We thank Dr. Jeffrey Shantz and Dr. Peyman Vahabzadeh for accepting our invitation to present at the 3rd Annual Sociology & Criminology Undergraduate Conference.
Dr. Jeffrey Shantz, Criminology Department, KPU
"Taking it Off the Streets: From Ritual to Resistance"
Photo credit: Heather Anderson Photography
Bio
Dr. Shantz teaches criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and has been active in a number of grassroots movements. "[Dr.] Shantz is an anarchist activist, poet, and sociologist. He has published a number of books and articles on social justice issues.
His books Active Anarchy: Political Practice in Contemporary Movements (Lexington, 2011) and Constructive Anarchy: Building Infrastructures of Resistance (Ashgate, 2010) offer an autoethnographic analysis of anarchist participation within contemporary social movements. Using various case studies of groups building what he terms "infrastructures of resistance", he compares anarchist involvement in rank-and-file workplace organizing, migrant defense, free schools, new media collectives, and community centers".
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Dr. Peyman Vahabzadeh
Department of Sociology, University of Victoria
'Transformative Nonviolence: Reflections for Activism and Change'
Abstract
A sad fact of our civilization is the pervasiveness of violence in myriad of shapes and forms. Violence is concomitant with various inequalities and injustices in our present time. Individuals and movements that advocate a better world know that violent social change is likely to reproduce the injustices of the present. In this lecture, I will engage with four arguments in favour of nonviolence in order to offer an approach to a nonviolent alternative for social change that is highly aware of the systemic and often concealed forms of violence.
Bio
Peyman Vahabzadeh is an Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Victoria, Canada. He is the author of Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements (2003), A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and the Fadai Discourse of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979 (2010), Exilic Meditations: Essays on A Displaced Life (2013), as well as six books of fiction, poetry, memoir, and literary criticism in Persian.