Events in UCIS

Thursday, April 8 until Friday, April 8

8:00 am Conference
Georgia Consortium: Exploring the Complexities of Vietnam
Location:
Online via Zoom
Sponsored by:
Asian Studies Center
See Details

Register here.

Monday, April 4 until Thursday, April 7

(All day) Symposium
The Human Rights to Housing: A Week with Leilani Farha
Location:
Multiple Locations
Sponsored by:
Global Studies Center along with Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Center for International Legal Education, Department of Sociology, Urban Studies Program, University Honors College and City of Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations
See Details

The Global Studies Center is honored to welcome Leilani Farha, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Adequate Housing, to the University of Pittsburgh as a H.J. Heinz Foundation Visiting Fellow.

Leilani Farha is the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and Global Director of The Shift. Her work is animated by the principle that housing is a social good, not a commodity. Leilani has helped develop global human rights standards on the right to housing, including through her topical reports on homelessness, the financialization of housing, informal settlements, rights-based housing strategies, and the first UN Guidelines for the implementation of the right to housing. She is the central character in the documentary PUSH regarding the financialization of housing, screening around the world. Leilani Launched The Shift in 2017 with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and United Cities and Local Government.

During the week of April 4th to 7th, join us as Leilani takes part in a number of public lectures, student and faculty visits, and meetings with City officials and community organizers to highlight housing as a human rights issue. See a full schedule of events below.

Wednesday, April 6

11:00 am Information Session
Summer EDGE Info Session
Location:
Zoom
Sponsored by:
Global Hub and Global Experiences Office along with College of Business Administration International Programs Office
See Details

The Summer EDGE in Entrepreneurship and Innovation program will take place from May 9-August 6. This is an undergraduate certificate program offered in the College of Business Administration and targeted toward non-business students. Through this curriculum students will be exposed to the mechanics of opportunity creation. These skills include modules on business plan preparation and feasibility analysis, presentation skills, interactive marketing, customer relationship management, and competitive analysis, project management, and leadership. Upon completion of the certificate students will have increased their ability to compete for summer and permanent positions in a wide range of industries and functions. ALL non-business undergraduate students are welcome to enroll.

Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrcOqqrjsjGdOjTE5UhFCucwIvUy_XXJyW

11:00 am Lecture
Great Expectations? The role of universities as civic anchors in place-based innovation
Location:
Posvar 4217
Sponsored by:
European Studies Center and Global Studies Center along with Urban Studies Program and the University Center for Social and Urban Research
See Details

Recent decades have seen increasing demands from policy makers for publicly funded universities to be proactive drivers of innovation and development in the places in which they are located, particularly in less developed or peripheral regions. This has led to a resurgence of interest in concepts such as the civic university in understanding the contributions universities might make to local social and economic development. This research explores, and culminates in challenging, many of the orthodoxies underpinning the policy rhetoric around the role of universities as civic anchors. It contends that a more realistic, honest understanding of the limitations of universities’ contribution as local civic anchors coupled with a more nuanced and context sensitive approach to policy design might lead to more mutually beneficial outcomes for them and the places in which they are located.

Lecture by Dr. Louise Kempton, Newcastle University

12:00 pm Panel Discussion
GSPIA Faculty Panel: Ukraine and Human Security
Location:
Zoom
Announced by:
Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies on behalf of Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA)
See Details

Please join us for a faculty panel discussion on the human security of civilians during the war in Ukraine. The invasion has created an escalating humanitarian crisis in a country of 41 million people, where approximately 10 million people have been displaced (including nearly 4 million refugees so far). Topics will include targeting of civilians; access to power, food, water, medical services; refugees; humanitarian assistance.

Panelists include:

Taylor Seybolt, Associate Professor, GSPIA
Paul Nelson, Associate Professor, GSPIA
Gemma Marolda, Teaching Faculty, Political Science
Svitlana Maksymenko, Senior Lecturer, Economics

Moderated by Luke Condra, Associate Professor & Public and International Affairs Program Director, GSPIA

There will be time for Q&A from the audience.

Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QjJxZqrzSLqSMWMGTSesnQ

12:30 pm Lecture Series / Brown Bag
Expansion and No End? How EU Expansion Kept Changing the Nature of the Union
Sponsored by:
European Studies Center
See Details

Professor Daniel Thomas (University of Leiden) joins Pitt Professor Gregor Thum (History) for a discussion of his recent work entitled "The Limits of Europe: Membership Norms and the Contestation of Regional Integration" and how it outlines the potential expansion of the European Union and what it means to be a member of Europe.

