Online Event  10:00 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4
10 AM New York l 4 pm Vienna

This roundtable supported by OSUN's Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice project and organized by Haley McEwen (University of Witwatersrand), Aiko Holvikivi (LSE), Tomás Ojeda (LSE) and Billy Holzberg (King’s College London) explores the transnational dimension of "anti-gender ideology" with leading trans, queer, and feminist scholars and activists who have experienced the effects of "anti-gender" attacks.

In recent years, trans, queer and feminist activists and scholars from different global contexts have faced increasing levels of hostility, censorship, and disenfranchisement as "anti-gender" groups have gained political power and influence. This roundtable will provide a space for critical interrogation and reflection on the ways in which anti-gender activism troubles, and can be troubled by, transnational queer and feminist perspectives, solidarity, and action. Register for this event

Online Event  8:00 am – 9:30 am EDT/GMT-4
8 AM New York l 2 PM Vienna

OSUN members are invited to attend as seniors from across the Open Society University Network discuss their capstone/senior projects. Viewers will hear about what was at stake in their work, how their educational experiences helped them prepare for it, and what lessons they learned along the way. Student presentations to be followed by Q&A.  

Moderated by OSUN Vice-Chancellor Jonathan Becker.

Confirmed panelists include (additional speakers TBA):

Ahmad Denno, Bard College Berlin
"Immigrants in Germany Historically, from Citizenship Rights to Obstacles to Social and Political Integration in Germany"

Yana Taratun, European Humanities University
"Psychology of migration among students: trauma relief perspective"

Hephzibah Ugochinyere Emereole, Ashesi University
"An Intelligent and Inclusive E-Learning System for Deaf Students in a Ghanaian University"

Dana Abu-Koash, Al-Quds Bard College
Command Responsibility in International Criminal Law: A Case Study on Benjamin Netanyahu

Hazel Carson, Bard Annandale
"French Bilateral Aid to Mali: Examining the Donor-Recipient Relationship's Effect on Development"

Maria Pankova, AUCA
"The Sounds of a City"Join via Zoom

Online Event  8:00 am – 9:30 am EDT/GMT-4
8 am New York l 2 pm Vienna

Over the past two years, the world has witnessed a number of crises that have resulted in forced displacement resulting in interrupted education for youth across educational levels. Networks of higher education institutions are well-positioned to support these youth in returning to formal learning, providing stability and hope in the face of profound trauma.

This panel of experts from across OSUN is part of UNESCO's World Higher Education Conference. It highlights the collaborative response to support youth displaced by the crises in Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, as well as protracted crises which continue to need attention.

Panelists will grapple with three key questions: How can higher education institutions forge productive partnerships to address the post-secondary needs of youth affected by crises? What are the barriers and challenges of bringing youth affected by crises (back) into a higher education experience? Who are the key stakeholders with which higher education networks must liaise in order to open access to these youth? 

Moderator
Jonathan Becker, Vice Chancellor of the Open Society University Network

Panelists
Ian Bickford, President of the American University of Afghanistan
Rebecca Granato, Director of the OSUN Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives
Oleksandr Shtokvych, OSUN Secretariat 
Kyaw Moe Tun, President of Parami Institute, MyanmarRegister to join via Zoom

Online Event  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) and partners at Western States Center and the Montana Human Rights Network welcome network members to attend the launch of a co-written and co-published toolkit called A Community Guide for Opposing Hate.
 
The purpose of the manual is to provide those who want to “do something” about hate with the steps to improve their communities, not only for the immediate aftermath of a hateful act, but for years to come. It details best practices for how to start a local group opposing hate and to improve the work of organizations already engaged in this effort.
 
Written by people with decades of experience in the field, the guide notes that “hate may be manifested by different means (rallies, posters, social media postings, crimes, etc.) and may have a variety of targets (people of different ethnicity or religion, gender or sexual identity, even different politics). It underscores that it is a mistake to ignore hateful acts, as hate "imbedded as a noble idea can inspire individuals to acts of violence.”
 
The guide has detailed sections on messaging, traditional media and social media strategies, working with politicians and schools and academics, hate crimes, security, and research. Importantly, it also has a section on the importance of protecting free speech rights, and how, while doing so, to make the hater’s free speech exercise backfire.Register for the launch here

Online Event  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
5/11, 6:00 pm New York | 5/12 12:00 am Vienna

CommUniversity presents “Mutual Benefit: The Secret Sauce of Reciprocal Partnerships.”

CommUniversity welcomes the University of Technology Sydney Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion as they share insights about key approaches to developing long-term partnerships that have real impact across multiple contexts. Their approach has proven vital through the disrupted COVID period and has allowed the Centre to be quick to adapt and to take meaningful community engaged action in response to a crisis. Join us to learn about their approach to creating long-term sustainable positive change.

The CommUniversity 2022 workshop series, organized by OSUN and the Talloires Network, showcases community-university engaged research and learning to support engaged scholars seeking to address the following questions: How do engaged scholars collaborate with communities to co-design and implement engagement programs? In what ways do community members contribute to the engaged scholarship? In what ways does engaged scholarship contribute to building civic values and skills for students? How might engaged scholarship impact students’ choices about career path or future involvement in their community? To what extend has the engagement program positively affected the community? How does one assess engaged scholarship? How do engaged scholars present their achievements at the time of promotion or career transition? In what ways are universities adapting internal review processes to reward engaged scholarship? What are the key elements for a successful long-term university-community partnership?This session will be recorded and posted on OSUN's YouTube channel.Register Now

Online Event  10:00 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4
The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network invites students from across OSUN to attend a virtual forum where students from American University of Central Asia, University of Thessaly, Bard College Annandale, and Bard College Berlin share the stories of their names. Readings are followed by small group discussions and finally an open forum in which students share their reflections with the group.

Contact [email protected] with any questions.Register for the virtual forum here

Online Event  9:30 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4

9:30 am New York l 3:30 pm Vienna

Students from the OSUN network will present and discuss real-world public service employment programs that have aspired to answer the call of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23, stating that all people have “the right to work, to free choice of employment, and to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”

Join OSUN students from Al-Quds Bard College (Palestine), American University of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan), and Bard College (USA) in this important conversation.Register NowFor more information please contact:

Pavlina R. Tcherneva
Email: [email protected]
Director, Economic Democracy Initiative

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us for the launch of Putting the Cooker on Low, a new Digital Commission by Ama Josephine Budge. Ama was the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard, and we are honored to welcome her back to premiere her new video. Ama is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, researcher and pleasure activist whose intradisciplinary praxis works to hold together Blackness, pleasure, art and ecology towards queerly climate changing futures.

Putting the Cooker on Low explores the daily rituals that allow Black women, femmes, and nonbinary folk to keep creating in the midst of spiritual, emotional, familial, societal, and ecological crises. Putting the Cooker on Low intimates that which happens in the simmer and bubble, on the back burner and the top oven, in the side eye and the hot pot. Thinking with an ancestry of Black feminist petitions for self-preservation, this visual essay works to make visible and then unsettle the ways in which Black womxn artists internalize value-(as)-labor-(as)-capital. The cracks, crevasses, and slippages these antierotic modes of survival engender—as felt by both human and nonhuman ecologies—remain forced from view until they become black holes, into which we are swallowed and disappear. Often without a trace. It is with the cooker on low, that resistance might reduce into potency. It is with the cooker on low that we never run out of gas.

Learn More

Register Now

Online Event  3:30 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
3:30 pm New York | 9:30 pm Vienna

A conversation with Nat Castañeda and Nariman El-Mofty from the Associated Press as a part of the EHCN Symposium “Reclaiming the Narrative.”

Nat Castañeda, Visual Storytelling Producer for the Enterprise and Investigations team for the Associated Press
Nat Castañeda is a visual artist and journalist based in Denmark. Common issues in Castañeda’s work are the role of technology within narratives and the permanence of the historical record. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and has shown at venues such as The High Line, El Museo del Barrio and Electronic Arts Intermix. Castañeda works at the Associated Press where she is a Visual Storytelling Producer for the Enterprise and Investigations team. She has contributed to projects on global migration and the civil war in Yemen, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2018. Castañeda’s photography has appeared in the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report and USA Today.

Nariman El-Mofty, photojournalist for the Associated Press based in Cairo, Egypt
After five years photo editing in addition to photographing for the Associated Press Middle East photo desk, Nariman became a staff photojournalist. She tells compelling visual stories in the region – on subjects ranging from the antiquities of Egypt, Arab Spring protests, the annual Hajj in 2016, migration, and the horrors of wars.  El-Mofty has covered Yemen, with a sensitive eye for portraiture that highlights the humanity of people struggling to survive amid a society in collapse. In 2019, she was part of an Associated Press team that won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for work uncovering the effects of Yemen's devastating war. She also received the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot Award for her Yemen photo reportage. She was awarded the Robert Capa citation for excellence for “Disembarking in Hell” on the dangerous journey of Ethiopian migrants – crossing the sea to Yemen and then making their way to Saudi Arabia. In 2020 she travelled to the Sudanese-Ethiopian border to document the Tigray people who take shelter by the thousands within sight of the homeland they fled in northern Ethiopia and was awarded the citation in the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for “Fleeing War.” The work was also exhibited in the International Festival of Photojournalism 2021 in Perpignan ‘Visa pour l'image.’Join Via Zoom

Online Event  10:00 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4
10:00 am New York | 4:00 pm Vienna

A special session of Adhaar Desai’s Spring 2022 course at Bard College, “LIT 263: What is a Character?,” this open lecture will discuss the introduction to John Cheney-Lippold’s We Are Data (NYU, 2017) and relate it to conceptualizations of fictional character in contemporary fiction and cinema. As part of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network’s “Reclaiming the Narrative Symposium,” the class will consider questions of agency, representation, and identity.Join Via Zoom

Online Event  9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
9 am New York l 3 pm Vienna

The last two decades have registered an outstanding wave of naked protests globally.  In Africa, the proliferation and hypervisibility of what is erroneously called "genital cursing" can be explained by multiple factors, including the power of the digital sphere and the intensification and multiplication of negative biopolitical conditions.

