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OSUN Student Global Engagement Fellow Sundus Al Fararja thinks that the limited number of women in decisionmaking positions throughout Palestinian institutions is one of the main obstacles to women and girls claiming their equal rights. In 2018, only 5% of representatives in the Palestinian government’s Central Council were women and in 2019, only 11% of the board members of Palestinian universities were women, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. 

Citing these troubling statistics, Al Fararja, a junior studying Human Rights and International Law at Al Quds Bard College, started Womenity Club in 2021, with the mission of educating Palestinian women and girls on their social, economic, and political rights. She hopes that the club’s group discussions, taking place over the two-year duration of the project, will help build self-awareness among students so they can become more socially empowered and can combat gender-based discrimination and violence in Palestinian society. 

Organizing the club with the assistance of three colleagues and 20 volunteers, she aims to mobilize a large group of student leaders (both male and female) who can effectively amplify the voices of women and girls, advocate for their rights, and achieve gender-balanced justice under Palestinian law.

The club’s first sessions took place last fall, focusing on teaching students the foundational tools and methods for conducting effective dialogues about rights fulfillment. Subsequent sessions examined specific rights and the laws that either empower women to claim such rights or the loopholes and deficiencies that stand in their way.

The club’s well-attended discussions grappled with the legal obstacles preventing women from fully exercising their rights to learn and to work; motherhood and paternity and how traditional gender roles imposed on women and men can cause discrimination; and women’s freedom of choice in matters related to romantic partnerships, access to abortion, and ability to travel.

Al Fararja claims that one significant problem with Palestinian Basic Law is that it is partially derived from traditional tribal law and cultural customs, leading to an unclear definition of discrimination against women. In addition, a male-dominated environment in education and in the workforce creates an imbalance that further marginalizes women in those public arenas. 

Al Fararja hopes that the ongoing discussions hosted by Womenity will empower students so they might have enough confidence to bring their appeals for gender equity to the public sphere. Starting in February, club sessions will include discussions on marriage and women’s property rights; custody rights; and political participation.

"In the spring semester, I hope to establish a firm foundation of knowledge for club members so we can use it outside of our meetings,” says Al Fararja. “I aspire to emerge from this two-year project with conscientious student leaders who understand their rights well enough so they can demand them and gain them,” she says.

Find out more about Womenity Club via their website and Instagram.

Recently at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) campus in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 14 student leaders discussed projects they are implementing through AUCA’s Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) during 2020-2022. The various initiatives are coordinated by AUCA’s Student Initiative Development Program (SIDP) and the Afghan Civic Engagement Program (ACEP).
 
SIDP and ACEP were developed in the framework of the Trustee Leader Scholar program at Bard College, another OSUN partner institution, and went full-time in 2017 and 2021, respectively. The aim of both programs is to develop leadership potential and professional skills among students, supporting them in the implementation of their civic engagement initiatives through consultation, individual mentorship, training, and workshops. While SIDP is devoted to developing civic engagement culture and increasing the sense of agency among all AUCA students, ACEP focuses specifically on the Afghan community within the university.
 
Despite challenges the pandemic created, AUCA students have demonstrated great enthusiasm in realizing projects for the public good on both the local and international levels. Out of 25 projects, 11 initiatives are international (i.e., Afghanistan and Tajikistan). In 2021, the “Girls in STEM” project led by a student from Afghanistan helped to remove barriers against young Afghan women accessing college and thriving in STEM fields in Kabul.

Since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, Afghan students have started new projects in Kyrgyzstan with the help of local students, contributing to the development of peer to peer learning. For example, the "Leadership Empowerment and English Advancement Program (LEEAP)" project led by Hawa Taban focuses on preparing Kyrgyzstani high school students for higher education and will be implemented during Winter 2022 in Osh city.
 
Importantly, most of the student projects were sustainable and were transferred from project founders to other active student leaders. During the fall of 2021, the “Basketball for All” project founded by Aidin Turganbekov and the “Central Asian Nomad Youth” project founded by Nurmukhamad Turkbaev continued under the leadership of new coordinators–Saliya Khurova and Erkebai Bakhadinov, respectively. The first project aims to develop an inclusive space for children with autism and with Down Syndrome through weekly basketball practices, while the second seeks to empower young people living in conflict zones (i.e., borderlands) with workshops on civic engagement, educational opportunities, and career prospects.

As these projects show, OSUN partners at AUCA strongly support both the continuation of successful civic engagement initiatives and the conception of novel initiatives by new student leaders.

A group of four OSUN East Africa fellows based at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya recently presented their research on the “Daily Life of Interpreters” at the first international digital conference on “Shifting Power in Educational Aid,” hosted by the Collective on Education, Decoloniality, and Emergencies (CEDE!).  

The fellows–Kamoso Jean Bertrand, M. Niyonzima Chouchou, Adam Mohamed Bashar, and Mulki Mohamed Ali–are also interpreters and refugees living in Kakuma. The team received OSUN Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives Research Fellowships for 2021-2022, as part of the Hubs’ mission to reflect on the challenges refugees face and to support advocacy efforts and programs that serve them.

Collaborating with anthropologist and OSUN-supported Bard faculty member Laura Kunreuther, who studies the role of field interpreters in global bureaucracies like the UN, the fellows are both subjects of her research and researchers in their own right. OSUN supports the fellows’ efforts to make a fiction film based on their research, while an OSUN engaged research grant allows Kunreuther to follow their progress in making the film.

The fellows are also acquiring filmmaking skills from film advisor John Thomas, director of the refugee-led organization Youth Voices of Kakuma. All of these efforts contribute to Kunreuther’s research on the historical and cultural tensions between UN interpreters' invisible labor and the ideals of transparency and global citizenship that the UN bureaucracy espouses.
 
The fellows discussed the educational impact of their research, which looks specifically at the difficulty of navigating being both a refugee who receives care from international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and serving as an “incentive worker” who gets paid to interpret for such agencies. They critically reflected on the problems of interpretation work, noting that humanitarian agencies paying refugees for labor plays a part in impeding the process of decolonization. They also addressed the issue of trauma among interpreters, who must translate and repeat accounts of escape or violence that sometimes resemble their own stories.

As CEDE defines it on its site, “Decoloniality is a way of understanding power in the contemporary world through its connections to historic and ongoing forms of colonialism and imperialism. Decolonial thinkers and activists examine the historical linkages behind the values, beliefs, and forms of violence that produce and sustain present-day systems of oppression and control, such as racism, sexism and patriarchy.”

In the group’s talk, Kamoso Jean Bertrand brought up the idea of the "colonization of the mind" that results from incentive work with humanitarian aid organizations, which he said ultimately devalues the labor of interpreting and creates deep relations of dependence between interpreters and INGOs.

In a simultaneous on-screen chat, one participant responded by writing, "This issue of incentive work is huge and never challenged by INGOs."

The research the fellows are conducting and the film project they are developing are consistent with the Hubs’ mandate to assist refugees as they forge paths to independence. This work also reflects OSUN’s commitment to supporting higher education as a means of exploring the global inequalities related to forced displacement, racism, and the effects of colonization. 
 

Award winners have been announced from the Visual Storytelling for Civic Engagement Film Festival, the culminating event of OSUN's “Visual Storytelling for Student Engagement” fall 2021 workshop. Over 100 students, faculty and interested public from across the network joined the online festival to watch and vote on 19 videos that were painstakingly crafted by students during the semester.

A Story That Eye Witnessed, by BRAC University students Nancy Rualzapar Bawm, Tanzil Talat Anonto, Muntaqa NRB Hakim, Bayazid Hossain, and Antara Farnaz Khan won a total of six awards, including Best Editing, Best Script, Best Cinematography, Social Impact, Best Narration and People’s Choice. With mentorship by Dina Hossain and Elizabeth Costa, the video tells the story of two Indigenous artists in Bangladesh who create art that builds awareness of the plight of marginalized communities in the country. 

The evening’s other award winner was Surviving the Taliban, by Susan Azizi and Nicholas Andersen, from American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan, who were mentored by Nurzhamal Karamoldoeva and Shigofa Jamal. The film features the moving testimony of women refugees who left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover of the country last summer and cites OSUN’s role in helping many escape to safety. The award was presented from Bishkek by OSUN Vice-Chancellor Jonathan Becker. 

Dina Hossain, award-winning filmmaker and lecturer at BRAC University in Bangladesh, served as master of ceremonies for the gala event, presenting excerpts from each of the 19 films. Additional commentary was provided by filmmakers who taught the course, including Adam Stepan, Seamus Heady, Aidan Maloof, Julia Totova, Nurzhamal Karamoldoeva, Shigofa Jamal, Elizabeth Costa and Ulukbek Batyrgaliev, as well as the student filmmaking teams.

OSUN congratulates all the student filmmakers for their outstanding work examining these important issues.
 

In the wake of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban, OSUN partner institutions Bard College and American University of Central Asia assisted Afghan student refugees in their efforts to find safety and to continue their education, writes Levi Bridges for The World. Evacuation from Afghanistan was complicated and required the collaboration of a team spread across Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, and New York. "It was a team operation of incredibly dedicated people who basically didn't sleep for six weeks,” said Jonathan Becker, OSUN Vice Chancellor, executive vice president of Bard College and acting president of American University of Centra Asia (AUCA). For many Afghan students, “the entire rhythm of life ended after Kabul fell—as if someone abruptly hit the stop button on a musical recording,” writes Bridges. But in their newfound life at AUCA, students celebrating at the school’s annual Afghan culture day, hope was still alive. “People must know that there is hope and a lot of happy faces in Afghanistan—it’s not all about killing and crying and the Taliban,” said Anwar, an AUCA student relocated from Afghanistan. Many students expressed a desire to return to Afghanistan in the future to improve conditions in their country.

Full Story on The World

CleanPalCo, a company created by OSUN students at Al Quds Bard that produces sustainable building materials, has won the award for Best Student Company for 2021 in a regional competition throughout the Arab world. Launched by Ahmad Hijawi (AQB '23) and several colleagues after development in the OSUN network collaborative course on Social Entrepreneurship, CleanPalCo competed successfully with 12 other countries in the area.

