Summit II - Players: We Are All Practitioners

This is the second in a series of three research summits organized as part of the The Cultural Relations Approach to Diplomacy: Practice, Players, Policy research project. Advancing our interest in reframing current discussion around the relationship of “the cultural” to diplomacy in the study and practice of global relations, we consider the Cultural Relations approach to diplomatic activity through the three dimensions suggested in the overall project’s title. Our inaugural summit, Cultural Diplomacy as Critical Practice, in September 2020 focused on practice and feeds into players, the featured dimension of this second summit. Finally, the discussions germinating about players informs the third summit’s interest in the potential they hold to vitalize an environment conducive to the development of effective policy. The three summits are meant to facilitate the development of discussion through a sequence of exchanges that brings emerging lines of inquiry forward for consideration. They also serve as focal points for networking among partners in charting directions for further research, advocacy, and policy development. The intention is to generate scholarship and practice that treats cultural diplomacy as a multidirectional, inclusive, and potentially activist practice that encompasses a diverse range of actors and their networks.

Join us! Events take place 17 & 19 November, 1 & 9 December 2021

• Wednesday, November 17: Decolonizing Diplomacy
• Friday, November 19: (Re)Constructing Identity: Diaspora Diplomacy
• Wednesday, December 1: Cultural Practice and Transnational Outreach: The practitioner in Sport, Art, and Music
• Thursday, December 9: Locations of Cultural Diplomacy: from your Neighborhood to the World - Discussions presented by the USC Centre on Public Diplomacy (see details for separate registration)

Thank you to our partner organizations: Queen's University, Royal Ontario Museum, Universidad Iberoamericana, University of Southern California Annenberg's Centre on Public Diplomacy and Centre on Communication, Leadership, and Policy, Global Affairs Canada, International Council of Museums, and Bloor Street Culture Corridor.

 

Schedule:

DECOLONIZING DIPLOMACY, November 17

Panel 1: "Call and Response: Resistance and Refusal as Diplomacy"
9:00 am (PT)/11:00 am (CT)/12:00 NOON (ET)

Moderators:

• Ryan Rice (Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawake), Associate Dean, Faculty Arts & Science, OCAD University, & Curator, Indigenous Art, Onsite Gallery
• Linda Grussani (Algonquin Anishinabekwe, Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg), Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies, Queen's University

Panelists:

• Emiliana Cruz Professor at CIESAS-CDMX
• Hayden King (Anishinaabe, Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi'mnissing, Huronia Ontario), Executive Director, Yellowhead Institute
• Christina Leza (Yoeme-Chicana), Associate Professor of Anthropology and Indigenous Studies, Colorado College
• Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning (member of Kettle & Stony First Nation), Assistant Professor, QNS, Anishinaabe Knowledge, Language and Culture, Queen’s University

Even the briefest survey of Indigenous diplomacies demonstrates a “radically divergent approach to the international” (King 2017) than that arising from the sovereignty-based normativity of the Westphalian state system. This requires nothing short of a move toward decolonizing diplomacy which necessarily involves a challenge to the underlying Eurocentrism of statist diplomatic activity. This panel considers how North American Indigenous communities have and continue to practice diplomacy and engage within the global arena; specifically, how historical and current forms of resistance, refusal, representation, and activism - all of which exist at the edge of conflict - function as avenues through which Indigenous nations exercise agency and force nation-states to engage in negotiation. Examples range from the Kanesatake land defenders to the Zapatista uprisings; from the Spirit Sings museum controversy to the toppling of colonial monuments; from the anti-pipeline grassroots movements originating from Standing Rock to the Wet'suwet'en and Tyendinaga territories to the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) territories impacted by the Line 3 pipeline route. This discussion examines the ways that Indigenous peoples, the first diplomatic Players of this continent, continue to advance diplomatic practices and objectives.