In this lecture, organized by the OSUN project on Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, Naminata Diabate, Cornell University, traces the historical trajectory of mature women’s insurrectionary disrobing and examines its recent deployment during moments of socio-political duress. Diabate meditates on the impact of internet media to reframe the terms of the debate around women’s agency. As news and images of the gesture travel outside of their original site of performance, the women’s agency takes on new forms. Diverging, thus, from the longstanding logic that frames the women as endlessly empowered and empowering, Diabate proposes that we think of women's agency as naked, in the keys of instability and openness. 

Naminata Diabate is an associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. A scholar of gender, sexuality, and race, drawing on archives of literary fiction, cinema, visual arts, and digital media, her most recent work has appeared in a monograph, peer-reviewed journals, and collections of essays, including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2020), Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019), African Literature Today ALT 36 (2018), Critical Interventions (2017), Research in African Literatures (2016), and Fieldwork in the Humanities (2016). Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and awarded the African Studies Association 2021 Best Book Prize. This year, she holds the Ali Mazrui Senior Research Fellowship at the Africa Institute of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, working on two monographs, “The Problem of Pleasure in Global Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains.”

This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, an OSUN project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from network institutions to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice. 

Join via Zoom.

Online Event  9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
9 am New York l 3 pm Vienna

This discussion organized by the OSUN project on Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, focuses on Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women by Kristen R. Ghodsee, University of Pennsylvania. Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the aristocratic Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan turned scientist turned global women’s activist Elena Lagadinova—Kristen Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of socialist and communist women.

None of these women was a ‘perfect’ leftist. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege, but they still managed to move forward their own political projects through perseverance and dedication to their cause. Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the desire to force their sometimes callous male colleagues to take women’s issues seriously, these five women pursued novel solutions with lessons for today’s activists.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles and essays have also been translated into over twenty languages and have appeared in publications such as Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Baffler, The New Republic, Quartz, NBC Think, The Lancet, Project Syndicate, Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Tageszeitung, The Washington Post, and the New York Times. She is also the author of eleven books, including: Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books, 2018 and 2020), which has already had fourteen international editions. Her most recent book is Taking Stock of the Shock: Social Impacts of the 1989 Revolutions, co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein and with Oxford University Press in 2021. She is also the host of the podcast, A.K. 47 - Forty-seven Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai.

This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, an OSUN project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from network institutions to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice. This is an online event. Register to join.

Online Event  9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
9 am New York l 3 pm Vienna

We are seeing an increasing number of migrants and refugees globally. Institutions are grappling with how best to support and mitigate the situation. Join us for a discussion sponsored by Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and the Open Society University Network to learn how higher education institutions might overcome these challenges and provide equity for refugees who seek access to a college education.

Panelists:

Mark James Wood
Research Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs working on the MIMC Project, MPA Candidate at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

Oleksandr Shtokvych 
Head of OSUN Secretariat, Central European university and Co-Director, OSUN Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative

Rebecca Granato
Associate Vice President for Global Initiatives, Bard College, Director of the Open Society University Network Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives.

Shahariar Sadat 
Director, Academic and Legal Empowerment, Centre for Peace and Justice, BRAC University

Janine Prantl
Legal Fellow for the Global Strategic Litigation Council for Refugee RightsRegister via Zoom 

Online Event  5:00 am – 7:30 am EDT/GMT-4
5 am New York l 11 am Vienna

OSUN member Black Mountains College in Wales, UK, invites network students to a conference examining what climate careers might look like in 10, 20, 30 years. In this free seminar, speakers will explore what impacts the new era of climate and ecological crisis have on the concept of a career and the various sectors involved. What transferable skills might you need to adapt to this future?

Once registered you can choose from a menu of breakout sessions where leading professionals from a range of fields will be present to answer your questions and give their views on how the crisis will impact their field. These inspiring leaders in the business of making a difference will share their views on how you can embed action and activism into your profession.

Speakers

Keynote by Clover Hogan

Ben Rawlence on Future of Education
Jeremy Young on Future of Architecture
Keesa Schreane on Future of Finance
Kawita Schur, Mike Tomson on Future of Healthcare
Phil Ireland on Future of Construction
Dawood Qureshi, Grace Murray, Owen Sheers on Future of Writing and Journalism
Elspeth Jones on Future of Law and Justice
David Clubb on Future of Energy & Infrastructure
Josie Mackenzie, Zoe Gilbertson on Future of Fashion
Alice Taherzadeh on Future of Food and Agriculture
Alice Skennerton Barroll on Future of WaterLearn more and register

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
12 pm New York l 6 pm Vienna

OSUN members are invited to join a panel discussion with the Center for Human Rights and the Arts' current collaborators in “Activism in Process”.

CHRA collaborates annually with a group of activists and organizers who are leading grassroots efforts in their communities. For our first “Activism in Process”, we are bringing together Badr Baabou from Damj (a LGBTQ++ rights organization based in Tunisia); Ernesto Pujol (a social choreographer based in Puerto Rico); and Elizabeth Rubin and Natasha Matteson from Last Exit Kabul (a global network supporting Afghan refugees).

Elizabeth Rubin and Natasha Matteson work with Last Exit Kabul, a civic initiative made up of journalists and activists who came together to help Afghans, left behind by the U.S. withdrawal, escape and survive. 

Ernesto Pujol is founder of The Listening School, which teaches deep-listening skills for the creation of conscious culture; The Savage Gardener Studio, which works to decolonize island ecology by designing native & edible gardens of sited memory; and Casa Pujol, an interdisciplinary residency for visiting scholars in San Juan. 

Badr Baabou works with Damj, the first LGBTQ+ rights organization in Tunisia that creates safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community in Tunisia and a legal support team to counter arrests. Damj works towards a vision of a pluralistic, egalitarian and safe Tunisia, focusing on abolishing law 230 of the penal code, which bans homosexuality. This is an online event. Register here.

Online Event  3:00 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4
3 am New York l 9 am Vienna

The OSUN Open Society Research Platform invites network members to attend a hybrid workshop with in-person panels and online presentations on "The Road to Domination? The Open Society and New Technologies." 

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, advances in biotechnology, deployment of (semi-)autonomous weapons, and the predictive power of algorithms – all these technologies shape and alter our moral, social, and political relations in profound ways. And while few doubt the potential of new technologies in areas such as medicine, communication, or transportation, philosophers and social scientists raise serious doubts about the neutrality of technology, the prospects for human agency in a world governed by machines and the liberating effects of technology.
  
The development of new technologies also challenges central concepts of the idea of "open society." In The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper famously asserts that an open society "sets free the critical powers of man," whereas a closed society submits to "magical forces." In an open society, therefore, individuals are confronted with personal decisions and the prospect of a radically open future. 

But new forms of global domination by Big Tech and the growing tendency to outsource fundamental decisions to algorithms fundamentally challenge the idea of open society. Current practices of technological solutionism might well stifle free expression and democratic self-government.

Keynote Speaker:
Claudia Aradau

Speakers:
Elke Schwarz
Nazam Laila
James Muldoon
Vladimir Cvetkovic
Elana Zeide
Philippe Foret
Meem Arafat Manab
Silviu CraciunasLearn more
No registration is required
Join via Zoom

Online Event  9:30 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4
9:30 AM New York l 4:30 PM Vienna

OSUN's CEU-based Open Learning Initiative, or OLIve, and OSUN’s Working Group on Education for Refugees, IDPs, and Host Community Members present a workshop series for all OSUN educators that examines the practices and pedagogies developed for teaching refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced students, asking how such tools can help educators themselves be better teachers and administrators in general.

Displaced populations in countries of first asylum -- whether in camp or urban settings -- face a number of barriers to achieving a life without conflict, including while pursuing education opportunities. Having escaped war, authoritarianism, climate devastation or other forms of trauma, these challenges – among many others – permeate the learning communities of the 3% of global refugees who manage to gain access to higher education.

This panel will highlight a number of tensions with which refugees grapple in their educational experiences. Through different case studies drawn from host countries, including Bangladesh and Kenya, panelists will present different best practices for navigating such tensions, which can be adapted by faculty to blended, online or f2f classrooms that include displaced learners.

Speaker
Rebecca Granato (Bard College)
Michael Oyoo (OSUN Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives)
Shahariar Sadat (BRAC University)
Azizul Hoque (BRAC University)
Tasnuva Ahmad (BRAC University)

Questions? Write to [email protected].This is an online event. Register here. 

Online Event  9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
9 am New York l 3 pm Vienna

In 2006, Esther Cooper Jackson, a renowned Black civil rights activist, social worker, and leftist thinker, participated in a community event in Harlem where she talked about her Cold War-era political activism and underlined that “more and more of us need to become internationalist.”

