Africa will be the topic of a campus-wide student forum held Saturday, Feb. 24 at Carleton College. Entitled “Eyes on Africa: Voices of Today, Visions of Tomorrow,” the forum will begin at 10:30 a.m. in Carleton’s Skinner Memorial Chapel, and will conclude with an Ethiopian celebratory dinner at 5 p.m. in Severance Great Hall. All events are free and open to the public.
The forum, sponsored by the Carleton student organization the International Relations Council, will feature three faculty-moderated student panels addressing the ethics of aid and development, inter-ethnic conflict, and the environment and development.
Speakers will include Macalester College’s Ahmed Samatar, the American Refugee Committee’s Hugh Parmer, former Somalian prime minister Ali Khalif Galaydh, and U. S. commerce department’s Robert Telchin.
Samatar is the James Wallace Professor of International Studies at Macalester College as well as the dean of its Institute for Global Citizenship, He has written extensively about Africa, including the book The State in Africa: Reconsiderations. Parmer is president of the American Refugee Committee, a Minnesota-based international relief agency that operates humanitarian relief operations in 12 countries around the world. He formerly worked for the Clinton administration as assistant administrator for U.S. Agency for International Development. Khalif Galaydh, former prime minister and one-time minister of industry for Somalia, is a faculty member at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Telchin, a 1999 Carleton graduate, is a Department of Commerce international trade specialist for eight Southern and East African countries.
For more information and disability accommodations, contact the Carleton College Campus Activities Office at (507) 646-4462 or Africa Forum organizer Andrew Ladner at (952) 484-7258.
