Thank you to K. Wayne Yang, Provost of John Muir College (UC San Diego) and Professor of Ethnic Studies, for his talk, Building Scyborgs. An evening on decolonization. The event was held on Feb. 13 by UW Public Lectures.
The event was co-sponsored by The Graduate School, UW Public Lectures, and the Simpson Center and co-hosted by the UW Office of Global Affairs, School of Law, and Comparative History of Ideas.
Thank you to the UW faculty and graduate teaching assistants who participated in our workshop on January 25 to explore globally-engaged, inclusive, and culturally-responsive teaching practices to meet the diverse needs of UW’s international student populations.
The workshop was co-sponsored by the UW Office of Global Affairs and the Center for Teaching and Learning and included panelists from the School of Law, Department of English, Comparative History of Ideas, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, and UW Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences.
A recording of the workshop is now available -please note a UW NetID is required to access the recording.
Sara Sherrard will lead advancement efforts for the Office of Global Affairs, broadening global opportunities for the Husky community and deepening the impact of the University of Washington’s global engagement.
The Office of Global Affairs (OGA) welcomes our first Associate Director of Development, Sara Sherrard. This inaugural role is a joint hire by International Advancement and the Office of Global Affairs. Sara will focus on frontline fundraising and donor stewardship to advance OGA’s work, including UW Study Abroad, the Global Innovation Fund, and the UW Rome Center.
Sara comes to the UW after five years with Hopelink, where she had increasing frontline fundraising responsibility in annual philanthropy, major gifts and major gifts management. Raised in the rainforests of Costa Rica, transplanted to the icy American Midwest for college, with stints in West Africa and South America along the way, Sara has a deep love for traveling the world and exploring new cultures.
Ladi Carr will direct new and existing international initiatives that support research, teaching, and global engagement among students, faculty, and staff across the University of Washington.
The Office of Global Affairs (OGA) welcomes Ladi Carr, PhD as our new Senior Director of Global Engagement. Ladi joins OGA from the University of Virginia, where she served for nearly a decade in key leadership roles with the Center for Global Initiatives at the Darden School of Business. She brings a breadth and depth of experience that will advance the University of Washington’s global impact both locally and around the world, having developed and delivered academic programs in more than 20 countries.
Ladi is passionate about cross-cultural learning and the international exchange of ideas. She is an ardent advocate of the notion that universities are global catalysts for human progress, and she believes deeply in the value of high-impact global learning, research, and experiences.
Q: What background and perspective do you bring to this role?
Originally from the Czech Republic (formerly part of Czechoslovakia), I grew up at a time when international travel was severely restricted by the government. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and my country’s rapid transition to democracy, such travel restrictions quickly vanished. And so, upon finishing my graduate studies at Charles University in Prague (Univerzita Karlova), I was afforded life-changing opportunities to experience the world far beyond my borders, and I have dedicated myself ever since to enabling others to do the same.
During my past two decades in higher education, I have spent nearly ten years focused exclusively on global initiatives and engagement. At the University of Virginia, I was chiefly responsible for developing international programs, cultivating global partnerships, managing global operations, and serving as an international ambassador for the institution at-large. As a result, I bring to my role at the University of Washington an abundance of direct, on-the-ground professional experience in more than 20 countries worldwide. In addition, as an avid traveler throughout my life, I have lived, worked, and visited more than 30 other countries. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to bring my passion for global engagement and experiences to the UW community!
Q: What has been your most impactful international experience to date?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Finland aspired to draw leading professionals from around the world to spend three months or longer in the country as part of a broader strategy to amplify its shrinking pool of native talent. To achieve this, the city of Helsinki created a special program, 90-Day Finn, making it possible for non-Finns to enter and stay in the country to immerse themselves in one of the world’s most dynamic, innovative, entrepreneurial, and tech-focused economies – despite Finland’s small population and remote location. After receiving more than 5,000 applications, my husband and I were among 15 people selected for this unique and life-changing opportunity.
Taking up full-time residence in Helsinki along with our middle school-aged son, we began a journey to understand and appreciate the virtues of a life in the Nordics. We became enchanted with Finland’s people and a culture that values transparency, honesty, directness, and equality. It is a place that respects its natural environment while also ensuring that urban spaces provide high levels of livability. And all this is achieved while delivering first-rate health care, education, and other public services. Finland’s model is a breathtaking achievement, considering that barely two generations ago, its economy had barely developed beyond the cultivation of its vast timber resources. Our horizons and perspectives were forever altered, and we now see the world in new ways – but only because we embraced this opportunity for global engagement.