Hijawi said the course provided him with useful leadership and analytical skills that helped him and his team to find a viable solution to the problems of pollution and a lack of building supplies in Palestine. After much methodical research, experimentation, and peer consultation, the members of CleanPalCo realized they could use discarded rubber tires, stone waste, and water to produce useful household products such as bricks, tiles, and rubber flooring for Palestinian municipalities.

The entrepreneurial competition was sponsored by INJAZ, an independent Palestinian NGO dedicated to enhancing the capacity of Palestinian youth to contribute to economic development. The INJAZ Student Company program runs for a full academic year, during which students from various schools and universities compete nationally to establish and manage genuine companies with limited capital, with the goal of receiving a contract. Successful participants then move on to the regional competition.

OSUN congratulates Hijawi and his colleagues on their outstanding achievement. 

Registration is now open for Spring 2022 OSUN online courses. 

Students from across the network can choose from 45 courses offered by 9 member institutions.

Areas of study include Arts and Society, Democratic Practice, Human Rights, Inequalities, Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Sustainability and Climate.

Some of the multi-disciplinary courses available are:

• Technology and Human Rights in the 21st Century
• Political Communication
• Data and Democracy
• Comparative Approaches to Race, Class and Gender
• Reproductive Health and Human Rights
• Economics for Non-Economists
• Architectural Entanglements with Labor
• Climate, Ecology, and Common Property
• Beyond Bollywood: Mapping South Asian Cinema
• Introduction to Information Security
• Science in Islamic Culture
• Oral History Theory and Methods
• Environmental Anthropology

Are elections actually bad for democracy? Might more participatory forms of deliberative democracy provide a way to help dissolve some of the gridlock around divisive issues such as climate change and police reform? These were some of the key themes recently explored during “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power and Spaces of Freedom,” a conference sponsored by OSUN’s Hannah Arendt Humanities Network (HAHN), a project based at Bard College that supports the integration and accessibility of humanities studies across OSUN institutions.  

Bringing together activists, authors, scholars, local politicians, and students to explore the growing trend of citizens’ assemblies, the conference on the Bard campus in New York’s Hudson Valley attracted over 100 in-person attendees and over 400 online participants. 

As explained in an opening panel discussion by author David Van Reybrouck, a specialist on citizens’ assemblies, elections and referendums are inherently divisive, and tend to “deliver one result, two divided communities.” Citizens’ assemblies, on the other hand, can enable local or national communities to work through their differences, providing a sort of “couples therapy” for the polity. Lasting a few days or several months, citizens’ assemblies convene anywhere from 30 to 150 randomly selected people for roundtable conversations that are facilitated by experienced moderators. After a period of deliberation and consultation with experts, the assembly then votes on final policy recommendations.

The tension between existing electoral democracy and more participatory alternatives was a key theme throughout the conference. Roger Berkowitz, leader of HAHN, reminded attendees that the aristocratic founders of the US political system considered elections a tool for maintaining elite control over a public that should not be trusted. Rather than encourage the type of popular participation exemplified by early American town halls, the US Constitution aimed to limit the engagement of ordinary, uneducated people. Berkowitz offered that citizens’ assemblies might instead be able to revive those “lost spaces of citizen freedom.”

The audience learned of multiple national assembly initiatives and their varying degrees of success. Jane Suiter, of Dublin University, reviewed the history of the Irish citizens’ assemblies on abortion rights and marriage equality, which led to major changes in the Irish Constitution. Helene Landemore, of Yale University, provided the additional example of France’s National Climate Assembly, which demonstrated the power of ordinary citizens to deliberate and even draft new laws, but which also lacked an effective enforcement mechanism. Landemore explained that while President Emmanuel Macron promised that the French Parliament would vote on the assembly’s 146 recommendations, the proposals were instead whittled down to a handful of legal changes, ultimately considered by citizens to be a betrayal of the process.

 While many speakers focused on state-led design of citizens assemblies by governments and experts, Kali Akuno and Masha Gessen spoke to the power of bottom-up organizing to reshape society from below or in parallel to existing institutions. 

Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, an emerging network of worker cooperatives in Jackson, Mississippi, warned against romanticizing early American democracy and citizenship, both of which deliberately excluded and exploited enslaved Black Americans. The American settler-colonial project had slavery as a key economic feature, and much of its anti-democratic design (e.g., the Senate and the Electoral College) continues to shape American politics, he said. Akuno traced the history of the Black assembly tradition in the American South, from the Reconstruction to the Council of Federated Organizations during the civil rights movement of the 60s and on to groups such as the Jackson People’s Assembly, founded in the 90s. Akuno stressed that democracy is something that needs to be practiced, and that without free time and economic resources, ordinary people would inevitably be excluded. Put in starker terms, he said that American democracy not only needs to be revitalized, it needs to be reborn.

Journalist, author, and activist Masha Gessen argued that even in so-called totalitarian societies, there always exists a parallel space where citizens can imagine and create pockets of a democratic society that might later blossom into larger movements. Gessen told the inspiring story of the Workers Defense Committee in Poland under communism during the 1980s, who, rather than retreating into internal exile, sought instead to convene in secret. There they assembled the underground publishers, councils, and independent universities that would later help seed the Solidarity workers’ movement. 
 
In one of the conference’s more provocative moments, Van Reybrouck asked the audience to reflect on the roots of the extremism that led right-wing insurgents to raid the U.S Capitol in January 2021 in an attempt to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. He asked if one of the agitators had been given the chance to speak their mind at a citizens’ assembly, “a place where he could express himself and feel respected,” would such a person still storm the capitol?  Referring to populist anger as a “gift wrapped in barbed wire,” Van Reybrouck asserted that “instead of running away from the barbed wire, we might try to disentangle it.”  

Watch a recording of Revitalizing Democracy and find out more about the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network.

The Open Society Research Platform’s October 1 discussion on “Karl Popper in Critical Conversation: Arendt, Shklar, Berlin, and the Open Society” concluded the project's “OSUN Talks” 2021 workshop series. While the May 25th and June 4th workshops focused on aspects of "open society," the multi-faceted concept which is essential to OSUN’s mission, this event centered on Popper’s seminal text, The Open Society and its Enemies, putting his philosophies into critical dialogue with three other influential political thinkers. 

In his introductory remarks, Christof Royer, of Central European University,  pointed out that the concepts of “open society” and “enmity” remain rather underdeveloped in Popper’s text. Reviewers of the Cambridge Companion to Popper have noted that scholarship on Popper resembles a “closed society,” as it is characterized by a “near total failure” to bring Popper and his concepts into conversation with current thinkers and ideas.  Even OSUN founder George Soros, who was a student of Popper, recently admitted that “It is fair to say that I have placed greater weight on the concept of open society than Karl Popper did.” 

While Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Isaiah Berlin all wrote in a common tradition of anti-totalitarian thought, their works also diverge in important ways. Aside from initiating a conversation between the four thinkers, the panel sought to link the discussion to the present moment, harnessing the ideas and insights of these theorists to address contemporary problems. 

In a wide-ranging and vibrant discussion, panelists broadly agreed that Popper's text continues to be a rich source of philosophical and political insights. For Allison Stanger, of Middlebury College, there are three reasons why the book remains topical and relevant: it allows readers to better understand the global challenges that Big Tech poses to democracies and open societies; it focuses on the elementary question of how to avoid cruelty; and it helps us to deal with the challenges of contemporary identity politics.

Oseni Afisi, of Lagos State University, emphasized how Popper’s commitment to rational conversation and deliberation is so crucial today, noting that Popper’s demarcation between an “open” and “closed” society is useful when applied to African societies and politics. Roger Berkowitz, of Bard College, emphasized that the book stands as a warning against the contemporary retreat from democratic openness and the shift toward totalitarianism. Like Stanger, Berkowitz also identified Big Tech as a serious contemporary threat, as increased reliance on Artificial Intelligence and algorithms diverts influence from the political realm. Despite their different interpretations of the book, all three speakers agreed that one of its greatest strengths is its eloquent critique of historicism – a mode of thought that embraces following prophetic laws of history as means of solving problems in the world.  

Stanger pointed out the striking parallels between Popper’s and Shklar’s thinking: both developed a non-utopian conception of liberalism that seeks to avoid cruelty and to protect the liberty of the individual. Yet Shklar’s important distinction between the “politics of memory” and the “politics of hope” is one not found in Popper, Stanger said. According to Shklar, the politics of memory, cognizant as it is of crimes and atrocities committed in the past, should inform both contemporary politics and liberal education as an antidote to moralistic and hubristic attitudes. 

Liberalism has long been accused of harboring an individualist conception of liberty that threatens to erode the “glue” that holds societies together. Afisi, who focused his comparative analysis on the notion of freedom in Berlin and Popper, insisted that this critique cannot be levelled against Popper. While Berlin famously preferred a “negative” conception of freedom over “positive freedom,” Popper drew on a “relational” conception of freedom–one that is exercised through critical engagement with others. This approach opens new avenues for thinking about the open society that are based on carving out a middle-ground position between individualist and collectivist notions of liberty. 

Berkowitz noted a crucial difference between Arendt and Popper: while Popper clings to a notion of “truth” in politics, Arendt rejected this explicitly and saw the political realm as one of “meaning making.” Moreover, while Arendt celebrated plurality, Popper did not take human plurality seriously enough. As a consequence, Popper’s conception of open society creates a tension between its putative “openness” and its supposed ability to generate particular moral, social, and political values, according to Berkowitz. 

The panelists sketched out a comparative conception of open society that shares Shklar’s aversion to cruelty and respect for the individual but which also benefits from Shklar’s emphasis on the politics of memory. This echoes Berlin’s warnings against “the pursuit of the ideal” as a dangerously utopian political program, but points to the need to explore how Berlin’s “value pluralism” shapes open society in theory and practice. Finally, the critical conversation with Arendt brought to the fore the question of plurality in all its urgency. 

For advocates of open society, the challenge is formidable: On the one hand, open society is neither a relativistic nor an anarchistic idea. Freedom, plurality, and openness cannot be unlimited, and certain lines have to be drawn. Yet if freedom, plurality, and openness are indeed fundamental values of an open society, it is crucial not to draw these lines too narrowly. The question for advocates of the open society, then, is not whether but where to draw these lines. And while this question poses difficult methodological, theoretical, and practical problems, advocates of the open society can no longer afford to avoid them. 

