The Global Voices Symposium is designed to educate, inform, and contribute to ongoing conversations to strengthen global consciousness and awareness on the University of Dayton’s campus and the larger Dayton community. It brings together faculty, staff, students, and community leaders to discuss and find ways to enhance global engagement within our community. It is the hope that these conversations will help us to find commonality in the human experience, identify things that unite rather than divide, and enable us to engage one another to learn and be informed. The symposium challenges us to continue to dare as we build a vibrant diverse, inclusive, and multicultural community.
These proceedings, available here free for download or for purchase in print for $5 plus tax and shipping, contain content provided by the participants. Some presenters did not include their presentation materials in the proceedings. Texts have been edited for clarity.
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Proceedings of the 2019 Global Voices Symposium
Julius A. Amin
The Global Voices Symposium is designed to educate, inform, and contribute to ongoing conversations to strengthen global consciousness and awareness on the University of Dayton’s campus and the larger Dayton community. It brings together faculty, staff, students, and community leaders to discuss and find ways to enhance global engagement within our community. It is the hope that these conversations will help us to find commonality in the human experience, identify things that unite rather than divide, and enable us to engage one another to learn and be informed. The symposium challenges us to continue to dare as we build a vibrant diverse, inclusive, and multicultural community.
These proceedings, free for download but also available for purchase in print for $5 plus tax and shipping, contain content provided by the participants. Some presenters did not include their presentation materials in the proceedings. Texts have been edited for clarity.
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Front Matter, Introduction
Julius A. Amin
This symposium provided an opportunity to gather on campus to learn and to educate each other on the importance of global awareness. All of you will agree with me that this is an important moment in history. Recent and repeated attacks on the diverse nature of the global community should not deter us. Rather they should embolden efforts to continue to create a diverse and inclusive community. By its very nature a university campus demands that its members challenge the dictatorship of ignorance.
Global and intercultural consciousness are at the heart of the University of Dayton’s mission. Two years ago, in his inaugural address, President Spina stated that “intercultural excellence” is a must. It was and remains a timely message and calls for a paradigm shift. People from diverse backgrounds must be respected, and not just tolerated.
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Introduction of Dr. Nwando Achebe, Keynote Speaker
Amy E. Anderson
We still have a long way to go to build truly global learning spaces where all students, and if fact the world, benefit from these important outcomes. It is symposia like this one that bring critical perspectives together—including our keynote tonight—and that serve as catalysts for us all. So without further delay, I’d like to introduce Dr. Nwando Achebe. Dr. Achebe is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History, and a multi-award-winning historian at Michigan State University. Dr. Achebe received her master’s and PhD from UCLA after studying theatre at the University of Massachusetts. Her research interests involve the use of oral history in the study of women, gender, and sexuality in Nigeria. Among her many accomplishments, Dr. Achebe is the author of six books, including:
- Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960;
- The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, a full-length critical biography on the only female warrant chief and king in British Africa
- Co-author of the 2018 History of West Africa E-Course Book
- Co-editor with William Worger and Charles Ambler of A Companion to African History
- Co-editor with Claire Robertson of Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective
- A forthcoming Ohio University Press book, Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa.
She is founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of West African History. She served as a Ford Foundation and Fulbright-Hays Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Dr. Achebe has received prestigious grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Wenner-Gren, Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright-Hays, the Ford Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Please join me in extending a warm Dayton welcome to Dr. Nwando Achebe.
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Making Sense of Global Awareness on American College Campuses: Women’s History in the African Tradition
Nwando Achebe
I feel deeply honored and privileged to have been asked to deliver the Keynote Address for this 2019 College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Chair in Humanities Symposium—Global Voices on the University of Dayton Campus. I wish to thank Professor Julius Amin, the Alumni Chair in Humanities for inviting me, and Heidi Hass for making all the arrangements.
As I contemplate the challenge before me, I have decided to approach it from a very personal space: to speak to, with the aim of making sense of, my journey into awareness, African awareness—an awareness that materialized out of my desire to decolonize knowledge on, and about, Africa and African women; and how I have transmitted that awareness into my teaching about Global Africa on two American college campuses — the College of William and Mary and now Michigan State University. It is an awareness that developed and found expression at another American college campus: namely, the University of California Los Angeles, the institution from which I earned my master’s and PhD degrees.
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Global Voices on Campus: Why the Symposium Matters
David J. Fine, Monica Harris, Miranda Cady Hallett, and Fahmi H. Abboushi
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Student Voices: Prospects and Challenges of Global Consciousness
Maya Smith-Custer
In this session, student leaders discussed global engagement and consciousness and how they have promoted it within UD campus organizations and the larger community. They concluded by making specific recommendations on what needs to be done to enhance global consciousness on campus and the larger Dayton community.
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Alumni Voices: Celebrating Global Engagement
Justin Forzano, Kwyn Townsend Riley, Matt Joseph, and Christine Vehar Jutte
This session brought together UD alumni who had a wide array of global experiences while here on campus as students; they spoke on how those experiences impacted their lives and careers.
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Community Voices and the Impact of Global Awareness
Arch Grieve, Eugenie Kirenga, Martha-Jeanette Rodriguez, Welcome Dayton, Cyril Ibe, and S. Michael Murphy
In this session, distinguished members of the larger Dayton community spoke about how they have promoted global engagement in the area and made suggestions on what additional steps need to take place to turn Dayton into a genuinely global city/community.
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Conclusion: The Forward March of Global Consciousness
Julius A. Amin
The 2019 Global Voices Symposium lived up to its hype. It was educational, informative, and enriching. It attracted onto the University of Dayton campus people from out of the state of Ohio and the larger Dayton community. Speakers were passionate about their topics and captivated the audience. All were engaged.
The Global Voices Symposium is built on the excitement that global awareness brings on college campuses and the larger community. Following this year’s symposium, people began asking what we have in store for next year—and that was revealing. The Global Voices Symposium is rapidly becoming a part of campus culture, and increasingly our campus is taking its rightful place as one which genuinely promotes global consciousness. It is the wave of the future.
