With each global health crisis, the interconnectedness of populations around the globe becomes more pronounced. Diseases not only affect the health of communities, but they have a profound impact on political, economic, and social stability within countries and regions. This course engages the interdisciplinary nature of global health by approaching the issue through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) developed by the United Nations. The SDGs range in focus from good health and well-being to gender equality to clean water and sanitation to affordable, clean energy. By engaging the ways that health has a stake in these goals, the course will bring the expertise of faculty from the University of Pittsburgh and CMU as well as practitioners to understand and address the issue surrounding global health from a myriad of perspectives and avenues. With an applied focus, the course will assist students in engaging and advocating for a community on a global health issue through a policy memo. This iteration of the course will examine gender equality and SDG #5.

Ari Tobi-Aiyemo will explore the status quo patriarchy in Africa in the context of African women and the law profession.
Over the past decade, the development agendas of many governments across the globe focus on women empowerment. These agendas venture through halls of discriminatory laws, practices, traditions, and cultures that have been unfair to women, especially African women. It is indisputable that African women have come a long way in their circle of life–from a place of biased laws, customs, and cultures– through thorns of cultural, social, and legal pressures, to glides of assertiveness. Typically, African girls grow into women of substance, power, affluence, and influence. They are not laid-back figures. They find their way to education and compete in what is often referred to as the world of men and make their way through law school. These women do not just end in getting diplomas, they pursue careers to practice law either in the private sector–as private Attorney, Founder and Executive Director of Civil Organizations or NGOs, Attorney in humanitarian practices, rendering pro bono services. Alternatively, these women also practice law in the public sector as judges, public servants, DAs, Prosecutors, Law teachers, and legal consultants. Hence, to a large extent, the journey through the circle of life of the African woman is filled with different forms of deprivation, discrimination, and disregard until today.

Ari Tobi-Aiyemo is a Ph.D. Candidate of Judicial Studies in the University of Nevada, Reno. She is a retired Magistrate-Judge from the great judiciary of Lagos State, Nigeria. She has interest in social justice, law, jurisprudence and human rights.

Hub Talks are a new programmatic series in which faculty can share their research and promote upcoming courses and receive interdisciplinary feedback in a casual setting.

Katie Manukyan has taught Russian language and literature in Pitt's Slavic department since 2011 and is the Managing Director of the Summer Language Institute (SLI). She maintains an active career in music as a soprano and a diction coach and collaborates with many opera companies and other performing arts organizations including Pittsburgh Opera and Pittsburgh Festival Opera. She is a leading expert in Russian lyric diction and a promoter of vocal performance in the Russian language and will be performing the role of Parasha in Stravinsky's "Mavra" at the Pitt Global Hub on March 28-29.

Manukyan's talk will cover the performance history of Stravinsky's one-act opera, "Mavra," and give an insider's perspective on producing this challenging work in Pittsburgh. "Mavra" will be staged on March 28-29 in the Pitt Global Hub by the Neighborhood Project with support from the Nationality Rooms Program, the Year of Creativity, and REEES.

Sean Guillory is the Digital Scholarship Curator in the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and host of the SRB Podcast (https://srbpodcast.org), a weekly podcast on Eurasian politis, culture, and history. He is currently producing a 12-part audio documentary on African Americans, communism and the Soviet Union told through Lovett Ford-Whiteman's life tentatively titled "The Reddest of the Blacks."

In Guillory's talk, he will tell Fort-Whiteman's little-known story as one of the first African Americans to join the American Communist Party and a key player in shaping its positions on race, racism, and African American equality in the 1920s and 30s. He was arrested in the Soviet Union during the Great Terror in 1938 and sentenced to five years in Sevvostlag in Kolyma, one of the harshest forced labor camps in Stalin's Russia, where he died six month later. Fort-Whiteman is the only known African American victim of Stalin's terror.

Ever since Deng Xiaoping effectively de-radicalized China in the 1980s, debates have swirled around which path China would follow. Would it democratize? Would it embrace capitalism? Would the Communist Party's rule be able to withstand globalization and the internet? One thing few seriously considered: Mao Zedong would make a political comeback. This live interview with Jude Blanchette will discuss the return of the populist enthusiasm for the Great Helmsman's policies, and what it means for the present and future of Chinese communism.

This event is part of the Socialism: Past, Present, and Future Pop-Up Course.

Register to attend here: https://pitt.zoom.us/meeting/register/upQlf-yqpjgqOn6gS4WXNDTFXM_H0kVbOg

Please note this language table is now meeting via Zoom. Contact Julia O'Hare (jho3@pitt.edu) for more information.

Portuguese Language Table

Please note this event is now meeting online. Join via Zoom: https://pitt.zoom.us/j/466509031
Contact Benjamin Brand (bmb145@pitt.edu) with any questions.

Join professors and students from the Department of German and practice your language skills!

Please note this event has been canceled. Contact Emily Fogel (ehf11@pitt.edu) with any questions.

Practice your Hebrew at our weekly language table!

Practice your Turkish language skills - all levels welcome!