This discussion with Tatsiana Shchurko of The Ohio State University, organized by the OSUN project on Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, asks "What does this statement mean for transnational feminist solidarities today? How can we pick up on Esther Cooper Jackson’s call thoughtfully and ethically? What are the prospects to engage with histories of socialist internationalism for social justice struggles today?"

Shchurko will explore alternative histories of transnational feminist solidarities rooted in practices of socialist internationalism. Today, many past solidarities associated with the Soviet Union and socialist internationalism have been excluded from transnational feminist inquiry and devalued. However, the current context of the pandemic, and the rise of the global right, imperial violence, and authoritarian politics all make obvious transnational interdependencies and raise concerns about the possibility of feminist solidarity and care between distant communities.

Shchurko explores the link between past radical struggles in the U.S. and the former second world, focusing on alternative geographies of connection, togetherness, and solidarity that appear marginal, insignificant, or invisible for conventional historiographies and traditional geographic arrangements. 

Tatsiana Shchurko is a researcher and queer feminist activist from Belarus. In 2021, she completed her PhD in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Her dissertation explores hidden or unclaimed histories of socialist internationalism for their relevance today. Specifically, Tatsiana explores the relations between Black women and state socialist women and “sister cities” solidarities to reevaluate how internationalist ideas and transnational mobility play a fundamental role in producing a sense of agency and resistance to global injustices.

This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, an OSUN project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from network institutions to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice. 

Join via Zoom.

Online Event  8:30 am – 10:00 am EDT/GMT-4
The OSUN Disability Justice program's annual panel takes place on April 22, focused on “Inclusive Education: Opportunities and Challenges,” and bringing together international perspectives from disability civil society, university administrators and policy makers.

The panel provides a frame for Disability Justice's priorities for the year, as reflected in various network-wide initiatives. It also seeks to serve OSUN partners in the area of disability justice, connecting their curricular and co-curricular initiatives, enhancing their resources and research, and expanding their teaching and learning opportunities. 

This year’s panel centers on building partner capacity and developing shared institutional goals and practices. Ultimately, the goal is to host a sustained global discussion on Disability Rights and Justice within the network that is grounded in an interdisciplinary space where key human rights issues, norms, strategies and challenges are explored with experts, practitioners and communities. Panelists:
 -Derick Omari: Ghana, alum of OSUN member Ashesi University, entrepreneur bridging the technology access gap for people with visual impairments in education and the workforce-Arlene Kanter: United States, Syracuse University, scholar in disability justice and law-Yohannes Takele Zewale: LL.B (BA degree in law) and LL.M in Business Law from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia; LL.M in International Human Rights and Comparative Disability Law, Syracuse University; disability inclusion specialist, advisor, and consultant.-Oladipupo Idris Olalere: Medical Doctor; Masters in Disability, Design and Innovation from College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Nigeria; disability inclusion facilitator exploring opportunities to improve access to assistive technologies in the Global South.
Moderator
 -Elena Kim: Kyrgyzstan, visiting faculty at BardJoin via Zoom

Basic Human Rights: What Does an Equitable Future Look Like?
Online Event  Presented by Bard College and the Open Society University Network.

On behalf of the planning committee for the 4th Annual International Difference and Justice symposium, all are invited to register for this year’s symposium. Members of our international community have prepared an impressive array of engaging presentations. Therefore, we encourage you to attend this quality academic experience. 

A symposium schedule and Zoom links will be sent to all registered participants approximately 24 hours before the event.  Registration is free. Also, session attendance can be verified for those who are incorporating symposium participation into an academic or work experience. 

Thank you for your support of those who are sharing their academic expertise with our global community.  We look forward to seeing you at this year's symposium. Register Now


Download: 2022 D&J Symposium Flyer-FINAL Draft.pdf Full Schedule of Sessions

Online Event  Bard College at Simon’s Rock invites OSUN members to join a conference that celebrates a forthcoming volume on sacred forests of Asia, the first cross-cultural, multidisciplinary study of sacred forests in South, East, and Southeast Asia.

Contributors foreground new scholarly dialogues on the nature of sacred space, place, landscape, and ecology in the context of sharply contested ideas of the Anthropocene. Given the vast geographic range of sacred groves in Asia, contributors examine the diversity of associated cosmologies, ecologies, traditional local resource management practices, and environmental governance systems developed during the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods. Adopting theoretical perspectives from political ecology, the book views ecology and polity as constitutive elements interacting within local, regional, and global networks.

Readers will find the very first systematic comparative analysis of sacred forests that include the karchall mabhuy of the Katu people of Central Vietnam, the leuweng kolot of the Baduy people of West Java, the fengshui forests of southern China, the groves to the goddess Sarna Mata worshiped by the Oraon people of Jharkhand India, the mauelsoop and bibosoop of Korea, and many more.

Incorporating in-depth, field-based case studies, each chapter shows how the forest’s sacrality must not be conceptually delinked from its roles in common property regimes, community resource security, spiritual matters of ultimate concern, and cultural identity.

Friday, April 22 focuses on South Asia; Saturday, April 23 on East Asia; and Sunday, April 24 on Southeast Asia.See the full conference schedule hereJoin via Zoom

Online Event  11:00 am – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
11 am New York l 5 pm Vienna

OSUN member the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) presents a screening of "Education Not Incarceration," an episode from the Incarceration Nations docuseries.

Beginning in Africa and ending in Europe, Incarceration Nations is a first-person odyssey through the prison systems of the world. The series looks into the human stories of incarcerated men and women and those who imprison them, creating a jarring, poignant view of a world to which most are denied access, and a rethinking of one of America’s most far-reaching global exports: the modern prison complex.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with:

Baz D. Dreisinger, Incareration Nations Network and John Jay College of Criminal Justice (US)
Craig Coston, Poet and Student (US)
Kofi Danso, Ubuntu Learning Community (South Africa) and Incarceration Nations Network Register via Zoom

Online Event  11:00 am – 12:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
11 am New York l 5 pm Vienna

OSUN ExEd Hub invites network members to the sixth edition of its signature Expert Insights virtual series, designed specifically with aspiring leaders and change-makers in mind. The events aim to help young leaders to drive their own personal and professional growth while also driving positive change in their teams, communities and organizations.

Stephen Fee, a communications leader and former journalist, now serving as Vice President of Communications at Enterprise Community Partners, one of the largest affordable housing NGOs in the United States, will deliver a session entitled Communicating for Impact - A New Model for Public Interest Communications. He will examine how organizations have been able to break through and leverage the press and public attention to advance advocacy goals, raise awareness, fundraise, and further their mission. While this workshop is geared toward examples in the NGO and non-profit sectors, it is meant for any leader who aspires to use communications to have an even greater impact in the world around them. 

This event is free for OSUN members.Register here. 

Online Event  9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
9 AM New York l 3 PM Vienna

The CommUniversity 2022 workshop series, organized by OSUN and the Talloires Network, showcases university civic engagement approaches (frameworks, strategies, methods, and practices) that have been shown to produce favorable results and that represent a standard suitable for adoption or adaptation.

These presentations are meant to prepare graduate students and faculty to apply for OSUN Engaged Research Funds, which support research tied to long-term, sustainable community partnerships. 

Rabih Shibli is the Director of the Center for Civic Engagement and Community Service (CCECS) and a lecturer in Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Under his directorship, CCECS has been awarded the Most Civically Engaged Campus by Ma'an Alliance 2015, MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship 2016, SXSW Learn by Design Honorary Award 2018, and the Fritz Redlich Global Mental Health and Human Rights Award 2018.

Shibli has conceptualized and implemented community projects and authored publications reflecting the process of bridging developmental planning and experiential learning. He will discuss CCECS' role in leveraging operational research, campus community, and socially responsive partnerships to tackle the most pressing societal challenges facing Lebanon, and beyond. CCECS has an overarching agenda to integrate developmental planning aimed at empowering the marginalized with experiential learning aimed for transformative change.

Other workshops in the series feature leaders in the field of university civic engagement and run each month through July 2022, highlighting innovative community-university research in communities in the United States, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ghana, and Austria.

Learn more about the Engaged Research Fund grants here. 
Learn more details about the workshops here. This is an online event. Register in advance.

Online Event  10:30 am – 11:30 am EDT/GMT-4
10:30 AM New York l 4:30 PM Vienna

This Research-to-Action Lecture continues the Economic Democracy Initiative's series on OSUN member institute Bard College's Alumni/ae taking important steps to shape contemporary policy conversations in the United States and beyond.

Ben Baum is the Deputy Chief of Staff and Member Services Director for Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (NY-18). He has worked for the Congressman since 2017 when he was a junior at Bard College. During his time in Washington, he has served as a senior staffer on the Congressman’s campaigns and most recently as the Deputy Chief of Staff at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

For more information: email Pavlina R. Tcherneva at [email protected].Join this online event via Zoom

Online Event  9:30 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4
9:30 AM New York l 3:30 PM Vienna
Join leaders of the Global Debate Network and faculty from across OSUN for a discussion about debate and critical thinking in the classroom. Some questions we will consider are: What does it mean to be a critical thinker in a post-Covid, post-Ukraine-war world? How does a critical thinker react to conspiracy theories and propaganda? Is affect/emotion incompatible with rational debate?With questions or for more information, contact Clarence Brontë, OSUN Global Debate Network Program Coordinator at [email protected].
This is an online discussion. Join via Zoom.

