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The Department of Global
& Intercultural Studies Alumni Newsletter: December 2017 |
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ITS student & Summer Scholar Jordan Hallbauer and Dr. Tani Sebro on a research trip to Thailand, summer 2017 | |
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| The Department of Global and Intercultural Studies (GIC) brings together 6 distinct but interrelated interdisciplinary programs. Together our programs foster critical self-awareness and engaged global citizenship that supports local diversity and respects individual dignity. The department offers 1 co-major, 5 majors, 5 minors, and 1 graduate concentration.
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| In its third academic year as a department, the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies has now passed many important milestones: creation, approval, and offering the Co-Major in Global and Intercultural Studies, registering Miami students in these important intellectual and political classes that expose them to patterns of globalization, as well as many other themes—human rights, environmental issues, international immigration, diasporic communities scattered from their homelands, gender and global labor, the global parameters of race and racism, and myriad other issues. Following our 2015-16 Year-Long Focus on #BlackLivesMatter and our 2016-17 Year-Long Focus on Refuge/Refugees, we are foregrounding Critical Tourism as our Year-Long Theme for 2017-18. Most significantly, we have hired three new tenure-track faculty: Jen Cohen, an economist working on formal and informal economies, particularly through feminist lenses, in South Africa; Naaborle Sackeyfio, a political scientist working on energy in Ghana; and Tani Sebro, a political scientist whose research explores Dai refugees, expelled from Myanmar and living along the Thai border. This year, we will hire a fourth tenure-track faculty member whose areas of teaching and research expertise are in the interdisciplinary field of Latino/a Studies with a focus on U.S., Latinidad, and the Américas. These are very exciting days for the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies!
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Spring 2017 Refuge/Refugee Lecture Series
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Elena Albarrán with William Beezley at the Rodolfo Usigli (Mexican theater) collection |
| LAS Passion Series The Latin American Studies (LAS) program has been putting on events for its Passionate about Latin America & the Caribbean series for more than a decade. In some cases, LAS is fully responsible for organizing visits by guest speakers or discussion panels, and in others we work with centers or cohort departments as a co-sponsor. Among the 2016-2017 highlights were: - A visit by Professor Sujey Vega of Arizona State University, who talked about her work on the Latino/a experience in the Midwest
- GIC/LAS associate professor Elena Albarrán worked with the Dept of History to bring Professor William Beezley from the University of Arizona to campus to talk about the Mexican Revolution as part of a retrospective on the Russian, French, and Mexican Revolutions.
- GIC chair Jana Braziel gave a talk for the series from her 2017 book, Riding With Death: Vodou Arts and Urban Ecology in the Streets of Port-Au-Prince.
- A few weeks before the 2016 US Presidential election, the LAS program organized a panel of faculty from across the university to talk about the impact of Latino/as on the election and the perceptions of the campaign and election across Latin America.
Through these very well-attended events and others, each year the LAS program offers the Miami community opportunities to engage important issues related to Latin America and the Latino/a community in the United States.
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WGS Symposium On February 17, 2017, the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies program sponsored the 16th annual Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality Symposium. The theme was "Intersectional Analyses of the Arts and Performance," and over 350 people attended symposia and performances throughout the day, which was capped off by the keynote talk of Alice Bag, punk rocker, author and teacher. A number of offices across the University generously co-sponsored the event, which was organized by former WGS director and associate professor of geography Roxanne Ornelas and a planning committee of faculty and graduate students. The symposium is typically held annually, alternating between Miami and Wright State. The next symposium will be held in February 2019. Energy at the symposium is always high, as this is an important mechanism for community and coalition building, and a way of showcasing the many talented and accomplished students, staff and faculty at Miami and Wright State.
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ITS Grayson Kirk Distinguished Lecture Series Dr. Bruce Cumings, the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor from the University of Chicago, was the speaker for the Spring 2017 Grayson Kirk Distinguished Lecture Series on February 15. His lecture was called “On the Futility of U.S. Policy Toward North Korea.”
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Penny Lecture 2017 Each year GIC sponsors the Critical Inquiry Penny Lecture Series, where an esteemed group of scholars are invited to present a themed lecture. This past year's theme, coordinated by GIC professor Dr. Rodney Coates, was Crossing Borders, where scholars from across the country and from Miami presented lectures. These lectures conceived of border crossings loosely to encompass all the various boundaries. Read more about the 2017 Penny Lecture.
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GIC Faculty Spotlight: Naaborle Sackeyfio Dr. Naaborle Sackeyfio, who joined the faculty this fall, teaches courses in Global and Intercultural Studies and International Studies. One of two courses she will teach in the Spring includes an ITS 300-level course in African Governance and Development which is congruent with her research focus on African political economy. Her new book, Energy Politics and Rural Development: The Case of Ghana, was recently published with Palgrave Macmillan Press in October. Her second book project will build on the first to examine the ways in which access to energy or lack thereof, in tandem with rural development are gendered. During the J-term, Dr. Sackeyfio will conduct ethnographic research in Japan, to examine the nature of African migrant incorporation in Tokyo. She is interested in questions of identity and class politics, belonging and economic mobility. Dr. Sackeyfio's research interests encompass governance, political economy, energy and resource politics, and gender and sustainable development, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa.
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GIC Student Spotlight: Jordan Hallbauer ITS student and Summer Scholar Jordan Hallbauer joined Dr. Tani Sebro for a research trip to Thailand during summer 2017. While accompanying Dr. Sebro, Jordan helped film the Migrant Voices films in a refugee camp along the Thai-Myanmar border for a Digital Humanities fellowship. They co-presented a conference paper at the International Convention of Asia Scholars annual meeting. Jordan also completed 45 hours of intensive Thai language study.
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