Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Brenda Yeoh, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

We live in a world on the move. In 2013, 3.2 per cent of the world’s population were international migrants. When you combine that with the growing numbers of internal migrants, particularly in places like India and China, it becomes clear that mobile lives are increasingly common. Creating successful multicultural societies and a global community that can respond to global problems is the challenge of the day. But where do people learn to be competent cosmopolitans – to embrace the values and skills that allow them to engage with diversity next door and across the globe? My lecture will explore the role that different kinds of cultural institutions play in creating cosmopolitans. It focuses on two possible sites: museums and institutions of secondary and tertiary education created to train the next generation of global leaders.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Peggy Levitt is Professor and Chair of the sociology department at Wellesley College and a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations where she co-directs the Transnational Studies Initiative. Her latest book is Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (University of California Press, 2015). Peggy was the CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the American University of Cairo in March 2015 and a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute in Summer 2015. In 2014, she received an Honorary Doctoral Degree from Maastricht University, held the Astor Visiting Professorship at Oxford University, and was a guest professor at the University of Vienna. She was the Visiting International Fellow at the Vrije University in Amsterdam from 2010-2012 and the Willie Brandt Guest Professor at the University of Malmö in 2009. Her books include Religion on the Edge (Oxford University Press, 2012), God Needs No Passport (New Press 2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (Routledge 2007), The Changing Face of Home (Russell Sage 2002), and The Transnational Villagers (UC Press, 2001). She has edited special volumes of Racial and Ethnic Studies, International Migration Review, Global Networks, Mobilities, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. A film based on her work, Art Across Borders, came out in 2009.

REGISTRATION

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