Trudeau Scholarships

U of T’s new Trudeau Foundation scholars explore Beirut refugee neighbourhoods and sovereign debt investors

Romi Levine — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 17:16:27 +0000

U of T’s new Trudeau Foundation scholars explore Beirut refugee neighbourhoods and sovereign debt investors

Romi Levine Thu, 06/21/2018 - 13:16

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PhD students Diala Lteif and Andrew Kaufman are the recipients of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation doctoral scholarship (photos by Sylvain Légaré/PETF)

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Cities

Global

Graduate Students

Human Geography

Every minute, 20 people flee their countries to escape terror and persecution, the United Nations says – with 68 million people displaced around the world.

And Lebanon, like the U.S., Europe and other Middle Eastern countries, has a long and complicated history of hosting groups of asylum seekers.

Diala Lteif, a PhD student in urban planning at the ��Ƶ, is hoping her research into that history will provide a better understanding of how refugees can shape cities like Beirut, and how migrant groups contribute to the places where they end up.

“The myth that I try to debunk is the portrayal of the immigrants – more specifically the refugee – that is here to steal your job and use the resources of a specific country and not give back,” she says. “The idea is to prove that they are active and positive participants towards the urbanization of a city that is fuller and more inclusive and accepting of everyone.”

Lteif and human geography PhD student Andrew Kaufman are two of 15 social sciences and humanities doctoral students from across Canada who have been given this year’s prestigious Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation doctoral scholarship.

The students were selected from a group of 273 applicants and chosen for their academic excellence and civic engagement. Since 2003, there have been 30 U of T PhD candidates who have received the scholarship.

Foundation scholars are each given $60,000 – opening up new research avenues and giving them more time to complete their PhDs.

“When this money came in, it let me think about how to extend my fieldwork to new areas,” says Kaufman, whose research focuses on the investors who purchase sovereign debt from countries that are struggling financially.

“My interest in urban marginalization made me curious about how larger socio-economic processes change cities,” he says.

Kaufman wants to find out how capital moves around the world through the buying and selling of debt while also exploring different perspectives on investing in sovereign debt. Those in favour of it say it is providing countries with the credit they need while critics say it can prevent countries from recovering from crises.

“I'm really interested in talking with people and understanding the financial networks and how this operates and understanding the different framings of these people’s work,” he says.

Beyond his research, Kaufman is looking forward to the mentoring and networking opportunities built into the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scholarship.

“It's good to be placed within a space in which you encounter people from other areas, which challenges how you frame your work, how you understand your work and what other ideas you put your work in dialogue with,” he says.

For Lteif, the scholarship has allowed her to spend a year in Lebanon, sorting through archives and conducting interviews with first-, second- and third-generation refugees.

Her work focuses on four waves of refugee immigration: Armenians, who came to Lebanon after the First World War; Palestinians, then Lebanese nationals displaced during the civil war, which began in the 1970s; and the Syrian refugees who are still making their way into the country. Many of those refugees ended up settling in one specific neighbourhood in Beirut.

Lteif has personal connections to her research. Growing up in Lebanon, her family was displaced during the civil war. Her father’s family settled near the neighbourhood she is studying.

“A large realization is that Lebanon, which has been a host to many communities, has not necessarily found effective strategies to welcome these people and help get them back on their feet, despite the long experience with many communities,” she says. “In terms of practical urban and planning policies, not much has been done.”

Lteif says she hopes her research can fill the practical and intellectual gaps.

“All these crises are first framed as a crisis and are studied in isolation, and so what I'm hoping to do is through a longer duration of study, uncover some more long-term effects and patterns we can learn from and refocus our literature,” she says.

Receiving a scholarship of this magnitude is a uniquely Canadian privilege, says Lteif.

“It made me really appreciate Canada's multicultural and inclusive politics that have really allowed me to find my place and be treated equally and be given the equal opportunity as my Canadian peers, friends and colleagues,” she says.

“I hope through the work that I do, I prove that being an immigrant, being given access to such a large opportunity, is actually beneficial for everyone. I hope in one way or another I become proof of the opposite narrative that we see everywhere.”

Three U of T students win prestigious Trudeau Foundation scholarships

lavende4 — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 16:39:39 +0000

Three U of T students win prestigious Trudeau Foundation scholarships lavende4 Thu, 06/09/2016 - 12:39

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(left to right) Christopher Campbell-Duruflé, Ido Katri, Cynthia Morinville

Terry Lavender

Author legacy

Terry Lavender

Topic

Christopher Campbell-Duruflé is researching international law and climate change. Ido Katri documents the rise of trans rights for gender self-determination. Cynthia Morinville is looking at the electronic waste crisis through the lived experiences of the workers who handle that often-toxic waste.

The three ��Ƶ doctoral students are among 15 national recipients of the prestigious Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation doctoral scholarship for 2016. The Trudeau scholarship – regarded as the most prestigious doctoral award for the social sciences and humanities in Canada – supports doctoral students who are committed to solving issues of critical importance to Canada and the world. In addition to an annual grant of up to $60,000 over three years, the scholars will also benefit from the expertise of the foundation’s fellows and mentors.