Annually each fall, the Institute for Writing & Thinking (IWT) at OSUN partner institution Bard College offers the Writer as Reader Workshops, a series that has expanded exponentially through IWT's OSUN project, the Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences Pedagogy (CLASP). These workshops provide an immersive experience that breathes new life into the ways educational texts are read and interpreted. Through odd-angled pairings of texts and through generative writing and reading practices, these one-day workshops offer faculty an interdisciplinary path to foster student engagement. The workshops are IWT/CLASP’s most popular programs; faculty note that they find the day long but restorative, and leave with concrete strategies to try out in their own classes. 

This fall, IWT/CLASP offered eight concurrent Writer as Reader Workshops on October 1 and will offer another ten workshops on Friday, November 5. Each workshop section has its own core text that serves as a springboard for new approaches. 

Lynn Clausen, a faculty associate at OSUN partner Black Mountains College (BMC) in Wales, has enrolled in several of the workshops, including “Reading Climate, Writing Change,” which she took in October, focusing on climate-related works by Octavia Butler, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac. Clausen, who has sometimes found aspects of the curriculum she works with to be “prescriptive and limiting,” found the workshops to be extremely helpful in discovering new ways to understand and discuss texts in the classroom. She also looks forward to seeing how things pan out with the new national curriculum being planned in Wales.

In the sessions, instructors were prompted to consider a challenging issue and then write freely about it, first focusing on their personal viewpoints and then contrasting that with what they might teach their students. The two, usually divergent, responses induced each writer to crystallize their own thinking so they could engage more authentically with the effort to address societal challenges.

“A light sort of switched on,” recalls Clausen, flipping the pages of a notebook she filled during a week’s worth of writing-as-reading exercises. “I was suddenly given the permission and the space to sit down and engage in my own thinking.” Immediately inspired, she began using the new techniques with the young people she teaches online.

“I want to share it as far and wide as I can,” Clausen says excitedly of the practice. Also a teacher-trainer, she anticipates sharing the intentional pedagogy with a multidisciplinary set of colleagues at BMC. 

She hopes that her fellow educators from a wide pedagogical spectrum can work together, sharing tools and techniques to more effectively discuss issues such as global warming. “That's where the magic can happen,” she says. “You put a musician with a mathematician, a horticulturalist with a writer and something is going to happen that wouldn't have happened before [...] Finding solutions to problems happens when you allow the space for possibilities to be explored, and already, just with the workshops I have attended, I can see how and where this could be applied and be of great value.” 

Historically, Writer as Reader workshops have been rooted in the humanities. In response to feedback gathered from OSUN faculty and administrators, IWT CLASP has also developed several new offerings that delve more specifically into multidisciplinary practices and texts, including STEM-focused workshops on “Science and Disenchantment” in October and “The Fractal Nature of Our World” in November.
  
Meem Arafat Manab, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at BRAC University—an OSUN partner in Bangladesh, says they were also hopeful about the results of sharing the CLASP/IWT pedagogical techniques with their students in STEM. Manab enrolled in the “Science and Disenchantment” workshop, which explored the writings of Max Weber and other scientific and political philosophers.

Manab says that while students of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics might be adept at successfully learning and carrying out a technical procedure, such as building a database or a website, they are often less skilled at discovering new solutions or understanding the thought processes that lead to such solutions. Manab claims that this is due to the way STEM students are trained to think.

“I've seen people in the humanities and social sciences—they can explain what they're doing—but when it comes to my students, they are almost taught not to think for themselves...That's what motivated me to take the workshop,” they say.

While Manab found the workshop enlightening, they struggled to pass the techniques they learned on to their students; a challenge many faculty encounter given the radically different ways of teaching these workshops present. For example, in a class on software modeling of economic trends, they found students were less interested in creating a model of the Bangladeshi stock market, which has been crashing steadily for the past twenty years. 

Manab asked their students to consider and discuss the problem, hoping further engagement would inspire them to explore potential solutions to Bangladesh’s perpetual economic slump, but the students claimed there was little point in modeling something that seemed hopelessly broken. This moment of disengagement is one that IWT CLASP workshops aim to address—to offer writing strategies that help students reflect on their own thinking in order to push past resistance to a topic or task.

Manab says one thing that might help them to better address their students' needs would be to associate subject matter more closely with the personal experiences of the students. “The techniques that CLASP/IWT employs are always student-centered and they make this task easier, especially for students finishing up their undergraduate studies.” Through the regular use of informal writing, IWT/CLASP practices offer all students a pathway into course materials with which they might not easily or readily connect.

Despite working with very different students and teaching different subjects, both Manab and Clausen found the CLASP/IWT workshops inspiring, even if the challenge of successfully applying their techniques in some academic areas was evident. Both agree that for education to be truly transformative, it must engage students authentically so they can think and solve problems on their own. For this to happen, educators must first get reacquainted with their own thought processes, which is the ultimate goal of any IWT CLASP workshop—to engage faculty experientially as they question and reflect on their own thinking. 

As Clausen admits, “We don't give ourselves the space or time to actually sit down and develop a reflective, evaluative practice and yet we expect our students to. As educators and course facilitators, we're not always necessarily walking the talk.”

CLASP/IWT will offer ten more Writer as Reader workshops on Friday, November 5, 2021. Find out more and register here. 

When Al Quds Bard student Ahmad Hijawi, (AQB '23), set out to find a way to tackle the problems of industrial stone waste and discarded tires in his native Palestine, he had no idea he would also wind up creating useful household products and winning national entrepreneurship competitions in the process. Hijawi says the recycling project he undertook with his colleagues owes much of its success to the skills he developed while taking OSUN’s network collaborative course on Social Entrepreneurship in 2020, as well as the valuable peer feedback he received throughout.

OSUN’s network collaborative courses, co-designed by partner institutions and offered simultaneously at multiple campuses, connect higher education students worldwide so they can share fresh approaches that make a difference in finding viable solutions to pressing social and environmental problems. 

“The class had a great impact on helping me gain leadership and analytical skills, specifically in brainstorming solutions for the problems we wanted to tackle,” says Hijawi. Hijawi found that the methodical research, experimentation, and consultation with classmates in different countries helped his team find a solution that was both viable and innovative. Ultimately, the course’s collaborative processes contributed to the team realizing they could chop up discarded rubber tires then combine them with polluting stone waste and water to produce useful household products such as bricks, tiles, and rubber flooring.

“We not only solved a pollution problem but also produced something useful that could serve as safety padding in parks and playgrounds,” he says.
 
CleanPalCo, the recycling venture Hijawi and his colleagues consequently launched, won the Best Student Entrepreneurial Company Competition for Schools and Universities in Palestine in 2021 and is about to compete against entrepreneurs from 14 other Middle Eastern countries on the regional level. The company is also meeting with many municipalities throughout Palestine who are agreeing to use its services.
 
Hijawi says RebelBase, the web-based software platform used in the course to provide structured steps for learning entrepreneurial skills and to connect practitioners, was another key element in the project’s success.

Eliza Edge, one of several Bard College instructors teaching Social Entrepreneurship, agrees that the globally networked structure and the platform supporting the course were invaluable. “Getting comments and feedback from global peers can help others understand models that might already exist in other parts of the world,” she says. “Knowing that we don't want to recreate, say, a food delivery app everywhere in the world, our system allows us to share examples and ideas from our own lives and worldviews that can be very helpful for thinking outside of the box.”

In its second year, the course is connecting over 100 students from countries across the globe, including Bangladesh, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Taiwan, and the US, creating a brain trust of multicultural interactions that is not available in most classrooms. 

Empowering students with the skills they need to develop practical solutions to problems, like those Hijawi and his team successfully tackled, is a hallmark of OSUN’s network collaborative courses. Multidirectional sharing of knowledge and ideas across boundaries and experiences is the glue that makes it possible. 

By Alejandra Ortiz  (Bard College '22)

OSUN held its inaugural Virtual Student Leadership Conference on October 9-10, giving attendees an opportunity to learn about and develop leadership skills, as well as connect with a global network of like-minded colleagues. Over 140 Students spanning the network, from 21 institutions in 68 countries, attended the online event, participating in workshops devoted to helping them learn more about themselves as leaders and as human beings. (See a map representing the global spread of attendees here.)

Speakers at four workshops focused on different aspects of leadership, including self-care, resilience, goal-setting, teamwork, networking, and time management. On the first day, Jonathan Becker (Vice Chancellor of OSUN) asked students about the meaning of leadership and William J. Barber III (Director of Strategic Partnerships, The Climate Reality Project), asked students to reflect on what is their personal philosophy as a leader and the importance of being a student of history. Barber also focused on leadership as it relates to education, action, struggle, and success within the climate justice and racial justice movements. The last speaker of the day was Jovanny Suriel (Dean for Civic Engagement, Bard College), who discussed goal setting and time management. 

Speakers during the second day of the conference focused on students’ well-being and the importance of intercultural communication among leaders. Kahan Sablo (Dean of Inclusive Excellence, Bard), Annia Reyes (Director of Health & Wellness, Bard), Erin Cannan (Vice President of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard), Sonita Alizada (rapper, activist, and Bard student), Zarlasht Sarmast (Global Fellows Program Coordinator, American University of Central Asia [AUCA]), Nurzhamal Karamoldoeva (Executive Director, CCE AUCA), and Zhamal Dzhumashova (Program Coordinator, CCE AUCA) discussed self-care, teamwork, resilience, and intercultural communication. These sessions successfully taught participants how to deal with the pressures of being a leader.

Many of the students in attendance expressed a strong dedication to improving their leadership skills so they might help solve problems affecting their home countries. Many spoke passionately about their current projects and what they needed to learn so they could reach those goals.

Organizing and participating in the conference gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own leadership skills and to check in with myself. I learned new ways to manage my time, my work, and teamwork and I appreciated that the guest speakers we gathered drew people deeper into the issues being discussed. 
 
Seeing students actively attend conference events and participate in the exercises was a powerful reminder that there are many people who want to see positive global change. These students and future leaders hail from countries all over the world that have complex human rights problems that need to be resolved. To successfully address these issues, leaders are needed–individuals who can motivate those who seek positive change to organize, build movements, and become leaders themselves.
 
