Logan Smith

Logan Smith

McGill students joined Montreal residents to venture beyond the McGill Ghetto during Culture Shock Week, an event co-organized by the Quebec Public Interest Research Group and the Students’ Society that runs through October 15.

QPIRG, a student-run organization that focuses on research, action, and education on environmental and social justice issues, has weathered attacks over the past few weeks. The Opt-Out Campaign targeting QPIRG has shifted attention away from events like Culture Shock, explained Andrea Figueroa, QPIRG’s external coordinator.

Reprising its role as an advocate for marginalized communities for a fifth year in a row, Culture Shock hosts a series of events designed to debunk myths about refugee, indigenous, and immigrant communities.

This year, the theme is community building, while last year’s organizers sought to promote greater student engagement. Nevertheless, increased student attendance at workshops and panel discussions remain a top priority for organizers.

“Students often find themselves caught in the university setting because midterms and assignments take precedence, and part of what Culture Shock is about is connecting people to the realities of Montreal by bringing it to McGill,” Figueroa said. “Now you can go during lunch to our workshop about racism, or go after class to a panel about migration.”   

Last week featured a panel discussion led by journalists and community organizers Jordan Flaherty, Jesse Muhammad, and Victoria Law, who embarked on a “Community and Resistance” tour that aims to connect grassroots activists and independent media, as well as to refocus attention on justice and liberation struggles.

“We’re trying to find positive ways that communities empower themselves and create change, despite the realities of racism and oppression,” Figueroa said. “We need to ask whose voices we’re listening to and why.”

Culture Shock aims to amplify the voices of the underprivileged or marginalized segments of society.

“The idea of balance or neutrality doesn’t really exist, because a lot of voices are never heard,” Figueroa said.

“Part of it is about giving a voice to people from these groups and challenging what you hear,” added Lydia Oulid Brahim, a Culture Shock coordinator.

Culture Shock owes its origins to Culture Fest, an event on campus that celebrated multiculturalism. Over time, it has grown to host a wide variety of speakers.

This week, the event will explore the range of strategies used by LGBT communities to get involved with or to critique the mainstream gay agenda through a panel discussion titled “Resisting the Neoliberal Gay Agenda: Queer Organizing in an International Context” on October 13. The discussion will showcase Ponni Arasu, who will speak about her experience working in India with different queer collectives.

“The speakers for this event also find themselves subject to multiple channels of discrimination,” said Figueroa. “We look at how different struggles intersect. Our panelists are people of colour and who are migrants.”

Local issues will also be brought into focus this week, with a workshop titled, “Racism in Canada” which taps into the experiences of indigenous communities and examines racial profiling and Islamophobia. Leading this workshop is Robyn Maynard, who has written on racial profiling, police violence, and migrant justice.

The experience of organizing Culture Shock has enabled Figueroa to further conside the notion of “community.” The existence of a community within the borders of McGill’s campus is difficult for Figueroa to envision because students experience things differently as a function of their race, nationality, or privileges.

“Part of being in a community is viewing things similarly and how you approach things in the world,” she said.  

Emily Clare, SSMU’s equity commissioner, whose role is to address and reach out to students who have been harassed or discriminated against, argued that a sense of community still exists at McGill in the midst of its diversity.

“I think when you speak about community, you can’t try and homogenize everyone. I think communities thrive through differences,” said Clare.

According to Figueroa, the success of Culture Shock cannot be measured in the numbers it attracts.

“Even if one person comes out of culture shock thinking differently about race, migration and multiculturalism, I would find that a success.

A diverse group of scholars, lawyers, politicians, and members of various academic disciplines gathered last weekend for the Global Conference on Human Rights and Diverse Societies at Centre Mont Royal, steps away from the McGill campus.  

Founded by Gordon Echenberg as the Echenberg Family Human Rights Conference, this was the second event of its kind. Its predecessor, the Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide, took place in 2007. Hosted by the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, the aim of the conference, Echenberg said, was to “have some practical contribution to human rights.”

François Crépeau, a professor of international law at McGill and the conference’s chair, opened the discussion by asking the audience to reflect on societies’ tendency to view issues in black-and-white terms. Societies tend to simplify issues, he said, to “us and them, thereby reducing the individual to a stereotype and thus dehumanizing the human.”

Numerous descriptions of human rights violations followed during the conference, with examples from locations as diverse as Afghanistan and Tibet.

The disregard for human rights due to a lack of respect for diversity exists around the world, and some speakers emphasized that Canada is no exception from this problem.

“Canadians tend to think that human rights [are] an issue dealing with others, those of developing countries,” said Commissioner Marie Wilson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which works on issues of suffering with Canada’s native population.

Through her work, Wilson highlighted the Canadian government’s imposition of rules and laws on First Nations which separated parents, children, and siblings from one another. In addition, she said, First Nations peoples were forced to give up their own laws, religion, and language while they attended residential schools that were administered by Catholic, United, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist Churches on behalf of the government.

Malalai Joya, a member of Parliament in Afghanistan, made a heartfelt speech to the panel about the current situation in her country. She blamed the United States, NATO, and Canada, along with Taliban forces, for leaving Afghanistan in its current state of turmoil.

Since the American invasion, Afghanistan has become progressively worse and a “haven for terrorists,” Joya said. She added that rape, violence, and crimes against women have increased sharply in the country since the U.S.’s war on terror began.

“The donated democracy of the West,” Joya said, “[Has] made Afghanistan what it is today.”

Joya said the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan only brought more terrorists to the country, and called for a total withdrawal of overseas forces.

Adding a perspective from a different part of the world, Thupten Jinpa Langri, a professor in McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies, and the principal English translator to the Dalai Lama, presented a talk about Tibetan Buddhists under Chinese rule. He suggested that there was no religious  persecution of any individual Tibetans, but that Tibet’s troubles were instead part of “a greater human rights crisis in China, which is a non-democratic, totalitarian state.”

Languri argued that if a ruling party views itself as the only legitimate voice of the state, then human rights cannot really be upheld in that society.

“Any expression of ethnicity and religiosity is seen as subversive and criminalized,” Jinpa added.

Professor Frances Raday, director of the Concord Research Center for Integration of International Law in Israel, took a more upfront approach to the issues of human rights violations and religious diversity.

“The problem of understanding religion and human rights,” she said, “is that most [violations are] actually racial hatred and not religious disagreement.”

She insinuated that many leaders and governments conveniently refer to these violations as an issue of religious discrepancies, which makes the problem into something it is not. According to Raday, racial hatred is often ignored, so progress is rarely made in dealing with these issues.