Panel 2: "Indigenous Video Games as Tools to Decolonize Cultural Relations"
11:30 am PST/1:30 pm CT/2:30 pm EST

Moderators:

• Amanda Rodríguez Espínola Research Fellow, North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative
• Amy Parks Research Fellow, North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative, Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies, Queen’s University

Panelists:

• Meagan Byrne ( pihtawikosisân, Métis, Ontario), Narrative Mechanic Designer and Owner, Achimostawinan Games
• Ashlee Hope Bird (Western Abenaki of the Champlain Valley), Moreau Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Notre Dame
• Samir Durán CEO and Producer, Bromio
• Eleanore Flack 3D Environment Art Student and Developer of Growing Up Ojibwe: The Game, University of Wisconsin - Stout
• Kahentawaks Tiewishaw (Kanien’kehá:ka, Kanehsatake), Skins Workshops Associate Director, Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF)

This panel explores how video games can put decolonial scholarship, diplomacy, and media in conversation. In the past two decades, digital resources have become an essential tool for cultural diplomacy and cultural relations, giving way to the concept of digital diplomacy. However, this notion is commonly limited to social media communications. Likewise, digital media have enabled and highlighted the role of non-state actors, allowing various new players, such as indigenous communities, to access resources and networks that situate them as diplomatic actors. These players represent non-sovereign entities with economic, cultural, and political interests. For indigenous communities, cultural relations and soft power are a way to share their values and culture, form relationships with foreign audiences, strengthen their network, expand their area of influence, legitimize their foreign policy agenda, and open the possibility to mobilize actions to advance their interests. Video games offer an opportunity for cultural understanding in cultural relations, highlighting the role of indigenous diplomacies while also being a platform to question, challenge, or disrupt colonial discourse. The virtual third space where video games take place becomes a valuable alternative when cultural relations cannot occur in person. These spaces can reinforce the legitimacy of indigenous actors and facilitate relationship-building in the long term. Video games also act as an instrument for economic pursuit, decolonized media representation, and an opportunity to challenge the power relations in the video game industry. At the macro-level, videogames open the possibilities to imagine indigenous diplomacies differently. The practitioners in this session represent some of the efforts made by Indigenous communities throughout the region known as North America to decolonize diplomacies, narratives, and business models to put different forms to conceptualize diplomacy outside of the Eurocentric worldview at the forefront.

 

(RE)CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY: DIASPORA DIPLOMACY, November 19

Keynote: "Mexican Diasporas in the United States: Tools for Engagement that Center Community Knowledges and Experiences"
9:00 am - 10:15 (PT)/11:00 - 12:15 (CT)/12:00 pm - 1:15 (ET)

Speaker: Alexandra Delano Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies, the New School, New York City
Chair: César Villanueva Rivas Associate Professor of International Relations and Public/Cultural Diplomacy, Universidad Iberoamericana

Since the mid 19th century, Mexican migrants in the United States have organized through mutual aid groups, community organizations and cultural programs. With multiple objectives and motivations, from celebrating and sharing cultural traditions across borders and across generations, to maintaining ties with and supporting their communities of origin, or making claims for political rights in Mexico and the United States, they create spaces for cross-border dialogues and engagement with multiple actors in both countries, challenging the fixed territorial boundaries of categories of citizenship and access to rights. In this presentation I focus on the history of engagement between different groups in the Mexican diaspora and the Mexican state, emphasizing practices of engagement that build from knowledges and experiences of the community, considering the opportunities that arise from them as spaces for new imaginaries and political horizons, as well as their tensions and limitations. 

Panel 1: "Remembering and Engaging: Diaspora Museums as Cultural Diplomacy"
10:30 am - 11:45 am (PT)/12:30 - 1:45 (CT)/1:30 pm - 2:45 (ET)

Moderators:

• Sascha Priewe, Associate Vice President, Strategic Planning and Partnerships, Royal Ontario Museum
• Simge Erdogan-O’Connor, Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies, Queen’s University, Research Fellow, NACDI

Panelists:

• Adán B.F. García, Academic Chair, Memory and Tolerance Museum, Mexico City
• Palina Louangketh, Founder & Executive Director, Idaho Museum of International Diaspora
• Grace Wong,  Board Chair, Chinese Canadian Museum Society of British Columbia
• Ulrike Al-Khamis, Director & CEO of the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto

Museums are increasingly recognized as diplomatic players in their own right. Associated with cultural diplomacy activities and foreign policy agendas of the nation states they are located in, museums have long played a role in global cultural relations through their exhibitions, collecting and research activities. Museums are also active in globe-spanning professional networks. They are increasingly shaping their global engagement activities through the lens of their own agendas, priorities and principles, rather than being simply subsumed under a nation-state driven soft power paradigm. This session seeks to explore 21st century museum agendas by foregrounding diaspora museums, museums that sit at the intersection between the heritage of the host population and the inheritance of the source country. 

