Provost's Global Forum 2024

Friday, February 23, 2024 - Saturday, February 24, 2024

This event is made possible through the generous support and contributions from the Stanley-University of Iowa Foundation Support Organization, UI International Programs, the UI College of Education, the Linda R. Baker Teacher Leader Center, the African Human Rights Coalition, and United Action for Youth. Activities for the 2024 Provost's Global Forum are hosted in collaboration with the Linda R. Baker Teacher Leader Center, UI International Programs, United Action for Youth, and FilmScene.

The Provost’s Global Forum - LGBTQ Youth in Global Perspective: Resistance, Resilience, Reimagination - will assemble experts from around the globe to speak to the power and agency of LGBTQ youth and their stories. Experts in education, the arts, human rights policy, and healthcare will convene on campus for a one-day academic symposium. As part celebration of youth identity, and part opportunity to build global strategy around supporting and building healthy and culturally sustaining environments for youth, this global forum will create a space for analysis, for community, and for hope and joy for LGBTQ youth and their advocates around the world.

The Forum will kick off with an academic symposium on Friday that is free and open to the public. Please register for the Friday symposium sessions below. Activities on Friday also include the 2023 Joel Barkan Memorial Lecture by Daniel Arzola, senior graphic designer at the University of Minnesota, and a 'pay what you can' documentary film screening at FilmScene.

On Saturday, United Action for Youth (UAY) is hosting PrideCon, an annual, free day of programming for youth. For more information on this event, please contact UAY directly.

Organizers & recipients of Provost's Global Forum Award

William Coghill-Behrends

Will Coghill-Behrends

Will Coghill-Behrends is the co-director of the Linda R. Baker Teacher Leader Center, where his focus is on expanding global education initiatives within the entire UI College of Education, and is clinical associate professor in multilingual education.

Josh Coleman headshot

Josh Coleman

James Joshua Coleman (Josh) is an assistant professor of English education in the University of Iowa’s College of Education. Broadly, his scholarship advocates for the use of intersectional LGBTQ+ youth literature within contexts of teaching and learning. His current project seeks to document the rapid increase in book bans across the U.S., and this project is funded by the National Academy of Education through a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. Entitled “Banned Childhoods,” this study traces how regional contexts shape book bans of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC youth literature and documents the bottom-up educational activism resisting those bans. Selected publications can be found in Teachers College Record, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Reading Research Quarterly. Josh was formerly a high school English teacher in the Deep South, where he is from, and in Paris, France, where he served as a Fulbright Scholar.

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Allison Rowe

Allison V. Rowe, MFA, PhD, joined the University of Iowa in 2021 and is currently an assistant professor of art education and the program coordinator for the art education program. Rowe has taught art and art education for over 15 years in formal and community organizations including Centennial College, Youth Arts Exchange, the Dovercourt Boys & Girls Club, and the Aga Khan Museum. Rowe earned her PhD from the University of Illinois in art education at Urbana Champaign in 2021and her MFA in social practice from California College of the Arts in 2011. She is a practicing socially engaged artist and has shown her work across the United States and Canada at spaces such as the Powerplant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Ontario; Outhaus in Urbana, Illinois; NURTUREart in Brooklyn, New York; and La Centrale in Montreal. Quebec. Rowe’s most recent research project on gallery-supported socially engaged art was supported by the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research interests include community engaged art education, arts-based research, socially engaged art, and art integration.

About the Provost's Global Forum

Through the generous support of the Stanley-UI Foundation Support Organization, the Provost’s Global Forum is the premier annual event on campus focused on international and global issues. The forum brings together experts from the faculty and leading voices from a variety of areas to raise awareness about and contribute to debate on the foremost issues in globalization that face us today.

In addition to serving the University of Iowa community broadly, the forum endeavors to build connections between the University and the state of Iowa, and positions the UI as a national node in discussions of global affairs.

All events are free and open to the public.

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Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact Daniel Vorwerk in advance by email at daniel-vorwerk@uiowa.edu or call 319-467-1619.