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The 23rd Annual Janet E. Hutchison Lecture with Lynda Jessup

March 3, 2020, 4pm
University College, Room 140

Putting Culture into Cultural Diplomacy
Lynda Jessup’s lecture draws on her current research about cultural diplomacy as advanced through the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI) in collaboration with Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy, the Royal Ontario Museum, Global Affairs Canada, the Bloor Street Culture Corridor, and the Canadian Committee of the International Council of Museums. In particular, she looks at the current global crisis and the ever-increasing importance of a cultural relations approach to diplomacy. The aim is to interrogate the Western epistemological basis of statist diplomacy to enable recognition of other ways of knowing and being, and in doing so, to foreground the importance of examining the potential contribution of cultural practitioners to fostering intercultural exchange and improved global relations.

Lynda Jessup is Associate Dean (Graduate Studies and Global Engagement) in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen’s and is Co-founder and Director of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI). Her research focuses on the representation and circulation of Canadian and Indigenous visual and material culture in nationalist narratives of Canadian art. She is author of several titles, including Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture (2008) and Negotiations in Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (2014).


Video and Photo: Dominic Chan.