Tagged with "recap"

On February 21, expert guests from UI Hospitals and Clinics, the Iowa State Hygienic Lab, UI Student Health, and UI International Programs joined host Joan Kjaer to discuss the virus and its potential for harm here in Iowa as well as the measures the university is taking to inform, protect, and support its students, staff, faculty, and the surrounding community.

What does the museum of the 21st century look like? What does it house? What is its role in the community? Does it see itself differently than museums of the past? And how do galleries, libraries, archives, and museums capture the zeitgeist of the time and reinvent themselves as expectations change? Host Joan Kjaer and guest panelists covered these topics at the February 6 WorldCanvass program, "The Future of Museums."

UI alum and world renowned opera singer Simon Estes was awarded the 2019 International Impact Award as part of this special program of WorldCanvass.

The October 9 WorldCanvass program covered an array of research breakthroughs taking place at the University of Iowa.

Contemporary African artist Eric Adjetey Anang, internationally renowned for the Ghanaian ‘fantasy coffins’ he and generations before him have created, spent the fall 2017 semester as artist-in-residence at the UI Museum of Art. He joined UI faculty and African art scholars on the December 7 WorldCanvass in a program called “Art & the Afterlife.”

2017 marks the hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution. That tumultuous century saw Russia reject the Romanov dynasty which had ruled for over three hundred years and embrace a new ideology whose leader, Vladimir Lenin, would become the head of the world’s first communist state. The world watched as the Soviet Union re-created a Russian-dominated empire, lost millions of lives to purges and terror, withstood the onslaught of Nazi Germany, faced off against the West during the Cold War, then dissolved, with Russia re-emerging under Vladimir Putin as a central player in global power politics.

News. Fake news. Disinformation. Fact-checking. Sourced news. Unverified sources. Social media incursions by foreign nations. Cleverly disguised mass propaganda that masquerades as a heartfelt message from a friend…….who knows what to believe anymore when even undeniably true facts are in dispute? This question was at the heart of the WorldCanvass discussion about “Journalism and a Free Press in the Age of Fake News.”

WorldCanvass started its ninth season by teaming up with Hancher and its Embracing Complexity project for a multi-layered program exploring the beauty of Islamic art and the diversity within Islamic cultures. Joan Kjaer and guests discussed the great diversity that exists within Islamic cultures and traditions, ancient and modern, near and far. They examined the many aesthetic, artistic, architectural, and other elements of Islamic expression that have made their way into the global consciousness and talked with a playwright who’s documenting the contemporary Muslim experience in Iowa. The show was closed out with a performance by musical group, Niyaz. They shared their musical vision, which is rooted in ancient poetry and Sufi mysticism, and their hopes to unite different peoples and traditions through a common humanity.

Cooking with firewood and other biofuels is one of the most urgent problems in the world today. It affects the health and wellbeing of those inhaling the fumes at close range, relies on increasingly scarce sources of firewood, and contributes over 20% of global black carbon emissions. The harm to individuals and the environment cannot be denied, and yet there’s little awareness of the issue among the general public. WorldCanvass host Joan Kjaer and a panel of experts drawn from multiple fields including engineering, urban and regional planning, public health, anthropology, and geography discussed the use of traditional wood-burning cookstoves and the complex social and cultural underpinnings of the practice on the April 12 WorldCanvass, a highlight of the UI’s yearly Provost’s Global Forum.

While immigrants have long fueled the American experiment, passionate debate about the pros and cons of immigration are nothing new. The rhetoric of recent national and local elections highlights tensions around changing demographics, inspiring debate about the impact of immigration on employment, on crime, and on community identity, while challenging the citizenry to examine their values and notions of what it means to be an American. WorldCanvass host Joan Kjaer and a diverse panel of guests discussed the history of immigration in the Midwest over the past century and a half, as well as current questions about bilingualism, multiculturalism, and belonging and exclusion in times of international and domestic conflict.