Overall, students who attended the conference reported learning new skills such as how to use SMART goals to manage their time and how to work effectively with teams. Many were excited to meet other students from the OSUN Network and looked forward to new opportunities to connect. Serving on the editorial team of the OSUN Global Commons publication is one of many opportunities currently available.

From October 5th-7th, over 3,000 scholars, activists, union representatives, and leaders from progressive private and public sector organizations, representing 85 countries, participated in the Global Forum on Democratizing Work—a worldwide virtual conference sponsored by OSUN’s Economic Democracy Initiative (EDI) that focused on the urgency of democratizing, decommodifying, and decarbonizing work. 

The forum consisted of 130 sessions running nearly 24 hours a day, conducted in nine different languages. Organized by eight prominent women scholars, Democratizing Work featured leading economists, such as Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Dani Rodrick, Jean Dréze and OSUN EDI’s Director, Pavlina R. Tcherneva. 

Echoing the Democratizing Work op-ed turned manifesto that was published one year ago in over 40 newspapers, in 27 languages and 36 countries, the forum established that the central lesson of the COVID crisis is that working people are much more than resources destined to feed rapacious markets.

According to the manifesto, "Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged. How to avoid this unacceptable situation?"

The Global Forum provided the answer: democratize, decommodify, and decarbonize work by involving employees in workplace decision-making, guaranteeing useful employment for all, and marshaling collective efforts to preserve life on the planet. 

A proposal for job guarantees was a central theme throughout all three days of the event, with an emphasis on connecting the right to employment with economic policy. Advocates argued that the guarantee provides a direct approach to securing economic rights by offering a genuine public employment option driven by local communities.

“The job guarantee is one of the very powerful ways to contribute to the decommodification and the decarbonization of the economy,” said Thomas Piketty, author and Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics, in a key conversation with Tcherneva. Pointing out that a “package of solutions” was necessary to tackle inequality, Piketty said that both a job guarantee and a basic income are needed but that the guarantee is “more ambitious” as it offers full-time work with at least a minimum wage. “It also comes with the process of empowering local actors and associations to redefine what economic value is and redefine our priorities.”  

On the subject of unpaid or underpaid labor that involves helping people who have particular problems or special needs, Jayati Ghosh, Economist at UMASS Amherst, noted "To remedy the problem of care work, there is no other solution but public employment–decent, well-paid public employment on a massive scale.” 

“I think there’s a great opportunity now,” said attendee Jean Dréze, economist and social activist, regarding the event. “Judging from the discussions in this forum, there’s an enormous interest in employment guarantees across the world that didn’t exist ten years — maybe even five years ago — except in specialized circles.” 

Watch the conversation with Thomas Piketty here and watch the EDI site for more forthcoming videos from the forum.

Nearly 200 students from Afghanistan, escaping the Taliban’s tightening grip on education, have been safely evacuated from Kabul under an ambitious plan led by OSUN partner institution the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) and the Kyrgyzstan government. About 60 percent of the students, undergraduates and graduates, are women, according to the university.

The overland road trip from Kabul, the capital, to the eastern-border crossing into Pakistan at Torkham, posed dangers as the students journeyed from September through early this month. Students passed through territories where undisciplined and armed Taliban fighters, smugglers and drug traffickers roamed.

The evacuation of students from Kabul was planned and carried out in consultation with the US and Kyrgyz governments. It was led by a team coordinated by Jonathan Becker, OSUN vice chancellor and interim president of AUCA. 

Jalil Sadat escaped Kabul during the Taliban takeover and has settled safely at OSUN partner Bard College after a long and arduous trip from Afghanistan. “A month ago I had never imagined living somewhere else besides Kabul,” he told a reporter from NBC News. His life changed in a matter of hours as he watched Kabul fall, and his family scrambled to find help. His brother had worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan for years, and Jalil was a student at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAf), also an OSUN partner institution. He and his family knew these connections to the U.S. put them in danger. Jalil managed to escape by convincing a U.S. Marine at the chaotic Kabul airport that his life was at risk, but he had to leave his family behind.

Jalil boarded a plane for the first time in his life and left the country. Sleeping on the ground in refugee camps, he made the journey from Afghanistan to Qatar, then Germany, and finally to the United States. When he arrived in Washington, D.C. he reached out to a Bard professor with whom he'd taken online classes as an AUAf student, and asked for help. “Seeing how people are willing to help—it's amazing,” Jalil says. He thinks about his family back in Kabul every moment of the day, and stays in close touch with them. “There is all that feeling of guilt at times ... because of the fact that I'm safe, I'm here, and my family is not.”

In August, Bard pledged to help Afghan students find safe havens to continue their studies and committed to taking in as many as 100 students at its campuses in Annandale, Berlin, and Simon’s Rock. OSUN has helped nearly 200 Afghan students depart Afghanistan and reach OSUN campuses, most of whom are attending the American University of Central Asia, and more students are expected to arrive at other OSUN campuses in the coming weeks.

Last week Bard also signed an agreement with the American University of Afghanistan to develop dual-degree programs for Afghan students in collaboration with OSUN, facilitate student and faculty exchanges, and further support AUAf students who continue to arrive in the US. “The AUAF community is proud to undertake this powerful affiliation with Bard College, and we are grateful to Bard and OSUN for stepping forward with immediate, meaningful aid to the young women and men of Afghanistan who deserve to pursue their studies without fear,” said AUAf President Ian Bickford.

Learn more about the program for refugee students and scholars here. 

By the Editors of The Review of Democracy

October marks six months since the launch of the Review of Democracy–RevDem for short–an intellectual and academic online journal founded by the Central European University Democracy Institute with support from the Open Society University Network.  At RevDem we set out to provide an open platform for discussing and debating the ongoing processes of re-democratization and de-democratization, as well as offering analyses, reflection, and opinion pieces on such developments in Europe and around the globe. This was a challenging task, as there are mixed sentiments about the current need for another intellectual journal. Ultimately, we at RevDem felt there still was a hunger for reflection on what’s happening in democratic societies.  Indeed, the fact that the journal’s readership has grown in the last six months from 20 viewers per day to 200 provides some confirmation of that need.

As a platform for exploring and debating democracy, RevDem gathers the intellectual resources of several European universities and research centers (European University Institute in Lithuania, London School of Economics, Oxford University, and The Delors Centre in Berlin) and shares them within OSUN’s lively network. Five editors and 15 assistant editors manage five sections within the journal, focused on growing intellectual connections and fostering dialogue among researchers, practitioners, and activists worldwide.
 
RevDem looks at democracy in a comparative perspective fueled by ongoing dialogues with historians of ideas and practices. The staff organizes debates on hot issues linked to de- and re-democratization, conducts interviews with key scholars and practitioners, offers reviews of major new publications, and commissions op-eds and longer essays that explore relevant new research initiatives linked to democracy. A large number of younger scholars and practitioners of democracy play a significant role in the editorial work: hailing from Europe’s top universities, they not only assist editors but also record podcasts, suggest relevant topics, and organize debates on select issues and publications.
 
RevDem explores democracy through five key lenses. The history of ideas section (the richest one so far) explores various theories of re- and de-democratization, probing the relationship between democracy and liberalism at the heart of current populist crises and pursuing debates about citizenship. Contributors and interviewees include Jan Werner Mueller on how to strengthen the critical infrastructure of democracy, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti on the Christian Democrat alternative to far-right Christian populism, LaTosha Brown on Black Votes Matter, and Lilli Rutai on the state of feminism in Hungary.

Cross-regional dialogue provides a comparative and transnational perspective, establishing new connections by reflecting on democratic processes around the globe. Hot topics include the Constitutional Convention in Chile and the discontent and possible unraveling of democratic institutions in Tunisia.
 
Political economy and inequalities are two issues central to democracy surviving and flourishing. This section analyzes the interplay between socioeconomic pathways and political change, examining the ways European integration and other forms of shared sovereignty regimes shape democracy at the national and supranational levels. Gabor Scheiring regularly reviews key texts in this area, giving readers a thorough orientation in the field.
 
The Rule of law section reinforces the fact that the most recent processes of de-democratization are based less on physical coercion or violence, but more on new ways to instrumentalize law to diminish political rights and neutralize democratic institutions. This section re-examines theories of Europeanization that have largely failed to forecast or properly address democratic backsliding in the region. Writers such as Petra Bard, Gabor Halmai, Laurent Pech, and Dimitry Kochenov provide key analyses of the regional instances of backsliding that are currently eroding the rule of law. 
 
Finally, the section on the future of democracy in Europe provides a forum for rich debate on innovation and what lies ahead for the continent. New ideas and practices of democracy are crucial to the flourishing of the European project, which is currently threatened by democratic deficits. Right now, the editors are closely watching the Conference on the Future of Europe, an online platform for citizens to debate Europe’s challenges and priorities, with the hopes of formulating strategies for strengthening European democracy. 

The foundation of an online journal always involves learning by doing, especially when it operates on a global level. At RevDem we are therefore gradually learning who is reading our pages and what their expectations are. So far, we have been surprised to learn that beyond Europe, RevDem is also read in the US, South America, and India and not only by academics but also by social activists. This information alone inspires confidence that a live intellectual platform is not only needed but could potentially grow audiences in areas that were previously overlooked. Please join the many debates and conversations now taking place at RevDem.

Two universities supporting the online Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice in March, part of OSUN's Solve Climate by 2030 Project, have won a Swift Grant award from Lever for Change. Bard College and the University of Waterloo will use the grant to engage students and faculty members from all disciplines in countries in Africa. The collaborative project aims to reach more than a million students from all over the globe to learn about climate change, climate solutions, and climate justice. 

The Worldwide Teach-In is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in conjunction with partners worldwide and the Open Society University Network. For the past three years, OSUN’s Solve Climate by 2030 has been supporting globally coordinated education about the climate crisis. The project has engaged hundreds of colleges, universities and high schools– from Malaysia to Minnesota, and from Austria to Alabama– in discussions of climate solutions, across the curriculum.

Targeting participation by a million students across the planet, the Worldwide Teach-in on Climate and Justice event on March 30, 2022 is perhaps the most ambitious component of the project yet, advancing a three-hour teach-in model that maximizes student involvement through faculty leadership. 

