In a group exhibition at Toronto’s Power Plant art gallery, perspectives on Western imperialism and their uncomfortable legacies come to the fore. The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding, on display until May 18th, uses Stuart Hall’s communication theory to highlight contested histories and the distortion of narratives and meanings by personal interpretation.

From a political and philosophical perspective, there is still much to flesh out conceptually on the importance of theatre, especially regarding the ways we might interrogate contemporary spectacles of violence through the lens of theatricality, performativity and the audience as witness.

When people in the US and Europe think of Peshawar, Pakistan, they perceive it as a hub of religiosity and extremism. Such a perception is understandable given Peshawar’s proximity to the geostrategic center of the War on Terror. But this proximity does not mean that the city’s population, or a large demographic of its population, have fallen prey to religiosity and extremism, or that they cannot be expected to show empathy for the victims of senseless violence. I teach an undergraduate political science class at the University of Peshawar.