Canada in the Era of Disorder: Global Outreach, Soft Power and the Limits of Realpolitik

What is Canada’s place in a rapidly changing international order marked by renewed great-power rivalry, geopolitical fragmentation, and growing skepticism toward multilateralism? Drawing on her experience covering Canada and global affairs, Matina Stevis-Gridneff will explore how Canada is perceived abroad and assess the strengths and limits of its traditional reliance on diplomacy, multilateralism, and soft power. The talk will consider whether Canada can sustain this approach in an era increasingly shaped by Realpolitik and strategic competition.

 

 

Matina Stevis-Gridneff became the New York Times Canada bureau chief in the summer of 2024 and leads the paper's coverage of the country. A career international correspondent, she covered Europe and East Africa for the Wall Street Journal for the best part of a decade, before joining the New York Times as Brussels bureau chief in 2019. Over the past two decades she has covered financial crises, refugee displacement, conflict, politics and culture from more than 30 countries across three continents. She read Modern History and Politics at the University of Oxford (BA/MA) and holds a Masters in Public Administration, Public Policy and Management from the London School of Economics (MPA/MPP). She was born and raised in Athens, Greece, and lives in Toronto with her husband and two children.

 

 

Maria Athina (Tina) Martimianakis is Professor and Director of Medical Education Scholarship in the Department of Paediatrics, and Scientist and Associate Director Collaborations and Partnerships, Wilson Centre, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. As a Scientist Tina studies the socio-politics of education with a particular focus on issues related to the hidden curriculum, identity and faculty and learner experiences.   As an educator, she employs critical and social cultural pedagogies to develop programming to address hidden curriculum effects and to enable health professionals to incorporate complex negotiations of the social world in their educational planning and implementation.  Tina works with educational leaders in the department of Paediatrics, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto and across Canada to enhance educational scholarship, and to contribute to efforts to improve clinical learning environments with policy and curriculum interventions.

 

Myrto Grigoroglou is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Toronto. She is also the director of the Toronto Language and Cognition Lab. Myrto’s research focuses on the study of meaning in natural language; how it is acquired by children during development, how it is achieved in conversation, and how it interacts with non-linguistic cognition. She courses on child language acquisition, language and communication, and language and thought. Born and raised in Athens, Myrto completed my undergraduate degrees at the University of Athens, before moving to the USA for a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Delaware. She first arrived in Toronto in 2018 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (OISE).