CDSN Capstone 2022: In Person and Loving It

 Yesterday, we held the third annual CDSN Capstone Seminar.  The idea is to bring together some of the best presentations from last year and from across Canada to one place to give these folks a chance to strut their stuff again, to give our partners a chance for their events to live again, and share with a different audience the insights these sharp folks have developed.  We solicit nominations from CDSN Partners as well as the MINDS Collaborative Networks.  Our first one was at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto just before the pandemic closed things in North America.  Our second one was online.  This time, we did a mix--one presenter was online, our audience was primarily online, but most of the presenters were in person.  

We had two panels.  The first featured Danielle Cherpako discussing the use of sanctions, Zohra Bahrami focusing on what has been doing on in Afghanistan since the collapse last summer, and Devan Prithipaul discussing the discourse of climate change.  

 

 

 

 

 

Our second featured Shannon Nash presenting on how terrorism is labeled in Canada mostly in ways that target Muslims and not white supremacists, Johanna Masse talked about gender and women in the ground combat occupations of the CAF, and Caroline Batka discussed how private military contracts do and not integrate with the rest of the defence team.

Widely varying topics but we had some of the presentations speak to each other. We had good Q&A sessions with combinations of those in the audience in person and those online asking the questions.  We had our two Undergraduate Excellence Scholars, Safia Hafid and Alexander Rizkhallah, attend the event so we could finally meet them in person and feed them a nice meal with the Capstone Laureates, and they asked some sharp questions as well.

Speaking of feeding them, it was great to have an in-person event so that we could chat beyond the presentations and have the Laureates get to know each other and our staff.  We didn't build the CDSN so that we could eat well and hangout, but ...

For the video of the event: