The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Noted Scholars Series presents:
“Methods for Tracing Empires: a conversation on war, race, and migration”
Christine Kim and Renisa Mawani
WHEN & WHERE
Wednesday February 25, 2026
12-1pm
Buchanan Tower, Room 323
Please RSVP below in advance
A light lunch will be served at 1:00pm
Abstract:
How does one write about histories of colonialism and violence that feel all-too present and overbearing? How does one conduct research in colonial archives that only renders themselves and their families among the colonized, uncivilized, inhuman, other, or as lost and unrecoverable histories?
In this talk, UBC scholars Dr. Christine Kim (English Languages and Literatures) and Dr. Renisa Mawani (Sociology) will discuss how these questions emerge in their own work in colonial archives, popular culture, family biographies, and literature. Examining figures of the North Korean “minor inhuman,” the Muslim woman, and colonial dispossession, Kim and Mawani will consider the challenges of working within discourses of human rights and emergency, proposing alternative methods for historical research that are attentive to our persistently colonial present.
About Dr. Christine Kim
Christine Kim is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures and an ACAM faculty affiliate. She was the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Literature (2020-25). Before joining UBC in 2020, she was Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University where she was a founding co-director of SFU’s Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Her research and teaching interests lie in Asian diaspora, the Cold War, imperialism, and race.
She is the author of Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War (Duke UP, 2025), The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012). Christine is working on a new project that examines literary and filmic representations of Korean diasporas and migrations within illiberal spheres.
About Dr. Renisa Mawani
Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories and Professor of Sociology at UBC. From 2022-2025 she was a Global Professorial Fellow at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London.
Renisa is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009) and Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020). With Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (Duke University Press, 2020). With Antoinette Burton and Samantha Frost, she is co-editor of Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Life Worlds (2024) and with Kristie Flannery and Mikki Stelder, she is co-editor of Oceans as Archives (Routledge, Ocean and Island Studies Series, 2025).
Renisa is currently working on a short book, The Laws of the Sea, which will be the inaugural volume in a new Cambridge Elements Series titled “Law and Humanities” and a longer monograph, Enemies of Empire, which is a sequel to Across Oceans of Law.
