Highlighted Speaker
Dr. Savage Bear
Dr. Savage Bear is the Director for the McMaster Indigenous Research Institute, an Assistant Professor within the Indigenous Studies Department and the National Director of Walls to Bridges. Bear won the Governor General Gold Medal for her outstanding 2016 PhD dissertation. In 2023 Bear was appointed to the Order of Canada.
Highlighted Speaker
Prof. Mary Caputi
Prof. Mary Caputi is a professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach where she teaches courses in political theory, feminist thought, and critical thinking. Most recently, she co-edited the Research Handbook on Feminist Political Thought with Patricia Moynagh, published by Edward Elgar Press. She has also published Slow Culture and the American Dream: A Slow and Curvy Philosophy for the 21st Century (Lexington Books, 2022). She is also the author of Feminism and Power: The Need for Critical Theory (Lexington Books, 2013), A Kinder, Gentler
America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and Voluptuous Yearnings: A Feminist Theory of the Obscene (Rowman & Littlefield, 1994). Amirhosein Khandizaji co-authored David Riesman and Critical Theory: Autonomy versus Emancipation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). She also co-edited and contributed to two collections of essays: Teaching Marx and Critical Theory in the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Bryant Sculos (Brill, 2019), and Jacques Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts, co-edited with Vincent Del Casino (Bloomsbury, 2013). She served as editor of Politics Gender from 2016-2019. Professor Caputi has taught abroad in Italy on three occasions, and in addition to her Ph.D. from Cornell, she holds a master’s degree in Italian Studies from California State University, Long Beach.
Highlighted Speaker
Dr. Soichi Kozai
Dr. Soichi Kozai is a linguist and an associate professor at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka. His major interests are pragmatics and sociolinguistics with consideration to cognitive linguistics in Japanese. Currently, he is working on Japanese gay men’s talk – onee kotoba. He is an apprentice of Aikido and Jodo.