Events

Citizens often lack clear information about what will happen when they apply for public programs - how much support they will receive or how long participation takes. Faced with this ambiguity, citizens must decide whether to apply, and how they respond to ambiguity may shape whether they ever do. In this talk, Christian Schimpf presents new evidence on how ambiguity affects take-up decisions and discusses what governments can do to help citizens navigate ambiguity more effectively.

Precis:  Unparliamentary provides a sourced account of unexpected events that have marked the history of Canada’s Parliament, from fistfights to scandals, and even a bombing (or two!) It offers an intriguing look into surprising moments that occurred on Parliament Hill, highlighting the unpredictable nature of human behaviour – especially among legislators.

Biographies:
Charlie Feldman is the former President of the Canadian Study of Parliament Group and has worked at Canada’s Senate, House of Commons and Library of Parliament.

The Hon. Paula Simons was appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2018, after a long and storied career as a documentary producer, investigative journalist, political columnist and public historian. 

Abstract: Through a close reading of the novel Little Eyes (2018), by the Argentinian writer Samantha Schweblin, this paper explores the political pedagogies of so-called critical dystopias (Thaler 2019), which, arguably, deploy a strategic combination of hope and despair, capable of socially and politically mobilizing its audience while avoiding extreme or naïve positions. Based on Sianne Ngai’s (2015) analysis of “the cute” as an understudied aesthetic category (comparable to the beautiful and the sublime), it is argued that the kentuki becomes a metaphor for the many ways in which technology washes away inequality and power asymmetries, as well as the impoverishment of human relations in the digital world. The kentukis’ deceptive nature—the false sense of intimacy that they foster and the false escape from our immediate reality that they make possible—throw light into the many ways in which digital technologies “erase their traces,” and go from being tools—mere mediums to an end—to becoming the framework—the very horizon of value—within which we set our ends and understand ourselves (Barba-Kay 2023). As the paper shows, through the “aestheticization of minorness” that the cute kentukis perform, they are capable of throwing light upon the ways in which new technologies often reflect back to us a diminished—disembodied, opaque, solipsistic—image of ourselves which, nonetheless, we are keen to call “superintelligent” and worship accordingly.

Bio: Adriana Alfaro Altamirano is a political theorist whose work focuses on questions about emotions, language, and narrative in the public sphere. Her research partakes in the methods and interests of continental philosophy, legal studies, critical theory, and literary criticism, and has also explored some connections between those traditions and Latin America’s political thought and legal practice.

Abstract: To represent citizens well, elected politicians need good knowledge about constituents’ preferences and needs. Yet considerable research has documented large errors in politicians' perceptions of their constituents' characteristics and preferences. Explanations of these pervasive errors using domain-specific factors, such as politicians' experience or institutional positions, have invariably failed. We suggest that politicians' errors reflect a domain-general tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones. Analyzing all available recent studies and our own original data (70,000 perceptions from 12,800 politicians in seven countries), we find that this "midpoint hedging" accounts for much of politicians' errors. Because politicians must understand their constituents to represent them well, such a perception-distorting cognitive tendency potentially undermines democratic representation. Our findings suggest that this distortion is indeed substantively large, widespread, and most acute when public opinion is clearest.

Bio: Jack Lucas is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary and Co-Director of the Canadian Municipal Barometer, a research partnership focused on municipal democracy and representation in Canada. His research is focused on political representation and local democracy in Canada. He is particularly interested in politicians’ beliefs about their constituents and the consequences of these beliefs for political representation.

Abstract:  The global war on terror has forged transnational relations of violence in constructing Muslims as unfit national subjects, justifying their displacement from the national landscape. These anti-Muslim interlinkages between Western imperial and postcolonial nations can be traced to the nineteenth-century Orientalism, where Islam was cast “as a psychological deformation, not a ‘real’ culture or religion” (Said 1981). In this context, the “Muslim” question in colonial India and the transition to a postcolonial Indian nation simultaneously manifested as a “crisis of minority” and a “national security threat.” This paper addresses the crisis of Muslims as an unfit national subject in India and argues that the anti-Muslim apparatus and its violent interlinkages (intensified through the global war on terror) manifest beyond the authoritarianism/democracy dichotomy in postcolonial India’s nation-making. It addresses the dispossession of Indian Muslims across the political and legal landscapes and examines the Hindutva state’s anti-Muslim politics as an exercise of “territorial sovereignty.”

Bio: Wajiha Mehdi is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science. Her research centres on Muslims in India, with attention to how communities navigate and make meaning within contested urban spaces. She is committed to community-based inquiry and draws on anti-colonial and feminist participatory approaches. Wajiha completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia and has received several distinguished awards, including the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the International Development Research Centre Award, the UBC Public Scholars Initiative Award, and the Graduate Global Leadership Fellowship. 

About the Book: Shifting Sands challenges the notion that Alberta is a conservative monoculture. Drawing on five years of survey data, the book offers fresh perspectives on how Albertans think about politics, themselves, and the province’s future. Chapters push beyond stereotypes and myths grounded in the province’s “wild west” past to show the complexity underpinning modern Alberta politics. Contributors examine the roots and rise of populism, separatism, polarization, and conspiratorial thinking, revealing how these factors have reshaped the province’s party system, policy landscape, and sense of community. Shifting Sands is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand where Alberta has come from and what lies ahead for one of Canada’s most turbulent provinces.