Shared Futures: General Education for Global Learning

Summer Institute 2006 Plenary Sessions

Plenary Session –  Caryl Phillips
An Evening with Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, brought up in Leeds, and lives in New York City. He is the author of three works of non-fiction and eight novels. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. After being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992, Phillips was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His latest novel Dancing In The Dark was published in September 2005.  Phillips is currently Professor of English at Yale University.  Prior to that, he was the Henry L. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College, Columbia University.

 Plenary Session – Debra Rowe
Creating Better Futures: Higher Education and Sustainable Development Leadership (podcast available)
Debra Rowe is Senior Fellow at the Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future, where she helps higher education institutions integrate "sustainability literacy" into curricula throughout the disciplines, student life, operations, and community partnerships. She is an Executive Committee member of the U.S. Partnership for the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development and the energy and sustainability consultant to an NSF-funded National Science Database Library. Rowe has been Professor of Renewable Energy Technologies and Behavioral Sciences for over 25 years at Oakland Community College. She was Interim Dean of Applied and Engineering Technologies in 2002-2003, and won the Outstanding Faculty Award in 2004.

Plenary Session – Obioma Nnaemeka
“Humanizing” and “Righting” Globalization (podcast available)
Scholar/activist, Obioma Nnaemeka is Professor of French, Women’s Studies and African/African Diaspora Studies and a former Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).  As an expert in African/African Diaspora studies, development, globalization, women's/gender studies, human rights, and multiculturalism, Nnaemeka combines research and consultancy for the United Nations, foreign governments, international agencies, and academic institutions with speaking engagements and active participation in national and international conferences and programs.  She is the convener of the "Women in Africa and the African Diaspora” international conferences. She is also the author/editor of nine books, including Engendering Human Rights: Cultural and Socio-economic Realities in Africa and the African Diaspora; Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses; Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora; and The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature.

Plenary Session – Benjamin Barber
Religion, Globalization, and Democracy: Is Fundamentalism an Obstacle to Democracy?  A Cause of Terrorism? Or a Reaction to the Secular Empire of McWorld? (podcast available)
Benjamin Barber is the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and a principal of the Democracy Collaborative, with offices in New York and Maryland. An internationally renowned political theorist, Barber brings an abiding concern for democracy and citizenship to issues of politics, culture and education in America and abroad. His 17 books include the classic Strong Democracy (1984) reissued in 2004 in a twentieth anniversary edition; the international best-seller Jihad vs. McWorld (1995 with a Post 9/11 Edition in 2001) and Fears Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy (2003). He is currently working on The Decline of Capitalism and the Infantalist Ethos, to be published next year.