Locke Rowe, Dean of Graduate Studies, congratulated Campbell-Duruflé, Katri and Morinville on receiving the scholarships. “These are three outstanding scholars working on issues of great significance to society. It is gratifying to see the Trudeau Foundation recognize the ��Ƶ’s concentration of excellent graduate students.”

Christopher Campbell-Duruflé, SJD, Faculty of Law

“I literally jumped with excitement when I received the phone call from the Trudeau Foundation,” recalls Campbell-Duruflé, a student in the Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) program in the Faculty of Law. He says the selection process was very intense: “a screening by the Faculty of Law, another by U of T’s Graduate Awards Committee, a first screening by the Trudeau Foundation followed by a video interview in February, and finally an in-person interview in March. It was hard not to be thinking about this process all the time this year.”

Campbell-Duruflé specializes in international environmental and human rights law. Besides pursuing his SJD, he is also co-chair of U of T’s responsible investment committee and an associate fellow at the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law at McGill University. Last December, he was officially accredited as an observer to the 21^st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21).

Read more about Christopher Campbell-Duruflé’s participation in COP21

He plans to use the scholarship to investigate what he sees as a shift away from sanctions and penalties towards reporting and review as mechanisms to compel states to adopt meaningful greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. “I would like to know if transparency-based approaches to compliance offer more opportunities for our engagement with the international regime, while at the same time granting adequate protection to those populations most at risk of suffering from harmful climate change.”

Campbell-Duruflé’s research supervisor, law professor Jutta Brunnee, says she was delighted with the news of the scholarship. “Christopher is deeply committed to promoting environmental protection and human welfare, and to harnessing international law to those ends,” she said. Brunnee, who is also holds the Metcalf Chair in Environmental Law, added, "He is a believer in the positive power of international law, but also clear-eyed about the many challenges along the way. His doctoral project, examining the transformations that the 2015 Paris Agreement brings to international climate law, has enormous potential and, needless to say, is impeccably timed.”

Ido Katri, SJD, Faculty of Law

SJD student Ido Katri was happy to learn he had received a Trudeau Scholarship, not for himself, but for the marginalized communities he works with. “This is an enormous opportunity, not only for me, but for the communities I come from and I promised myself to use it to create opportunities and resources for others.”

Katri has been an advocate for the trans community for over a decade. In 2010, he founded the first transgender association in Israel, and the following year he co-founded the Gila Project for Trans Empowerment to mobilize community resources to provide legal and social assistance and to advocate for broader institutional change.

“I want to use to voice I have been given, by the ��Ƶ and by the Trudeau Foundation, to bring those marginalized voices to the forefront of current and future public debates.

“By looking at seemingly unrelated issues faced by trans people, such as solitary confinement in prisons, access to identification document and the relation between law and medical technologies, I hope to formulate a critical legal analysis that would challenge accepted norms and standards.”

Katri has other research interests as well, “focused on ‘in-between’ categories of law, transformations and passing and on the relation between racial/ethnic and gender performance, specifically with respect to Mizrahi Jews (Jews who have immigrated to Israel from Arab and Muslim countries).

“I have a very broad spectrum of interests, perhaps too wide, and currently my work drives from administrative, international and family law, feminist and queer legal theory, critical race theory, affect theory, post-colonial studies, psychoanalysis and post-humanism. I am currently working on these issues within and outside academia, continuing my work as an advocate for gender variant issues with local and international players.”

Cynthia Morinville, PhD, Department of Geography

“I’ve always been interested in people’s interactions with their environment,” says Geography PhD student Cynthia Morinville. But that interaction, she says, is tied up with politics. “Whenever you ask questions about environmental sustainability, you have to start with social justice and equality. Access to land and resources is at the base of all radical politics.”

Morinville is currently looking at electronic waste and its effect on the people who eke out a living handling and dismantling it. Her research seeks to shed light on the ways in which rare metals embedded in electronic devices are valued, extracted and returned to markets.

Before coming to U of T, she earned a master’s degree at the University of British Columbia, where she looked at access to water in Canada and internationally. The issue still interests her.

“I think it would be hard to not take an interest in questions of water access and governance,” she says. “Water is not only a necessary substance of life, its material characteristics are such that it constantly circulates and acts as a social connector. It’s a really interesting resource through which we can consider questions of equity, justice and environmental sustainability.”

Morinville’s supervisor, assistant professor of geography Rajyashree N. Reddy, says “Cynthia is a student of unusual promise who is deeply passionate about environmental and social justice issues. Her proposed research on e-waste will shed new light on the ethical and environmental dimensions of contemporary practices of planned obsolescence.”

Trudeau Scholarships

U of T’s new Trudeau Foundation scholars explore Beirut refugee neighbourhoods and sovereign debt investors

Three U of T students win prestigious Trudeau Foundation scholarships

Read more about Christopher Campbell-Duruflé’s participation in COP21

Learn more about the Trudeau Foundation scholarships