IMAGINEPEACE Forum

Online ticket sales are now closed. Tickets can be purchased at the door beginning at 6 pm.
$18 General / $15 Gardiner Friends

Inspired by Yoko Ono’s peace activism, this two-event conversation series, moderated by political scientist and renowned international relations expert Janice Gross Stein, pairs artists with academics to discuss how governments and citizens are shaping their future in the digital space.

March 26: IMAGINEPEACE Forum with Ronald Deibert and Yan Wu
May 23: IMAGINEPEACE Forum with Farhaan Ladhani and Jacqueline Mabey

More so than ever, an open and accessible internet continues to further the goals of civic engagement and free speech. Tech tools like Psiphon, a firewall circumvention app, are helping protesters in Iran evade government internet censorship. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter began with a hashtag, demonstrating how the Internet has enabled horizontal organizing networks. Yet as governments and ISP gatekeepers now move towards jeopardizing net neutrality and free speech, the efforts towards ensuring the internet remains a public utility will be explored by those that work at the intersection of art, technology and political economy.

Farhaan Ladhani is Director of the Digital Public Square at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. Jacqueline Mabey is a co-founder of Art+Feminism, an international, activist curatorial platform.

IMAGINEPEACE Forum is presented alongside a three-part installation by Yoko Ono entitled THE RIVERBED. Yoko Ono is a forerunner of Conceptual art who frequently involves collaboration, audience participation, and social activism in her artwork. YOKO ONO: THE RIVERBED invites visitors to collaborate with the artist, the museum, and each other, participating in the artwork through everyday action and contemplation. YOKO ONO: THE RIVERBED, in a sense, becomes a temporary village—a repository of hopes and dreams for individuals and for the world.

About Farhaan Ladhani

Farhaan Ladhani is Director of the Digital Public Square at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, and CEO and Co-Founder of Betterplace. For over a decade, Farhaan has been leading efforts on the use of digital tools to connect people. From 2014-2015 he served as the Senior Advisor for Digital in the Office of the Prime Minister. Prior to this, Farhaan was the Deputy Director for Direct Diplomacy at Global Affairs Canada, an initiative focused on engaging with non-state political actors seeking to increase the openness, inclusiveness and responsiveness of their political systems. Mr. Ladhani’s foreign assignments include the Head of Section for Strategic Communications in Kandahar where he lead a team of Afghan, US, Canadian, and international partners responsible for executing strategic communications and public engagement initiatives throughout Kandahar Province. From 2006 to 2008, Farhaan was based in Washington, D.C. at the Embassy of Canada where he focused on the development of social and new media initiatives. In 2011, Farhaan was a Principal at Cloud to Street, a project to connect Egyptian democracy activists with technology expertise and to better understand the intersection between cyberspace and political space in the Egyptian revolution.

About Jacqueline Mabey

Jacqueline Mabey’s work is shaped by the study of art history at Wilfrid Laurier University, McGill University, and The University of British Columbia and by multifarious professional experience in commercial galleries, museums, and artist studios. Mabey is a co-founder of Art+Feminism, an international, activist curatorial platform based out of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with satellites at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate, London; Banff Center for the Arts; MAXXI, Rome; Archives nationales de France, Paris; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; MoCA Detroit, amongst many others. They have curated the work of artists including Jen Liu, Lorraine O’Grady, Hannah Black, Addie Wagenknecht, Lorna Mills, Divya Mehra, and Kate Gilmore, and spoken about their work at venues such as Barnard College, Cornell University, The New School, and Printed Matter. They were named a Leading Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine and a Badass Woman by Buzzfeed. Mabey works independently under the honorific, failed projects. They were born in New Jersey, raised in Nova Scotia, and currently live with a small dog by a large park in Brooklyn.

About Janice Gross Stein

Janice Gross Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and the Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the Massey Lecturer in 2001 and a Trudeau Fellow. She was awarded the Molson Prize by the Canada Council for an outstanding contribution by a social scientist to public debate. She has received an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from four universities and is a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. She is a frequent contributor to CBC and TVO and has just launched a new podcast, Disrupting the Global Order.

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Header image: Yoko Ono’s IMAGINE PEACE billboard. Photo courtesy Wikimedia.