This forum brings together educators to rethink relationships between institutions of higher education, their local communities, and their global milieu. In response to current, hegemonic trends of globalizing higher education, we will explore alternative histories and theories of education, asking how local and global concerns in fact pertain to all educational institutions, and how educational inequalities pertaining to class, race, gender, and geography might be either exacerbated or redressed through new institutional, interdisciplinary, and pedagogic strategies. Rather than reject outright a concept of global education, this forum instead asks participants to consider what it would mean to truly make higher education globally accessible and what aims such an education would need to address. What hypothetical curricula, exchanges, funding structures, and institutional relations would respect societies’ and individuals’ rights to intellectual self-determination without, however, positing a priori assumptions of differing educational needs based on cultural or class distinctions?
Keeping in mind that free, compulsory, “universal” education (i.e., for children within a state’s boundaries) was inaugurated just over a century ago, we might take as a starting point the conundrum faced at the onset of universal primary education: How to impart both practical and theoretical knowledge? Or, put another way, how to establish fundaments of knowledge that somehow lend themselves to the pursuit of diverse vocations and professions, ranging from the agrarian to the academic, and can certain disciplines and forms of knowledge be justified as essential whether or not they prepare students for future occupations? Presentations will offer alternative visions of higher education, touching on issues of disciplinarity, class, geography, institutional structures, and new educational media.
Organized by Ginger Nolan, INTERACT post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and Jamyung Choi, INTERACT post-doctoral fellow at the Weatherhead Institute Columbia University. Co-sponsored by the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Institute of Comparative Literature & Society, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
Free and open to the public; no registration required.
November 6, 2015 Friday
9:30am - 10:15am EDT
10:15am - 10:30am EDT
10:30am - 12:30pm EDT
Mark Taylor
Professor
Columbia University
Jamyung Choi
Jamyung Choi
Visiting Assistant Professor, College of the Holy Cross
Saskia Cornes
Farm and Program Manager
Duke Campus Farm
Mark Wigley
Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
GSAPP, Columbia Universty
12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT
1:30pm - 3:30pm EDT
Davarian Baldwin
Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies
Trinity College
Noliwe Rooks
Associate Professor in Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, Sexuality Studies
Cornell University
Stephen Zacks
Journalist
Laura Kurgan
Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
GSAPP, Columbia University
3:30pm - 3:45pm EDT
3:45pm - 5:30am EDT
Noëleen Murray
Director of the Wits City Institute and the A.W. Mellon Foundation Chair of Critical Architecture and Urbanism
University of the Witwatersrand
Susan Gillespie
Vice President, Founding Director of Institute for International Liberal Education
Bard College
Felicity Scott
Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Columbia University
November 7, 2015 Saturday
9:30am - 10:00am EDT
10:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Denise Ferreira Da Silva
Director of Centre for Ethics & Politics
School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London
Ruth Hayhoe
Professor of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education
University of Toronto.
Ajay Singh Chaudhary
Director
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Lydia Liu
W.T. Tam Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
1:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Jacques Lezra
Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature
New York University
Reinhold Martin
Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Columbia University
Bruce Robbins
Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities
Columbia University
2:30pm - 2:45pm EDT
2:45pm - 4:00pm EDT
Hidetaka Hirota
Visiting Assistant Professor
The City College of New York
Dan-el Padilla Peralta
Assistant Professor in Classics
Princeton University
Grant Wythoff
Fellow
Society of Fellows in the Humanities
4:00pm - 5:00pm EDT