Connect with the PCJ community
Throughout the year, the PCJ program offers a wide range of events and student-led initiatives that enrich your academic experience and foster meaningful connections across the community. Many of these are led by the PCJ Society, our student executive committee, which organizes cohort gatherings, academic panels, and alumni events. This year’s programming includes the Trudeau Centre Fellows’ Academic Seminar Series, the Joint Social Science Pub Night, and the PCJ 260 Orientation. The annual PCJ Conference showcases selected student research organized around evolving themes of peace, conflict, and justice, while the Rapoport Journal publishes an annual edition featuring student research centered on a chosen theme.
PCJ Society
The PCJ Society (PCJS) is a student leadership group that represents the Peace, Conflict, and Justice student body. The PCJS Academic Directors provide academic support to our members by hosting events, such as the Academic Seminar Series and the Trudeau Centre Fellows’ talks. The PCJS develops a range of peer and professional networking opportunities for students, creating spaces to build meaningful connections with classmates, alumni, and professionals in the field of peace, conflict, and justice. Through events, mentorship initiatives, and collaborative programming organized by the PCJ Socials Directors, students are able to expand their networks, explore career pathways, and engage with the broader PCJ community. Both the PCJ Conference and Rapoport Journal provide opportunities for the presentation and publication of student-directed research. The PCJ Mentorship Program is a peer-to-peer academic and career support initiative connecting upper-year PCJ mentors with first-year mentees.
PCJ Conference
The 2026 Peace, Conflict & Justice Conference critically examines the transformative role of digital technology in shaping memory, justice, and collective identity. This year’s theme explores how digital technology can serve as both sites of resistance, justice, and political possibility, but also as tools of repression that exacerbate deep-rooted inequalities and grievances. Our goal is to challenge dominant historical narratives, amplify marginalized perspectives, and cultivate dialogue between scholars and students working at the intersections of technology, justice, and memory.
Forum 1: The Digital Floating Homeland: Resistance and Contestation in Palestine
Demonstrated how Palestinians have used digital platforms to share information, mobilize communities, and maintain connections across fragmented spatial boundaries. The forum also centralized the concern that digital infrastructures are used as instruments to assert control over political dissidence.
The student speaker featured in Forum 1, Nawal Dabbagh, a master's student at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, discussed her research on the use of digital checkpoints attached to migration movement in Palestine. Her thesis is dedicated to demonstrating how migration is made permissible or impermissible by Israeli authorities through the mediation of digital technologies.
Forum 2: Digital Borders and the Politics of Violence: Mobility, Surveillance, and Technology in North America
Charted how digital technology has transformed migration politics and border governance in the region, transforming both the management of mobility and experiences of displacement. Lucia Nalbandian, a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, discussed her research relating to mechanisms of digital control in policing immigration and movement in the U.S. and Canada.
Forum 3: Digital Transitions in Transitional Justice
Recognized how transitional justice practices have been reshaped by modern digital spaces. Digital tools have increasingly been used to document and preserve cultural memory, including archives, testimonies, photographs, and in participatory research methods. Dr. Amanda Grzyb, Reynaldo Hernández, Dr. Maria Flores Barba, and Zack Macdonald, researchers on the 'Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador Project,' delivered a talk on how digital documentation has been indispensable to their efforts to commemorate the Salvadoran Civil War. Surviving Memory's collaborative projects include survivor testimonies, historical memory workshops, massacre mapping, architectural co-design of massacre memorials, and documentary films. This talk revealed how digital technology is central to modern efforts to recover sites of mass atrocity and reconstruct destroyed villages."
Past Themes of PCJ Conference
2023-2024: Power, Privilege, and Perspective: Interactions between the Global North and Global South
2022-2023: The Oppression of Identity: Minorities and the Right to Self-Determination
2021-2022: The Many Masks of Imperialism: COVID-19 and Consolidation of Power
2020-2021: The Changing Landscape of Global Health: Unpacking the Dimension of Health Crises and Response in a Post-COVID-19 World
PCJ Rapoport Journal
The Rapoport Journal is dedicated to celebrating the exemplary work of students whose scholarly interests are within related fields of peace, conflict, and justice. The 2026 edition, entitled ‘Flesh and Jurisdiction,’ is an exploration of how governance acts not just through law, but also through bodies. This year’s edition features the work of six undergraduate students on subjects as diverse as gender clinics in Casablanca to the foreign policy apparatus of Washington. The edition can be found here.
Rapoport Masthead
Editor-in-Chief, Mahika Varma
Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Leora Kasneci
Managing Editor, Jaelin Caverhill
Treasurers, Suneet Bains and Jozi Oliver
Creative Director, Quintina Liu
Deputy Creative Director, Juliette Leblanc
Communications Director, Lauren Thomas
Past Themes of Rapoport Journal
2025-2026: Flesh and Jurisdiction
2024-2025: Detached Worlds
2023-2024: Resilience and the Dynamics of Power
2021-2022: Unconventional Approaches to Diplomatic Cooperation
Other Events, 2025-2026
March 2026:
- Rapoport Launch Event
- Screening of ‘This is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth’
- Trivia Showdown: Ethics, Society, and Law vs. Peace, Conflict, and Justice
- Trudeau Centre Fellows’ Academic Seminar
- Munk Undergraduate Research Symposium
February 2026:
- Paws for Wellness
- Academic Seminar, ‘National Cultural Influences on the Expression of Extremist Beliefs in the United States’ by PhD candidate Kayla Preston
January 2026:
- Joint Student Union Pub Night
November 2025:
- Screening of ‘Nuked’
- Academic Seminar, Dr. Maya el Helou
October 2025:
- Joint Student Union Pub Night
- PCJS Trivia Night
September 2025:
- PCJ Orientation
- 2025 Trudeau Centre Frank W. Woods Lecture, delivered by Professor Wendy Wong of the University of British Columbia
- Munk School Undergraduate Welcome Week
- PCJ General Members Meeting
- PCJ Mentorship Social
Other Past Events
- Munk Undergraduate Research Symposium (March 2025)
- Academic Seminar, ‘Community-Based Participatory Research from the Place of Nepantla: Building from a Decolonial Solidarity Framework from the Perspective of the Salvadorian Diaspora’ by Professor Juan Carlos Jimenez (March 2024)
- Progression or Regression: The Winners and Losers of Change?
- Academic Seminar, ‘Economics for Infrastructure and Working at the World Bank’ by Professor Moussa Blimpo