“As educators, there is nothing more important than engaging students across our campuses in this extraordinary moment in which we are living,” says Eban Goodstein, director of Bard Center for Environmental Policy and director ofr the Solve Climate by 2030 Project. 

Lever for Change is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation affiliate, whose mission is to unlock significant philanthropic capital and accelerate social change around the world’s most pressing challenges. In May 2021, Lever for Change introduced the Swift Grants fund, aimed to provide small grants to Bold Solutions Network members for collaborative projects. This fund provided an outlet for the world’s top problem solvers to leverage expertise and join forces to find creative solutions in their fields.
 

Roger Berkowitz, noted political scientist and director of the OSUN Hannah Arendt Humanities Network, has been exploring and working to share the debate around sortition and its impact on democracy for the last five years.
 
“Sortition, or the choosing of citizens by lottery to vote on key issues, was central to Greek democracy and democratic theory for more than 2,000 years” explains Berkowitz. “It then fell out of favor in the 1700’s, and was replaced by our current representative democracy. It is now getting new attention as a mechanism for democratic inclusion, often combined with the contemporary tools of digital democracy.”

On October 14-15, the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College will host its annual conference, this year focused on “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom,” giving people from around the world access to informed debate around sortition and its surrounding issues.
 Berkowitz and the Hannah Arendt center have been running the annual Arendt Center Fall Conference since 2006, and this year they have teamed up with OSUN to offer a new and enhanced style of digital meeting, one that will feature in-person presentations, online events, and digital educational assets that can be used before, during and after the live event. 

“We decided to look into ways we could reach a larger audience that can be physically present for our annual event at Annandale.  We had experimented in 2020 with Zoom, but we knew we could do more, and we knew that the OSUN network could be key in these efforts,” says Berkowitz.
 
As they planned the 2021 conference, Berkowitz was introduced to OSUN partner and digital education leader Adam Stepan by Jonathan Becker, Executive Vice President of Bard College and Vice Chancellor of OSUN. “OSUN is expanding its digital presence and looking for new ways to connect thinkers across the network,” explains Becker. “Roger Berkowitz is an important leader in these efforts; he has travelled across the network to deliver in-person talks and has led many online conferences. We felt the sortition project was a great opportunity to pilot new digital tools we are already implanting in network classes and events.”

Adam Stepan is an Emmy-award-winning filmmaker and the director of the Picker Center Digital Education Group at Columbia University, where he spearheads Columbia’s collaboration with OSUN.  Since 2020 he has worked with OSUN students and faculty on digital storytelling projects, video case studies, and pre-recorded “flipped class” videos.
 
“Sortion is an issue that has levels of complexity and nuance, so we felt it would naturally lend itself to a series of ‘TED Talk-style’ lectures,” explains Stepan. “Zoom is a powerful tool, but we all are all facing Zoom burnout. We need to find ways to create high-quality content that can be used to make online digital events more engaging for participants and to help create real online communities around key issues.”
 
The team decided that the conference would feature a new interactive website, with pre-conference videos on key issues that could be watched before live debate begins. During the actual conference, visiting scholars would also record new “TED-style” presentations, so that the post-conference website could become a platform for ongoing learning and debate.
 
Since most people don’t have enough time to watch many hours of post-conference debate, shorter, more focused presentations in the TED style are the most practical solution, says Stepan, because these are assets that people can view and engage with more easily.
 
“During the conference we will invite some of the world’s leading scholars to create and present short video presentations,” explains Berkowitz. “We will then post all the videos to the website post-conference for the general public, and host an ongoing moderated discussion forum, encouraging other thinkers from around the world to join and add their own contributions to the debate.”

Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist, author, translator and activist; Kali Akuno, co-founder and director of Cooperation Jackson; and David Van Reybrouck, renowned cultural historian, archaeologist and author, are among the forty prominent intellectuals who will speak over the two days of the conference. 

“If the idea of sortition is to be democratic and engage citizens, we cannot do this by small in-person events that only a small number of people can afford to attend,” explains Berkowitz. “The in-person interaction and debate at the conference is vital – but we felt we needed to share it widely and offer paths for inclusion of remote scholars and students. We feel these tools can help achieve this.”
 
The 2021 Revitalizing Democracy Conference takes place October 14-15 at Bard College in Annandale, New York. In-person registration is now closed but virtual participation is still open. Pre-conference videos, a list of speakers and registration links can be found at www.sortition.academy.

More than 110 students are beginning their studies at the Socrates Project, a new educational program at Central European University (CEU) and Bard College Berlin providing free university-level courses in Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin to adults who have had limited opportunities to attend college. The OSUN-supported project is a collaboration between CEU and Bard College Berlin, offering undergraduate-level classes in the humanities and social sciences in English, Hungarian, and German to adults in each respective city who are under-resourced economically and in other ways.

“With the Socrates Project we are serving the local communities around our institution in that we're both expanding what an educational institution offers to the wider public and dissolving the boundary between the university and the broader community,” says Socrates Project Director Aaron Lambert. 

On March 30, 2022, OSUN's Solve Climate by 2030 Project with Bard College and other global partners are organizing a Worldwide Teach-in on Climate and Justice, targeting participation by a million students across the planet.

“As educators, there is nothing more important than engaging students across our campuses in this extraordinary moment in which we are living,” says Eban Goodstein says, director of the project and of Bard's Graduate Programs in Sustainability. 

For the past three years, Solve Climate by 2030 has been supporting globally coordinated education about the climate crisis. The project has engaged hundreds of colleges, universities and high schools– from Malaysia to Minnesota, and from Austria to Alabama– in discussions of climate solutions, across the curriculum. The March 30, 2022 event is perhaps the most ambitious component of the project yet, advancing a three-hour teach-in model that maximizes student involvement through faculty leadership. 
 

OSUN’s Enhanced Network Teacher Education Capacity (ENTEC) project and the Master of Arts Teaching Program at Al Quds Bard recently held well-attended workshops at Al-Istiqlal University in Jericho and Dar Al-Kalima Evangelical Lutheran School in Bethlehem that focused on the promotion of advanced pedagogic skills for educators. While the ENTEC workshop in Jericho was conducted in preparation for Palestine's participation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the seminar in Bethlehem addressed the implementation of higher thinking skills for more than 80 teachers and ten ENTEC mentors.

Mentors are MAT graduates who have been trained in advising and guidance practices as well as teaching methods. Cross-campus mentorship is a crucial part of the ENTEC project, which also supports partnerships between Bard MAT alumni and MAT candidates at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 

The aim of the mentoring component is to increase capacity and help teachers improve learning outcomes where such progress is needed most. In the Bethlehem session, participants learned from mentors about the practical applications of cultivating advanced thinking skills, such as analysis, evaluation, critical thinking, and creativity. 

Mentees have found that such collaborations allow them to successfully situate their analysis of their own classrooms within a broader perspective of research on action interventions, such as teaching methods and lesson plans, designed to enhance learning environments and results. Often they wind up being mentors themselves.

Maram Da’boub says her experience being mentored while she worked on her MAT has nurtured in her enough self assurance so she can now mentor three English language teachers. “The ongoing capacity-building opportunities AQB offers to its graduates, alongside our former MAT professors’ trust in us as teachers, has helped me develop self confidence so I too am capable of mentoring other teachers,” she says. Da’boub, who has instructed teachers for eight years, says “sharing this experience is awe-inspiring and rewarding.”
 
Da’boub says the program has allowed her to help mentees engage with more modern teaching strategies, assessment tools, and different research methodologies that will equip them in their M.A. studies. “I am looking forward to sharing more experiences with my mentees and witnessing the awesome progression they will achieve in the rest of this mentoring journey.”

Mentor Fatima Mafarjeh says that mentoring and directing new or previously under-qualified teachers toward professional training is fundamental in preparing them for their careers.

“In my ENTEC mentoring experience, I have encountered teachers who are super passionate and excited about their role as educators; however, they often lack a background in teaching methods or they might just be inexperienced,”  says Mafarjeh. “And in an online and blended teaching experience, even greater intervention and guidance is needed. As one year of mentoring has already passed, I feel proud that I have been helpful to my mentees.”

For Eban Goodstein, Director of Bard’s Center for Environmental Policy and OSUN’s Solve Climate by 2030 project, the global climate crisis will only be solved by ongoing mobilization and activism. So in the fall of 2020, he and his colleagues began Solve Climate 2030, a massive online project launching a social media campaign with hundreds of schools across the country, including the creation of 200 social media channels and over 100 webinars.
 
Then in the summer of 2021, Goodstein and OSUN invited Columbia University filmmaker and digital education innovator Adam Stepan to run an open-to-the-public version of their OSUN “Visual Storytelling” class that focused specifically on training environmental activists in video production. 
 
“We had great success in the fall of 2020 running a social justice digital production class across the OSUN network, and had created pre-recorded video lessons that showed each step of the filmmaking process,” explains Stepan. “We felt sure that today’s media-savvy young activists could make fantastic films on climate issues if we provided the needed support and framework.”
 
Stepan invited a team of other filmmaker/activists to co-teach the class with him, including Kynan Tegar, the award-winning 16-year-old indigenous filmmaker from Borneo; Paul Redman, from the activist filmmaker organization If Not Us Then Who? and Julie Tumasz, of Build.org.
 
“I thought climate activists might really appreciate having experienced activist filmmakers as mentors. I know Kynan, Paul and Julie from other projects, and we thought it would create a great dynamic to have cohorts of ten or more students, each mentored by different filmmakers,” Stepan explains.
 
The class built on the OSUN Network Collaborative Course model and changed it up to use pre-recorded “flipped class” videos which students watched outside of class, followed by intense weekly large group sessions on Zoom, and then smaller Zoom breakout rooms dedicated to discussing individual projects. 

Instructors decided to run the six-week class as a competition and all films were screened and voted on at an online festival held at the course’s end. After commentary from a panel of hosts and judges, four films were awarded $500 prizes, funds that could be used to benefit local climate campaigns. 
 
Students from a diverse set of backgrounds took the course, ranging from teenagers in high school to climate activists in their 70’s. Some had limited film or photography experience, but most were new to filmmaking. Students joined from over 12 different countries.

New filmmakers included Helena Robinson, a high school teacher from New Orleans, who made New Orleans Flash Floods – Wading Through, a personal film about flooding and climate change, featuring her family and neighbors. Her neighborhood was once again flooded in the wake of Hurricane Ida in August of 2021.

