English Student Presents Prize Winning Paper
Brittany Hopkin, a fourth year English Honours student at Mount Royal University, was awarded first prize for her paper at the first Institute of African Studies Undergraduate Conference at Carleton University, which took place on the 17th of October, 2015.
The IAS event was an interdisciplinary research conference that aimed to provide a platform for future researchers in African Studies. Participants included students from Canada, the US, France, and Ghana.
Brittany gave a twenty- minute presentation on her research project entitled, "The Genocidal Consequences of Imperialism: How Predatory Capitalism and International Complicity Incubated the Rwandan Genocide", which was supervised by Dr. Yaw Asante.
Brittany's paper examines how colonialism acts as an incubator of genocidal violence due to factors such as severe human rights violations and political oppression marked by Western capitalism. By aligning a specific focus on the hypocrisy of the West in its attitude towards global violence, Brittany's paper identifies how the discriminatory colonial ideologies that legitimize violence are endorsed by Western-dominated political institutions such as the United Nations and International Monetary Fund.
Second prize was awarded to Heather Donkers from Queens University for her research on sexual violence, and third prize was given to Sophia Jesow from York University for her project on the African diaspora.
In response to her paper, the judges of the conference said that, "Brittany's paper grips you from its very first paragraph." Brittany's paper will soon be published in Nokoko, an open-access academic journal that features discourse and debate on Pan-Africanism, Africa, and Africana.