What are your Thoughts on a Changing World?

An Open Forum with Columbia Faculty

September 13, 2017 • 6-8PM

Columbia University, Kent Hall, Room 403

The Undergraduate Committee on Global Thought (UCGT) presented its first event of the semester, a lively discussion among undergraduates and faculty about youth in our changing world.

What are YOUR thoughts on a changing world? What issues are most pressing today? How do you envision the challenges and opportunities of the future? Lend your voice to the conversation at this on-campus event!

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About the UCGT

The Undergraduate Committee on Global Thought (UCGT) is a student association that engages the Columbia undergraduate community in conversations and initiatives examining issues of global importance. With faculty collaboration, UCGT members plan public events, organize workshops with university faculty, and foster undergraduate global education.

The UCGT is open to students from Columbia’s four undergraduate schools: Columbia and Barnard Colleges, the Schools of General Studies and Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Learn more about the UCGT.

Neil Krishan Aggarwal is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His areas of research interest are cultural psychiatry, cultural-competence training, and psychiatric anthropology. He is especially interested in conceptions of mental health and illness among South Asian and Middle Eastern populations.

Patricia Culligan is Professor of Civil Engineering, Founding Associate Director of the Columbia Data Science Institute, and a CGT member. Her research investigates the opportunities for green infrastructure, social networks, and advanced measurement and sensing technologies to improve urban water, energy, and environmental management. She is co-Director of a $12 million research network sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop new models for urban infrastructure to make cities cleaner, healthier, and more enjoyable places to live.

Vishakha N. Desai is Senior Advisor for Global Affairs to the President of Columbia University and a Senior Research Scholar for the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She also serves as Senior Advisor for Global Programs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. From 2004 through 2012, Dr. Desai served as President and CEO of the Asia Society, a global organization dedicated to strengthening partnerships between Asia and the U.S. Under her leadership the society expanded the scope and scale of its activities with the opening of new offices in India and Korea, a new center of U.S.-China Relations, internationally recognized education programs, and inauguration of two new architecturally distinguished facilities in Hong Kong and Houston.

Carol Gluck is Chair of the Committee on Global Thought as well as the George Sansom Professor of History in the departments of History, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. A founding member of the Committee on Global Thought, she specializes in the history of modern Japan from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with writings in modern social and cultural history, international relations, World War II, history-writing and public memory in Japan and the West.

Bernard Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and director of the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University.  He also serves as Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en sciences sociales in Paris, and is currently a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Bernard Harcourt’s scholarship focuses on social and critical theory, with a particular interest in punishment and surveillance.

Rosalind C. Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her earlier scholarship focused on the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of the mass media in its development, particularly in the encounter between old and new forms of mediation. More recently, she has been writing an ethnography of South Africa’s mining communities. Traversing these fields of inquiry, her work addresses questions of the relationships between value and violence; aesethetics and the political; the sexualization of power and desire; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory.

David K. Park is Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. Dr. Park is a member of Columbia University’s Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering New Media Center, Director of Special Projects at the Applied Statistics Center and Fellow at the Center for the Management of Systemic Risk at Columbia University. Dr. Park is also a founding member of Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab. Dr. Park has co-founded several New York-based technology companies.

Kian Tajbakhsh is Visiting Professor of Urban Planning at GSAPP. He has taught at both American and Iranian universities. Tajbakhsh’s academic research spans both theoretical and policy projects related to the culture of urbanism as well as the governance of cities and metropolitan regions. He has conducted empirical research on decentralization, the role of social capital in local government performance, and local economic development in a number of countries.