Events

Pittsburgh’s Coro Latinoamericano—one of the nation’s only secular choirs performing in Spanish—is teaming up with the First Unitarian Universalist Choir & students at Duquesne University’s Mary Pappert School of Music for a special holiday concert—Paz y Armonía (Peace and Harmony), Sunday December 16 at 3:00pm.

Location: First Unitarian Church, 605 Morewood Ave., Pgh, PA 15213.

Admission is free although donations will be accepted.

The concert is family friendly; the venue is handicap accessible.

Please be sure to submit the registration for your school by 12/20/18 to participate in the 2019 Model African Union Conference!

Students should continue researching country specific information while focusing on the agenda topics of climate change and displacement. Determine where your country stands on the issues listed in the agenda, any challenges they face, and suggestions to overcoming these obstacles.

As part of a collaboration between the Yasuda University students at the ENGLISH LANGUAGE INSTITUTE and the ASIAN STUDIES CENTER, we will be hosting the second Seijin Shiki at the University of Pittsburgh.
We would love to have Pitt students participate. If you are turning 20 years old this year (April 2018-April 2019), we invite you to be a part of the ceremony. Visit this link to register or for more information, please email asia@pitt.edu by December 7, 2018.

Finland’s education system consistently ranks high in the OECD’s annual Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, prompting U.S. educators and education reformers to ask “What can the U.S. learn from Finland?” In this installment of our monthly roundtable series, the ESC has invited education experts to discuss this question and explore issues impacting student achievement in both countries. Join us for this virtual roundtable to go beyond the op-eds and blog posts for a richer conversation on education in Europe and the U.S. Audience participation is encouraged.
To participate remotely, contact irm24@pitt.edu

The 2013 Bosnian census figures reported by the central government contain an over-count of approximately 150,000, a number greater than the population of the third-largest city in the country, and probably due to mainly to illegal registrations of non-residents in strategically important parts of the country. While EUROSTAT had devised procedures to ensure a more accurate enumeration, the leaders of the three main ethno-national political communities had opposing interests in counting non-residents, illegally, as residents. This analysis of the 2013 Bosnian census will show that like an election, a census can be stolen by manipulating how data are counted, despite international efforts to prevent such a result.

Salmaan A. Keshavjee, Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Presenting to University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Keshavjee's research spans four areas: (1) multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) treatment and policy; (2) health-sector reform and access to health care and medical technology in transitional societies, with a special focus on countries of the former Soviet Union (Central Asia and the Russian Federation); (3) the role of non-governmental organizations in globalization and the formation of trans-border civil society; and (4) modernity, social institutions, civil society, and health in the Middle East and Central Asia. In addition to being an active clinician, his methodological expertise is in ethnography, participant-observation, and qualitative interview techniques.

Begin to expand your research from your specific country to looking at neighboring countries to determine how climate change and displacement affect the region as a whole.

Please ensure that the $10 registration fee per student is submitted to the African Studies Program by 2/1/19!

Brown Bag is a monthly seminar for faculty to learn about the research currently going on at Pitt in the area of migrations. Each month a faculty member will give a presentation about their ongoing research projects or an introduction to their research agendas. Students and faculty are encouraged to attend.

The Model African Union is a simulation of the proceedings of the African Union, amplified by pre-conference study at home institutions and Embassy briefings in Washington, D.C. at Howard University in collaboration with the African Union Mission in Washington, D.C. and Member State Embassies sponsors this annual simulation of the African Union, the regional organization of African states, in the form of a Model African Union Conference. This is an opportunity for university and college students to study the role, structure, and activities of the African Union as well as the economic, social, and political-security issues facing African countries. Through simulation, students gain a better and clearer understanding of the capabilities and constraints that shape the policies of African Union member states in the arena of intra-African diplomacy on issues of mutual concern.

Begin drafting a 1-2 page policy brief on behalf of your country in response to agenda items 1 and 2 that you will use when working with other Member States in drafting the final conference resolution in April.