Online Event  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
3 pm New York l 9 pm Vienna

The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) invites OSUN members to attend a discussion with Amy Spitalnick, Executive Director of Integrity First for America, and Jessica Phillips, an attorney, on the aftermath of the Charlottesville trial, which held organizers of the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally financially responsible for violence they caused.

Spitalnick and Phillips will speak on what the case says about the state of white supremacy (and how to combat it), focusing on the evidentiary discovery received from the defendants, the expert reports and trial testimony. See video from Spitalnick here. 
 
Integrity First for America recently  launched a database with trial testimony, exhibits and expert reports (including Deborah Lipstadt’s report on antisemitism reflected by the defendants and others at the rally.)
 
Register for the webinar.

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Open Society University Network (OSUN) is a global association of over 40 educational institutions, collaborating on learning, research & civic engagement, that was founded by Bard College and Central European University. 

Take a lunch break and drop by a casual info session at Weis Cinema at 12:30 each Thursday in April.

Get some free pizza and find out about some of the many local and international opportunities Bard students can take advantage of! 

This week you'll hear from OSUN's communications team and from a former OSUN student about: Study Abroad Online Courses Microgrants International Workshops Global Commons Student Publication Certificate in Civic Engagement MUCH MORE!Next information session is Thursday, April 14. Tell a friend!

Online Event  9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
9 am New York l 3 pm Vienna

“Experiential learning that enables people to forge solutions across borders will always be a threat to those who would close societies.” — Richard Harrill, Entrepreneur in Residence, OSUN Social Entrepreneurship Practicum

Network members are invited to attend a discussion among global faculty participating in the OSUN Social Entrepreneurship Practicum, focused on lessons learned, the relevance to the current moment, and how to further democratize access to social innovation around the world.

Some questions to be explored are:
Can we open up opportunities for students around the world to learn to confront pressing problems and replace inadequate institutions by building solutions of their own? As they practice the art of “piecemeal social engineering,” which Karl Popper saw as crucial to the open society, can they learn, by doing, the capabilities and mindset crucial to renewing our institutions and industries to meet the demands of today?

In 2021, the second year of the OSUN Social Entrepreneurship Practicum, we deepened the exploration of these questions across nine educational institutions. Using common methodology and course collaboration via the RebelBase Future of Work platform, participating universities challenged students to tackle pressing problems together. These students and their instructors participated in a remote, interactive, project-based course offered jointly across their universities. 

During this event, we will also talk about an upcoming report from OSUN on skills (from critical thinking to the capacity to work on diverse teams) and mindset built through the experience. Hear about the challenges we faced, what global faculty learned through the experience, and the outcomes reported by students. Also find out how your institution can participate.

Panelists
Dalia Najjar - Co-instructor at Al Quds Bard College
Sebastian Groh - Co-instructor at BRAC University
Natalya Mikhailova - Co-instructor at European Humanities University
Evelina Van Mensel - Co-instructor at American University in Bulgaria
Eliza Edge - Co-instructor at Bard College Annandale
Richard Harrill - Entrepreneur in Residence
Alejandro Juárez Crawford - Global LeadJoin via Zoom.

Online Event  Central European University's Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations invites OSUN scholars to attend its 17th Annual Doctoral Conference. The conference provides a professional, stimulating, and international environment for PhD students and early career researchers in political science to discuss their works in progress, establish informal networks, and initiate future collaborative research. The conference will present submissions that reflect the plurality of research projects and approaches in the field of political science.

The impact of the pandemic puts into question previous habits, assumptions, theoretical frameworks, methods, leaving a sense of dismay and disarray. But the awareness of such precariousness produces an open space for new practices and ideas. Times like these could be the most fertile for younger scholars working on theoretical, empirical, or methodological issues. CEU is pleased to share scientific contributions reflecting on individual, national, transnational, and global challenges driven by the loss of certainties and by unprecedented changes.See the full conference program here.

Register to attend by April 1.

Online Event  6:00 am – 8:00 am EDT/GMT-4
6 am New York l 11 am Vienna

OSUN members are invited to attend the University Social Responsibility Network's Webinar Series on “Social Responsibility in Teaching and Learning — What Works?" co-hosted by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and University of Pretoria. 

USRN and other higher education institutions will share effective university social responsibility practices and impact stories, aiming to advocate for wider social responsibility in higher education.

The second webinar focuses on "Service-Learning as a Vehicle for Global Learning and Internationalization."

Internationalization and global learning are important learning outcomes in higher education, and an increasing amount of resources are poured into learning programs that facilitate global learning, such as student exchange or study tours.

Service-learning is a well-researched pedagogy that is known to be effective at nurturing students’ civic learning. Considering that many service-learning projects require students to cross socio-economic boundaries, including those of race, ethnicity and/or culture, and some projects even bring students offshore to serve, it makes sense to wonder whether service-learning could also be a vehicle to promote students’ global learning and Internationalization.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University has been running a large offshore service-learning program for several years. Prior to COVID-19, almost 1000 students travelled away from home to serve communities from mainland China to Cambodia to Rwanda. This effort has continued with online international service-learning after COVID-19 put restrictions onto student and teacher mobility programs. Do students learn intercultural competencies and global citizenship through these programs? What are some of the inherent challenges to teaching and measuring global learning in the context of service-learning? This talk will explore some of these issues and present our experiences and findings. 

Moderator
Daniel T. L. Shek, Associate Vice President (Undergraduate Programme), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Speakers
Grace Ngai, Head, Service-Learning and Leadership Office, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Stephen C.F. Chan, Consultant and former Head, Service-Learning and Leadership Office, The Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityRegister to join

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
12 pm New York l 6 pm Vienna

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts presents a webinar with Layli Long Soldier entitled "My Art Is a Being: Building a Relationship to Art through Agreement, Ethics, and Pleasure."

By understanding our art as a being with whom we create a relationship, Layli Long Soldier explores the ways in which we can make commitments and agreements with our writing and art; uphold expectations and enact reciprocity, as one would do with a relative; and nourish our relationship through pleasure, playfulness, or enjoyment. These agreements with our art, in turn, lay a foundation of ethics that can protect us from capitalism and the dangers of becoming human art-machines!

This will primarily be an artist talk in which Long Soldier will share images/videos of projects that have helped her build a practice based on relationship and reciprocity rather than productivity, alone. It will be moderated by Mónica Lucía Espinosa Arango (Universidad de Los Andes).

Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, the New York Times, the American Poet, the American Reader, the Kenyon Review, BOMB, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.Join via the Zoom link below

Online Event  11:00 am – 12:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The war in Ukraine has transformed thinking about almost every aspect of the European Union, from security to energy, and put the spotlight on its central and east European member states.

In this event presented by OSUN partner the CEU Democracy Institute, author Timothy Garton Ash will ask:
How does it affect the future of democracy in Central Europe? Does it sharpen the focus on the erosion of the rule of law and democracy in countries like Hungary and Poland, or rather soften it, since for a united response to Putin's aggression in Ukraine the EU needs the support of its frontline states?

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. At St Antony's, he also directs the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom. He is the author of ten books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ including The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague, The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name, Facts are Subversive and Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. He writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, amongst other journals.Stream this event online via the CEU Democracy Institute’s Facebook page.

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
12 PM New York l 6 PM Vienna
Weis, Cinema, Bard College

OSUN members are invited to attend the second annual Economic Democracy Initiative's Keynote Address with scholar Jayati Ghosh, professor, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and advisor, United Nations HLAB on Economic and Social Affairs, who will discuss how global inequality has not just increased absolutely but changed in nature.

The increase and changing nature of global inequality has come about not only because of vaccine inequity but also massive differences in fiscal responses across rich countries and others, greater informality of labor in the developing world, the unequal experience of climate change, and the implications of the international architecture. Ghosh will specifically address International Property Rights and global investment rules and patterns, and what we can do about it.

This is a virtual and in-person event taking place at Bard College. 
Join the livestream on YouTube

Online Event  10:00 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4
10 am New York l 4 pm Vienna

OSUN’s Women's History Month Program welcomes Shabana Basij-Rasikh, cofounder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA). SOLA is Afghanistan’s first and only all-girls boarding school, enrolling nearly 100 students from 28 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. In August 2021, Shabana led the evacuation of her students and SOLA’s faculty from Afghanistan to Rwanda, where all are now engaged in a study abroad program.

Cosponsored by: Afghan Hub, the Muslim Student Organization, the International Student Organization at Bard College, and the OSUN Civic Action and Research Class.Register via the Zoom link below

Online Event  8:00 am – 10:00 am EDT/GMT-4
8 AM New York l 2 PM Vienna

The CommUniversity 2022 workshop series, organized by OSUN and the Talloires Network, showcases university civic engagement approaches (frameworks, strategies, methods, and practices) that have been shown to produce favorable results and that represent a standard suitable for adoption or adaptation.

These presentations are meant to prepare graduate students and faculty to apply for OSUN Engaged Research Funds, which support research tied to long-term, sustainable community partnerships. 

Join this important discussion with Laura Kunreuther, Professor of Anthropology, Bard College, and colleagues, who will discuss a year-long ethnographic research project about interpreting in the humanitarian context of Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya.  