Museums are important platforms to promote a nation, a people or a culture, and are being harnessed by diaspora and other communities as vehicles to channel their cultural and national expressions, histories and location. This session will address the role of diaspora museums at the junction between the local and the global alongside their negotiation of identities. Additionally, the session will also consider in what ways museum projects are deemed diplomatic activities, as well as how their activities are affected by the increasing push among other museums to include diaspora and diverse voices and representations.

Panel 2 : "Flipping the Script: Bottom-Up Methods for Diaspora Diplomacy Studies"
12:00 noon - 1:15 pm (PT)/2:00 pm - 3:15 (CT)/3:00 pm - 4:15 (ET)

Moderator: 

• Eduardo Luciano Tadeo Hernández, Adjunct Professor, International Studies, Universidad Iberoamericana

Panelists:

• Vanessa Bravo, Associate Professor of Strategic Communications and Chair of the Department of Strategic Communications, Elon University
• Maria DeMoya, Associate Professor, Program Chair - Public Relations and Advertising, DePaul University
• Alina Dolea, Principal Academic in Media, Communication & Politics, Bournemouth University
• Ilan Manor, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Communications, Tel Aviv University

Diaspora studies offer a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the movement and transnational settlement of people. The dispersion of populations across borders and the construction of an identity as a distinct community, which invokes in many cases connections to the homeland and reconfigured relations to the host country, has existed throughout history. However, in our globalized age, the phenomena of communities that maintain transnational connections have become more prevalent. As the field evolves, the methodological toolkit for its study is expanding to encompass the proliferation of meanings and applications. Diaspora diplomacy scholars are engaging with new forms of understanding diasporas as communities that are constantly negotiating and constituting their identity. We continue to recognize the fluidity of the ethnicity category that relies on social practices. In that process, it is important to give more attention to the power dynamics that ultimately converge in the diaspora. 

In reflecting on the opportunities for a deeper engagement with the communities, new methods for diaspora diplomacy studies would enable scholars and practitioners to better align themselves with stakeholders and to articulate the changes in practice needed to serve an increasingly transnational public. This session brings together scholars working in the cultural aspects of diaspora studies and whose work outside of North America has relevance in grasping the diversity of the communities.

Panel 3: "The Scholar as Diplomat: Diaspora Intellectuals and (Cross)Community Representation"
1:30pm - 2:45 pm (PT)/3:30 pm - 3:45 (CT)/4:30 pm - 5:45 (ET)

Moderator: 

• Nicholas J. Cull, Professor of Communication and Global Communication Policy Fellow, Center for Communication, Leadership, and Policy, University of Southern California

Panelists:

• John Bieter, Professor, History Department, Boise State University
• Salpi Ghazarian, Director, USC Armenian Studies Institute
• Yael Siman, Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Universidad Iberoamericana

Diaspora diplomacy is a rich academic field as well as a vibrant space for activism. Diasporas play important roles such as building and nurturing relations between their host country and their homelands and assisting in the democratization processes of the latter. Furthermore, they can create solidarity groups with other diasporas, increasing organized mobilizations and establishing wider networks of support that acquire economic and political resources to affect the structure of the host country, allowing claims and demands in the public sphere. With increased access to information and communication technologies (ICT’s), such associations can become more diverse and open the path to new forms of organization, calling for new models of practice.

Diaspora communities form g/local networks of relations and hybridized visions of nation which challenge the primacy of state-centric diplomacy. The Scholar as Diplomat session will bring together scholars of diaspora to consider the evolution of individual diasporas and their interaction including the emergence of reciprocal campaigns.

 

CULTURAL PRACTICE AND TRANSNATIONAL OUTREACH: THE PRACTITIONER IN SPORT, ART, AND MUSIC

Keynote: "Minding the Gaps: Connecting Diversity, Diasporas, and Skate Diplomacy"
9:00 AM (PT) / 10:00 AM (CT) / 12:00 NOON (ET)

Speaker: Neftalie Williams Provost’s Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. Visiting Fellow in Race, Culture & Community, Yale Schwarzman Center

Chair: Nicholas J. Cull Professor of Communication and Global Communication Policy Fellow, Center for Communication, Leadership, and Policy, University of Southern California

Dr. Williams’ keynote argues for a new sport and cultural diplomacy agenda which reimagines diverse non-state actors as the critical connectors and agents of change capable of advancing multiple interdisciplinary policy goals of nation-states. Drawing upon experience as envoy for the US Department of State in Cambodia, the Netherlands, Kazakhstan, and NGO efforts in South Africa, Cuba, Williams demonstrates how his efforts to develop skateboarding as a tool for cultural diplomacy operates at the nexus of sport, culture, education, and community. Williams’ talk establishes a new critical paradigm for developing more inclusive, sport and cultural diplomacy efforts that simultaneously speak to the needs of diverse audiences. When utilized, this framework places both state and non-state actors in allyship with the movements driving positive change across the globe. 