Q: How do your experiences align with the mission and work of the Office of Global Affairs?
As a bilingual, dual citizen (CZ-US) who has lived and worked in different cultural and political contexts around the world, I feel a personal sense of mission to introduce others to the transformational potential of international education and research. As my students and faculty colleagues would probably tell you, when it comes to global education and exploration, I am an ardent (exuberant!) cheerleader and champion for global experiences. In fact, I truly believe that universities have a uniquely important role to play in bridging the world’s most diverse cultures and contexts, and through our collective efforts they can serve as catalysts for human progress. For these reasons and many others, I am honored to do what I can to advance the mission of UW’s Office of Global Affairs in research, education, and community engagement – both at home and around the world.
Q: What do you hope to focus on in your first year of serving in this role?
Four key priorities guide the Office of Global Affairs’ vision for global engagement at the UW.
Listen, learn…and then listen some more. As is always the case at great universities, and as the old saying goes, I am privileged to stand on the shoulders of giants. The University of Washington has achieved a well-earned reputation as one of the very best and most highly ranked global universities. While I may have good and relevant experiences to contribute at the UW, I also have much to learn from those who have come before me. Fortunately, we can draw upon the Office of Global Affairs Strategic Plan (2022-2026) as well as an excellent framework for action developed by the Global Engagement Task Force (2021). Over the course of the year, I look forward to working though these ideas, consulting with UW’s leaders, meeting with stakeholders across the university, and together envisioning a future of even greater global impact and recognition for the University of Washington.
Tuesday, February 13 // 6:30-7:30 PMTown Hall Seattle, Livestream (Hybrid)
Monsters, machines, and mortals, we are the objects of colonization, and perhaps, we can be the agents of decolonization too. Join scholar, organizer, and co-conspirator K. Wayne Yang as he shares stories about decolonizing endeavors from past, present, future and speculative somewheres. How do we bend our own complicity in colonial institutions to forward Indigenous, Black, queer, and Other futures locally and globally? Come ready to consider your own scyborg powers and plans.
The livestream of this lecture will be accompanied by an ASL interpreter and will include CART captioning.
Co-sponsored by The Graduate School, UW Public Lectures, Simpson Center.
Co-hosted by UW Office of Global Affairs, School of Law, Comparative History of Ideas.
The Population Health Initiative and the Office of Global Affairs are partnering again to offer a one-credit General Studies course, “United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Global Goals, Local Actions” (GEN ST 297A), on Tuesdays from 1:30 to 2:20 p.m. during spring quarter 2024 in Condon Hall 139.
Registration opens February 9, 2024!
This one-credit (graded as credit/no-credit) course will introduce undergraduate students to the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, research at the University of Washington that aligns with those goals and the role the goals play in improving local and global population health, societies and the environment. Yen-Chu Weng of the UW’s Program on the Environment is the lead facilitator of this course.
This seminar will invite experts and scholars from the UW and the Seattle region. Each lecture will include an overview of the selected SDGs, case studies based on speaker’s expertise and programs in the Seattle regions that are working towards realization of the SDGs. Visit our website to see the course overview, details, learning goals, and facilitators.
A series of talks and discussions on the aftermath of Oct. 7, the war in Gaza and responses worldwide.
Moderator: Reşat Kasaba, Jackson School Professor of International Studies and Middle East expert
When: Weekly from Jan. 16 to Feb. 27, 2024 from 5:00-6:20 p.m.*
Location: Lecture locations vary by session. Click here for session descriptions
*Note: The Jan. 22 lecture will be held from 7:00-8:30 p.m.
This lecture series is free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the Social Sciences Division, College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington in partnership with the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.
Questions? Email jsiscom@uw.edu
A workshop for UW faculty and graduate teaching assistants.
Co sponsored by the UW Office of Global Affairs and the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Facilitators:
Apply now! The 2024 UW Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Fellows program will be a tri-campus program open to faculty who teach full-time at UW Bothell, UW Tacoma, or UW Seattle.
Screenshot of a February 2022 COIL Fellows workshop.
COIL – also known as international virtual exchange – is a virtual exchange pedagogy that fosters global competence through development of a multicultural learning environment, linking university classes in different countries. Using both synchronous and asynchronous technologies, students from different countries complete shared assignments and projects, with instructors from each country co-teaching and managing coursework.
