Political Science Weekly Digest for Friday, September 25, 2026
September 25, 2026
POLITICAL SCIENCEWEEKLY DIGESTFriday, September 25, 2026 |
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We acknowledge and respect the Ləkʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsəpsəm/Esquimalt) Peoples on whose territory the university stands, and the Ləkʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. |
Department Announcements |
What a dreary day today, my sympathies to anyone who biked to campus this morning. Our undergrad meet and greet on Tuesday got off to a slow start but turned into a great turnout, with over 70 attendees. Thanks to everyone who came out.
A reminder that the department office and university will be closed on Wednesday, September 30, for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. UVic is holding a campus-wide Orange Shirt Day event next Tuesday. You can find out more about that and other events on campus here - https://www.uvic.ca/event/orange-shirt-day/index.php
Finally, for faculty, study leave applications for 2027-28 are due next Thursday, October 1.
Have a great weekend,
Matt
Congratulations & Achievements |
CONGRATULATIONS TO JUSTIN LEIFSO who spoke with The Walrus about the implosion of the BC Conservatives. Read it here.
CONGRATULATIONS TO AMY VERDUN on a new publication: Lucia Quaglia and Amy Verdun (2026) ‘Geofinance and Fragmentation: Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currencies’Global Policy, early view; 0:1–15. Read it here.
Amy has also continued to speak with media about Canada’s possible EU associate membership. She did an in-studio interview on CFAX here in Victoria and spoke with Carolyn Beeler on The World, the Boston-based public radio program.
Department Events |
POLI SPEAKERS SERIES: Dr. Shireen Hassim
“Gender, social imaginaries and democracy in South Africa: the view from the margins”
Tuesday, October 13, 2026 | 2:30-4:30 PM
Location: DTB A357
How would our understanding of democracy in Africa change if gender were treated as a core category of analysis? Dr. Hassim argues that feminist scholarship on Africa remains outside the mainstream of democratic analysis. That gap does more than make women invisible: it narrows the very idea of democracy to a small public sphere and a handful of influential actors. Using South Africa as her case and drawing on extensive archival sources, she shows how the concerns about inequality raised by black women, including queer black women, went beyond politics as it is conventionally understood.
Shireen Hassim is Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics and Professor in the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University. An internationally recognized scholar of feminist theory, social movements and collective action, she was previously on faculty at the University of the Witwatersrand and was a distinguished visiting professor at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. She earned her PhD in Politics at York University.
All are welcome
University Events |
On Friday, September 25, 2026, Associate Professor Benjamin McKean visits the Victoria Colloquium.
Bio: Benjamin McKean is a political theorist whose research concerns global justice, populism, climate politics, and the relationship between theory and practice. He’s the author of Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2020). His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Journal of Politics, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, and elsewhere. He has also written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Jacobin, and other general audience publications.
He will be giving his talk “Climate Change as a Fight for Time: Guy Debord as Eco-Marxist” (Ohio State University) from 3:00pm until 4:30pm in Room A 152 of the Fraser (Law) Building.
Everyone is welcome to attend. The papers are now available online for UVic users by logging into UVic and going to our website. Non-UVic users can be sent the paper by email by requesting it at uvicphil@uvic.ca
Abstract: Political demands for mitigation of and adaptation to catastrophic climate change face a temporal double bind. Efforts to reduce emissions and transition to green energy are enormously urgent and must be pursued immediately in order to avoid worst case scenarios. However, effective movement organizing is slow; it takes time to develop meaningful relationships that can move people to take actions required for radical change. To address this temporal double bind, I propose we turn to the work of Guy Debord. By putting Debord’s famous 1967 manifesto The Society of the Spectacle in the context of his 1971 essay “A Sick Planet” and his comments on environmentalism in 1988’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, I offer an eco-Marxist reading of Debord’s argument that focuses on its account of the temporality of contemporary capitalism. Debord’s book can help us understand neoliberal communicative capitalism as a way of controlling our attention – that is, our experience of time. Historically, the temporality of life under capitalism is experienced as being inevitable – as part of economic development understood as an inevitable form of progress. But in fact this temporality is collectively produced and can be politically reconstituted. Accordingly, the temporal double bind of climate organizing appears not as a unique or idiosyncratic challenge but as intrinsic to capitalism’s relation to climate change. Fighting against climate change thus requires engaging in what Paul Apostolidis has called “the fight for time” – a fight to control our own time so that it is possible to build the social relations we need. Unlike efforts to imagine the future, Debord’s argument directs us to political and economic constitution of temporality in the present and helps us traces the political possibilities of our own conjuncture.
LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES are hosting a Lansdowne Scholar next month, Dr. Leigh A. Payne.
Thursday October 15, 2026 at 4:30 PM
Fraser Building, Skyclassroom (B261)
The title of the talk is "The Right Against Rights in Latin America."
The Political Science Weekly Digest is available online. I’d love your help in highlighting media appearances, awards, publications, student achievements, upcoming events, and any other good news — please send items to mattdavies@uvic.ca.