Panel 1: "Always Already Players: Considering the Cultural Diplomacy of Artists"
10:30 AM (PT) / 12:30 PM (CT) / 1:30 PM (ET)

Moderators:

• Sarah E.K. Smith Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University
• Linda Grussani (Algonquin Anishinabekwe, Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg), Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies, Queen's University

Panelists:

• Carla Rippey, Visual artist
• Jeff Thomas Curator and Photographer
• Lori Blondeau, Assistant Professor at the School of Art, University of Manitoba

Recent scholarship in cultural diplomacy has focused on institutions and national players; overshadowing the role and impact of cultural producers. Reflecting the emphasis of the second summit on players, this panel engages with visual artists to understand their contributions and experiences, as well as the diverse networks to which they contribute. The cultural diplomacy of artists is often addressed within larger frameworks, such as national representation and foreign policy agendas, or alternatively, artists are perceived to be isolated within creative discourses. Conversely, this session seeks to advance visual artists as engaged players within the diplomatic landscape; and notably, players who have long been participants and initiators of significant networks, contributing through complex relationships that work in hand with (and at times against) cultural institutions (public and private), as well as with other cultural producers and workers, and a range of geographic structures (local to global).

The panel will address how artists wield their agency, even when contributing to larger institutional and structural agendas. Additionally, the panel will consider the issue of artists’ lack of self-identification as players within cultural diplomacy. Further, the discussion will attend to how artists build productive collaborations globally, and how artists seek to challenge normative frameworks and understandings which encompass issues from artists’ material conditions to decolonial agendas, and more.

Panel 2: "Performing Connections: Musical Performance and Cultural Relations"
12:00 NOON (PT) / 2:00 PM (CT) / 3:00 PM (ET)

Moderator: 

• Eric Fillion, Buchanan Postdoctoral Fellow and Term Adjunct, Department of History, Queen's University

Panelists:

• Astrid Hadad, Artist, musician, and performer
• Umair Jaffar, Executive Director, Small World Music
• Mark Katz, John P. Barker Distinguished Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Julia Palacios Franco, Liaison and Special Projects Coordinator of the Communication Department, Universidad Iberoamericana

Music is a powerful medium through which cultures around the world have expressed themselves. It can organically bridge cultural divides and allow communities to explore common cultural identities. As a practice of cultural relations, music can break down language barriers and promote cooperation and understanding among different cultures and communities to promote social cohesion. It is an artistic expression that can inspire people to create community and build something together that would not be possible to build separately. Governments have also used music as a diplomatic tool to connect their citizens with citizens from other countries to build or improve relations. Besides being a language for community building, music is also a form of dissent through which disenfranchised communities express their social, economic, and political realities in ways that question oppressive governments, racism, and systemic power inequalities affecting their livelihoods. As this initiative continues to look at cultural diplomacy critically, these inclusions become an essential aspect of its practice.

Music is inextricably linked with the context in which it is produced and consumed. It is not only an instrument to improve intercultural communication and cooperation, artists become diplomats whose music serves as a vehicle for conveying messages of resistance and subversion. The Performing Connections brings together practitioners, artists, and academics whose work in and about the music industry suggests different approaches to music diplomacy. It suggests questions such as: What is the relation between the society we live in and the role, function, and position of music within that society? How is music influenced by social, political, economic, technological, and other developments and vice versa?

Plenary Listeners’ Closing Remarks & Discussion
1:30 PM (PT) / 3:30 PM (CT) / 4:30 PM (ET)

Moderator: 

• Amanda Rodríguez Espínola, Research Fellow, North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative

Plenary Listeners:

• Rosalba Icaza Garza, Associate Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam.  (Session 1)
• Gerardo Ochoa Sandy, Journalist, writer and cultural worker, former cultural attache for the Mexico Embassy in Czech Republic, in Peru and the Consulate of Mexico in Toronto (Session 2)
• Cynthia Schneider, Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy; Co-Director, Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics Georgetown University (Session 3)

Join the Plenary Listeners for a moderated discussion on the main themes and practical considerations generated in Sessions 1, 2, and 3 of the Research Summit.