Please register using the following link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/302753522937

1:00 pm Lecture
Libros imaginarios, autores fabulados: La historia literaria segun Jorge Luis Borges
Location:
Cathedral 501
Sponsored by:
Center for Latin American Studies along with Department of Hispanic Languages & Literatures and Borges Center
See Details

This talk focuses on three imaginary writers invented by Borges: Pierre Menard, Herbert Quain and Mir Bahadur Alí, on how the invention of these authors, and the imagining of their literary production, as a way for Borges to invent himself as a new kind of writer in the 1940s, and to reimagine literary history.

3:00 pm Lecture
How Yan'an Became China's Revolutionary Holy Land
Location:
548 William Pitt Union
Sponsored by:
Asian Studies Center
See Details

Yan'an is China's "Revolutionary Holy Land," the heart of Mao Zedong's Communist movement from 1937 to 1947. In this lecture, Joseph W. Esherick, Emeritus Professor of History at University of California, San Diego, will examine the origins of the Communist Revolution in Northwest China, from the political, social, and demographic changes of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), to the intellectual ferment of the early Republic, the guerrilla movement of the 1930s, and the replacement of the local revolutionary leadership after Mao and the Center arrived in 1935. Esherick compels us to consider the Chinese Revolution not as some inevitable peasant response to poverty and oppression, but as the contingent product of local, national, and international events in a constantly changing milieu. To register, go to https://tinyurl.com/pittesherick

4:30 pm Lecture
Healing Landscapes and Grieving Eco-Warriors: Ecological Activism in Children’s Literature
Location:
501 Cathedral of Learning
Sponsored by:
Global Studies Center along with Department of English and Newcastle University
See Details

Children, we are told, are becoming more anxious. But what are they anxious about? Recent studies on “climate anxiety” suggest that the current climate crisis is at the top of children and young people’s concerns and is being expressed in the form of grief. This presentation considers a growing body of climate fiction for children that links personal grief to planetary grief as a way of promoting climate activism. It examines contemporary middle-grade books that include Ali Benjamin’s The Thing about Jellyfish (2015) and Sarah Baughman’s The Light in the Lake (2019), tracing the historical and literary roots of this trend in literature for the young. Beginning in the early twentieth century, an increasing number of materials for parents and educators attempted to “teach” children how to immerse themselves in nature. But, as the archival records produced by children reveal, young people often took charge of their own relationship with the environment. Through an examination of these historical records, Dr Emily Murphy argues for a participatory approach—a method that focuses on co-production between adult and child—to the narration of these experiences as a way of broadening who we identify as young climate activists and recognizing the complex emotions associated with ecological grief.

Emily Murphy is a Lecturer in Children’s Literature at Newcastle University (UK), with research interests in international children's literature, childhood studies, and global citizenship education. Her monograph, Growing Up with America: Youth, Myth, and National Identity, 1945 to Present (University of Georgia Press, 2020), was the winner of the 2021 International Research Society for Children’s Literature Book Award. The book explores the role of the figure of the adolescent in challenging national myths about U.S. identity, and looks at both canonical American novels and young adult fiction, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and M.T. Anderson’s Feed, to support its argument. She has published essays in The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and Jeunesse, and her work also appears in Prizing in Children’s Literature (ed. Kenneth Kidd and Joseph Thomas) and Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media (ed. Vanessa Joosen). Currently, she is working on a new book project entitled The Anarchy of Children’s Archives: Children’s Literature and Global Citizenship Education in the American Century, for which she has received an Ezra Jack Keats/Janina Domanska Research Fellowship from the De Grummond Children’s Literature Collection and an International Youth Library Research Fellowship.

5:00 pm Panel Discussion
Asia Pop: Gamified: Gaming Culture in East Asia Panel Discussion
Location:
Online via Zoom
Sponsored by:
Asian Studies Center
See Details

The Spring 2022 Asia Pop Series explores the growth of the gaming culture across East Asia and its historical implications along with distinguished scholars and experts in the field. Please join us for our last event in the series, a panel discussion led by Dr. Yun-Oh Whang, Clinical Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh, and Dr. Zach Horton, Assistant Professor in Film & Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Register here.

5:00 pm Lecture
Using International Law and Institutions to Support Housing as a Human Right
Location:
Alcoa Room, Barco School of Law
Sponsored by:
Global Studies Center along with Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice, Department of Sociology, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), University of Pittsburgh Law School, Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, University of Pittsburgh's Urban Studies Program, Office of Health Sciences Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, City of Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations and Pittsburgh Human Rights City Alliance
See Details

Many local policy makers and legal practitioners remain unaware of the extensive body of international law and precedent upholding the internationally recognized human right to adequate housing. Farha will discuss this legal context and how the United Nations is working to support governments to do better and more to realize this most basic right for all residents.