Past Events

Take a break from studying to order and enjoy mít khô and nước dừa in Vietnamese, चाय and चकली in Hindi, or szaloncukor and ásványviz in Hungarian! Instructors and students from the Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Center and Pitt's many language departments will teach you how to order in Swahili, German, Modern & Ancient Greek, Quechua, Hebrew, Irish, Chinese, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Ukrainian, and many more of the nearly 30 languages offered at Pitt. Then you can place your order at the Language Coffeehouse and enjoy free drinks and snacks from around the world. Have you ever wondered what sorts of treats people enjoy in Ethiopia, or Montenegro, or Sweden, or Brazil, or how to sign your order at one of Starbucks 11 Signing Stores? Stop by the Language Coffeehouse in the WPU Assembly Room on Friday 2/17 between 11:00 and 1:00 to find out. This is the international study break you have waited a whole pandemic for!
Languages participating in the event: American Sign Language, Amharic, Arabic, Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, Chinese, English, German, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish/Gaeilge, Italian, Persian/Farsi, Portuguese, Quechua, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Please join us for the film screening of What We Left Unfinished, directed by Mariam Ghani, as a part of the CMU International Film Festival.
This award-winning documentary showcases five unfinished films from Afghanistan’s communist era; the screening will be followed by a Q&A session with director Mariam Ghani, moderated by the Global Studies Center's PiNTS Scholar and Visiting Research Faculty in Afghan Cinema and Theatre Habib Sorosh. The featured director is an Afghan-American woman who is a writer, artist, and filmmaker, focusing on spaces in which social, cultural, and political structures and forces engage and take on visible configurations.
This screening is presented by the Center for the Arts in Society, the School of Art, the Kim and Eric Giler Humanities Lecture Fund, the Dietrich College Humanities Scholars Program, the Humanities Center, and CMU International Film Festival.

This is the second event as part of the series Race, Rebellion, and Global Solidarity. The classic 1973 film, based on the novel by writer Sam Greenlee, tells the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first Black CIA officer. The film, directed by the actor and filmmaker Ivan Dixon, follows Freeman through his training in the Central Intelligence Agency, his subsequent assignment as a field officer, and his eventual role as the leader of a paramilitary group engaged in armed resistance against institutionalized racism. There is no registration for this screening.

Join the Student Office of Sustainability, Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, and the Global Studies Center for a student-centered discussion with Dr. Eve Darian-Smith, Chair of the Department of Global and International Studies and is a professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has published several award-winning books focused on global issues. Trained as a lawyer, historian and anthropologist, Dr. Darian-Smith is a critical interdisciplinary scholar interested in issues of postcolonialism, human rights, legal pluralism, and sociolegal theory. Her current work focuses on authoritarianism and crises of democracy. Food and refreshments will be provided!

The Global Studies Center and Postindustrial, a multimedia outlet focused on reimagining industrial communities, is hosting a 4-part series that will allow a small group of students to develop journalism skills while learning about global issues in the context of Appalachia. Students will get the opportunity to learn about podcast production and journalistic writing from Postindustrial journalists that have a wealth of knowledge and experience in reporting on global issues as they relate to our region. By the end of the series, students will have the tools to produce narrative written work, created a podcast episode, and learned about other podcast production techniques. These skills will be situated in discussions about the impacts of the war in Afghanistan, slow violence, and extractive economies featuring conversations with individuals who experienced those impacts firsthand both at home and abroad. This event is solely in person.

The revolutionary prospect of socialism inspired homosexual emancipation and the growth of toleration toward same-sex relations in the first quarter of the twentieth century in many countries, including the UK, US, Hungary, and USSR. However, the development of LGBTQ+ rights within socialism was never linear and even.
The conference seeks to address those discrepancies and the reasoning behind them. It aims to discuss the LGBTQ+ experience and its political, social, and cultural implications under state socialism from a global perspective. What was the place of queerness under socialism? Was socialist ideology generally more responsive to queer people’s agenda and empathic towards them? How did legislation relate to same-sex activity change over time in socialist countries? How did the Cold War and geopolitical tensions between socialist and capitalist counties influence and inform sexual politics toward queer people and their perception? Why did some socialist countries, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the GDR decriminalize homosexuality as early as the 1960s and the Polish People’s Republic never criminalize it? What strategies of networking and concealment did sexual and gender non-conformists adopt in the socialist countries where homosexuality was still illegal, such as Soviet Republics, China, and Cuba? What was the attitude towards gender and sexual dissidents among the left-leaning movements in capitalist countries? Why decriminalization of homosexuality and homosexual emancipation that followed it was subsequently cut off in some post-socialist countries such as Russia?
The main goal of the symposium is to reflect on the broad spectrum of topics related to the conjunction of queer and socialist ideology from a global and comparative perspective. The symposium aims at the broader public, including students, scholars, and activists.

The Global Studies Center and Postindustrial, a multimedia outlet focused on reimagining industrial communities, is hosting a 4-part series that will allow a small group of students to develop journalism skills while learning about global issues in the context of Appalachia. Students will get the opportunity to learn about podcast production and journalistic writing from Postindustrial journalists that have a wealth of knowledge and experience in reporting on global issues as they relate to our region. By the end of the series, students will have the tools to produce narrative written work, created a podcast episode, and learned about other podcast production techniques. These skills will be situated in discussions about the impacts of the war in Afghanistan, slow violence, and extractive economies featuring conversations with individuals who experienced those impacts firsthand both at home and abroad. This event is solely in person.