Design Ecologies: Sustainability in Global Culture
Beth Blostein, Knowlton School of Architecture
Lisa Tilder, Knowlton School of Architecture

Listening to the World: New Ideas fro Resolving Identity-Based Conflict
Amy Cohen, Moritz College of Law

Dialogues of the Lusophone World with Europe and the Americas
Lùcia Helena Costigan, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Global Access to Information
Nancy Courtney, University Libraries
Guoqing Li, University Libraries

Modernity and Tradition: Building on the Past
Kay Bea Jones, Knowlton School of Architecture
Philip Armstrong, Department of Comparative Studies

Borders, Culture, and the Construction of Identity: the Case of Trieste
Charles Klopp, Department of French and Italian

Public Diplomacy as a Global Phenomenon
Alexander Stephan, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
John Brown, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University

DESIGN ECOLOGIES: SUSTAINABILITY IN A GLOBAL CULTURE

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS:
Beth Blostein, Knowlton School of Architecture
Lisa Tilder, Knowlton School of Architecture

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
The United Nations Population Division estimates that by 2007 the world's urban population will
exceed its rural population for the first time in history. This fact is emphasized by looking at the extreme example of China which, in order to meet the needs of the burgeoning population, this year alone will produce enough new construction to fill a city the size of Philadelphia. What seem like localized environmental concerns have global ramifications. The symposium “Design Ecologies” examines the ways material practice; architecture and landscape architecture contribute to ecological systems and sustainable practices. Design Ecologies brings together geographically segregated, yet vitally important international figures such as Bruce Mau (Toronto), Anneliese Latz (Germany), and Japan's Shigeru Ban to name a few, to join their counterparts here in the United States to discuss current global development trajectories and pose alternative design strategies that augment rather diminish the environment. A critical interdisciplinary discussion needs to occur among academics and practitioners from around the world. We need tangible alternative strategies to current building trajectories seen worldwide and in some of our most susceptible environments. This project will be comprised of a day-long workshop and a day-long symposium titled “Design Ecologies” with key-note speakers Bruce Mau and Shigeru Ban providing international perspective on a global problem. These events will be followed by an expected book also titled "Design Ecologies." By sharing new, unpublished ideas and projects developed specifically for this event, we can offer examples and methods that deal with the fragile state of the environment today. Unless provided with alternatives, it is inevitable that the situations of environmental degradation faced by one country will also be faced by another. The Workshops will be attended by undergraduate and graduate students in the Knowlton School of Architecture and the College of the Arts. The Symposium, open to all, will be attended by students and faculty within the KSA and many other Departments and Colleges within the University including the Colleges of the Arts and Engineering. The Symposium is expected to draw an audience from counterparts at regional universities, including University of Michigan, University of Cincinnati, Miami University, and others. The book, intended to disseminate these important ideas to a broader audience, will be published through Princeton Architectural Press with whom the KSA has an established relationship.

PROJECT TIMELINE: January 13-14, 2006
PROJECT SPONSORS:
National Endowment for the Arts
The Ohio State University Battelle Endowment for Technology & Human Affairs
Knowlton School of Architecture
College of the Arts
Office of International Affairs

LISTENING TO THE WORLD: NEW IDEAS FOR RESOLVING IDENTITY-BASED CONFLICT

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR:
Amy Cohen, Moritz College of Law
PROJECT ABSTRACT:
In the United States, we turn to courts, administrative agencies, and the political process to
resolve social problems. However, significant conflicts related to race, ethnicity, religion, and class often remain unaddressed. This symposium will bring together interdisciplinary scholars from around the world to generate new ideas for building United States institutions that are responsive to such conflict. The symposium will use social problems implicated by police community relations as a case example to refine and expand our understanding of the possibilities of dispute system design. The target audience will be interdisciplinary scholars, practitioner scholars, and students interested in questions of dispute system design, transnational conflict resolution, and identity-based conflict. The first portion of the symposium will provide an overview of the techniques, goals, and social effects of comparative dispute system design and a sketch of police-community relations in the United States. During the second portion, an interdisciplinary panel will discuss how conflict resolution mechanisms might address conflict that arises in the context of domestic police community relations. In the third portion, scholars from South Africa, Israel, and Northern Ireland will share insight and innovation based on experiences in their home countries. The symposium will conclude with Dean Nancy Hardin Rogers moderating a discussion between dispute resolution experts and the domestic and international community panelists. Through this valuable opportunity, we hope to identify important lessons, gaps, and questions for both comparative dispute system design and dispute resolution institution-building within the United States. In addition to stimulating interest and scholarship in the nascent field of comparative dispute system design, the symposium will launch a new project in transnational conflict resolution sponsored jointly by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and the College of Law and entitled, The Bridge Initiative at Mershon and Moritz: New Ideas for Bridging Divided Communities. Additionally, all symposium papers will be published in Volume 22, Issue 1, of The Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2006.

