Flight Routes: Policing and Subterfuge in the Mediterranean Migrant Corridor – A Public Lecture
On Thursday, November 27th, 2025, 1:00-3:00 p.m., Chloe Howe Haralambous, PhD (Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, Princeton University), will present a lecture from her ongoing research on Europe’s maritime border regime. The event will take place in the Visualization Room (EL1441) inside the MRU Library. See the poster below for details.
Contextualizing Palestine – A Public Panel
On Wednesday, November 12, 2025, 4:30–6:00 p.m., a public panel, Contextualizing Palestine, will take place in T107 (Lincoln Park), Mount Royal University. Featuring Dr. Muhannad Ayyash, Dr. Jeremy Wildeman, Dr. Gabrielle Weasel Head, and Dr. Roberta Lexier, with Dr. Mary-Lee Mulholland moderating, the panel engages recent scholarship alongside current developments to situate Canadian and Israeli settler colonialism, the genocide in Gaza, the ongoing colonization of the West Bank, Palestinian–Indigenous solidarities, student encampments, and the possibilities and limits of decolonial liberation. Anchored by insights from two recent books, the conversation is designed to clarify terms, ground claims historically, and ask—carefully and concretely—where we might go from here.
See the event poster below for details!
“Para-site Manifesto”
Penelope Papailias (PhD) and George Mantzios (PhD) (directors of the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory & Experimental Humanities) deliver a 10-point “Para-site Manifesto” for Experimental Humanities Labs in the latest issue of the non-standard—a weekly bulletin broadcasting provocative experimentations in the humanities and beyond, crafted and steered by Jacob Henry Leveton (PhD, Art History & Visual Culture, Loyola University Chicago).
Social Issues Film Series
The Social Issues Film Series collaboration with the Anthropology Affiliation at Mount Royal University continues through 2025-2026.
On Thursday, October 23, we screened Sugarcane (2024, dir. Julian Brave NoiseCat & Emily Kassie, National Geographic Documentary Films). The feature follows the Williams Lake First Nation’s investigation into abuses and missing children at St. Joseph’s Mission residential school, interweaving survivor testimony with a filmmaker’s family history to expose the infrastructures of settler–colonial violence and the painstaking work of truth-telling and redress.
Artistic Publication
Leviathan’s Maw, an illustration by George Mantzios, appears in Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025). Conceived on the island of Lesvos (Greece) during the 2017 “Cultures, Migrations, Borders” summer program, jointly organized by the University of the Aegean and the University of Amsterdam, the work reflects on the Mediterranean migration crisis as both a humanitarian and representational crisis. As a meditation on graphic art as ethnographic form, it exemplifies the book’s central claim that visual media open innovative ways of reframing refugee displacement and mobility.
Ethnographic Research & Practice Lab 