Patricia Ehrkamp, University of Kentucky Department of Geography
Presenting to University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Ehrkamp's research considers how immigration changes contemporary European and U.S. American cities and polities. She has argued that in order to understand immigrant geographies research needs to consider how immigrants and non-immigrant residents in cities of the United States and of Europe create spaces of everyday life, and how these new spaces of everyday life shape wider debates about citizenship, belonging, inclusion and exclusion. Her recent work on debates about minarets and mosque construction projects in Germany and Switzerland examines how understandings of secularism, religion, and gender shape contemporary liberal democracies in Europe.

Brown Bag is a monthly seminar for faculty to learn about the research currently going on at Pitt in the area of migrations. Each month a faculty member will give a presentation about their ongoing research projects or an introduction to their research agendas. Students and faculty are encouraged to attend.

Share your research with other undergraduate students! Get real feedback on a paper! Gain conference experience for work or graduate school! Interested? Then send an abstract to a biannual undergraduate research conference hosted by the Modern Languages Departments at the University of Pittsburgh on March 2223, 2019. Abstracts should be sent to mecchia@pitt.edu by January 5, 2019.

The papers should address the concept of cultural migrations in the broadest sense of the term, that is, immigrations and emigrations in real and virtual spaces linked to the movements of people(s), language(s) and culture(s). We are looking for multiple disciplinary, geographic, and historical perspectives on the conflicts and opportunities created by the shifting flows of populations, languages and cultural traditions throughout the ages and in the contemporary world.

The language of the conference is English but we welcome papers addressing Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian languages and cultures.

Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Katelyn Knox, Asst. Professor of French at the University of Central Arkansas, author of Race on Display in 20th and 21st Century France (University of Liverpool Press, 2016).

Topics could include:
▪ Multilingual societies and their conflicts ("language wars") and advantages
▪ Linguistic landscapes and their evolution
▪ Translation as a political tool ▪ Literatures of the diaspora
▪ Circulation of texts through multiple areas and in multiple languages
▪ Travel literature through the ages
▪ Exiles, migrants, and refugees
▪ Processes of acculturation
▪ The politics of cultural production
▪ Films and the problems of cultural translation

Papers should be twenty minutes long. Papers will be selected by a selection committee staffed by undergraduates from the University of Pittsburgh. Students who submit abstracts will be notified about acceptance by January 20 2019. All inquiries can be directed to Prof. Giuseppina Mecchia, at mecchia@pitt.edu.

Limited travel subsidies will be available!

Dr. Harcourt Fuller is an Associate Professor at Georgia State University. His lecture is titled: Maroon Queen, Mother of the Nation, & “Science Woman”: Using the Physical, Social and Metaphysical Sciences to Interrogate the History of Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Maroons.

Final preparation and review of your country's position, policies and aspirations leading up to the MAU Conference.

The Soyuz Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary forum for exchanging work based on field research in postsocialist countries, including Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Africa, East and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Soyuz is an interest group of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and an official unit of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). The Soyuz symposium has met annually since 1991 and offers an opportunity for scholars to interact in a more personal setting. More information on the Soyuz Research Network can be found at http://soyuz.americananthro.org/symposium/.

The Undergraduate Research Symposium is an annual event since 2002 designed to provide undergraduate students, from the University of Pittsburgh and other colleges and universities, with advanced research experiences and opportunities to develop presentation skills. The event is open to undergraduates from all majors and institutions who have written a research paper from a social science, humanities, or business perspective focusing on the study of Eastern, Western, or Central Europe, the European Union, Russia, or Central Eurasia. The Symposium is held on the University of Pittsburgh-Oakland campus. After the initial submission of papers, selected participants are grouped into panels according to their research topics. The participants then give 10- to 15-minute presentations based on their research to a panel of faculty and graduate students. The presentations are open to the public.