As part of the UW Awards of Excellence Ceremony in June of 2023, UW President Ana Mari Cauce and Provost Mark Richards awarded the inaugural UW Excellence in Global Engagement Award to Dr. Faisal Hossain, John R. Kiely Endowed Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering.
The Excellence in Global Engagement Award honors faculty and staff at the UW for their leadership in global engagement, focusing on teaching, research, and service activities that connect UW students, faculty, and staff to global communities locally, nationally, and internationally. The Award alternates each year between faculty and staff honorees.
Dr. Faisal Hossain was selected from a cohort of nine distinguished UW faculty. The Office of Global Affairs is excited to celebrate Dr. Hossain alongside the other eight nominees, and we invite you to learn more about their global impact below.
Dr. Faisal Hossain has deployed engineering technologies to reduce social inequity in the availability of food, water and energy around the world. Beyond his research impact, Hossain is dedicated to training the next generation of scholars in water management and forecasting systems. As a teacher, Faisal has personally trained 10 graduate students and 300 other trainees globally and manages the SASWE (sustainability, satellites, water, and environment) research group at the university. Prof. Hossain has received a number of awards including the Charles Falkenberg Award and the International Award (2020) from the American Geophysical Union. In 2022, Dr. Hossain was elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is a two-time recipient of the Office of Global Affairs’ Global Innovation Fund Grant.
Over the past three years Dr. Charu has made significant contributions to institutionalizing internationalization efforts on the Bothell and Tacoma campuses. She has served as the faculty advisor to Global Initiatives at UW Bothell from 2019 to 2022 and during that time started the Global Initiatives Advisory Board. Charu was part of the first cohort of COIL fellows and has since introduced new processes that make COIL more sustainable as a curricular offering. A former international student herself, Charu helped to advocate on behalf of a new international student fee structure at UW Tacoma. Charu’s own scholarship focuses on issues of gender, globalization, postcoloniality and decoloniality. She has twice served as an elected member of the board for the International Association for Feminist economics, and is currently focused on projects for local and global change through research on and support for socially just and ecologically sensitive approaches to solidarity economies.
Listen: Dr. Charu on the Diverse Economies podcast.
Through her research, teaching, and service, Dr. Heidi Gough has forged pathways to improve global gender equity in the water sciences, particularly in regions where women engineers and scholars are often marginalized. Her research has included wastewater treatment practices in Syrian refugee camps, in agricultural communities in the Eastern Nile Delta and along the Mt. Everest summit trail in Nepal. She has provided guest lectures for classes in Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey. In 2012, she established the first engineering-themed faculty-led study abroad course at the university, leading students to learn about water engineering practices in the water-scarce country of Jordan. Dr. Gough is a co-founder of the Women Water Nexus (WWN), a technical committee within the International Council of the Environment and Water Resources Institute that facilitates international engagement for Water Engineering Professionals. She is a recipient of the Outstanding Teaching award at UW for her study abroad efforts and a three-time recipient of the Office of Global Affairs’ Global Innovation Fund Grant.
Dr. May Kay Gugerty is Professor of Nonprofit Management & Philanthropy, the Associate Dean for Teaching & Learning, and the Principal Investigator for the International Program on Public Health Leadership (IPPHL) at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance. IPPHL works with emerging African public health leaders and as of 2023 comprises a community of over 150 African leaders across 24 countries. Her research has included work on NGO and nonprofit evaluation and accountability, the impact of community self-help groups on women’s social and economic well-being and the impacts of donor funding on local organizations. During her time at UW, Dr. Gugerty has published one book, two edited volumes, and more than two dozen peer-reviewed articles. She actively engages doctoral students, having co-authored extensively with PhD students and serving on more than 30 dissertation committees.