 Clement Cupido's film Living on Faith in a Changing Planet tells the story of the Namaqualand pastoralists in South Africa, who face drought and other challenges due to global warming. A rangeland ecologist and amateur photographer, he had never studied documentary film technique. “The class allowed us to go step-by-step through the process of planning and filming; the combination of online training with consultations with our mentors worked extremely well,” Cupido says.
 
Topics ranged from activist music videos, such as the powerful Carbondale is On Fire; to stories of political activism, such as The Eyes Behind Frontline Resistance, by Lina Salas from Colombia; and personal stories such as Noe: Saved or Developed by Cassie Danton, which profiles the battle to save a New Jersey pond from housing development. All the videos and filmmaker bios can be seen on the project website.
 Award winners included Save The Sundarbans by Amrita DasGupta of India, an exploration of the plight of people living in mangroves near Kolkata, where climate change and rising sea levels have placed humans and tigers on a collision course. The audience gave the video awards for best cinematography and script and editing, which Dasgupta will use to help spread awareness of the situation in the Sundarbans and support the creation of new livelihoods for the people who live there.
 
Rashid Shahriar won the Climate Activism in Media Award for his video The Story of Bottle Light, about a Bangladesh-based research and innovation social enterprise that supports the creation of solar lights and street lamps using recycled bottles. 
 
“It was thrilling to see such a diverse group of activists and filmmakers come together,” says Stepan. “Over six weeks, the group formed a real community, viewing and commenting on each other’s projects, and providing great support. The pre-recorded video training allowed key learning to take place offline, so class sessions were dedicated to interaction and active peer-to-peer interaction. We feel it’s a strong model for collaborative learning, and look forward to running new versions of the class using this format.” 

“We need authoritarian-proof higher education models.” —Kyaw Moe Tun

Kyaw Moe Tun, OSUN project leader and president of the Parami Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, published an article in Times Higher Education discussing the need for authoritarian-proof higher education models in Myanmar. Following the military coup, faculty and students fear the end of a budding modern higher education system. Bard is an OSUN cofounder and partner of the Parami Institute

Open Society University Network has signed on to an urgent appeal to President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas to work closely with Congress to take immediate action in admitting Afghan evacuees into the United States within the next 30 days.

The letter asks that the United States fulfill its promise to "provide safety and security to Afghans who have stood alongside us for the past twenty years" in the war against the Taliban and "ensure that our Afghan allies do not languish in legal limbo abroad waiting for an opportunity to restart and rebuild their new lives."

The letter explains how the small number of US allies that did manage to escape Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover face a web of bureaucratic and punitive legal processes that will greatly delay entry into the United States.

"Our allies are exhausted and traumatized, and many are separated from family and friends who are anxiously waiting to welcome them. We cannot further abandon them by leaving them in limbo abroad, at risk of having to wait for years to enter the United States—or, worse, be returned to Afghanistan," explains the letter.

Many evacuees are being held in dire conditions on military bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and Germany, while others wait in third countries such as Albania, Rwanda, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan that will soon close their borders.

The full letter recommends that:
1)     All evacuated Afghans and those with pending immigration applications be paroled by US Customs and Border Protection into the United States within a maximum of 30 days. 
 2)     The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services commit to the creation of a designated humanitarian parole program to guide and expedite the review of parole petitions for additional at-risk Afghans. This program should include pro-democracy activists, journalists, women’s rights activists, human rights activists, children, and LGBTQ persons.
3)     The administration pay specific attention to expediting the reunification of separated Afghan families. 

Through Bard College, OSUN is now accepting scholarship applications from students from Afghanistan who are experiencing displacement.

This article was originally published in Karin Fischer's latitude(s) newsletter.

Heartbreak and What You Can Do: How Higher Education Can Aid Afghanistan

An Afghan student studying abroad fears for the safety of siblings still at home. A university president works to evacuate students from Afghanistan and find them places to study. Higher-education groups raise emergency funds.

As the precipitous and tragic crisis in Afghanistan unfolds, students, scholars, and researchers are vulnerable. For years, the Taliban has targeted academics and universities in its attacks. In particular, it has opposed the education of women and girls. 

Some American colleges are erasing any mention of past collaborations with Afghan colleagues from their websites or social media out of fear that such western ties could make them Taliban targets.

Jonathan Becker, the acting president of the American University of Central Asia, has been scrambling to try to get endangered students out of Afghanistan. “The stakes are high for all students but especially for young women who won’t be able to pursue higher education under the Taliban,” he said. “These are women who are smart, who are empowered, who are extraordinary.”

Working with the Open Society University Network and Bard College, where he is also vice president for academic affairs, Becker has persuaded universities to host displaced students and raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay for chartered airplanes. Bard will take as many as 100 students as well as threatened scholars. But a big challenge remains: how to get visas for the students to go to other countries.

In recent days, Becker got some good news: The government of Kyrgyzstan, where AUCA is located, has pledged to issue 500 visas to students from Afghanistan. Now, he hopes other countries will do the same. “It’s a sprint to get these students out.”

I’ve also been in contact with Afghan students who have shared heartbreaking and harrowing stories. One student who is studying abroad told me how much she worries about her sisters who are still in Afghanistan; they have lost their chance to study, to work, to live their lives, she fears. Another told me that her family has gone into hiding. “We are not sure about tomorrow,” she said.

I hope to tell you more about these amazing students, but for now, they worry that revealing even minor details could put their families at risk.

One of them asked me to appeal to you: Urge your elected officials to advocate for the presence of troops in Afghanistan, she said. Lobby the U.S. government not to recognize the Taliban government unless it guarantees human rights and women’s rights and refrains from persecutions based on ethnicity, gender, language, and religion. Ask humanitarian and media organizations to remain in Afghanistan.


Through Bard College, OSUN is now accepting scholarship applications from students from Afghanistan who are experiencing displacement.

After 40 years in prison, Gregory Mingo was pardoned on August 23, along with several other incarcerated people, in one of Andrew Cuomo’s last acts as governor of New York State. Last fall, Bard College student Seamus Heady produced a video for OSUN’s inaugural Visual Storytelling Workshop that depicted the longstanding advocacy efforts of the grassroots group seeking clemency for Mingo.

Mingo has served the greater part of a 50-year sentence at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in New York State for a crime he maintains he did not commit. In fall 2020, Heady and other students enrolled in a Bard College course on human rights advocacy worked with CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create a short video that was filed with Mingo’s official application for clemency. Heady then went on to create a second video with his own production crew that served as a "digital case study" for the OSUN workshop. “Bring Them Home: The Fight for Clemency” provided a less clinical take on the case, including emotional interviews with Mingo and members of his grassroots advocacy group of family, friends, and carceral justice activists. 

Heady says the second video allowed him to humanize the arduous process of the appeal for clemency, “giving some of the perspective of Mingo’s family while they were going through this fight and struggling with bureaucracy and feelings of loss and grief.” 

Heady says it is difficult to put into words the feelings that the pardon has stirred up, particularly after Mingo's bid for clemency was at a dead end as recently as last winter. When he found out last December that Mingo’s appeal had been denied, “my heart sank at that moment.” When he got the news this time around that Cuomo had granted clemency, he was “overwhelmed, overjoyed” but found it "difficult to process the emotions in such extremes.”

Heady has since gotten some emails from members of Mingo’s advocacy team that included brief comments from family members, who are all struggling to articulate their feelings. “For the family this is something greater than anything they could imagine.” 

The OSUN Visual Storytelling Workshop, cotaught by filmmakers Adam Stepan and Sean Steinberg, trains students across OSUN to use inexpensive tools, such as smartphones, to create “digital case studies” of the research and civic engagement projects they undertake for OSUN network courses.

OSUN’s Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative has joined 45 other scholar protection groups and organizations in signing an urgent appeal to European governments and EU institutions to take immediate action toward safeguarding the lives and careers of Afghanistan’s scholars, students, and civil society actors.

As explained in the appeal, signers, including the Scholars at Risk Network (SAR), the PAUSE program in France, and the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, are racing to offer assistance to researchers, scholars and civil society actors in Afghanistan whose lives and livelihoods are now at risk due to the Taliban takeover of the country. 

These groups and organizations are asking European governments and EU institutions to continue evacuation flights from Afghanistan for as long as possible and to increase resettlement quotas to help those in need of international protection. Among other measures, they also ask for dedicated EU and national fellowship schemes for scholars and expedited complementary legal pathways for candidates who demonstrate an existing host institution, job, or sponsor. 

“The eroding situation in Afghanistan poses a threat not only to the lives of our colleagues still in Afghanistan, but to the future of that country,” reads the appeal. “The European higher education community is ready to do its part, but we need your help. If we move quickly, we can go a long way towards mitigating the worst of the threats and demonstrate continuing commitment to the future of Afghanistan and its people.”

Read the full appeal and list of signers here.

Eva Gedeon, Director of the CEU-OSUN Summer University, recently sat down for an online interview with Bonnie Goad, OSUN Director of Communications, to discuss the program’s history, vision, and what’s in store for the future. 

OSUN Summer University is a great opportunity to work as a team on developing and piloting new curricula, bringing together students, scholars, practitioners and community advocates in an intensive collaborative learning experience. OSUN provides funding for SUN courses, covering the costs of development and delivery of the courses, tuition waivers, stipends and travel support for OSUN affiliates. 
Learn more about submitting a proposal for the 2022 OSUN-CEU Summer University. The OSUN-CEU Summer University 2022 course proposals deadline has been extended to September 1, 2021.
  
BG: Let me start by asking you, because you've been doing this for a long time, how did the CEU Summer University get started?

EG: I've been with the program since 1997 so it's quite a while. It was started just a year before I came to CEU and the reason it started was really to enhance CEU’s mission through this outreach program. The original idea was to generate more knowledge and research projects.  The program originally targeted the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe and then the effort was expanded to enhance access to existing knowledge and scholarship, which many of these countries had been deprived of. There was even a book donation program because people were starving for knowledge and books.

The original idea was to meet the existing scholarship, which was largely one-directional from Western to Eastern scholarship. As time went on, it became more of an experimental ground for research and cooperation and the outreach was more global, where people applied from every corner of the globe. It’s the same today.