PROJECT TIMELINE: January 26, 2006
PROJECT SPONSORS:
Moritz College of Law
Mershon Center
Office of International Affairs

DIALOGUES OF THE LUSOPHONE WORLD WITH EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR:
Lύcia Helena Costigan, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
Despite the fact that Brazil is the largest country in Latin America, and that the Portuguese language is the 7th most spoken language in the world; with a growing native-speaker population in Europe, Asia, in the Americas, and in several African countries; the place that the Lusophone cultures and literatures occupy in the academic sphere of The Ohio State University is still very small. The increased prominence of Spanish over the past two decades has contributed to widen the gap between the number of Spanish and Portuguese speakers in the American universities. Since Portugal and Brazil represent a major part of the Hispanic world the exclusion of these two countries from the canon results in a partial view of Latin America and the Iberia Peninsula. The proposed lecture series Dialogues of the Lusophone World with Europe and the Americans will build on the interdisciplinary strength of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese by bringing to campus international and national scholars whose work will promote a more integral view of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Through the eminently global topic of Lusophone studies, this interdisciplinary event will help to build the department, promote scholarly contact across campus, and help to raise Ohio State's profile at the international level. More specifically, this series of interdisciplinary lectures on comparative topics will foster exchange of information and insight across disciplinary borders in order to build a basis for comparative dialogue involving the Lusophone world, Europe, Africa and the Americas. On campus, it will stimulate collaborative research initiatives across disciplinary and institutional lines. The lectures will be widely advertised through the campus media and by the participating academic units. The global concern of the lectures series will draw scholars from various disciplines around campus, including history, political science, music, and anthropology. Our core audience will be the faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, but faculty and students from other departments, and also from the local community will be encouraged to attend.

PROJECT TIMELINE: Winter and Spring Quarter 2006
PROJECT SPONSORS:
Office of International Affairs
CIRIT
Center for Latin American Studies
Center for African Studies
School of Music Ethnomusicology
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Department of African and African American Studies

GLOBAL ACCESS TO INFORMATION

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS:
Nancy Courtney, University Libraries
Guoqing Li, University Libraries

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
In the U.S., the means of access to information has changed radically in the last ten years. The
Internet, the shift from ownership to access, the explosion of journal publishing, the shift in format from paper to electronic – all have had an impact on the way we gather, consume, and distribute information. What impact have these changes had on information exchange in other parts of the world and how does the experience of other countries resemble or differ from our own? The topic of global access to information and insights into the similarities and differences between information access in China and the U.S. will be of interest to a wide audience of faculty, students, and academic and public librarians. The economics of information transfer and the impact of sociopolitical factors on the free flow of information are topics that are relevant to everyone, particularly in our academic environment. Dr. Jianzhong Wu, Director of the Shanghai Library will address these issues in a lecture at the University and Ohio library communities. Dr. Wu is the author of Library of the 21st Century and the author or co-author of numerous articles on information and libraries, including "Academic Library Development in China" and "Shanghai Library's Quality Service Campaign." Shanghai Library is the largest public library in China and has pioneered new standards of user services to library users, attracting more than 8,000 users daily and providing open access, network facilities, and reference services. Dr. Wu is the founder of the Shanghai Information Resource Network (SIRN), a consortium of public, university and research libraries providing cooperative acquisitions, interlibrary loan, and professional training. Dr. Wu has also directed the Shanghai Central Library Project, through which all the public and university libraries in Shanghai will be incorporated into one network.

PROJECT TIMELINE: Spring or Fall Quarter 2006
PROJECT SPONSORS:
Office of International Affairs
OSU Libraries

MODERNITY AND TRADITION: BUILDING ON THE PAST

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS:
Kay Bea Jones, Knowlton School of Architecture
Philip Armstrong, Department of Comparative Studies

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
Franco Albini, prominent Italian architect, urban planner and furniture designer, is the subject of an upcoming exhibition and symposium to be held at The Ohio State University. Albini’s work during the period defined by Rationalism before World War II and experimentalism through the 1970s characterizes the shift from radical to revisionist modernism. The events will examine the problem of "being modern" in light of the complex forces that shape an ever-changing notion of modernity. The exhibition, “Franco Albini: Museums and Installations,” curated by Federico Bucci and Augusto Rossari of Milan Polytechnic’s Department of Architecture, will be on view in Knowlton Hall’s Banvard Gallery from Monday, February 20 to Saturday, March 4. Opened at the Milan Polytechnic in April 2005, the exhibition makes its U.S. premiere at Ohio State, and will continue to University of Michigan, Arizona State University, Kent State University and University of Tennessee. The exhibition features selected works from 1930 to 1977 by Albini and his collaborators and surveys their "neo-rationalist" alternative to high modernism. Though Albini first came to international attention for his furniture design, by the 1950's he had produced some of Italy's most influential works of architecture. The sensitivity to context, materiality and history of these buildings transformed the very idea of modernism and helped set the stage for a more complex reckoning with modernity throughout Europe. The symposium, “Modernity and Tradition,” will take place on Friday, March 3 from 1:00 to 3:15 p.m. in the Knowlton Hall Auditorium. While contemporary thought retains an allegiance to early modern attitudes about progress, productivity, abstraction and experimentation, it is critical of modernist developments such as global production and the placelessness and destitution of cultural differences that such developments entail. With the work of Albini as its provocation, the symposium will revisit the problem of "being modern" in light of the complex forces that shape an ever-changing notion of modernity with an open discussion on the dilemmas inherent in our current state of affairs.