The research was designed to answer the following questions: What is entailed, materially and affectively, in standing between the UN field officer and the local source, speaking in two voices at once, neither of which is “one's own”? What happens, subjectively, when the medium for circulating the voices of so-called "global citizens" is another human being whose labor is often imagined as the output of a machine? What kinds of training programs (if any) have been developed for interpreters within the field, and how is interpreting work imagined by other professional staff in global organizations? At its broadest level, the research explores historical and cultural connections between the invisibility of field interpreters' labor and the bureaucratic ideals of transparency and global citizenship, asking how these ideals are embodied, or not, in the day-to-day work of UN missions. 

Transformed into a virtual mode of ethnography due to the pandemic, the research was conducted with a team of humanitarian interpreters who were inspired to convert findings and research into a narrative film. The interpreters applied to and received their own funding through OSUN to cover the costs of learning filmmaking and producing the film. They then drew on collective research as the interpreters learned the skills of filmmaking to write and create a film that fictionally portrays the daily life of interpreters in the camp.  The film is currently in the production stage and is called "The Bridge." This workshop will discuss the evolution of this project as it evolved from a traditional academic research project to a collective community project of self-representation.  

Co-presenters:
Kamoso Jean Bertrand, Research Collaborator and Director of The Bridge
Adam Mohamad Bashar, Research Collaborator and Cinematographer of The Bridge
Majuto Niyonzima Chouchou, Research Collaborator and Main Protagonist of The Bridge 
Mulki Mohamed Ali, Research Collaborator and Sound Recorder of The Bridge

Other workshops in the series feature leaders in the field of university civic engagement and run each month from February 2022 through July 2022, highlighting innovative community-university research in communities in the United States, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ghana, and Austria.

Learn more about the Engaged Research Fund grants here. 
Learn more details about the workshops here. This is an online event. Register in advance.

Online Event  On Wednesday, March 30, universities and organizations worldwide will lead more than 250 teach-in events focused on ambitious but feasible regional and local solutions to help solve climate by 2030. 

The Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice, a massive grassroots initiative led by OSUN's Solve Climate by 2030 project, invites network members to sign up and present a diverse set of speakers to identify what needs to be done in your state, region, or country to actually stop climate change. Information about each of the Teach-In events can be accessed at this site. 

There is still time to organize your own event so you can help focus your campus and community on local climate solutions! Easy to organize models are available to engage hundreds of people on your campus or in your community in critical dialogue about our future. Click here to learn how to help mobilize a million college, university and K-12 students, as well as community members and faith organizations.

The world's top climate scientists have told us that the time to act is short.  Action taken, or not taken, in the next few years will have impacts for thousands of generations into our human future. Now is the time to focus on feasible, ambitious, local solutions. Sign up for the Teach-In

Online Event  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
12 pm New York l 6 pm Vienna

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA) invites network members to attend the online portion of its "Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure" public film screenings. The series, curated by Nadine Fattaleh, CHRA Fellow, considers the politics and poetics of visibility in the Global South and the complex ways in which moving images of agricultural labor, large-scale dams, and rural dispossession constitute a fragmentary audio-visual archive conversant with the circulation of ideas around Third Cinema.

A network of Ciné-Clubs in Syria, convened by Omar Amiralay (1944-2011) and other veteran filmmakers, were unique spaces for the circulation of politicized images in the age of celluloid. They brought together artists, intellectuals, and enthusiasts interested in watching and debating the relationship between cinema and radical politics.

In the spirit of the Ciné-Clubs, this program will feature short films by Ateyyat El Abnoudy (1939-2018), developing a conversation about innovative aesthetics from the 1970s that mediates narratives of marginalized and exploited communities. The program seeks to recreate an intimate space for dialogue around the transformative possibilities of cinema, then and now, in global struggles around land, labor and infrastructure.

The screening will be followed by a post-screening discussion with Fattaleh. The screening and discussion are free and open to the public.

Ateyyat El Abnoudy films in the screening:

حصان الطين Mud House (1970), 12 min
أغنية توحة الحزينة Sad Song of Touha (1972), 12 min
الساندوتش The Sandwich (1975), 12 min
بحار العطش Seas of Thirst (1981), 44 min
 Register to join this event. 

Online Event  9:30 am – 11:00 am EDT/GMT-4
9:30 AM New York l 4:30 PM Vienna

OSUN's CEU-based Open Learning Initiative, or OLIve, and OSUN’s Working Group on Education for Refugees, IDPs, and Host Community Members present a workshop series for all OSUN educators that examines the practices and pedagogies developed for teaching refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced students, asking how such tools can help educators themselves be better teachers and administrators in general.

This session explores the experience of forced migration through refugee writing and storytelling. We look at the entanglement of literary and legal technologies in the asylum decision-making process as it operates today in juridical, advocacy and creative circles and, in particular, at the narrative constraints placed on forced migrants who must conform to a particular "story" of persecution.

Through readings of literary representations of refugees by contemporary writers, we consider the role of (self) narrativization in the context of humanitarian advocacy and as counter-narratives to dominant media representations.

Agnes Woolley (Birkbeck)
Jeff Champlin (Bard)

Questions? Write to [email protected].This is an online event. Register here. 

Online Event  6:00 am – 8:00 am EDT/GMT-4
6 am New York l 11 am Vienna

OSUN members are invited to attend the University Social Responsibility Network's Webinar Series on “Social Responsibility in Teaching and Learning — What Works?" co-hosted by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and University of Pretoria. 

USRN and other higher education institutions will share effective university social responsibility practices and impact stories, aiming to advocate for wider social responsibility in higher education.

The second webinar focuses on "Community Engagement Using a Hybrid Approach."

Digital media have increased the resources available to universities to develop and implement innovative university social responsibility (USR) projects using hybrid approaches of engagement. This webinar will focus on the USR projects developed by three different Faculties at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, in order to continue with their USR projects, despite the constraints imposed by the national lockdown conditions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The University of Pretoria Law Clinic will provide a presentation focusing on how the Clinic had been able to continue its community interventions through the creation of unique virtual communication and file management systems (parallel to the High Courts’ virtual “CaseLines” litigation system) and a hybrid infrastructure enabling virtual communication with clients. Department of Social Work & Criminology at the University of Pretoria will discuss the following three projects developed for their final-year students: (a) a video on motor skills exercises for learners, (b) podcasts shared on a virtual platform with older persons who had become increasingly isolated during the lockdown, and (c) a virtual support network for health care workers at a hospital using the WhatsApp platform. The Occupational Therapy Department will provide an input on interprofessional and interdisciplinary work coordination in resource-constrained contexts.

Moderator:
Norman Duncan, Vice-Principal: Academic, University of Pretoria

Panelists:
Antoinette Lombard, Head of Department: Social Work and Criminology, University of Pretoria
Eddie Hanekom, Director, University of Pretoria Law Clinic
Helga Lister, Lecturer, Department of Occupational therapy, University of PretoriaRegister to join

Online Event  9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT/GMT-4
9 AM New York l 2 PM Vienna

OSUN partner The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs invites network members to join the Carnegie New Leaders as they explore how tech, AI, and global norms intersect to generate political, legal, and ethical dilemmas.

The event will feature four panelists discussing the future of warfare, and how changing norms shape strategic challenges and tactical decision-making for national security leaders. Philip M. Breedlove - General (ret.), U.S. Air Force Anthony F. Lang, Jr. – Professor, School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews Mary Ellen O’Connell – Professor, Notre Dame Law School Arun Seraphin – Deputy Director, Emerging Technologies Institute, National Defense Industrial AssociationModerated by: Josephine Jackson, Carnegie New Leader InternationalRegister to join.

6:00 am – 8:00 am EDT/GMT-4
6 am New York l 11 am Vienna

OSUN members are invited to attend the University Social Responsibility Network's Webinar Series on “Social Responsibility in Teaching and Learning — What Works?" co-hosted by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and University of Pretoria. 

USRN and other higher education institutions will share effective university social responsibility practices and impact stories, aiming to advocate for wider social responsibility in higher education.

The first webinar focuses on "Civic Learning through a Service-Learning Requirement: Does It Work?"

Service-Learning is an effective pedagogy for nurturing students’ civic awareness and social responsibility, and it is very common to find service-learning programs in higher education institutions. However, most of these programmes are voluntary. Though they have been found to be impactful on students’ learning, students who participate of their own volition may already be somewhat civically inclined.

Less is known about the impacts of mandatory service-learning. Is it possible to mandate civic awareness and empathy? Will forcing students to serve the community backfire? Or, is civic learning no different from the common language, or mathematics requirement, which ensure that even students who are weak in language or maths achieve a basic level of competency?

In 2012, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University took the bold step in instituting a service-learning requirement for all undergraduate students. Today, ten years later, this program reaches a total of almost 5,000 students annually. Students learn about a social issue and a potential solution, are prepared with the skills and expertise to execute their service project, spend 40 hours in direct service to the community, and can reflect and learn from the experience.

This talk will present the results of two studies on this service-learning requirement: (1) how does such a requirement impact students, in particular, the less-inclined ones; and (2) whether this requirement have a lasting impact after graduation.

Moderator:
Daniel T. L. Shek, Associate Vice President (Undergraduate Program), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Speakers:
Grace Ngai, Head, Service-Learning and Leadership Office, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Stephen C.F. Chan, Consultant and former Head, Service-Learning and Leadership Office, The Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityRegister to join

Online Event  9:00 am – 10:00 am EDT/GMT-4
9 am New York l 2 pm Vienna

The OSUN Civic Engagement Working Group is co-hosting an open networking session with the OSUN Solve Climate by 2030 Initiative. Join us to learn more about Solve Climate by 2030 and to discuss best practices on promoting climate action through student leadership and community engagement.

