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The European Studies Group will conclude its spring lecture series will a talk presented by Rebecca Léal, titled “My Mother, the Stranger: Ruptures, Transmissions, and Stereotypes in Popular Representations of Arab-French Mothers,” at noon Friday, May 4, in 2520D UCC. A light luncheon will be provided and the event is free and open to the public.

During the week of April 23-27 the UI UNA, Global Health Club, the Food and Water Watch, and Delta Sigma Pi will be sponsoring a week of global citizenship. In honor of UI Global Citizen's week, the Global Health Club formally invites all to attend the Charity:Water Benefit.

The infectious beat and flurried movements of Latin music and dance will take center stage at this year's Gusto Latino.

"There are a lot of diversity events on the University of Iowa campus, but this one is a really great display of dance and music, and it gives the community and the student body a chance to have live, authentic music and be able to experience the dancing talent of people from all over Iowa," said Kimberly Tranel, a graduate student in the University of Iowa International Programs and an organizer of the event.

In January of 2012, approximately 650 of Brazil's top-notch undergraduate students traveled to the United States to study on U.S campuses as part of the Science without Borders program, sponsored by the Brazilian government. The University of Iowa has had the fortune of hosting four participants in this two semester academic scholarship program, and is expecting to host more Brazilian undergraduates in the fall. Below, the four undergraduates have shared some of their thoughts and reflections on life at the University of Iowa.

In this presentation, I trace the roots of Japanese reggae from the early 1970s until the present, focusing on the musical productive strategies through which “J-reggae” has come into being. Among these strategies are incorporation of Japanese musical traditions; creative use of the Japanese language (as opposed to patois); and in the way of artistic self-representation, male dancehall performers’ referencing of the figure of the samurai. I argue that these strategies invoke discourses of the traditional that are deeply interlinked with those of modernity in Japan, a modernity shaped by the specter of Western domination that Japanese, like Jamaicans, have long had to negotiate. I focus, however, on the link between these discourses of the traditional and a contemporary ethos of cultural internationalism in recessionary Japan, in which Japanese reggae practitioners imagine global southern countries like Jamaica as simultaneously signs of these artists’ cultural and sociopolitical cosmopolitanism, but also as tradition-bound and thus instructive symbols of Japan’s own potential rebirth.

The DI: Why do you think it's important to include and recruit underrepresented and minority students?

President Mason: I think it's the whole way in which they approach life — which may be different from ways in which others approach life. The way they think, the cultural traditions that they perhaps were raised with. When you're out in the workforce after you leave the University, being exposed to different types of people and different ways of thinking and different ways of looking at life and different cultures and traditions, that's extremely important because that's likely what you'll be facing in the workforce. We know that many employers today are looking for people who have a diversity of experiences. In other words, haven't just been raised in one place all their life and never experienced any other part of the country or any other part of the world and that's part of the reason why we also do so much study abroad and why we encourage students to get involved in activities that might take them beyond the boundaries of Iowa and into communities that they perhaps haven't been exposed to

The University of Iowa Opera Studies Forum (OSF) in International Programs will conclude its 2011-12 lecture series coordinated with the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD theater screenings Monday, April 9, with a talk on Verdi’s “La Traviata” presented by Roberta M. Marvin. All lectures take place at 5:30 p.m. in the University Capitol Centre conference seminar room 2520D and are free and open to the public.