permeate categories such as "women's health" or the designation of... Continue Reading →