The session is open to all faculty/staff across OSUN and suggestions for future discussion topics are welcome!

This is an online event. Register via Zoom.

Online Event  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
11 am New York l 4 pm Vienna

Nadim Nashif will deliver a keynote lecture and Q&A on "Palestinian Digital Rights Challenges and Violations" for the OSUN Network Collaborative Course on Freedom of Expression.

Nashif is a social entrepreneur and digital rights defender. He is also the founder and executive director of 7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media. He is also a senior policy analyst for Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. For the past 20 years, he has worked on community development issues. 

Questions can be sent to Nadim Nashif in advance by contacting the course faculty lead Kseniya Shtalenkova. Join via Zoom.

Online Event  8:00 am – 10:00 am EDT/GMT-4
8 am New York l 1 pm Vienna

Join the Open Society University Network tolearn how you could study abroad this Fall withOSUN institutions from Dhaka to Bogota andBerlin to Bulgaria.

Representatives from the following participating OSUNinstitutions will be present:
Al-Quds University, Palestine
Bard College of Arts and Sciences, US
American University in Bulgaria
American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan
Bard College Annandale, US
Bard College Berlin, Germany
Bard Globalization and International Affairs, US
BRAC University, Bangladesh
Central European University, Austria
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
University of the Witwatersrand, South AfricaJoin via Zoom

Online Event  9:30 am – 11:00 am EST/GMT-5
9:30 AM New York l 3:30 PM Vienna

Join leaders of the Global Debate Network and faculty from across the OSUN network for a discussion about best practices for using debate and speaking activities in the classroom. Faculty members will be encouraged to share activities and assignments they are currently using in their classes as well as to ask questions and seek feedback from one another. 

This is an online event. Join the meeting here.

With questions or for more information, contact Clarence Brontë, OSUN Global Debate Network Program Coordinator at [email protected].

Online Event  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
11 am New York l 5 pm Vienna

OSUN ExEd Hub invites network members to the fifth edition of its signature Expert Insights virtual series, designed specifically with aspiring leaders and change-makers in mind. The events aim to help young leaders to drive their own personal and professional growth while also driving positive change in their teams, communities and organizations.

The next interactive session features Dalia Najjar, Lecturer, Al Quds Bard College and General Manager, Farouk Systems Palestine, who will hold a crash course in social entrepreneurship and share insider tips on how to succeed as a social entrepreneur.

This event is free for OSUN members.Register here. 

Online Event  6:15 am – 7:45 am EST/GMT-5
6:15 AM New York l 12:15 PM Vienna

With Europe abuzz with talk of war in Ukraine, Mitchell A. Orenstein explores the geopolitical conflict between Russia and the West over The Lands in Between, the title of his 2019 book with Oxford University Press. Since at least 2007, Russia and the West have engaged in a tug of war over countries perched in between, a conflict fought sometimes with military force, but more often by covert means, hacking, disinformation, and other tools of hybrid war. Though this conflict has been going on for more than a decade, many do not see or want to believe it is happening. Now that people perceive open conflict, this talk will explain the rules of this new hybrid war and how it affects countries like Ukraine and those within the European Union.

Mitchell A. Orenstein is Professor and Chair of Russian and East European Studies at University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Join the livestream

Reem-Kayden Center  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
5:30 PM New York l 11:30 PM Vienna
RKC 103 Bard College

For decades, well-meaning journalists and cultural workers used a humanizing framework in their representation of oppressed people, in hopes of countering the traditional portrayal of the Palestinian as a “terrorist.” Within this framework, a perfect victimhood emerged as an ethnocentric prerequisite for sympathy and solidarity, often over-emphasizing oppressed people’s nonviolence, humane professions, and disabilities.

In “Bombs, women, children, etc.”: Humanization, Victimhood, and the Politics of Appeal," an event co-presented by the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts and the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Bard College, Mohammed El-Kurd unpacks the impact of such practices of “defanging,” which reproduce the mainstream cultural order in which Palestinians are robbed of their agency, right to self-determination, and, ultimately, their humanity.

The discussion will be moderated by Ziad Abu-Rish (Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College).

Mohammed El-Kurd is an internationally touring and award-winning writer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. His work has been featured in numerous international outlets and he is currently the Palestine Correspondent for The Nation. RIFQA, his debut collection of poetry, was published by Haymarket Books in the Fall of 2021.

Online Event  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
3 PM New York l 9 PM Vienna

Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) invites OSUN members to a discussion with Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, who will speak on these Holocaust-related issues: reparations for Holocaust survivors (including recent German funds for Russian Jews who survived the two-year siege of Leningrad), on Nazi-era stolen art, and on the work of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Eizenstat was President Jimmy Carter’s Chief Domestic Policy advisor, and it was his recommendation to create the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust chaired by Eli Wiesel that led directly to the creation of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, whose governing Council he was just appointed to chair by President Biden. During the Clinton Administration he was US Ambassador to the EU, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business & Agriculture, and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, while also serving as Special Representative of the President and Secretary of State on Holocaust-Era Issues. In that capacity, he negotiated over $8 billion in recoveries for Holocaust survivors and families of victims from Swiss and French banks, German and Austrian slave labor companies, European insurance companies, the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, and private and communal property compensation. His book Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor & the Unfinished Business of World War II recounts those negotiations. In the Obama Administration, he served as Special Adviser to Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry on Holocaust-Era Issues. He was recently appointed by Secretary of State Blinken to be his Special Adviser on Holocaust Issues. Since 2009, he has been Special Negotiator for the Jewish Claims Conference in their negotiations with Germany. Register for the webinar.

Online Event  12:00 pm – 12:30 pm EST/GMT-5
12 pm New York l 6 pm Vienna

OSUN's Solve Climate by 2030 project invites network member media staff to attend an informational webinar on Tuesday, March 8 on upcoming opportunities to participate in a global social media effort promoting the #MakeClimateAClass initiative. Attendees will learn about placing op-eds in their regional media, and about elevating the profile of their institution as a center for serious discussion of climate solutions.

Please register to attend the webinar here: we will send URL information to all registrants in advance of the meeting.

On March 30, universities and organizations worldwide will lead more than 250 teach-in events focused on ambitious but feasible regional and local solutions to help solve climate by 2030.  The Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice presents a diverse set of speakers who will identify what needs to be done in your state or region to actually stop climate change. 

Information about each of the Teach-In events can be accessed at this site. 

There is still time to organize your own event so you can help focus your campus and community on local climate solutions! Easy to organize models are available to engage hundreds of people on your campus or in your community in critical dialogue about our future. Click here to learn how to help mobilize a million college, university and K-12 students, as well as community members and faith organizations.

The world's top climate scientists have told us that the time to act is short.  Action taken, or not taken, in the next few years will have impacts for thousands of generations into our human future. Now is the time to focus on feasible, ambitious, local solutions. 

Register to attend the March 8 media webinar.

Online Event  11:30 am – 12:30 pm EST/GMT-5
11:30 am New York l 5:30 pm Vienna

OSUN ExEd Hub invites network members to the fourth edition of its signature Expert Insights virtual series, designed specifically with aspiring leaders and change-makers in mind. The events aim to help young leaders to drive their own personal and professional growth while also driving positive change in their teams, communities and organizations.

The next interactive session features Joy Medos, President of the Professional Women Network Vienna and the Founder & Chief Executive Explorer of The Leadership Explorer. She will host a session on “Her Seat at the Table: What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There," sharing practical tips on how to identify and overcome bad behaviors that might be constraining your career.

This event is free for OSUN members.Register here. 

Online Event  10:00 am – 11:00 am EST/GMT-5
10 am New York l 4 pm Vienna

Prof. Anna Lawson, University of Leeds School of Law, will deliver the inaugural lecture for the OSUN program on Disability onnline on Wednesday, March 2nd, 10 am NY time.

In her lecture, Prof. Lawson will provide a macro-level overview of the international legal and human rights frameworks of disability justice and how the social model of disability has been reframed by people with disabilities. The lecture will mark the launch of the OSUN program on Disability which aims to foster an inclusive environment within OSUN institutions for students, faculty, and staff with disabilities.

Event Sponsors:OSUN Disability Justice Working GroupCivic Engagement InitiativeCivic Engagement Network Collaborative Course ProgramJoin this online event via Zoom

Online Event  10:00 am – 11:30 am EST/GMT-5
10 am New York l 4 pm Vienna

Gender-based violence is a heavily politicized issue in India with diverse organizations supporting women’s legal claims. Meanwhile, law enforcement personnel are sexist and have limited abilities to enforce the law.

This discussion with Poulami Roychowdhury, Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University, organized by the OSUN project on Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, asks "How do women claim rights within these conditions? How do rights negotiations impact gender inequality, legality, and state authority?"

Using participant observations and in-depth interview data, Roychowdhury shows how women are compelled to demonstrate “capability” when they claim rights against violence. Law enforcement personnel respond favorably to women who mobilize collective threats and do the work of the state themselves, while ignoring women who are meek and docile. They incorporate “capable” women into regulatory functions, urging them to complete case processing duties, negotiate extra-legal settlements, and deploy violence. The talk urges listeners to reconsider existing theories of law and gender-based violence, arguing that the study of India may provide insights on how law enforcement relates to survivors in other parts of the world.