Dr. Divya McMillin is Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation & Global Engagement and Professor of Global Media Studies at UW Tacoma. She is a leading scholar of participatory design and global media studies with three critically acclaimed books and numerous journal articles and book chapters on the impact of globalization in emerging economies. Her fieldwork in sweatshops and call centers have merited her Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association, marking her as a postcolonial scholar who has shaped the field of International Cultural Studies. At UW Tacoma, Dr. McMillin is known as the Builder, having pioneered the Communication major, served as founding Executive Director of the Global Honors Program, and created the Institute for Innovation and Global Engagement and the Global Innovation and Design (GID) Lab, while forging international partnerships and collaborations to enrich curricular offerings. The GID Lab provides community design thinking workshops connecting students to project based learning. All programs demonstrate Dr. McMillin’s commitment to experiential learning, integrating curricular pathways with community engagement. In addition to courses in Global Media Studies at UW Tacoma, Dr. McMillin is guest lecturer in the London School of Economics Executive Msc in Cities Program. She is the only faculty at UW Tacoma to receive all three honors in research, teaching, and community engagement with a Distinguished Research Award (2012), Distinguished Teaching Award (2017), and Community Engagement Legacy Award (2021).
Dr. Stephen Meyers is Associate Professor in Law, Societies and Justice (LSJ) and the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS) (and core faculty in Disability Studies). He is also Director of the Center for Global Studies in the JSIS. Within disability studies, Dr. Meyers is actively working to define “global disability studies” as a new subfield within both international studies and disability studies. This includes two forthcoming books, one the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Hierarchies in Disability Human Rights, which features chapters from academics, activists, and others from more than twenty countries, the majority of whom identify as persons with disabilities, and What is Global Disability Studies? a new monograph from University of California Press. In his Social Justice through Philanthropy Class, an undergraduate seminar in partnership with the Philanthropy Lab Foundation and the Seattle Intenrational Foundation, students study a key global social problem and then award grants to both grassroots associations and international development and humanitarian non-governmental organizations addressing those issues. To date, the course has granted over $300,000 to organization around the world. Finally, through the Disability and International Development Initiative (DIDI), which was founded by Dr. Meyers and Megan McCloskey, Dr. Meyers has involved over forty graduate and undergraduate students as DIDI Fellows in applied research projects, which have ranged from supporting the UN Secretariat on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to organizing focus groups with youth around the world for UNESCO’s “Every Child Should Be Welcome”: School violence and bullying involving young people with disabilities report, researching and writing case studies for the UNFPA’s activelyg Young Persons with Disabilities: Global Study on Ending Gender-based Violence and Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, and developing an amicus brief for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights..
Dr. Ana Lucia Seminario, originally from Peru, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatric Dentistry and adjunct faculty in the department of Global Health. She has taught courses, provided clinical care, and conducted research on behalf of the UW since 2007. Most notable is her work as Director of the UW Timothy A. DeRouen Center for Global Oral Health, which she leads since 2017 to improve quality of life by promoting collaboration and inclusivity in oral and craniofacial research. The Center focuses its efforts in Thailand, Kenya, Peru and Washington state (working with the refugee population). Notable accomplishments include: a virtual manuscript program for Kenyan oral health professionals, creating internships in global oral health, setting up the Visiting Scholar program for global oral health at the UW and increasing research capacity in the sites she works at through NIH funding. .
Dr. Toshiko Takenaka is Washinton Research Foundation/W. Hunter Simpson Professor of Technology Law at the law school and a world-renowned expert in comparative patent law and intellectual property (IP) law with a global footprint. Toshiko established the globally-recognized Center for Advanced Study and Research on Innovation Policy (CASRIP), which aims to improve discussion and exchange of views among legal professionals impacting IP law and policy across the world. She is fluent in English, Japanese, and German and both teaches and conducts research in all three languages. Since Professor Takenaka started working at the UW nearly 3 decades ago, she has educated more than 500 J.D. students, many of whom practice IP law in the U.S. nationwide, and approximately 200 students and visiting scholars who serve important roles in the patent bar, government, and judiciary in Asia and Europe
Dr. Anu Taranath is Teaching Professor in CHID and English and has been at the UW for 23 years. She serves asa racial equity and DEI consultant across the UW campuses and around the country. Her research focuses on the politics and practices of diversity, social justice and global consciousness. Just some of the accolades Dr. Anu has received are: four-time member of Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Seattle Weekly’s “Best of Seattle” recognition, the UW’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and multiple US Fulbright Fellowships. Her 2019 book, Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World, has gained widespread recognition and is the winner of multiple book awards. Dr. Anu’s impact on campus has been extensive and includes collaborations with partners in over a dozen countries and leading study abroad programs in India, Ghana and Mexico. She serves as a consultant and coach for UW international education programs as well as more widely in the travel industry, and is a founding member of the Pedagogies of Reciprocity project and Global Reciprocity Network.