A Panel on Palestine: Decolonization, International Law, Gender, Media and Solidarity

Starting with our commitment to decolonization, this panel presents experts working in a variety of areas to analyze the roots of the current crisis.

Monday, November 27, 2023, from 7:30pm to 9:30pm EST
Thistle Complex Room 325 at Brock University

This event is hosted by the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Rights, Equity and Decolonization (PACHRED), and co-sponsored by the MA in Social Justice and Equity Studies, PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities, Social Justice Research Institute, and Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies. With thanks to the Human Rights and Equity Office.

Learn more about our panelists below:

Abigail B. Bakan is a Professor in the Department of Social Justice Education (SJE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, cross-appointed to the Department of Political Science, and an affiliate with the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Recognized as a scholar in the fields of citizenship and anti-oppression politics, her research explores intersections of gender, race, class, political economy, and citizenship. Abigail Bakan teaches in the areas of interdisciplinary approaches to research, relationships between theory and practice/praxis, and intersectionality and global politics. Her recent book, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race (co-authored with Yasmeen Abu-Laban) explores questions of race, identity and power (Bloomsberry, 2019).

Patty Krawec is an Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker belonging to Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory and residing in Niagara Falls. She serves on the board of the Fort Erie Native Friendship Center and sings with the Strong Water Singers, a hand drum group. She is the cohost of the Medicine for the Resistance podcast and in November 2021, after three years of personal fundraising, cofounded the Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation with journalist Nora Loreto and Blackfoot activist Terril Tailfeathers. Nii’kinaaganaa challenges settlers to pay their rent for living on Indigenous lands and then disperses that money to Indigenous people and organizations who are building their communities in a variety of creative ways. Patty worked for a sexual assault crisis center for four years, supporting victims through the medical care and collection of evidence after an assault. Following that, she obtained a degree in social work and went on to work in child protection for 16 years where she was also an active union member and served on her union local’s executive for several years before taking an early retirement. Her work has been published in Sojourners, Rampant Magazine, Midnight Sun, Yellowhead Institute, Indiginews, Religion News Service, and Broadview. She posts podcasts and essays with some regularity on multiple Substacks. Her book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future will be published in September by Broadleaf Books. She lives on Twitter as @gindaanis. Find her online at daanis.ca

Michael Lynk is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Law, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada, where he taught between 1999 and 2022. He taught courses in labour, human rights, disability, constitutional and administrative law. He served as Associate Dean of the Faculty between 2008-11. In May 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council unanimously selected Professor Lynk for a six-year term as the 7th Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967. In his capacity, he delivered regular reports to the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council on human rights trends in the OPT. He completed his term in April 2022. He has written about his UN experiences in a 2022 book co-authored with Richard Falk and John Dugard, two of his predecessors as UN special rapporteurs: Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine: Working Through the United Nations (Clarity Press, 2022).

Shree Paradkar is a Toronto Star social and racial justice columnist where she writes on issues of oppression, including race, gender and Israel-Palestine. She is also the country’s first internal ombud in a newsroom, a position created to develop an anti-racist newsroom and to make newsrooms less hostile to journalists of marginalized backgrounds. As the 2018-2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy, Shree went around the world in search of success stories on education without oppression. She is the winner of two Amnesty Awards for Human Rights reporting. Shree won the Racial Justice in Media award by the Urban Alliance of Race Relations. She has been a journalist in Toronto, Singapore, Bangalore and Mumbai.