Juniors Elhom Gosink and Tim Lindgren, co-founders of the Global Crises Global Change undergraduate conference, discuss the upcoming deadlines for the conference. The conference “aims to provide a unique space to produce, interact, and debate the depth of these critical issues and to build platforms for the next generation of scholarship.” Photo by Catherine Blakemore
Three Westminster students and two professors are asking questions about global crises and global change and are now asking the Westminster student body and alums to join in their questioning. This April, Westminster will host the first Global Crises Global Change Undergraduate Conference. According to its website, the conference “aims to provide a unique space to produce, interact, and debate the depth of these critical issues and to build platforms for the next generation of scholarship.”
Tim Lindgren, a junior from Sweden, is one of the conference’s co-founders, alongside junior Elhom Gosink. Luis Mario Ruiz, junior, joined the team in fall 2015.
“I have for long desired to organize a conference focused on global challenges that provide a space for cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural multilateral knowledge exchange,” Lindgren said. “As I see it, some of the global challenges are so large that we ought to utilize knowledge in new ways that are inclusionary and seriously connects different ideas for novel conceptualizations of both critics and solutions.”
The idea for the conference came in spring 2015 as a term project in Political Economy of Conflict. The process accelerated when Lindgren and Gosink received the Westminster College Griffin Grant.
“From the point of the first draft, we spent weeks on editing and streamlining the application to fit the Griffin Grant,” Gosink said. “In fact, after that we submitted the proposal we realized that the original format, which was actually a lecture series and a conference, was no longer the direction we wanted to go. We redrafted the proposal, and after learning that the original lecture format had been accepted, we asked for approval to change it to only a conference.”
The conference will be accepting submissions until the late deadline of Feb. 25. Submitting a paper to the conference offers students a chance to be published in “The Myriad,” Westminster’s academic journal.
The conference organizers, selected faculty and “The Myriad” together will select the three most promising papers presented at the conference to consider for publication.
“Our hope is that the conference will function as a platform for critical thinking and discussion about the global world we live in—a platform for novel conceptualizations and deeper understandings of our individual and communal roles and responsibilities globally as well as locally,” Lindgren said. “If the individuals who partake leave with new novel knowledge, aspirations and ideas to tackle global issues, then we have succeeded. If we can be the space for better futures we have succeeded.”
The guidelines for paper submissions are to submit a 200–250 words abstract including keywords and a brief description of the writer. All papers must be submitted to gcgcundergrad@gmail.com by the late submission deadline: Feb. 25, 2016. For more information, visit gcgcundergrad.com.
