Welcome to the Spring semester!
The Baha’i Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland is proud to share with you our exciting semester schedule of talks, lectures, and special events. As always, these events share a common pursuit – addressing the challenges to peace with careful consideration and a bias toward transformative action.
Though it might not feel like it now, the Spring semester is here! Please join us on our journey to building a more peaceful world.
Our first event on February 3rd, features 2024 Macarthur Fellowship recipient Dorothy Roberts. Professor Roberts will be discussing her upcoming book, The Mixed Marriage project, an intimate history of her own upbringing and the life and research of her parents – devoted sociologists who studied interracial marriages. Professor Roberts, a Law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, will examine the nuanced possibilities and limits within interracial unions and their ability, or inability, to address the deeper structural harms a society faces.
Our next event takes place on March 5th, and we are excited to host a truly special evening at the Library of Congress. Though we are constantly engaged in studying best practices towards peaceful outcomes, it is very rare that we have the opportunity to host multiple national leaders in a roundtable discussion. Consular leaders from Bahrain, Kenya, Azerbaijan, and other nations will discuss how diversity, often discussed as an add-on, has become a key part of their nation-building strategy. Leaders from these nations will provide tools and tactics we too can follow in America, and even in the spaces we inhabit as individuals.
On March 10th the Chair will host “Recommending Toxicity”, a joint presentation by Debbie Ging and Dr. Catherine Baker. Both scholars investigate the ways in which popular social media apps like TikTok and YouTube Shorts speed the influence of male-supremacist ideas. The consequences of such ideas, and the modern technologies that distribute them, loom ever larger over our moral and intellectual landscape, influencing a generation of young men in profound ways. Professors Ging and Baker invite the audience to contemplate such systems, and such influences, and to imagine whether more egalitarian considerations of gender in the world are possible.
Our next event takes place on March 25th, and will feature the scholar, Patricia Owens. In “Erased”, Professor Owens will discuss how women’s contributions to International Relations have been historically sidelined and overlooked. Contrary to the vision of an elite cadre of prominent white men determining the outcome of world events, Dr. Owens shows how women have always labored within the field, providing intellectual heft, tactical considerations, and organizational insight. Though their achievements have been sidelined and ignored, “Erased”, and other efforts currently underway are unveiling a proud history of women’s achievement in International Relations. These efforts also consider how much better the world might be if it listened and paid attention to the insights many women have offered.