1 December 2021 Online Seminar
“BLM and the International Aid Community:
Reflection by a Former Aid Worker from Japan”

The Black Lives Matter movement has reached the aid industry and triggered many discussions within it. Aid workers are now critically looking at systemic discrimination within the international aid community and their organizational culture. Most of the discussions so far, however, seem to assume a dichotomy between the white and non-white and focus on unequal and unjust relations between the so-called Global North and South. As a former aid worker for international organizations and as an Asian and Japanese woman, the current framing of the discussions makes the speaker wonder: where do I find myself in the current race-focused discussion about the aid industry? This seminar may make the current discussion landscape a bit more complicated by adding an element of intersectionality into the context.

Date and time

1 December 2021, 7:00PM-9:00PM JST (11:00AM-1:00PM GMT)
* The event will take place on Wednesday 1 December 2021 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm JST (Tokyo time). You can confirm the time of the event in your time zone using this Time Difference Calculator. https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html.

Panel

Speaker Shukuko Koyama, Associate Professor at Toyo University
Chair and Discussant Tamara Enomoto, Professor at Meiji University

Participation fee

Free

Language

English without translation

Registration

Pre-register by Monday 29 November 2021 at the link below.
* The seminar will be held using Zoom. We kindly request all participants download the software prior to the seminar. Specific login instructions including Zoom ID and passcode will be sent one day prior to the start of the seminar, via email, to registered attendees. Your information will be kept confidential by one of the co-sponsors (Arms and Civil Society Research Forum) and will only be used to provide you with information on its events.

On-line pre-registration form

Sponsors

This seminar is sponsored by the Meiji University Research Institute for the History of Global Arms Transfer. It is co-sponsored by the Arms and Civil Society Research Forum and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). It is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 18H03606, 20K13439, 16K17075 and 21K13250.

Biographies of the speakers

Shukuko Koyama is an Associate Professor at Toyo University. Between 2007 and 2015, she worked for the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and engaged in post-conflict reconstruction, and disaster response in the Asia and Pacific region. Prior to joining the ILO, Shukuko worked at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva and the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shukuko holds a BA in International Relations from Tsukuba University in Japan, and an MA and a PhD in Conflict Resolution from the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom.

Tamara Enomoto is Professor at Meiji University. From 2013 to 2015, she worked at Oxfam where she was in charge of policy, advocacy and research on humanitarian and arms control issues and coordinated humanitarian aid and advocacy projects. Her recent publications include Weapon Taboos: Genealogies of Pariah Weapons (2020, Nihon Keizai Hyouronsha, edited book) and The Arms Trade Treaty: The Self, Sovereignty, and Arms Transfer Control (2020, Kouyou Shobou).

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