Poulami Roychowdhury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. Her research focuses on politics, law, and gender. She has published in a range of journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Law & Social Inquiry, Gender & Society, and Signs. In this lecture, she will be talking about her recent book, Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India, published with Oxford University Press in 2021.

This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, an OSUN project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from network institutions to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice. 

Join via Zoom.

Online Event  9:00 am – 11:00 am EST/GMT-5
9 AM New York l 3 PM Vienna

In a recent column in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead writes: "Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has claimed his place in history. Not since Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 has a European leader committed an act of aggression as brutal or as nakedly cynical as Mr. Putin’s utterly unprovoked attack on Ukraine. He has made himself an international outlaw and turned the great nation of Russia into a rogue state.”

But the criminal nature of Russia’s war and the justice of the Ukrainian cause does not guarantee that Putin’s war will fail. Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, it is likely that the Russian war of aggression will reshuffle the post WWII world order and threaten The United States's global leadership.

In this panel sponsored by OSUN and partners at Bard College, Walter Russell Mead alongside Frederic Hof, Malia Du Mont, Maksimas Milta, and Allison Stanger will seek to put the stakes of the Russian-Ukrainian War in context and offer ideas for how the United States and the world can respond. Moderated by Roger Berkowitz.

Panelists

Malia K. Du Mont is Chief of Staff and Vice President for Strategy and Policy at Bard College. 

Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York.

Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, Research Affiliate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, and a Senior Advisor to the OSUN Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. 
 
Frederic Hof is Diplomat in Residence at Bard College. 

Maksimas Milta  is a ReThink CEE Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Moderator

Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights. 

Sponsored by:
OSUN
The Hannah Arendt Center
The Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at Bard College
Bard Center for Civic Engagement
Alexander Hamilton SocietyRegister via Zoom.

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
12 pm New York l 6 pm Vienna

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts welcomes network members to attend a talk by Kendall Thomas of Columbia University School of Law as he revisits “Human Writes.”  "Human Writes" was a 2005 performance-installation about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on which Thomas collaborated with the choreographer William Forsythe and The Forsythe Company.

The cultural theorist Stuart Hall once argued that in the arts “things get said in ways in which they can’t get said in any other domain.” In his talk, Thomas takes the triangulated homonymic relationship between “rights,” “rites,” and “writes” as a point of departure for exploring the uses and limits of “participation” as an aesthetic politics and practice for building a culture of human rights.

Kendall Thomas is the Nash Professor of Law and the Director of the Studio for Law and Culture at Columbia University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1984.  His teaching and research interests are in the areas of U.S. constitutional law, human rights, law and culture, sexuality and law, and critical race theory.  Thomas was a co-editor, with Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda and Gary Peller of Critical Race Theory: Key Writings that Founded the Movement (New Press, 1995).  Thomas has taught or lectured at universities around the world.  An activist, Thomas was a founding member of the Majority Action Caucus of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a vice-chair and board member of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a board member of the New York City AIDS Memorial and a co-founder of Amend the 13th, an educational campaign about the Thirteenth Amendment and compulsory prison labor.  He is also a vocalist who has performed most recently at Joe’s Pub at the New York Public Theater and at the New York Museum of Modern Art’s MoMA PS1.

The talk will be moderated by Dr. Pamila Gupta (University of Witwatersrand).

This is an online event. Register.

Online Event  3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
3 pm New York l 9 pm Vienna

The University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute invites OSUN members to attend a panel discussion on the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), co-founded by Susan Randolph, Emerita Professor of Economics at UConn.

HRMI is a global collaborative venture between human rights practitioners, researchers, academics, and other supporters to measure performance on 13 key human rights metrics internationally. In this workshop, the HRMI team will provide an overview of the methodology underpinning their innovative metrics, demonstrate the rights tracker (a key tool of their impact strategy), and highlight several new endeavors.

Panelists:
Anne-Marie Brook, Co-Founder and Vision & Strategy Lead (based at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Institute in New Zealand)
Annie Watson, Children's Rights Co-Lead (based at Middle Georgia State University)
Chad Clay, Co-Founder and Methodology Research and Design Lead (based at University of Georgia)
Susan Randolph, Co-founder and Economic and Social Rights Lead (based in Connecticut and Oregon)
Matt Rains, Civil and Political Rights Lead (based at University of Georgia)
Thalia Kehoe Rowden, Strategy and communication Lead (based at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Institute in New Zealand)
Elizabeth Kaletski, Children's Rights Co-Lead (based at Ithaca College)

Register here for this online event.

Campus Center, George Ball Lounge  6:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Join us to learn more about the Certificate in Civic Engagement (application deadline: February 27)!  The certificate provides a structured path for undergraduate students interested in deepening their knowledge and understanding of civic and community engagement by merging curricular and co-curricular interests.

Online Event  9:00 am – 10:30 am EST/GMT-5
9 AM New York l 3 PM Vienna

This is the sixth training module in a series on "Designing and Expanding Complementary Education Pathways for Refugee Students" led by the OSUN co-chaired Global Taskforce on Third Country Education Pathways. Together, the modules are intended to build the capacity of relevant stakeholders to design and implement complementary higher education pathways for refugee students. Training modules will address key elements of program design and discuss best practices to address common barriers. 

Session VI highlights different funding models, including the involvement of governments, the philanthropic community, and the private sector and explores the concept of levy models to support programming.

Contact Rebecca Granato of the Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives for more information.This is an online webinar. Join via Zoom.

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Bard Center for the Study of Hate invites OSUN members to join Bard alumna Mengyao Li ’12, a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute, in a discussion on her recent book chapter “Understanding Intergroup Violence and its Aftermath From Perpetrator and Victim Perspectives.” The chapter is from the book Confronting Humanity at its Worst: Social Psychological Perspectives on Genocide, edited by Leonard S. Newman and published by Oxford Scholarship Online.

Mengyao Li’s chapter addresses something that has received relatively little attention in academic literature: looking at the “psychological experiences of victim and perpetrator groups in tandem.” How does in-group identification work, how are beliefs about harm informed, what roles do emotions play, and what are the implications for conflict interventions such as retributive or restorative justice?

Register via Zoom.

Online Event  9:30 am – 11:00 am EST/GMT-5
9:30 AM New York l 3:30 PM Vienna

OSUN's CEU-based Open Learning Initiative, or OLIve, and OSUN’s Working Group on Education for Refugees, IDPs, and Host Community Members present a workshop series for all OSUN educators that examines the practices and pedagogies developed for teaching refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced students, asking how such tools can help educators themselves be better teachers and administrators in general.

This session on trauma informed teaching deals with managing academic demands and the personal stories/needs of students. Facilitators will support participants in making a map of the different contexts and kinds of trauma students with a migration background may have experienced including self-positioning; introduce some of the psychological and physiological impacts of trauma; and share methodologies and exercises for creating a supportive course structure and seminar environment organized around trust.

Ariane Simard (Bard)
Kerry Bystrom (Bard)

Questions? Write to [email protected]This is an online event. Register here. 

Online Event  9:00 am – 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
9 am New York l 2 pm Vienna
 
OSUN's project on Research Collaboration on Technology, Equity and the Right to Health invites members to an in-depth online discussion on the role of the United Nations and governments in driving rights-based use of digital technologies for HIV and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), including reflections from young people.

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed deep-rooted inequalities and systemic weaknesses in health systems. While the potential of digital technologies to support health systems has become evident during the pandemic, access to technology is not equitable, and safety is not a given.

For people living with HIV, key populations, including women and girls, the online world brings new risks of cyberbullying, extortion, marginalisation and discrimination. The Digital Health and Rights Project is investigating these issues through in-depth social science research and has new findings from the first country in the study, Kenya.

Speakers:

Amb. Stéphanie Seydoux, France's Ambassador for Global Health
Tlaleng Mofokeng, UN Special Rapporteur on The Right to Health, OHCHR
Mandeep Dhaliwal, Director, HIV, Health and Development, UNDP
Sara (Meg) Davis, Senior Researcher, Global Health Centre
Tara Imalingat, Programme Associate, KELIN Kenya
Joyce Ouma, Influence and Engagement Advisor, Y+ Global

Register for the conference here.

Campus Center, George Ball Lounge  6:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Join us to learn more about the Certificate in Civic Engagement (application deadline: February 27)!  The certificate provides a structured path for undergraduate students interested in deepening their knowledge and understanding of civic and community engagement by merging curricular and co-curricular interests.

Online Event  11:00 am – 12:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Thursday, February 17, 2022
11 am – 12:15 am New York l 5 - 6:16 pm Vienna

Do you ever feel like you are sabotaging yourself but don't know how or why? We all self-sabotage, and it can be so automatic that we don’t even realize it. When this destructive thinking continues, it causes us to struggle and draws us further into negativity and self-defeat.

Join us for the third edition of OSUN Ex Ed Hubs' Expert Insights series, where speaker Lydia Wazir-Staubmann, OSUN ExEd Hub Director and Certified Resilience Trainer & Executive Coach, will take a deep dive into the concept of self-sabotaging and share proven tools and exercises to strengthen your resilience and re-train your brain to strengthen positive thinking. 

This event is free for OSUN members.Register here. 

Online Event  8:00 am – 10:00 am EST/GMT-5
8 AM New York l 2 PM Vienna

The CommUniversity 2022 workshop series, organized by OSUN and the Talloires Network, showcases university civic engagement approaches (frameworks, strategies, methods, and practices) that have been shown to produce favorable results and that represent a standard suitable for adoption or adaptation.

