For the first show of 2018 and Sea­son 2.2 (Win­ter Semes­ter), our guest is Métis mas­ters stu­dent in the Peace and Con­flict Stud­ies joint pro­gram host­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­i­to­ba and Uni­veristy of Win­nipeg, Kath­leen Wil­son. In addi­tion to her grad­u­ate research on Indige­nous the­o­ries of peace build­ing and con­flict res­o­lu­tion, Kath­leen was the Co-Chair for orga­niz­ing the 3^rd Annu­al Peace and Con­flict Stud­ies’ Stu­dents’ Asso­ci­a­tion Grad­u­ate Stu­dent Con­fer­ence: Peace With­out Bor­ders. Every Fall, the PCSSA brings togeth­er lead­ing con­trib­u­tors to glob­al research on inter­na­tion­al peace and con­flict res­o­lu­tion at spaces co-host­ed by UM and UW. At the 2017 edi­tion, Kath­leen pre­sent­ed her paper ​“The Mer­its of the Spe­heri­cal Cow: Weav­ing Togeth­er Peace­build­ing The­o­ries in the Con­text of Vio­lence Against Indige­nous Peo­ples in Cana­da”. Kath­leen’s work puts intel­lec­tu­al pres­sure on the the­o­ret­i­cal abstrac­tions of very real sites of con­tes­ta­tion in neo-colo­nial Cana­da and what effect phi­los­o­phiz­ing has on the pur­suit of peace and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Peace and Con­flict Stud­ies as a dis­ci­pline is new in the larg­er spec­trum of acad­eme and goes by dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions across the coun­try, Kath­leen gives us her take on the dis­ci­pline’s strengths and weak­ness­es, the larg­er role of Peace and Con­flict Stud­ies in the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty, and her per­son­al expe­ri­ence as a Métis woman deliv­er­ing gradaute research in a joint pro­gram admin­is­tered by the Fac­ul­ty of Grad­u­ate Studies.