PROJECT TIMELINE: March 3, 2006
PROJECT SPONSORS:
Knowlton School of Architecture
Office of International Affairs
Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities
College of Humanities
Department of Comparative Studies
CIRIT
Columbus Sister Cities

BORDERS, CULTURE, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY: THE CASE OF TRIESTE

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR:
Charles Klopp, Department of French and Italian

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
The issue of borders and their gradual blurring or erasure in our globalized world is a topic of
considerable interest to scholars in several different disciplines, including geography, history,
sociology, urban studies, and politics as well as literary history and theory. Do borders mostly confine or exclude? Do they help or hinder the formation of identity? Are they finally psychological – even atavistic – rather than geographical? Does their insistence on nationalistic "families" lead instead to the creation of emotional orphans on both sides of the dividing line? What is the relation of culture to ethnicity in regard to borders? Discussion of these matters as they apply to the single case of Trieste should produce tentative answers to these questions as they affect everyone today, whether they are living on a border of some sort or not. Of all significant Italian urban configurations, Trieste best fits the notion of a border city. Located at the periphery of Slavic, German, and Italian speaking cultures, Trieste ceased being part of the Austrian Empire only in 1918 and for the years that followed, including those of Fascism, was Italian. With the Nazi invasion of 1943, however, Trieste's status was again in question, and the city had to wait until 1954 before it finally became a permanent part of the new Italian Republic. The purpose of this interdisciplinary colloquium is to give scholars and students from OSU and elsewhere an opportunity to reflect on how Trieste’s location at the edge of three distinct and very different ethnicities and its troubled and sometimes violent history in modern times have contributed the city’s striking, unique, and very self conscious literary and municipal identity. The colloquium will feature two keynote speakers, Professor Giuseppe A. Camerino, from the Università degli Studi in Lecce and Professor Katia Pizzi of the University of Kent in Canterbury, England as well as a number of presenters from OSU and outside of the university. They represent literary studies in Italian, Slavic, German, English, and Spanish, as well as the related fields of architecture, theater, Jewish Studies, and history. Teaching initiatives connected with the colloquium include an undergraduate Italian course offered Winter Quarter 2006 that will focus exclusively on Trieste and Triestine writers and a graduate seminar in the Fall of 2006 that will also focus on the literature and culture of Trieste and on literary space, culture, and identity more generally. An exhibit of maps, photographs, and books dealing with Trieste and its writers is also being considered, as is an exhibition of Slovenian art of the period.

PROJECT TIMELINE: Fall Quarter 2006
PROJECT SPONSORS:
Office of International Affairs
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Center for Slavic and East European Studies
Melton Center for Jewish Studies
Department of French and Italian
Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities 

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS:
Alexander Stephan, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures / Mershon Center
John Brown, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
In the twenty-first century, public diplomacy is becoming increasingly a global phenomenon. To be sure, the history of public or "soft" diplomacy, under different names, can be traced back to the creation of diplomacy itself. But public diplomacy's modem origins can be located most precisely during World War I – when, under another designation (often propaganda), it began to be used in a new form by industrialized states as tools in carrying out their international relations. During the Cold War, the term public diplomacy was coined by Dean Edmund A. Gullion of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to describe the interaction of groups, peoples, and cultures beyond national borders, influencing the way groups and peoples in other countries think about foreign affairs, react to our policies, and affect the policies of their respective governments. Today, a widely accepted definition of public diplomacy is that given by the State Department – the art of engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences. Since 9/11 and with the decline of the image of the United States in the world, public diplomacy has been a frequent topic in the American and foreign media. The fact that public diplomacy is now a global phenomenon raises a number of important questions that shed light not only on the evolving nature of diplomacy in the twenty-first century, but also on key issues that shape our current era, including international security and globalization. The aim of the proposed conference is to discuss these questions and give tentative answers to them. The conferences conclusions would be of use to practicing diplomats, foreign policy specialists, scholars specializing in the study of diplomacy and international relations, and members of governmental and non-governmental organizations that deal with media, international exchanges, and overseas art exhibitions. The conference will be organized around three questions to be discussed in separate sessions with three to four speakers each: 1) Why and how did public diplomacy become a global phenomenon; 2) In what ways do individual countries define and use public diplomacy today; and 3) What is the future of public diplomacy as a global phenomenon. The organizers of the conference Public Diplomacy as a Global Phenomenon plan to invite students from the OSU International Studies Program, the International Scholars Program housed in the Office of International Affairs, OSU faculty, and the general public to the event.

PROJECT TIMELINE: April 28-29, 2006
PROJECT SPONSORS:
Mershon Center for International Security Studies
Office of International Affairs