BG: Many universities have summer programs. What makes this one different?

EG: It’s really an extension of CEU into the larger community. We want to give other people a taste of CEU. The program also helps faculty to connect and work more intensively on a project during the summer school or to forge new relationships. 

What makes it different is exactly this team element, it’s not one faculty offering a course. It's a real team approach. So there can be a group of five or six or seven people working and teaching together. That’s rather different from the model of most summer schools. Very often, because it's a team, there's a chance to be multidisciplinary so it's not just one narrow discipline but a multidisciplinary union with a 360-degree look around the world and within those fields. And that's exciting.

CEU SUN is typically one or two weeks of intense work so, as one student said, “it’s an incubator of ideas.” It can be very stimulating because you hear ideas and perspectives from a lot of people, which sparks new ideas and deep critical thinking.  

BG: This past year, everyone has had to make a transition to online teaching due to COVID. How has that impacted the experience for the faculty and for the students? 

EG: That’s where OSUN has really been instrumental. If it hadn't been for OSUN, I don't think we would have been successful in making this transition. OSUN helped faculty to see that they could do this and also provided the extra funding for the preparation. It was a big jump in the first year but by the next summer the whole world had learned what Zoom is. Everyone is so much more proficient but the support gave us the resources to train faculty and to realize that despite the loss of being together in the same physical space, we can do even more than we realized. 

No doubt, that act of being together, of continuing a conversation at a bar or over dinner, has always been an important part of the SUN learning experience. But we can see that so many people who would not have been able to come to Budapest because of the cost have been able to participate online. So that is something we have to consider for the future. We had a very successful online mediation course this summer, for example, where there were deep emotional ties that developed during the breakout rooms. They did a lot of simulation exercises with rich discussions and developed strong bonds. 

BG: You've had a big transition during this time but also experiences that sound like they were incredibly powerful and really speak to the original mission of outreach in a way that you had never envisioned. So what are you hoping for in 2022?

EG: Well, we are hoping to become more aligned within the OSUN network and with other projects. Perhaps a SUN course can be an exploratory phase of a larger project or as a pilot to test an idea and see how it works before developing it into a larger project. A SUN course could also be the dissemination phase of a larger project.

BG: That sounds like a great opportunity. So if I'm a faculty member at an OSUN partner and I have an idea I'm incubating, what should I be thinking about if I want to submit a proposal for a course next summer?

EG: We’re really happy to help nurture an idea, discuss it together, and identify possible partners and, where appropriate, a CEU faculty member to contribute to the team. Faculty members can contact me directly. 

BG: Terrific. Anything else you wanted to share?

EG: So many of our students have talked about how they are not only learning from the faculty but from each other. That's very exciting. We have these very mature students and professionals in the same group. What they learn from each other is unique because the students are very diverse in terms of geography, age, experience, and disciplinary background. And there's a lot of exchange going on. They tend to hang out after classes – including the faculty. No one flies in, teaches the course, and flies out. They are here for a week or two and spend almost 10 hours a day together in each other's company. The learning that takes place outside the classroom is very powerful.

As the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan proceeds, multiple OSUN partners, including the American University of Central Asia, Bard College, and the American University of Afghanistan, are working intently to evacuate students and scholars to safety. Jonathan Becker, Vice Chancellor of OSUN and Acting President of AUCA, shared the following letter with the AUCA community and offered commentary on the situation in a recent article by George Packer in The Atlantic.

As Becker's letter points out, while some progress has been made, OSUN continues to work to assist its colleagues and friends in Afghanistan, and continues to express solidarity with Afghan scholars across the globe during this troubling time.


Dear American University of Central Asia Community:

While we all watch with concern the quickly evolving situation in Afghanistan, I want to express on behalf of the AUCA community our deep concern for our Afghan students and their families and friends and Afghan students across the Open Society University Network (OSUN), particularly at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAf).

We are working now to find safe havens for students and graduates.  I met with more than 80 Afghan students yesterday, and we have active communications going through various forms of media.  Several weeks ago, we opened a special scholarship program for Afghan graduates of AUCA, and we have offered to host many AUAf Embassy Scholars through an academic exchange program.  Bard College has offered to take in as many as 100 students, as well as threatened scholars. 

We are heartened by and thankful for the bold decision of the Kyrgyz government to extend visas to 500 Afghan students across the country.  We want to salute this generous humanitarian initiative, which stands in stark contrast to the tepid steps we see some others taking.  Numerous commentators in the U.S. and Europe have praised the Kyrgyz initiative, and have held it up as a shining example for others to follow.  

We have informed our students still in Afghanistan that we will honor their scholarships whenever they can make it to Bishkek.

Herculean efforts are taking place through the Open Society Foundations and other NGO partners to arrange for planes out of the country, but conditions in Afghanistan, and in particular surrounding the airport in Kabul, have made our efforts far more difficult.  We are working day and night on this issue, liaising with governments, NGOs and anyone we believe can help our students.  AUCA’s vice presidents, the international student office, the alumni affairs office and many others have worked tirelessly on this issue and I wish to thank them here.

AUCA will continue to work to support its students in Bishkek and through OSUN, the Open Society Foundations, and other partners to find ways to welcome to Kyrgyzstan the students to whom we have made scholarship commitments. 

What is taking place now in Afghanistan is a tragedy.  It affects students and colleagues we have educated and worked with over many years.  We stand with the Afghan students from AUCA, AUAf and across the globe.  

Yours cordially,

Jonathan Becker
President
AUCA

Last month, Bard College and the Open Society University Network sent out a call to Afghan graduates of American programs in Afghanistan and the region. Immediately 120 replies came back. “I had a student this summer who had to miss class because ‘the Taliban surrounded our town.’ She indicated to me her final paper would be late because a bomb blew up her house,” Jonathan Becker told the Atlantic’s George Packer. “This is a tragedy of epic proportions.” After reading Honorable Exit, Thurston Clarke’s account of efforts by individual Americans to save their Vietnamese allies before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Becker realized how little time was left. In recent days Bard and Open Society have appealed to universities in the region to host Afghan evacuees, and to foundations and board members to pay as much as $400,000 to charter flights out of Afghanistan. “In many cases we have institutions to host them. Colleges, universities, and funders are stepping up,” Becker said. “That is not a problem. The challenge is the time to get people out and get them visas into those countries.” Jonathan Becker is OSUN vice chancellor, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard.

The most successful K-12 teachers are scholars of their practice as well as their discipline. In the Master of Arts in Teaching Programs at American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Kyrgyzstan, Al-Quds Bard in Palestine, and Bard College in New York, all candidates learn to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their lessons by reflecting on student work, mining the current research literature for ideas and best practices, developing a revised course of action, and studying the results. Variations on this cycle of classroom research play a role not only in MAT coursework, but also in the capstone research projects at each site. The projects differ in emphasis and structure depending on local needs, but they share the common goal of instilling in MAT graduates a sense of the value of teacher-led research.

As part of the Enhanced Network Teacher Education Capacity project (ENTEC), supported by OSUN and led by Bard MAT, alumni of the Bard MAT program are advising candidates in the AUCA MAT as they research and write their capstone projects. The collaboration not only enhances capacity through a cross-campus sharing of human resources, but it also enriches the projects and the work of students and faculty alike. 

Having taught for many years in K-12 settings, and having completed doctoral level studies in education or their discipline, Bard alumni involved in the project during 2020-21 are eager for the opportunity not only to guide teacher research, but also to benefit from the cross-cultural experience that the OSUN setting offers. 

“It was great to see [my advisees] deepen the questions they investigated and use their own research to improve education in Kyrgyzstan,” says John Shekitka, Assistant Professor at Manhattanville College in Harrison, New York. “The OSUN collaborations are definitely a model for future educational partnerships in our increasingly globalized world.” 

Peter Joshua Hatala, Director of Curriculum and Innovation at the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, also noted the value of “connecting our two worlds through this cross-cultural exchange.” 

Bard MAT alumni got a glimpse into the reality of schooling in the Kyrgyz context; while the AUCA MAT candidates were able to situate their analysis and articulate their insights within a broader perspective of research on interventions (teaching methods, lesson plan, other activities) that teachers design and implement in their own classroom to improve the learning environment and learning outcomes.

Like their advisors, the AUCA MAT candidates appreciated the opportunity to work across campuses and cultures. Many of them spoke enthusiastically about the guidance they received. Zalina Satylganova wrote, “Thanks to the questions (my advisor) asked regarding some ideas in my findings, I could better analyze, unpack, and make them accessible to readers.” 

Versaviia Gura attested to the ways her advisor’s modeling allowed her to learn to “look at pedagogy with a critical eye,” a central goal of the capstone project. Nazima Abdybekova described her advisor as a “lighthouse” that kept her from “drowning” in the information that she had to navigate, and Aiperi Arystanbekova wrote that “cooperative work with my advisor made my research paper interesting, original, and academically strong.” Altogether, fourteen AUCA candidates worked with Bard alumni and faculty in 2020-21. 

The project will continue with a new cohort of AUCA candidates in ENTEC’s second year. Based on feedback from the first year, candidates and advisors would benefit from a longer engagement that brings the Bard advisors on board earlier in the process. Tamo Chattopadhay and Derek Furr, MAT directors at AUCA and Bard, respectively, are currently working on a timeline that will start the next round of projects in the fall of 2021.
 

Erica Kaufman, Director of OSUN’s Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences Pedagogy (CLASP) and the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking, recently shared her thoughts on CLASP's new fellowship program, a two-year professional development opportunity for early and mid-career OSUN faculty interested in writing-based, student-centered liberal arts pedagogy. What follows is an edited version of her comments.

Can you explain what the Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences Pedagogy is and what it does? 

CLASP is an OSUN project established by the Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT). IWT offers professional development workshops for faculty around the world with a focus on writing-based teaching and critical reading and writing practices. What CLASP does is slightly different: it makes available regular workshops, which are usually quite expensive, to an international network of faculty who might not normally have access to pay for them. CLASP also offers a full spectrum of pedagogical workshops beyond writing that focus on teaching in the liberal arts tradition; student engagement and motivation; how to hold classroom discussions; and ways to design syllabi and assignments, so students feel like they have a choice in their own education.

Can you tell us how the fellowship came about and some of its goals?

