2024 Stanfield Conversation featured speakers

Dr. Debra Thompson is a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race and a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Her research, teaching, and public scholarship seek to analyze the complex historic and contemporary relationships among race, the state, and inequality in Canada and other democratic societies. Dr. Thompson’s multiple award-winning first book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Her best-selling second book, The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging (Scribner Canada, 2022) is equal parts a personal meditation, penetrating analysis, and pointed social critique of the dynamics of race and belonging over time and across the Canadian-U.S. border. The Long Road Home was one of Indigo’s top 100 books, CBC’s best non-fiction of 2022, the Hill Times top 100 books of 2022, the winner of the Canadian Political Science Association’s Donald Smiley Prize for the best book on Canadian politics and government and a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Dr. Thompson is a frequent commentator in print media, radio, podcasts, and television, appeared in the 2022 documentary Black Ice, and in collaboration with the Institute for Research on Public Policy, produces and hosts the In/Equality, a special series of the Policy Options podcast on the many facets of inequality in Canadian society. She is currently working on several projects that extract and examine the mechanics of systemic racism in Canada.

See Dr. Debra Thompson's website for more information.

Doug Saunders is The Globe and Mail's international affairs columnist. He has been a writer with the Globe since 1995, and has extensive experience as a foreign correspondent, having run the Globe's foreign bureaus in Los Angeles and London.

Doug was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and educated in Toronto. After early success in magazines and journalistic research, he first worked for The Globe and Mail as a general news reporter, then as an editorial writer and feature writer. In 1996, he joined the weekend section where he created a specialized writing position on media, culture, advertising and popular phenomena. In 1999, he became the paper's Los Angeles bureau reporter, covering both social and political stories in the American west and the broader developments in wider U.S. society. From 2003 until 2012, he was the paper's London-based European bureau chief, responsible for the paper's coverage of more than 40 countries. He has also done extensive reporting in the Middle East, North Africa, the Indian Subcontinent and East Asia; from 2013 to 2015 he was the paper's online opinion editor and creator of the online Globe Debate section.

He has won the National Newspaper Award, the Canadian counterpart to the Pulitzer Prize, on five occasions, including an unprecedented three consecutive awards for critical writing in 1998-2000, and awards honouring him as Canada’s best columnist in 2006 and 2013. He has also won the Stanley McDowell Prize for writing and has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award. His work has been awarded the Schelling Prize in Architectural Theory, the National Library of China Wenjin Book Award and the Donner Prize.

He has published three books. His first, Arrival City (2010) chronicled the unprecedented wave of rural-to-urban migration and the rise of urban immigrant enclaves, using firsthand reporting on five continents. It has been published in eight languages and has won numerous honours, including the Donner Prize for best book on politics and a runner-up for the Gelber Prize for the world's best international-affairs book. His second, The Myth of the Muslim Tide (2012), examined the effects of immigration from Islamic countries to the West and has been published to acclaim in Canada, the United States and Germany. His third, Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough (2017) is a detailed examination of Canada's history of population loss, its current problems of underpopulation and the obstacles to future population growth.

See Doug Saunders's profile page via The Globe and Mail website.