04/06/2011
Seven scholars from the Middle East and North Africa will visit SUNY Cortland to share their views on current affairs in their homelands on Thursday, April 14.
The campus guests are participants in Syracuse University’s Civic Education Leadership Fellows (CELF) program. Four members of the group will present a sandwich seminar, titled, “Egypt and Tunisia as Inspirations for Revolution: The State of Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa,” at noon in Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge. This lecture is free and open to the public.
“Given recent events in the Middle East and North Africa, this is an incredible opportunity to hear from those who live, work, and study in that part of the world,” said Professor Richard Kendrick, director of SUNY Cortland’s Institute for Civic Engagement, which organized the visit.
Julia Ganson, program manager for the Middle East and North Africa in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, will moderate the discussion. The panelists will include:
• Atef Ahmed, an education development specialist from Egypt; and area manager of the country’s Education Reform Program;
• Sara Kamal, a teacher in the Faculty of Commerce at Ain Shams University, in Egypt;
• Halima Ouamouch, a professor in the English Studies Department at Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco;
• Imen Yakoubi, a professor of English literature with the Higher Institute of Human Sciences in Jendouba, Tunisia.
The group also will meet with students in Kendrick’s Civil Society class to learn about sociology service-learning. The students will describe their service projects and how such service is integrated into coursework. For their part, the guests will discuss conditions of civil society in their own countries.
In the afternoon, the visitors will meet with representatives of social service and not-for-profit agencies and members of the College’s AmeriCorps project to learn more about how colleges form partnerships with community agencies. The academic visitors from abroad will describe the partnerships their own campuses have formed.
“This is the third group of CELF scholars we have hosted on our campus,” Kendrick said. “It always is exciting to learn about how institutions of higher education in the Middle East and North Africa think about their connections to their own communities.”
For more information, contact Kendrick at (607) 753-2481 or via email