The Fellows Program has always been intended to be the core of CLASP’s work; however, OSUN and our project began in the midst of a pandemic so we had to shift gears pretty quickly to assist faculty who were suddenly teaching online. The fellowship was postponed and that was actually great because it gave us a chance to hear more from our partners about what they needed. 

The program will produce two results. First, it generates trained fellows with expertise in liberal arts and sciences pedagogy and embeds them in campuses across the network. Second, the fellows themselves will be researching the kind of liberal arts pedagogical practices that succeed in their own classrooms at their own campuses. So we'll both be training faculty to increase support across campuses and we'll be generating new research and scholarship on the pedagogy that we practice. The program also prepares the fellows so they can continue to facilitate workshops on their own campuses and collaborate to develop new workshops that bring OSUN faculty together around pedagogical topics.

What can educators expect from engaging with the fellowship?

We hope the fellows who apply will be faculty who are not brand-new to an institution, who are maybe early to mid-career. We are particularly interested in faculty who are in positions where they're committed to their OSUN partner institution and will be there for a while. We are also excited to welcome faculty from across all disciplines, so this is not something that's just focused on the humanities.

The nuts and bolts of the program revolve around the monthly online workshops that are spread throughout the academic year and cater to what the fellows want. We hope to convene in-person at an OSUN partner site in Europe in January and then at Bard in Annandale in July, pending COVID.

The first year is really the training year and the second year is the content year, when we begin to move towards a mentoring, research, and experimentation model. Fellows will be intentionally trying out strategies in their own classrooms, identifying a research project that they're exploring, and then bringing that to our sessions for feedback.

In the second year we will also bring on a new cohort of fellows, so there will be a mentoring opportunity for the already experienced fellows. And we're going to use Brightspace (a cloud-based learning platform) which will allow us to build up a collaborative archive of materials that can be used for future online modules.

The mentoring aspect of the fellowship is really interesting and innovative–sort of a built-in model of sustainability.

OSUN adds a whole new range of different kinds of institutions and faculty expertise to the conversation. We really feel it's important to collaborate with our partners and offer them the support they need to be thinking seriously about what it means to teach in an interactive, student-centered way in different contexts.

It seems collaboration is key in that the program welcomes educators from many different disciplines and it is also collaborative across institutions. 

Our workshops are best when we're learning from the people in the room and I think that ethos is represented beautifully by all that OSUN stands for and does. Let’s say a Spanish-speaking university is interested in learning more about writing-based teaching. My hope would be that through the fellows program we have people within the region or school who could create and lead the workshops themselves.

I feel context is so important. One of the goals we have is to really build this contextual, intercultural knowledge and begin to think about what are best practices in liberal arts education that is intentionally and authentically global and culturally sensitive. I'm not interested in bringing any particular pre-made model to a new context. Instead, we want to build something new with the faculty we work with.

The call for the fellowship says the commitment is intense. So it’s important that fellows be able to commit to contributing to this project going forward.

The thing that I’m increasingly fascinated by is that in the field of writing-based teaching there is little research on how these practices work on a global level and beyond English-language learning. So it seems everything that we're doing as a network should be written up because it represents a significant contribution to the field of writing studies. That’s something I feel incredibly excited about.

From my experience, doing this work and teaching myself, I know that the growth that students experience when faculty move from a more faculty-centered to a student-centered teaching model is really significant and really surprises faculty. So I feel like the capstone research project and year two is something that can have a real impact on the field of thinking about global higher education.

Do you see the program as a workshop of sorts for establishing a “COVID-era” way of learning?

Absolutely. I think that being pressed to teach online very quickly invited faculty to perhaps pay more attention to what they do in the classroom. Teaching online is really very hard sometimes as there are so many wild cards in play. Now you have to sit down and plan and really think about the practice of teaching intensely. And we’re obviously very lucky in that we have a network of educators who care deeply about their students and about what it means to teach in a college or university environment.

I also think that, as faculty are returning to in-person classes, there's going to be a ton of excitement. And so I'm hoping that this will enable us to really build and create a stronger collaborative bond across campuses by virtue of the fact that we're all doing this thing that we care so much about.


Accepting applications until August 30, 2021, the CLASP fellowship runs on a cohort model with 20 fellows joining each year. Fellows come from a range of disciplines and institutions across OSUN’s global network. Educators who have completed the fellowship will be equipped to offer their own intensive workshops in pedagogy, cultivating future generations of OSUN faculty so they can in turn lead blended workshops and collaborate with colleagues at partner institutions. 

Apply to the CLASP Fellows Program by August 30, 2021

In July, Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, Executive Director of the Foundation for Knowledge and Freedom (FOKAL), a Haitian NGO, and the former Prime Minister of Haiti from 2008-2009, spoke at a summer class on “Civic Engagement in Challenging Environments” taught by Jonathan Becker, OSUN Vice Chancellor and Erin Cannan, Vice President for Civic Engagement, Bard College. 
 
Pierre-Louis examined the mass protests against state corruption and repression currently taking place in many countries across the globe, discussing how students and other individuals living in such distressed countries can still effect political and social change. With students attending the virtual class from Haiti, Myanmar, Swaziland, and Albania—all places that have recently experienced political turmoil amidst other ongoing social challenges—Pierre-Louis’ valuable insights focused on students’ agency and the benefits of renewed civic engagement. 

Pierre-Louis said that in places such as Algeria, Belarus, Brazil, Hong Kong, Sudan, and the US, mass mobilizations had been triggered by corrupt governments, systemic inequalities, authoritarianism, racism, and the denial of minority groups’ rights. Such problems motivated activists to emerge from their private spheres and enter public spaces to speak out collectively against injustices. 

“Collective interests and the collective risks taken to defend them are key in the mobilizations,” Pierre-Louis pointed out. Mostly younger protestors, emboldened by shared experiences of physical, institutional, or political repression by their governments, have taken to the streets to demand their civil and political rights. In this way, the sense of mutual responsibility that is the hallmark of civic engagement has been translated into citizens assembling on a purely voluntary basis to bring about the social transformations they desire. 

Another factor in the surge of public protests is the popular conception that traditional politics is synonymous with crime and corruption. As this opinion pervades public consciousness, civic engagement can act as a process to restore confidence in politics as a legitimate tool for transformation.

“Civic engagement challenges authoritarianism,” stated Pierre-Louis, while the opposing phenomenon of “political disimagination” discourages citizens from envisioning and building a more positive future together. Pierre-Louis explained that disimagination occurs when a centralized government power restricts civil and political liberties and a deceptive, homogeneous narrative begins to permeate public discourse.  Social inequalities also feed into these trends, abrading the social fabric and coercing the public into apathy and withdrawal from political involvement.

Despite this “vicious circle” where social inequalities can lead to weak political culture and polarization of society, such adverse conditions can also cause civic movements to emerge, sometimes taking the form of civil disobedience. 

“Civic engagement is a way to rescue the political imaginary,” added Pierre-Louis. The audacity of students and other young activists who espouse direct political action surprises government officials, creating a ripple effect on the streets and online. These phenomena spark greater numbers of citizens to engage in collective actions aimed at regaining their capacity to participate and recover the right to a political future.

Pierre-Louise made it clear that while civic engagement can act as a catalyzing agent for political renewal, it requires citizens to believe in a shared human condition. This sense of a common interest spurs citizens to take the risk of transforming a belief into action, with the hope that reentering the public sphere might eventually lead to improved living conditions. 


 

Recently, OSUN's Hannah Arendt Humanities Network, Central European University (CEU), and the Institute for Human Sciences awarded Helga Nowotny, former President of the European Research Council and Professor Emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, the first annual Yehuda Elkana Fellowship.
 
During the award ceremony at CEU in Vienna, Nowotny delivered an insightful keynote lecture that was livestreamed to a global audience, addressing the ambiguities surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms.
Watch video of the lecture here. 

The lecture was followed by a four-day workshop on artificial intelligence and the digital humanities that drew on Nowotny’s forthcoming book, In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion, and Control of Predictive Algorithms. Scholars attending the workshop hailed from a wide array of network institutions, including CEU, Asheshi University in Ghana, Bard College in the US, Birkbeck College in the UK, BRAC University in Bangladesh, The Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, and American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan.
 
Nowotny’s address and the workshop discussions focused on a series of paradoxes regarding the limits of human certainty. Nowotny and the scholars established the fact that people have always yearned to know the future and master their fates. AI and predictive algorithms offer people the uncanny knowledge that gives useful insights on phenomena as diverse as the weather, the economy, and human behavior. With this unprecedented ability to predict the future, the demand for certainty grows, even though human life itself remains irrational and unpredictable. While artificial intelligence is deployed to simplify and master the world, artificial intelligence also makes the human world more complicated.
 
Nowotny and the scholars agreed that what people too often neglect to ask is: How does the desire and conviction to know the future–and the increasing ability to predict the future–affect humans? What happens to humans–­fallible, passionate, unpredictable beings–when they put their trust and faith in AI and algorithms to predict and plan the future?
 
Several of the scholars warned against overestimating the power of artificial intelligence; they also worried that misplaced faith in and over-reliance on AI could foreclose future possibilities instead of creating new ones. One common theme was the concern that AI predictive algorithms might become self-fulfilling prophecies. In contrast to the yearning for certainty that is promised by AI there also exists the need for celebrating human fallibility and embracing uncertainty.
 
The scholars discussed the fact that new advances in machine neural networks allow machines to make judgments and explanations at the same capacity as humans. This raised the question of how to nurture human values in a world where ever-more corporate, social, and political decisions will be made by or alongside artificially intelligent neural networks.
 
The scholars also examined the question of what it means for humanity to retain meaningful control over the world, which led to yet another paradox: as people seek more control over their environments, the more they find that is beyond their control. For example, as expectations of safety rise, the desire for an ever-more complicated reliance on artificial intelligence emerges. As people turn to machines to regulate behavior and thus provide more security, they inevitably discover new and greater risks tied to the very tools at their disposal.
 
Nowotny’s central theory of the human desire to gain certainty and security through the use of artificial intelligence and the ever-more complicated relationship with technology provided rich fodder for the workshops building on her digital humanities research. Scholars drew on a wide range of knowledge and experience to address the paradoxes she introduced, clarifying some of the human impacts of technological advancement.