These presentations are meant to prepare graduate students and faculty to apply for OSUN Engaged Research Funds, which support research tied to long-term, sustainable community partnerships. 

Join this important discussion with professors from the International Medical University (IMU) in Malaysia:

Suan Phaik Khoo, Dean for Community Engagement
James Koh, Head of the Division of Medicine and 2013 MacJannet Prize Winner

Professors Khoo and Koh will share lessons from IMU and its 9-year engagement with the Temuan tribe in Kampung Tekir, a small, remote village 10 miles from IMU's clinical campus. This village birthed IMU Cares, an autonomous entity within IMU overseeing more than 50 projects dedicated to promoting community engagement, community-based research and engaged scholarship.


Schedule:

8:00am – 8:10am : Introduction and purpose of webinar

8:10 – 8:30am : Overview and Perspective of Engaged Scholarship and Role of the University – International Medical University Case (Prof. Suan Phaik Khoo, Dean for Community Engagement at IMU)

8:30 – 9:30am : Community Engagement of a Malaysian Indigenous Community (Prof. James Koh, of the 2013 MacJannet Prize winning program)

9:30 – 10:00am : Q&A and discussion

10:00am: Closing of webinar

Other workshops in the series feature leaders in the field of university civic engagement and run each month from February 2022 through July 2022, highlighting innovative community-university research in communities in the United States, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ghana, and Austria.

Learn more about the Engaged Research Fund grants here. 
Learn more details about the workshops here. 

This is an online event. Register in advance.

Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute invites OSUN members to attend a colloquium on NGO-Scholar Engagement with Zehra Arat & Shareen Hertel.

Zehra Arat is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at UConn. She studies human rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights, as well as processes of democratization, globalization, and development.

Shareen Hertel is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at UConn, jointly appointed with the Human Rights Institute. Her research focuses on changes in transnational human rights advocacy, with a focus on labor and economic rights issues.

For many human rights scholars, human rights is more than intellectual curiosity; it is the motivation for their work. They try to use their research and expertise to improve human rights conditions and work with policy makers and advocacy groups. The work of Arat and Hertel explores the complexities of partnerships between scholars and human rights organizations and groups (HROGs). Focusing primarily on the experience of social science and humanities scholars with a range of HROGs, they identify areas of tension, as well as the political implications of such engagement, marking a critical step toward developing a more formal typology of such relationships that can be used to further explore variation in human rights outcomes stemming from such collaboration.

Register here to join this online event.

Online Event  9:00 am – 11:00 am EST/GMT-5
9 am New York l 3 pm Vienna

The Yehuda Elkana Center for Higher Education at CEU invites OSUN faculty, staff and graduate students interested in short term research visits at CEU in Budapest, Hungary to attend an information session covering the application process for short-term visits to be completed before July 31.

The goal of this small grants program is to support members of OSUN institutions whose research, writing and curriculum development projects will benefit from access to CEU research resources and infrastructure and engagement with CEU scholars. 

Learn more about the grants and apply here by March 1.

Join the Info Session via Zoom.

Online Event  10:00 am – 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
10 am - 1 pm NY l 4 pm - 6 pm Vienna

The Yehuda Elkana Center for Higher Education at CEU invites OSUN members to a symposium on whether and how university teaching and learning, research, governance and outreach should be redesigned to promote the ideal of what Yehuda Elkana called “concerned citizenship.”

Higher education acquired an unprecedented degree of centrality in the public agenda in some places around the year 2000. With this, the idea of promoting public responsibility and citizenship in and through higher education gained more and more traction. Meanwhile, the “golden age of higher education has passed”, we were told, with the Great Recession, at least in the Global North, in terms of continuously increasing enrollment and access; the announced “death of expertise” has further reduced the public’s expectations from, and trust in, higher education’s contributions.

This symposium asks if the ideal of concerned citizenship still legitimate. Is it still on any agenda? Elkana provided us with some of the preliminary answers on how to preserve and promote concerned citizenship in universities: make the study of values a cornerstone of education for critical thinking; create an intellectual fusion of theory and practice; emphasize personal and social responsibility; develop ethical reasoning and a critical and reflexive approach to knowledge. He argued that universities should have the ambition to educate their students in a way that enables them to become “responsible, concerned, problem-aware citizens.”  

This symposium will consist of four thematic panel discussions on the meanings of the “concerned scholar” concept in the areas of teaching, research, governance and outreach.  

Each session will include a debate among invited panelists and an open discussion with the participants: What curriculum for the interdisciplinary training of “concerned citizens”? Training socially responsible researchers. Who are they and what should they do? Should university governance be more “concerned”? Social responsibility and outreach: training “even more concerned” citizens?
Learn more about the symposium and register here. Deadline to Register is Thursday, February 10

Online Event  4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
4 pm New York l 10 pm Vienna

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts proudly presents its first public event of the semester: a webinar discussion called “Everything at Once: Permaculture, Abolition, and Trans Love" with transdisciplinary artist Bhenji Ra, who asks if we can mourn and celebrate at the same time.

Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi (LSE) moderates as attendees learn from the practice of choreographer, dancer, and mother to the Asian Pacific ballroom house, House of Slé. 

Bhenji Ra will be joining us from Sydney, Australia (the stolen land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation).

Join via Zoom.

Online Event  10:00 am – 11:00 am EST/GMT-5
10 AM New York l 4 PM Vienna

OSUN invites all members to attend the first event in the Higher Education in Prison Education Webinar Series for 2022, presented by The Consortium on Education in Prison, the Alliance for Higher Education, the UNESCO Chair in Applied Research for Prison Education, the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, and the Institute for Cooperation in Adult Education.

In this free, online event, panelists will present a portrait of higher education in prisons in the U.S context and discuss its development from a practical and theoretical point of view.

Erin Castro (University of Utah) and Mary Gould (Alliance for Higher Education in Prison) will contextualize why data collection at the national level is paramount to advancing equity and inclusion in higher education in prison and will provide an overview of the research being conducted.

Megan Callaghan and James Kim from the BPI will present the experience and programs of the Bard Prison Initiative and their evolution over the last 20 years.

The panelists will also discuss how these research programs and practical initiatives can mobilize collective expertise, resources and networks in ways that foster pathways and pipelines to college for historically excluded students.

The conference will be held in English with simultaneous interpretation into French and Spanish

This is a free online event. Register here. 

Online Event  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
3 PM New York l 9 PM Vienna

The Bard Center for the Study of Hate invites OSUN members to join Susan Benesch and Cathy Buerger of the Dangerous Speech Project, who will discuss speech as a driver of violence and the potential effectiveness of “counterspeech.”

There are many urgent questions about hate, and what to do about it, especially when it catalyzes violence. Benesch and Buerger will speak on the Dangerous Speech Project's recently released publications, reviewing and evaluating the literature on two such questions: Is speech a driver of intergroup violence? And is counterspeech an effective response to hatred?

This is an online event. Register here. 

Online Event  8:00 am – 9:00 am EST/GMT-5
8 AM New York l 2 PM Vienna

The OSUN Graduate Mobility Program enables student mobility among OSUN institutions, supporting research opportunities for all with a particular focus on "South-South" and "North-South" exchanges.

This information session will review the process for applying for short-term graduate research visits among OSUN member institutions, ranging from five to thirty days and to be completed before September 30, 2022.

Graduate students (Masters and Doctoral level) enrolled at the following institutions can apply for the May-September round:

Al-Quds University / Al-Quds Bard College, Jerusalem, Palestine
American University in Bulgaria, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Bard College Annandale, NY, USA
BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Central European University, Vienna, Austria & Budapest, Hungary
Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South AfricaRegister in advance for the information session.

Online Event  9:30 am – 11:00 am EST/GMT-5
9:30 AM New York l 3:30 PM Vienna

OSUN's CEU-based Open Learning Initiative, or OLIve, and OSUN’s Working Group on Education for Refugees, IDPs, and Host Community Members present a workshop series for all OSUN educators that examines the practices and pedagogies developed for teaching refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced students, asking how such tools can help educators themselves be better teachers and administrators in general.

This roundtable with students and alumni who have experienced displacement discusses university access programs and full time university programs.

The session is meant to be an honest critical assessment of the ways in which universities are - and are not - welcoming and inclusive environments. 

Akileo Mangeni (CEU and OLIve alum) 
Ibrar Hossein Mirzai (Bard College student and OLIve alum)
Akli Habiballah (SOAS and OLIve alum) 

Questions? Write to [email protected].This is an online event. Join via Zoom.

Register here. 

Online Event  8:00 am – 9:00 am EST/GMT-5
8 am New York l 2 pm Vienna

OSUN invites faculty from across the network to attend an Information Session on Wednesday, January 19th about its new Faculty Mobility Program.

Attendees can find out about the current call for applications for Junior, Visiting, Short-Term, and Replacement Faculty Fellowships.

The Faculty Mobility Program is designed to strengthen bonds throughout the network and spur collaboration on teaching, course design, curriculum development, scholarship, research, and civic engagement. These collaborations will foster academic integration, which will in turn expand opportunities for students to engage diverse global perspectives more fully.

Attend the Information Session to find out more about these upcoming opportunities.Application Information on Mobility FellowshipsFaculty Mobility Program Description
Register in advance for this meeting.